Category: North Korean refugee

North Korean defector: I could not trust anyone – Part 1

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A North Korean defector has spoken out about how he escaped from the world’s most secretive state with his infant son strapped to his back and a cyanide pill in his mouth.

New Malden, a suburb in south-west London, is known for its large South Korean population, but few people know about the 600 or so North Korean defectors who have taken refuge in the borough.

Choi Joong-Ha had to leave North Korea with his wife Yun-Ah-Jung and one-year-old son Joon Choi in 2004. The country had just come out of a devastating famine that killed almost 3.5m people when he made a comment to his brother about how conditions would not change while the Kim dynasty was in charge. Joong-Ha became so scared that someone would repeat his words and he would be arrested that he made plans to leave.

He had been conditioned into such a state of paranoia that he did not tell his wife about the escape. Speaking through a translator, Joong-Ha said: “My wife is another person and I didn’t know what she was thinking. I could not trust her, I could not trust anyone. It is the way the regime works, the way it stays in power. You can only trust yourself.

“I was scared that I would be sent to a labour camp for what I said and that would have effectively been a death sentence.”

Joong-Ha told his wife they were going to visit his brother who lived near the Chinese border. When they reached the Tumen River that separates the two countries he revealed the real reason they had come. “My wife was not pleased and she didn’t want to go. If the authority catches you trying to escape you will be shot or sent to a camp.”

For 12 years Joong-Ha had been in the North Korean army and would, therefore, have been subjected to the most severe punishment if he had been caught trying to leave. Because of this he waded across the river with his son strapped to his back and a cyanide pill in his mouth.

He said: “I got to quite a high position in the army and we were constantly shown propaganda about how our country was the best in the world and no one could compare to us. … If I had been caught they would have singled me out as an example to others who might be planning to do the same thing. I would have been arrested, tortured and put in a camp or shot there and then. If the authorities saw us trying to cross it would be better to die in the river.”

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North Korean defector: I could not trust anyone – Part 2

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Despite the propaganda he had been subjected to, Joong-Ha could see the poverty around him and thought North Korea might not be the country the government made it out to be.

He remembered reading about the UK when at school and was fascinated by the history. He said: “I read about the Industrial Revolution that had happened hundreds of years ago in Britain and thought it must be a really advanced place. Economically it seemed like the most stable country I could get too.”

The trip across the river took a day and when Joong-Ha and his family got into China they had to strip off their clothes and dispose of anything that might identify them as North Korean. He said: “Just because we had got to China it didn’t mean we were safe. Every day we were fearful of being caught and being deported.

“We were lucky that my wife had family near the border and she and my son could stay with them. They helped us a lot.”

After four years working as a labourer, Joong-Ha managed to save enough money to pay a broker to take him and his family to the UK. He said: “My wife was not happy and did not want to go. She liked being with her family in China, but we could not stay because we would always be looking over our shoulder, wondering if we would be caught and sent back.”

When the family first arrived in UK they were placed in Newcastle and struggled to cope with the culture shock and the language barriers. Joong-Ha joked: “There were many days I woke up in Newcastle and thought I’d made a huge mistake. I couldn’t speak any English and could not get on with the culture in the town; it was so different from what we were used too.

“I heard there were lots of Koreans in New Malden and we decided to move down there.”

The family has now been living in New Malden for six years and in that time Joong-Ha has established himself as the chairman of the North Korean Residents’ Society. He said: “I want the North Koreans to interact in society. It is hard sometimes with the language barriers but I think it’s important for people to hear our stories.”

The 600 North Korean residents in New Malden each have a unique story of escape from the most secretive country on the planet.

[Full story] 

UN panel on North Korea stands by rights abuses report

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The head of the UN commission that produced a damning report on North Korean rights abuses has dismissed Pyongyang’s claim that doubts about the credibility of a prominent witness made the panel’s findings “invalid”.

“The partial retraction of Shin Dong-hyuk of the testimony he gave to the Commission of Inquiry on North Korea is not significant for the report, conclusions or recommendations of the commission,” said retired Australian judge Michael Kirby.

Mr Shin, a well-known defector and Pyongyang critic, admitted this week that elements of his best-selling gulag survivor book Escape from Camp 14 were inaccurate, although he stressed that the crucial details of his suffering and torture still stood.

For his part, Mr Kirby noted that Mr Shin was only one of 300 witnesses interviewed by his commission, whose overall findings were based on a mass of “overwhelming” corroborative evidence.

The commission’s conclusion that North Korea was committing human rights violations “without parallel in the contemporary world” was the basis of a resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly last month. It urged the Security Council to consider referring Pyongyang to the International Criminal Court.

For activists within the North Korean defector community, Mr Shin’s admissions of inaccuracies in his survivor story are a genuine blow, given his high profile.

In his statement, Mr Kirby was protective of the 32-year-old defector. “Mr Shin bears, on his body, the evidence of torture and suffering. At this stage he needs help and support, not hounding,” he said.

[AFP]

North Korean defectors drop leaflets and “Interview” posters into North Korea

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In the past, Pyongyang has called the North Korean defectors who organize covert balloon launches “human scum.” For good measure, the North Korean military promises to “physically eliminate” anyone who dares to send any material into the hands of its citizens, thereby breaking its information monopoly.

The threats did not dissuade a hearty band of North Korean defectors, their South Korean allies, Silicon Valley technologists, and a global team of pro-democracy activists, who braved sub-zero temperatures late Monday night to send word about Sony’s controversial movie The Interview into one of the world’s darkest corners.

The instigator for this adventure was Park Sang Hak, a man targeted as “Enemy Zero” by the North for his anti-regime activities. The son of a former high-ranking official who himself defected in 1999, Park followed his father into exile, crossing the Yalu River into China with his mother, brother, and sister.

Over the past decade, Park and his Fighters for a Free North Korea have sent dozens of balloons to the North, releasing 60-80 million leaflets into the sky, with varying rates of success. Yet Park’s activism has earned the ire of Pyongyang, which in 2011 dispatched a double agent to the South to kill him with a poison-tipped pen.

This week’s launch was especially prominent, however, in light of the recent computer hack of Sony Pictures. Park enlisted the help of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, which launched a “Hack Them Back” campaign aimed at raising funds to send 100,000 copies of The Interview on DVD and USB into the North. Though the group did not send copies of the film on this launch, it plans to do so “on a rolling basis” over the next few months. A 2010 survey of North Korean refugees found that 48 percent had viewed DVDs, a 28 percent increase from just two years prior.

[The Daily Beast]

North Korean prison camp survivor admits inaccuracies

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Shin Dong-hyuk’s horrific descriptions of his time in a North Korean prison camp became a best-selling book translated into 27 languages, made him a key witness before the United Nations and grabbed headlines around the world.

Now the publisher of the book and its author say has revealed that parts of the story he told weren’t true. Blaine Harden, author of the book “Escape from Camp 14,” said in a statement on his website over the weekend that Shin had changed “key parts of his story.”

“On Friday, Jan. 16, I learned that Shin Dong-hyuk, the North Korean prison camp survivor who is the subject of ‘Escape from Camp 14,’ had told friends an account of his life that differed substantially from my book,” Harden said. “I contacted Shin, pressing him to detail the changes and explain why he had misled me.”

Shin had previously said that he had lived his entire life in Camp 14 before escaping in 2005. He now says he escaped from Camp 18 twice before — in 1999 and 2001, wrote Harden in his statement.

Shin now says he was 20 years old when he was tortured as a punishment for escaping, wrote Harden. His original account indicated that he was tortured when he was 13.

Shin had described in the book that his finger was chopped off by an angry guard after he dropped a sewing machine in Camp 14. Now, Shin told Harden that his finger was mangled as a guard pulled out his fingernails as punishment for escaping.

“When I agreed to share my experience for the book, I found it was too painful to think about some of the things that happened,” Shin told Harden.

Human rights activists argue that changes in Shin’s account do not ultimately affect his testimony, saying they still believe he was tortured and that his story highlights the horror of prison camps.

[CNN]

‘The Interview’ movie not well-received by North Koreans

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According to North Korean defectors, “The Interview,” the Sony Pictures comedy about a fictional CIA plot to assassinate Kim Jong-un, is not going over well with North Korean viewers, even among people who oppose the country’s dictatorship.

Several democracy activists with contacts in the North said the North Koreans they spoke with reacted to the film first with fear of punishment for watching it, but also with derision and wounded feelings over the depiction of their country. Some of the activists said it was unlikely that many people would risk watching it.

To put it simply, national pride trumped their dislike for Kim Jong-un, their country’s young and often ruthless leader.

“They cursed at the movie,” said Chung Kwang-il, a North Korean defector and democracy activist in South Korea who said that his associates in China had smuggled digital copies of the movie into the North and that he had since spoken by cellphone with eight people who surreptitiously watched it. “They were angry it depicted North Koreans as a bunch of idiots,” he said. “Now, these are not people worshiping Kim Jong-un; they are ones who wish he were gone.”

Kim Sung-min, a North Korean defector who runs Free North Korea Radio, a Seoul-based website, wrote there that he spoke to two North Korean viewers and one of them said that he was thrilled by the scene in which an American talk-show host visiting Pyongyang asked the Kim Jong-un character why he was starving his people. Nonetheless, Mr. Kim quoted the viewer as saying that “the movie will only increase animosity among us because it not only failed to understand our feelings, but didn’t even try to.”

[NY Times]

Bureau 121 hackers operating in China says defector

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In the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang, you’ll find businesses owned and operated by the North Korean government.

You’ll also find a secret network of North Korean hackers, known as Bureau 121, according to defector Kim Heung-Kwang.

“It’s easy for them to work secretly. It also has great Internet infrastructure,” says Kim Heung-kwang, a former Pyongyang computer science professor who escaped North Korea in 2004. Kim says some of his own students became cyber warriors for the hacker network. “By day, they worked regular jobs. But the rest of the time, they were acting on orders from Pyongyang,” he says.

Kim claims North Korean hackers operated secretly in Shenyang for years, moving from location to location to conceal their whereabouts and activities. “Bureau 121 began its large-scale operation in China in 2005. It was established in the late 90s,” Kim says.

“Team members entered China separately — in smaller groups — 20 members at a time,” he says. “When they entered China, they came under different titles. For example an office worker, an official with a trade company or even as a diplomatic staffer.”

Long before North Korea had its own Internet, it dialed in to servers in Shenyang, in Liaoning Province, in the country’s north. Today, nearly all of North Korea’s Internet traffic is still routed through China.

Kim says the operation in China scaled back considerably a few years ago, when North Korea expanded its high speed Internet access. But he believes hackers are still operating in Shenyang.

“North Korea does have illicit activities in China,” says Steve Sin, a terrorism expert at the University of Maryland and former U.S. military intelligence analyst. Sin wrote a report naming Shenyang as a North Korean hacker hub. “It has the location, security, as well as infrastructure,” Sin says.

“Right now, the best information available to us is that they are still conducting such an operation and they can still conduct such an operation from that location.”

[CNN]

The cold relationship between China and North Korea

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The last time a Chinese leader visited North Korea was in July 2013 when Vice President Li Yuanchao tried to patch up relations, and pressed North Korea, after its third nuclear test in February 2013, to slow down its nuclear weapons program. Mr. Li failed in that quest.

After the vice president’s visit, relations plummeted further, entering the icebox in December 2013 when China’s main conduit within the North Korean government, Jang Song-thaek, a senior official and the uncle of Kim Jong-un, was executed in a purge.

In July, President Xi Jinping snubbed North Korea, visiting South Korea instead. Mr. Xi has yet to visit North Korea, and is said to have been infuriated by a third nuclear test by North Korea in February 2013, soon after Kim Jong-un came to power.

A heightened debate in China is spurred in part by fears that North Korea could collapse even though economic conditions in the agriculture sector seemed ready to improve, several Chinese analysts said. Indeed, one of the tricky balancing acts for China is how much to curtail fuel supplies and other financial support without provoking a collapse that could send refugees into China’s northeastern provinces, and result in a unified Korean Peninsula loyal to the United States.

“If China presses D.P.R.K. too hard it could collapse,” Zheng Jiyong, director of the Center for Korean Studies at Fudan University, said. “But if it doesn’t press hard enough it will become uncontrolled and do more things like nuclear tests.”

[NY Times]

North Korean defector: Hunger is humiliation and hopelessness

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As a boy, Joseph Kim could only watch helplessly, he says, as he watched his father “wither and die” in the isolated country’s devastating famine in the 1990s, which led to the tragic disintegration of his once loving family.

Kim was 12 when his father died, and his mother and sister left for China to try to find food.

When his mom returned she was alone, having sold his sister to a man in the belief that she may have a better life, according to Kim’s account.

Kim, who now studies in New York, after himself escaping to China in 2006, urged his audience not to judge his mom harshly — as he still tries to track down his sister. “So many North Korean mothers are forced to make these kind of heartbreaking decisions.”

“This isn’t just my story, but the story of millions of North Korean people,” said 24-year-old Kim. Once orphaned, he said, he would wander the streets rummaging through trash cans. “Hunger is humiliation, hunger is hopelessness,” said Kim.

[AFP]

Activists to drop ‘Interview’ DVDs into North Korea

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Whether or not North Korea is behind the Sony hack, Kim Jong Un better brace himself because “The Interview”, a comedy that has the CIA recruiting a couple of hapless American journalists for a mission to kill Kim Jong Un, is headed to his country. Human rights activists are planning to airlift DVDs into the country via hydrogen balloons.

Fighters for a Free North Korea, run by Park Sang Hak, a former government propagandist who escaped to South Korea, has for years used balloons to get transistor radios, DVDs and other items into North Korea—not to entertain the deprived masses, but to introduce them to the outside world.  Over the past two years, the Human Rights Foundation in New York, created by Thor Halvorssen, has been helping bankroll the balloon drops, with the next one set for January.

The balloons are launched from South Korea and they fly two miles high so that they cannot be shot down. Each is affixed with a small, acid-based timer that breaks open plastic bags and drops packages over the countryside.

Statistics vary, but by some accounts 74 percent of North Koreans have access to a TV and 46 percent to a DVD player, neither of which are illegal assuming only preapproved TV shows and movies are played on them, which increasingly is not the case.

The Kim regime will especially be on the lookout for copies of The Interview, a comedy about a mission to kill Kim Jong Un. “In a totalitarian country the state endeavors to control all citizens, and so every activity that is not government-sponsored is a subversive act,” says Halvorssen. “Watching a film is a crime for which you can be executed. And comedies are hands down the most effective of counterrevolutionary devices.”

[Hollywood Reporter]