Category: North Korean refugee

Young North Korean defectors now Pyongyang Poster Children

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A CNN crew led by Will Ripley met several North Koreans Pyongyang intent on defending their country’s tarnished human rights record. As is normal procedure, the team was given no advance notice about what or who they would be able to film before they arrived in the capital. On the first morning, they were led into the same meeting room at the Koryo Hotel, where most visiting foreigners stay.

In 2013, these youngsters had been caught on the Laos-China border as they attempted to head for South Korea. Returned to North Korea, the world feared for their safety at the hands of a state that is usually merciless when it comes to defectors they regard as traitors.

But instead of being punished, they told CNN they received special treatment, extra tuition to make up for three years of missed schooling while on the run, as well as places in the best educational establishments in the Pyongyang — poster children for the state’s “benevolence and forgiveness.”

While there was no way to confirm how they were chosen to speak, the highly secretive state seems keen to get its point of view across when it comes to its rights conduct — it vehemently rejected claims in a United Nations report that it “terrorizes” its own citizens.

[CNN]

North Korean refugees endure rape and starvation

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Rape and repeated sexual abuse of female North Korean refugees is extremely common. Many defectors have testified it was common for military men to rape women in North Korea and then shame them for being sexually assaulted. Many were forced to abort children conceived through these rapes.

This echos the tale of Park Yeonmi, a refugee who has traveled the world to create awareness and alarm regarding the situation in North Korea. A Chinese soldier raped Park’s mother in front of her; her mother had sacrificed herself to prevent her young child from having to endure the rape herself.

Another woman, Song Kyong-ok, lost her mother, whom the local government chose to execute when the girl was ten-years-old. She had been caught praying, which UPI describes as “an act of treason.” During her time as an orphan in North Korea, Song “was forced into the streets to beg for food, finding it in the unlikeliest of places–such as unpicked fecal matter containing edible kernels of corn.”

The allure of escaping the yoke of Kim Jong-un is enough to attract thousands to try to escape, triggering increased vigilance on the part of the North Korean government.

China has also pressured North Korea to keep its people from using China as a bridge to South Korea. Many who defect from North Korea have experienced severe trauma, and some have raised the ire of the Chinese government.

[Breitbart]

The night I helped my mother escape North Korea

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Extracted from The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story by Hyeonseo Lee:

I set my phone to silent, dressed myself entirely in black and walked calmly and purposefully through the hotel lobby. Outside I hailed a cab and directed the driver to take me to the point where the town ended, about 200 yards from the river. There, at the end of a row of low buildings, was the derelict house among the trees where I was to meet my mother and brother. I crouched down behind an old garden wall and waited. … I peeped over the wall and saw North Korean border patrols passing on the opposite bank of the river.

‘I had not seen my mother in 11 years. In the half-light I saw a strained, old face and a body moving stiffly’

My phone was buzzing. Min-ho’s voice was fast and tense: “We’ve had a problem.” Quickly Min-ho explained that just as he and my mother had been about to cross they had walked straight into a border guard.

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Following North Korean defectors on their exodus

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Much of the information we get about North Korea comes from people who’ve escaped the regime and sought refuge in South Korea, or from the people who do business along the river border that separates China and North Korea.

Lee Hark-joon, a journalist for the Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s largest newspaper, sheds new light on the ordinary lives of North Koreans with his extraordinary book “Crossing Heaven’s Border,” in which Lee focuses on everyday people, telling stories of “common hardships,” as he puts it. It grew out of a documentary he made with the same name, which was broadcast on PBS in 2009 and was nominated for an Emmy in 2010.

To get these stories, Lee did something unprecedented – he “embedded” with North Korean defectors. Between 2007 to 2011, Lee lived among North Korean defectors in China, enduring some of the same hardships that these terrified escapees endured. He takes incredible risks to tell these stories; the book at times reads like a thriller as Lee makes a perilous, 12,000-mile journey through China, across into Laos and then Thailand.

Lee’s book is compelling because it offers a fresh perspective on the puzzle that is North Korea. He writes about the challenges he faced in reporting on this story and the ethical questions he encountered, and the toll it took on him as a person.        Read more

Motivated to accompany North Korean defectors in their escape

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Lee Hark-joon, a journalist for South Korea’s largest newspaper who’s now in England working on another project, answered some questions from The Washington Post about his work and his book “Crossing Heaven’s Border”.

WP: First up, kudos to you. You lived among North Koreans on and off for years, taking many of the same risks they did. What motivated you to go above and beyond the call of duty like this?

LHJ: In 2007, my boss suggested that I do a piece about the human rights situation of North Korean defectors. At that time, reporting related to North Korean defectors was mostly done by international media, but my boss pointed out it was an issue about our nation so South Korean media needed to take charge of the issue.

It’s an issue about real people. I was thrilled to cross borders with defectors and see them finally find freedom. I often wonder if the purpose of my education and becoming a journalist was to feel this joy.

I wasn’t able to help the defectors but they helped me. When we were crossing the border between China and Laos, our group included a woman in her 60s and a boy. We embarked on a journey walking 18 hours in the mountains. I was so worried that someone in the group may not be able to make it but I was sure of myself as I had completed my military service. Surprisingly, I was the one who began to fall behind.

The North Koreans’ passion for life and freedom helped them overcome their age and physical disadvantages. I was holding the group back so I asked them to leave me and go on. For them, being captured could lead to their repatriation to North Korea, but for me, my punishment would just be spending some time in Chinese prison.

But they didn’t leave me. They said they couldn’t abandon a journalist, a Korean like them. They carried my bags and pulled me by my hand and we finally crossed the border together. Maybe this kind of experience, relying on each other and meeting people who care for others, kept me going and working on this issue for such a long time.

I consider North Korean defectors as “the Jews of Asia.” It’s been a long time since the Holocaust but the world remembers it. It should be the same for North Korean defectors. …. I hope more attention will be given to them until their misery is over.

[Washington Post blog]

Why some North Korean defectors tend to exaggerate

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In the past in South Korea, when defection from North Korea was rare, we used the term “returned hero” to refer to a North Korean defector. The South Korean government offered a lot of money and support for their resettlement. That kind of support doesn’t exist anymore.

When they’re in China or in Russia, North Korean defectors tend to think they would be fully satisfied if they just had freedom. But when they arrive in South Korea they find it hard to accept the reality that they’re no longer treated as returned heroes but instead have to settle down to life as second-class citizens.

In this situation, some people exaggerate their stories. Why do they exaggerate?

Exposure to media leads to opportunities for speeches at churches in South Korea and the U.S. A defector gets paid. As the world started to pay more attention to North Korean defector issues, more defectors seek fame. Some end up believing in their exaggerated stories, and the media plays an important role in this process.

North Korean defectors have [experienced] serious trauma and they tend to maximize their damages. Media outlets look for more sensational stories. In other words, they want North Korean defectors who are selling attractive stories. NGOs, the South Korean and American governments want sensational stories as they believe they can put more pressure on North Korea about its human rights issue with a symbolic figure.

It is sad because the North Korean defector situation deserves international attention by itself.

I did a lot of my interviews in border areas between China and North Korea.  … People don’t tend to lie about themselves when they’re in imminent danger. I believe they were pure and honest at that moment. … Maybe that is why defectors I’ve interviewed tend not to exaggerate.

[Excerpts of a Washington Post interview with Lee Hark-joon, a journalist for the Chosun Ilbo]

A North Korean defector’s observation on life in America

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After his father died of starvation during the North Korean famine of the 1990s and his mother and sister went to China, Joseph Kim was left living on the streets, having to steal and beg to survive. He was eventually liberated by a charity at the age of 16 and resettled in the US.

Asked in a Reddit AMA what he was “most surprised to learn about the world once [he] left North Korea”, you might have expected Kim to reference the enormity of skyscrapers, the prevalence of fast food or the pace of life.

His answer was much more personal, and incredibly touching. “Coming to America, probably the biggest shocking moment was how everyone was living different lives.  … going to public parks with family, refreshments and barbecues, laying on the ground – I think that was something I never really imagined. I never had that in North Korea. We never had those kind of things.”

While Kim is happy to be away from the struggles of life in North Korean and able to appreciate the simple joys of lying on the ground with loved ones, there are things he misses about the country. “I definitely miss some things. I do miss my friends, and also my hometown, my hometown has so many memories,” he said. “It’s a place that I learned how to swim in the river there, there were mountains we climbed for fun, and one thing I do really miss is the pear tree from my backyard.

Since resettling, Kim has spoken about his experiences at the UN and TED Global stage. Earlier this month, he published a memoir about his life titled ‘Under the Same Sky’.

[The Independent]

Tales from the North Korean Famine – Part 1

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About the time that North Korean founder Kim Il-sung died, unbeknownst to North Korea’s citizens, Russia stopped subsidizing the nation with food and fertilizer. Then, in 1995, biblical rains and flooding washed away what few crops grew. What little there was of the electrical grid went out.

North Korea plunged into a great famine. Within weeks, Joseph Kim’s father, a respected member of the Workers’ Party of Korea who had been so successful that he was able to build a house for his young family, was unable to feed his family. Kim’s mother was ripping up any plant she could find, edible or not, and force-feeding it to Kim and his sister.

“Your belly is temporarily full, but you can tell no nutrients are flowing to your limbs, that there’s no fat to make your tastebuds happy,” he writes in his memoir, “Under the Same Sky: From Starvation in North Korea to Salvation in America.”

The deprivation was sudden and severe. A next-door neighbor’s grandfather died of starvation. His parents began fighting brutally over how to get food; his father refused to engage in bribes or the black market, believing such things morally wrong. His mother was in agony: “You’re sacrificing your own children!”

She sold her wedding dress to buy what little food was available. “We were dying,” Kim writes. “Our eyeballs pushed from their sockets, or so it seemed. Really, our faces were just growing leaner. We had little energy for playing or reading books or anything else.”

By spring 1996, the family’s lone daily meal was a handful of weeds, but some days, they only had tiny sips of water.

Kim’s mother went to stay with her own parents. His father decided their best hope was with his brother, who lived near Pyongyang and was a major in the Korean People’s Army. They traveled by train, and a journey that should have taken less than 10 hours took them three weeks, each car stuffed with the starving and unwashed, no room for anyone to move.   Continued   

Tales from the North Korean Famine – Part 2

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“People lay in the aisles of the cars, too weak to lift their heads for morsels of food; others were taken out to the fields on either side of the railbed and left to die,” Joseph Kim writes. “As we passed stations, I saw corpses piled up outside them, people who had been waiting and had expired in the heat.”

Kim writes of seeing one relative, an older woman, sneaking some of the very little food in the house and begging Kim not to tell — her own son had once caught her in the act and nearly yanked out her teeth with a pair of pliers.

Dogs vanished from the streets; so did rats. After even vermin became scarce, stories spread about people killing and eating their own infants and selling their children for food — stories Kim believes to this day.

Kim’s father sold half of the house for a week’s worth of cornbread, and after that ran out, he walked six hours to beg a cousin for food. The cousin refused. That was the end for Kim’s father. He began decompensating rapidly, screaming all day and all night in agony. It took two-and-a-half months for Kim’s father to die.

At his burial, Kim’s mother announced that she and his sister would be going to China; she had hired a broker to smuggle them out. His mother would eventually be caught and put in prison, and he later learned that she had sold his sister to a Chinese man.

Kim was 12-years-old. He spent the next three years bouncing between various relatives, but at times he lived on the streets or in a detention home for young boys and girls, where he would hear the screams of children being raped by the guards.

Yet security was lax, and after several months, he successfully ran away. With no family and no food, he did what had previously been unthinkable: One cold winter night, he snuck across the frozen Tumen river into China — one of the most common ways North Koreans attempt to escape, and one the government tries to discourage by telling its citizens that the water is laced with 33,000 volts of electricity.

[News.com/au]

North Korean refugee now a college student in New York

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“Under the Same Sky” vividly describes what Joseph Kim and millions of other North Koreans endured during famines that began in the 1990s. Kim is one of the few North Korean escapees to end up in the United States.

Unlike most books about North Korea, the frightening aspect of this story is not a police state’s rigid control over its people – it is the chaos and absence of any authority during the time of crisis, with desperate citizens left to fend for themselves.

The book does include some accounts of the brutality of the police state, such as when Kim is beaten at a youth detention center. But, for the most part, the soldiers in Kim’s world are malnourished young men who rob peasants in remote areas of the countryside, while the police who patrol outdoor markets are there mainly to take bribes from thieves.

For Kim, famine began when he was 5 years old. Kim explicitly describes how near-starvation affected his body and mind. He also recounts how it affected his family. His parents eventually lost everything they owned, and the family members became squatters in an abandoned building. Kim’s father dies an agonizing death, due to illness and hunger.

Kim resorts to begging and stealing, and even risks public execution for the theft of state property – manhole covers – selling the iron for enough money to buy a bowl of noodles.Kim describes the techniques he used for stealing food from farmers’ fields and urban dwellings, the pecking order among thieves, and even the moral code (don’t steal from mothers with young children).

The book offers fascinating details about daily life in North Korea – such as how the country comes to a standstill every evening as the whole nation watches dramas and soap operas on TV.

It’s not a spoiler to mention that Kim escaped to China, but the way in which he did it comes as quite a surprise. Kim was one of many North Korean refugees hidden and helped by Christians in China. His transition to life in the U.S. was difficult, but he is currently a college student in New York City and has even told the story of his childhood in a TED Talk.

[Christian Science Monitor]