Category: North Korean refugee

China to send back 9 defectors to North Korea

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Nine defectors are in danger of being sent back to North Korea after being caught in Vietnam and handed over to China last month, an activist group said. Among the North Korean defectors are an army captain and a one-year-old boy.

After fleeing the North in early October, they traveled from Shenyang to the town of Nanning on the Chinese border with Vietnam, according to the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights.

They crossed the border on Oct. 22 but were caught by Vietnamese police during a random check on a bus bound for Laos in Móng Cái, Vietnam. They were handed over to Chinese police in Dongxing, Guangxi, where they were detained until recently.

On Monday they were taken to Shenyang by train and transferred to a garrison in the border town of Tumen and are now facing repatriation to the North.

China used to repatriate all defectors that were caught there, but since last year it has mostly stopped. Now there are worries that improving ties between the two allies mean defectors will be sent back again.

[Chosun Ilbo]

Why North Korean defections are down – Threatened North Korean border guards

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For the first time in 12 years, an average of less than 100 North Koreans now defect to South Korea each month.

A North Korean defector who was a chief border guard in Hoeryong, North Hamgyong Province until late 2013, said, “Since Kim Jong-un took power, border guards have been punished for taking bribes from defectors, even if this came to light after they’d already left the job. They became terrified. So bribes no longer worked.”

On the other hand, border guards who capture defectors are rewarded with promotion, Workers Party membership and recommendations to prestigious universities.

Apart from all this, the regime also installed CCTV on popular defection routes and fortified the border with barbed wire.    Read more

Why North Korean defections are down – More expensive trafficker fees

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As the risks rise, so do the fees of traffickers who assist North Koreans in their escape. These have doubled from five years ago.

A source said traffickers who used to charge $3400-4300 to cross the Yalu or Tumen rivers into China, now charge nearly $8600. In some areas along the Tumen River, the cost climbs to $14,000.

China has also boosted crackdowns on North Korean defectors because it fears a mass exodus.

Better living condition in North Korea also undoubtedly plays a part in less defectors. One researcher at a state-run think tank said since there are now some 400 markets in the North, and they have improved the lives of many who might earlier have risked their lives to flee destitution.

However, this same development has prompted more members of the elite to defect, often to escape the side effects of nascent capitalism.

“Capitalism has spawned corruption and business conflicts,” said Cho Dong-ho at Ewha Womens University. “It seems a lot of fat cats defect when they lose a battle over business interests or face corruption charges.”

[Chosun Ilbo]

South Korea police raid Christian group for North Korea spying

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Seoul’s spy agency raided the offices of a Christian organization last Friday on charges of violating South Korea’s anti-Pyongyang National Security Law, after the group helped a North Korean defector, who wanted to return home, hold a press conference.

Law enforcement entered the offices of the group known as Christian Peace Action Shepherds and also served search warrants at the residences of Pastors Choe Jae-bong and Kim Seong-yun.

Police also issued an arrest warrant for Kim. A law enforcement source said Choe was out of the country, but once he returns from China, and after the seized documents from the raid are analyzed, police would determine whether to issue a subpoena, the source said.

Police said they have evidence the two pastors had been in contact with North Korean agents, and that Kim had met with spies affiliated with the Pyongyang’s Workers’ Party, during a trip to the Chinese city of Dalian in April 2011.

Christian Peace Action Shepherds received public attention in August after staging a press conference for the North Korean defector who said she wished to return to the North. Kim Ryon-hui had said she was tricked into defecting by South Korean agents in China.

The group immediately held a press conference outside the building on Friday where the raid had occurred and condemned the police and Seoul’s spy agency for “devising a sinister plot” to engage in “religious persecution,” Yonhap reported.

[UPI]

Defections from North Korea fall below 100 a month

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For the first time in 12 years, fewer than 100 North Koreans are defecting to South Korea each month, that is less than 1200 per year.  Last year’s figure was 1,400, with the highest being 2,914 in 2009.

North Korea watchers point to tougher crackdowns along the border with China since Kim Jong-un took power but also to rising living standards thanks to burgeoning open-air markets in the socialist state.

Lee Soo-seok of the Institute for National Security Strategy said, “The spread of open-air markets has reduced the number of North Koreans who live on the edge of starvation, and tightened security along the Chinese border has made it more difficult to defect.”

As of the end of October of this year, 28,497 North Korean defectors had settled in South Korea.

[Chosun Ilbo]

North Korean activist Yeonmi Park a tale of triumph

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A refugee of Kim Jong-Il’s regime, Yeonmi Park has become an unlikely mouthpiece for the 25 million living on the very edge, in a place shrouded in darkness–literal and metaphysical. It is a nation predicated on fear, misinformation, and torture; a place that asks its citizens for absolute devotion, even as it executes them indiscriminately.

The Establishment sat down with North Korean defector Yeonmi to discuss her newfound activism and the painful realities of penning her memoir. In person, she is a portrait of grace and composure, possessing a preternatural wisdom for any 22 year old.

Elaborating on the plight of her fellow North Koreans and the global community’s obligation to them, she becomes quietly insistent: “These people, they don’t even know they have rights and I think it should be stopped. If we allow this to happen, it makes us less human, that’s what I believe. We have to fight, we have to educate the public, we have to tell their story, we have to ask North Korea to stop killing its own people…

“And we have to tell China that they cannot send these refugees back to their country–they are actually committing a crime by this; they’re helping North Korea and killing these people.”

Yeonmi Park’s childhood reads like the kind of fiction best-suited for sadists, marked by starvation, the execution of a friend’s mother, the imprisonment of her father, human trafficking, and chronic sexual violence.

Her story is also a tale of triumph–of a victory as formidable as the darkness that threatens to tamp it out forever. It is not a tale of good conquering evil–for the evil still thrives, with North Korea a prison kingdom of the first degree. But it is a story that reminds us of the strength of the human spirit.   Read more

The harrowing story of North Korean defector Yeonmi Park

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Yeonmi Park, although just 13 years old when she fled North Korea and a mere 22 years old now, is a testament to an archetypal–if rare–act: it is sometimes better to spit in the face of death than suffer at the hands of crippling oppression.

The oppression she faced growing up in North Korea was absolute. Park describes a fear that plagued and formed her childhood. Born in the wake of the Soviet Union collapse and consequent famine in North Korea, Yeonmi faced hardships beyond this brutal mind control. The daughter of a once-successful civil servant for the ruling Working Party, Yeonmi adored her father, who was sentenced to 17 years in a labor camp for smuggling metal to feed his starving family. There he was tortured and fell ill under the harsh conditions; meanwhile Yeonmi, her mother, and her sister were relegated to the margins of society as a part of her father’s punishment.

At times subsisting on insects and grass, the family decided they had to leave–or perish. Her mother and Yeonmi fled when Yeonmi was 13. What they hoped would be their path to freedom, quickly proved to be another two-year chapter of degradation and suffering. Trafficked upon entering China, Yeonmi’s mother sacrificed herself to prevent her daughter from being raped, and was in turn violated in front of her child. Both members of the family were sold.

Yeonmi was purchased for $260. Essentially functioning as a sex slave, Yeonmi said she cried every day. Her captor, however, ultimately released them, but only after her father rejoined she and her mother in China; he died soon after from untreated colon cancer.

In the wake of this tragedy, Yeonmi and her mother set out again for freedom–this time traversing the Gobi Desert on foot in frigid temperatures, with only the stars to guide them. Both carried knives to use on themselves if they were captured, resigned to suicide rather than facing repatriation.

[The Establishment, republished in Huffington Post]

Suicide rates high amongst North Korean defectors

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Statistics gathered in South Korea indicate that a startling number of defectors from North Korea end up taking their own lives. This is the darker side to the stories of those who flee their homeland.

Over the past ten years, 6% to 7% of defectors who’ve died have been suicides.

But this year, there’s been a big rise. According to the ministry, 14% of deaths among defectors have been suicides.

There are a number of factors involved. One is that the home they’ve left is close but unreachable. Another is that their new economic reality can be very different from the glamorized life portrayed in the South Korean soap operas smuggled into the North.

Defectors get three months’ training when they arrive but critics of the system say that’s not enough to learn new skills. Some Christian groups provide vocational training and say that what works best is training in simple but useful skills like making coffee to serve in a cafe.

[BBC]

Joint Letter to UN Security Council re North Korean human rights

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Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a number of other co-signers * are urging the UN Security Council to hold another formal session, prior to the end of 2015, on the human rights situation in North Korea.

Excerpts of the letter:
As you know, the UN Human Rights Council-mandated Commission of Inquiry on the human rights situation in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) concluded that “the long-standing and ongoing patterns of systematic and widespread violations” of human rights in the DPRK “meet the high threshold for proof of crimes against humanity.” The commission found that the nature, scale, and gravity of these abuses “reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.”

The commission concluded that the DPRK’s ongoing “open defiance of the United Nations makes this a case where decisive, yet carefully targeted action should be taken by the Security Council in support of the ongoing efforts of the remainder of the United Nations system.”

The human rights situation in the DPRK remains dire. In his most recent report to the UN General Assembly, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the DPRK concluded that “grave violations continue to be committed on a large scale and particularly affect the most vulnerable groups.” The Special Rapporteur further called on the international community to “step up efforts to protect the population” of the DPRK and “hold the government accountable for those gross violations.”

In our view, it is critical that the UN Security Council hold another formal session on the situation in the DPRK this year. International pressure remains a critical avenue to press the DPRK to change. It is no coincidence that last year’s unprecedented engagement by the DPRK at the UN Human Rights Council and at the UN General Assembly followed concerted international attention to its human rights record.

[Co-signors include Amnesty International, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights (NKHR), Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK), Freedom House, Human Rights Watch, International Coalition to Stop Crimes Against Humanity in North Korea (ICNK), International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), and Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights]

November 1 International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church

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Last year was the worst year for persecuted Christians in contemporary history; beatings, rapes, kidnappings and killings all increased. To let persecuted Christians know they are not forgotten and to educate Americans about persecution, Open Doors USA is turning to technology to reach into homes and churches across the nation via the ministry’s second live webcast.

During the live webcast, Open Doors USA will provide expert commentary and give viewers the chance to ask questions of persecuted Christians from Iraq and Kenya through a live chat. There will also be a rare interview with a North Korean woman who spent several years in a prison camp because of her faith.

[Christian News Wire]