Category: North Korean refugee

Defector speaks of North Korea horrors

Posted on by

When Yeon-Mi Park was 9 years old, she and everyone in her North Korean village were forced to watch in horror the execution of a woman for the crime of watching illegal DVDs, she says. The victim was the mother of one of her friends.

Park was born in Hyesan, the daughter of a government official, whose job provided the family with relative stability and protection. Then came the famine, and to survive her father set up a small illegal trading business smuggling goods into China, says Park.

“In 2004 my whole world came crashing down. My father, my hero, got arrested for his illegal trading business.” He was sent to a hard-labor camp, and the family was marked. “We had no real future anymore.”

So, Park said, she and her mother decided to sneak over the border into China, where a trader spotted them. In exchange for not giving them away, he demanded sex with Park, then just 13. “My mom offered to be raped in order to protect me,” she said simply.

Later, after her father had rejoined them in China but died of lung cancer, Park and her mother met up with a group heading to Mongolia.

“We walked and crawled across the Gobi desert, evading Chinese police, kidnappers and wild animals. We followed the compass, but it broke, so we followed the stars to freedom . . . we wanted to live as human beings,” she said.

[AFP]

North Korean defector: I could not trust anyone

Posted on by

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. Choi Joong-Ha left North Korea with his wife Yun-Ah-Jung and one-year-old son Joon Choi in 2004. He had been conditioned into such a state of paranoia that he did not tell his wife about the escape.

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. “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.”

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.

[Full story]

Meet North Korean refugee Jee Heon-a

Posted on by

A United Nations inquiry held in Seoul, chaired by former Australian High Court Justice Michael Kirby, produced a massive, 400-page report detailing North Korean atrocities. Kirby explained to Reuters that the report was compiled from testimony given by former inmates and North Korean exiles at hearings in Seoul and Tokyo.

Pyongyang furiously denounced the report as a “fraud” and a tactic of “the frantic human rights racket” and labeled the witnesses who had come forth as “human scum.” But all the testimony, given in public, is now on the public record, on the UN website, for all to see.

For example,  the story of Jee Heon-a, who was arrested during the government-induced famine in 1999 for the crime of collecting grass to eat!

Together with a younger girl who was caught with her, Jee Heon-a’s punishment was to be forced to eat clods of grass covered in soil. The other girl was immediately gripped by diarrhea, she said: “Suddenly she couldn’t get up or turn over. She died with her eyes open because she didn’t have the strength to close them.”

Jee also told of how she witnessed a mother giving birth in a prison camp and being forced by guards to drown her own baby in a bucket of water.

Jee eventually managed to flee to South Korea.

[Sydney Morning Herald]

North Korea “the most dangerous place on Earth”

Posted on by

Along the so-called Demilitarized Zone that divides South Korea from North Korea, only about 2,000 yards of wasteland separate hundreds of thousands of battle-ready troops backed by enough artillery to obliterate each other within a few hours.

Over the decades, sporadic gun battles have taken the lives of scores of soldiers on both sides. The Communist regime still sends spies and saboteurs and now drones south, keeping the war at a low boil. Naval and air clashes regularly erupt. Just south of the DMZ, South Korea keeps finding tunnels big enough to rush thousands of Communist soldiers south in an hour.

“The most dangerous place on Earth,” President Bill Clinton once called the Korean Peninsula, and it’s probably gotten more dangerous since he said that two decades ago. Following a searing U.N. condemnation this month of its Soviet-style gulags and other human rights outrages, Pyongyang threatened a fourth nuclear weapon test.

Such grandiose brinksmanship is typical of the regime. Last year, North Korea rattled its missiles at Hawaii, Guam and Washington, D.C. (no matter that it can’t yet reach them) as well as South Korea.

Faced with such threats over the years, the U.S. has embraced its own doomsday scenario. After meeting with the U.S. commander in South Korea when he was defense secretary in 2012, Leon Panetta said he had a “powerful sense that war in that region was neither hypothetical nor remote, but ever-present and imminent,” he recalls in his memoir. If the Communists invaded en masse, he wrote, the U.S. would use “nuclear weapons, if necessary.”

All of which makes Korea a kind of Cold War theater of the absurd, frozen in amber. Outright war is unthinkable, suicidal. Yet both sides talk about a future “reunification” based on the triumph of one side over the other.

Most observers think China will never permit a North Korean collapse, in part because it would propel millions of refugees into its territory, not to mention open the gates to a U.S -South Korean advance to its doorstep. Nevertheless, officials in Seoul recently showed off its Ministry of Unification, which has an annual budget of about $180 million and 200 staffers (augmented by 600 government advisers) dreaming about the future, “so people won’t be caught off guard when it actually happens,” as a slideshow there instructed the visiting reporters. Plus, according to South Korea’s JoongAng Daily, the government has budgeted as much as $500 billion for “a possible sudden collapse of [the North Korean] government or another kind of rapid and unexpected reunification.”

[excerpted from Newsweek]

Highlights of UN action on North Korean human rights atrocities

Posted on by

Under a UN mandate, former Australian High Court Justice Michael Kirby chaired a year-long inquiry into human rights abuses in the North Korean dictatorship, which has been repressing its people brutally and systematically under all three generations of the Kim family dynasty. (Believe it or not, this was the first time the UN has taken the problem seriously enough to order an official inquiry.)

Pyongyang refused to co-operate so the former High Court judge and his two fellow commissioners, one from Indonesia and the other from Serbia, traveled to various countries and took evidence from about 80 North Korean escapees and expert witnesses.

Their findings were published in February in a massive, 400-page report detailing North Korean atrocities. “The commission finds that the body of testimony and other information it received establishes that crimes against humanity have been committed” in North Korea, said the report.

“These crimes against humanity entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation.”

They specifically named as a “main perpetrator” the supreme leader himself, Kim Jong Un. Kim, aged approximately 30, has done everything possible to stop Kirby’s report and to avoid its consequences.

When the UN committee for human rights decided to put the Kirby report to a vote so it could go to the UN General Assembly, and then to the UN Security Council for possible referral to the International Criminal Court, North Korea launched into the next phase. It went on a charm offensive. In an effort to head off the vote, the Kim regime freed three American citizens it had had been holding in jail. It signaled that it was open to discussing its nuclear program with the US.

But last week the UN human rights committee cast a strong vote to refer the Kirby report to the UN general assembly, by 111 votes to 19 with 55 abstentions.

This sent Pyongyang into its fury phase. It said the vote compelled it to conduct another nuclear weapons test, which would be its fourth, and threatened nuclear attack on the US and its allies.

[Sydney Morning Herald]

The North Korean defector news network – Part 1

Posted on by

News about North Korea often originate from people in North Korea, through networks of defectors determined to get out information on the authoritarian, highly insular country they left behind.

Their words and images are snapped up with enthusiasm, and often credulously, by South Korean and international media desperate for news from the poorly understood country. The sources may not be particularly well informed: They could be ruling-party officials or factory workers. Or smugglers, professors or soldiers.

Generally, they are in it for the money, not a desire to force change in their homeland, according to the defectors they communicate with.

Whatever their motives, the risks they face are the same. Defectors say some of their sources are now dead because of their work.

In the months after the North’s December 2013 execution of Jang Song Thaek — an uncle of Kim Jong Un who had been widely regarded as the country’s No. 2 official — a defector’s organization reported on its website that another top official, Choe Ryong Hae, had been detained for unclear reasons. Those reports, cited by many news outlets, appeared doubtful days later when state TV aired photos of Choe accompanying Kim on an inspection trip.

Kim Seong-Min, a well-known defector who heads the organization involved, Free North Korea Radio, said he now believes Choe was least investigated, if not detained. There have been varying reports about Choe’s political fortunes, but on Friday, state media reported that he will travel to Russia as Kim Jong Un’s special envoy.

Kim Seong-Min is unperturbed as long as the information helps expose North Korean wrongdoing. And he has worked to help North Koreans bolster their reports by smuggling in illegal cellphones and camcorders for them.

[Excerpts from Associated Press article by writer Hyung-Jin Kim]

Read more

The North Korean defector news network – Part 2

Posted on by
1

Most of the North Korean defectors’ groups in Seoul specializing in sneaking news out of North Korea have no more than 10 North Korean sources. They regularly call their South Korean contacts at dawn or late at night, when North Korean security officials are less likely to be out with mobile equipment to detect cellphone signals.

Defectors’ organizations say they don’t tell their sources exactly who they are or how their information will be used, so the sources will more freely share information and will face less danger. The organizations usually release no details about a source except the province he or she reported from.

“They’d face espionage charges if they’re arrested” and owned up to a connection with an anti-Pyongyang organization in South Korea, said Kim Heung Kwang, a North Korean defector who heads the North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity organization. “I just tell them I’m writing something and need some information.”

His organization got a legitimate big scoop about the North, one of the few reports by defectors’ groups to be independently confirmed: the news of the country’s botched currency revaluation in 2009. South Korean officials confirmed the details days later.

Defectors say their sources often include their own relatives, friends and acquaintances. In return for information, they often get cash or gifts.

Kim Heung Kwang says he gives $50 to $100 to ordinary sources when they give him useful information, with more money for “ace” informants.

Ahn Kyung-su, a North Korea researcher at a Seoul-based nongovernmental organization, says he suspects that sources are mostly ordinary citizens who pick up rumors circulated in North Korean border markets. That can be useful in getting a picture of life in many North Korean communities, but much less so when it comes to high-level government decisions.

[Excerpts from Associated Press article by writer Hyung-Jin Kim]

Korean-American Christian aid worker detained in China near North Korean border

Posted on by
1

A Korean-American living on the border of China and North Korea has been detained by Chinese authorities, US officials have confirmed.

Peter HahnPeter Hahn, a 73-year-old naturalized American citizen who left North Korea as a child, was taken in for questioning by local police on Tuesday and placed under detention after a six-hour interrogation, his lawyer told reporters earlier.

According to Hahn’s lawyer, Shanghai-based Zhang Peihong, the aid worker is accused of embezzlement and possession of fraudulent receipts. Zhang described the allegations as “groundless” and “impossible to stand up.”

Hahn has run a Christian aid agency in Tumen, Jilin province for the past two decades, which provides education and supplies to the poor in North Korea. Two other staff members, including a South Korean national, were detained earlier this month.

Hahn’s detention comes three months after Chinese authorities detained Canadians Kevin and Julie Garratt, who had lived in Dandong, Liaoning province – also on the North Korean border – since 1984. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said the couple was “under investigation for suspected theft of state secrets about China’s military and national defence research.”

Pastor Simon Suh told reporters that around 1,000 South Korean missionaries have been forced out of China, and many churches in the region had closed. “Obviously, the screw is tightening all along the border,” a South Korean Christian activist told Reuters.

[South China Morning Post]

North Korea reaching out to Russia

Posted on by

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will send a special envoy, Choe Ryong Hae, to Russia next week, both countries announced Friday, in a trip expected to focus on how to boost ties at a time when his country faces deepening diplomatic isolation.

The ministry said in a statement that Russia hopes to discuss trade and economic ties, the situation on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia, and other international issues. Choe’s trip also appears aimed at easing North Korea’s diplomatic isolation, said analyst Cheong Seong-chang at the private Sejong Institute.

Choe, a senior Workers’ Party official, is considered as one of Kim’s close associates. He visited Beijing last year as a special envoy and told Chinese President Xi Jinping that North Korea would take steps to rejoin stalled nuclear disarmament talks.

Choe was also a member of a high-profile North Korean delegation that visited South Korea in early October and agreed to resume senior-level talks. The talks, however, haven’t moved forward because of tension over propaganda leaflets that South Korean activists send by balloon across the border into North Korea.

Russia and North Korea maintain cordial ties, but are not as close as they were during Soviet times, when Moscow provided significant aid and support to Pyongyang.

For North Korea, better ties with Russia could provide a much-needed economic boost because its ties with China are not as strong as they once were. Russia, for its part, has been seeking to bolster ties with North Korea amid a longtime effort to strengthen its role in Asia.

 [Associated Press]

Connecting with the Internet from North Korea’s borders

Posted on by

According to North Korea Tech, which monitors technology in North Korea, foreign visitors now have to de-activate their Sim cards upon departure from the country.

They can buy cards which give web access on entry but, in the past it was possible that they could be left behind, still loaded with unused internet access for locals to use. That gap has been plugged.

So has the possibility that North Koreans near foreign embassies and the offices of international organizations could access the buildings’ wi-fi.

In August, foreign missions were told that “signals of regional wireless networks… produce some effect on our surroundings” and, therefore, their licenses were revoked. The ban followed a report on a South Korean website that demand for property around embassies in Pyongyang had risen because of the ability of neighbors to furtively make use of unencrypted wi-fi.

There is a continual game of cat and mouse between the North Korean authorities and people who want to talk to the outside world – for which there are fierce penalties.

Martyn Williams who runs the North Korea Tech monitoring site says, “It’s very difficult for the average North Korean to get near the South Korean border because that’s such a heavily guarded security area.”

“It’s easier to get near the Chinese border and there you do see people inserting Chinese Sim cards into their phones, or they’ll have smuggled phones from China.If they can get onto the Chinese cellular network, they can make calls to anywhere in the world. They can also access the internet without the North Korean government stopping them.

“One of the things the North Korean government does is heavily patrol the border and try to find people using these cellphones.”

[BBC]