Category: North Korean refugee

Chinese crackdown on missionaries to the North Koreans

Posted on by
1

Conditions in China have never been easy for foreign missionaries, and most try to keep a low profile. They work for so many different organizations and denominations that numbers are hard to come by. But from interviews with nearly a dozen former and active missionaries, experts and academics it’s clear at least hundreds – perhaps nearly 1,000 – have been forced out of China.

In early 2013, at the peak, China was home to some 2,000 to 4,000 missionaries from South Korea alone; U.S. missionaries made up large numbers as well.

The forced departures form the background to the detention a little more than two weeks ago of Canadians Kevin and Julia Garratt, a  Christian couple who had run a coffee shop in Dandong, a Chinese city on the North Korean border. Chinese authorities have accused them of stealing state secrets, but said little about what they have done wrong. Canadian officials believe their detention is likely China’s response to allegations of Chinese espionage in North America, including by a Canadian immigrant who is accused of co-ordinating hacking attacks to steal U.S. fighter jet secrets.

Yet the Garratts also stood at a dangerous nexus of issues that stir Chinese suspicion, by virtue of their personal faith, their humanitarian work with North Korea and the donations from Canadian churchgoers that supported them. That background almost certainly attracted the attention of authorities, though it may not be the primary reason for the couple’s detention.

China is North Korea’s closest ally, but the two nuclear powers still operate with great of mutual suspicion, and the Garratts live in a place that is the focus of intense Chinese military and intelligence scrutiny. Some of that is directed at Christian missionaries who play a critical role in the underground railroad that secrets North Korean defectors out of China.

“If you are a North Korean in China, the only place where you can realistically be given food and shelter is a church,” said Andrei Lankov, a Russian scholar and expert on North Korea. Often, that means the involvement of missionaries, who “actively proselytize among the North Korean refugees,” and train them in spreading Christianity inside North Korea.

The eviction of missionaries is in some ways a mark of China’s own perceived global strength, as an increasingly confident Beijing seeks to define China, an atheist state with government-run churches, on its own terms. Yet it also threatens to revive a point of conflict between China and Western nations, which have long criticized the Communist country for its refusal to allow free pursuit of religion.

[Globe and Mail]

The Church in North Korea

Posted on by

North Korea’s cryptic response to the Pope’s visit to Seoul is emblematic of the nation’s complicated relationship with religion in general. Its constitution formally grants citizens religious freedom, but in reality, religious practice is punishable by public execution or banishment to the nation’s kwan-li-so prison camps.

The few churches in Pyongyang are maintained by the state in order to give the appearance of religious practice; congregants are actors bussed in to services for the benefit of tourists.

It hasn’t always been this way. North Korea actually has a long history with Christianity. Catholic missionaries first arrived on the Korean Peninsula in 1784. There, prominent Korean Studies historian Andrei Lankov reports, the Church took root with such success that by the 1920s, Pyongyang was known among missionaries as “the Jerusalem of the East.” Kim Il-sung himself grew up in a Christian household, and was reportedly a church organist as a teenager.

In her book Escape from North Korea, journalist Melanie Kirkpatrick writes of North Korea’s underground church. Figures reporting on the size of such organizations are inherently subject to inaccuracy, but her estimate puts their number at 200,000 to 400,000 adherents, somewhere around 1% of North Korea’s population.

Though their numbers are small, Christians in North Korea are important for at least two key reasons. First, they are faithful in quiet opposition to an ideology of state propaganda that amounts to a religion of dictator worship. The modest ideological diversity they represent is anathema to authoritarianism and may constitute the seeds of a freer future North Korea.

Second, Christians are key actors in what Kirkpatrick calls Asia’s underground railroad – a network of safe houses that help North Korean defectors escape to China and beyond. Defectors’ testimonies bring to light the heinous human rights abuses of the Kim regime, which will eventually oblige the international community to respond. The defectors also reach out to their family and friends in North Korea with reports of the outside world, exposing what the state propaganda calls “paradise on earth” for the hellish prison it really is.

[Huffington Post]

The children of North Korean defectors prospering in South Korea

Posted on by

About 25,000 North Koreans have escaped to the South over the past two decades.

The first wave of defectors tended to be high-ranking officials who were treated like royalty in the South, mined for information about Kim Jong Il’s regime.

But then thousands who were not considered so valuable in the South’s eyes started arriving, including many from the impoverished northern provinces of North Korea. They had no useful information about Kim and his cronies, spoke with country-bumpkin accents, and didn’t know how to use credit cards or smartphones — essentials of life in the South.

But their children have grown up in South Korea and have been able to integrate more easily. “These are people who came here 10 years ago and are the first wave of high school and university graduates,” said Joanna Hosaniak, deputy director general of the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights. “Now they’re writing books, painting, showing leadership in their own areas. They’re like eggs that are hatching.”

That applies even to the most disadvantaged of North Korean children — the kkot-jebi. In the North, these children survive by begging and scrounging for food, and can often be seen sleeping around train stations.  The problem of homeless children was particularly severe in the first decade of the 21st century, after a devastating famine in the 1990s caused perhaps millions of North Koreans to die of starvation or flee across the border to China. Many left behind children who had no choice but to fend for themselves.

While malnutrition is still common in North Korea, starvation is not. That means there are fewer traditional kkot-jebi in the closed state, but new categories of “swallows” are emerging. Today, North Koreans talk about the other “swallows” who have flown away: the gun-jebi, who have left the military; the chong-jebi (young adults) and noh-jebi (elderly people) who are living on the streets. There are even whole families — kachok-jebi — leaving their homes to look for food.

As many as 2 million people in North Korea — a tenth of the population — are homeless, says Kim Hyuk, a former kkot-jebi who has written a memoir, The Boy Who Stole Freedom. “People now have more flexibility because the state can’t provide for them,” said Kim, who is enrolled in a doctoral program in North Korean policy at a South Korean institute.

[Washington Post]

North Korean defector finds his voice in rap

Posted on by

Most rap songs do not deal with matters of geopolitical significance — such as nuclear weapons and labor camps — but Kang Chun-hyok is not most rappers. The 29-year-old is an escapee from North Korea.

“You took money that we made digging earth to fund nuclear weapons. Take out that fat from your pot belly. Nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons,” he rapped at the opening of an exhibition in Seoul this month titled Kkotjebi in Bloom. “I am not afraid. Go ahead, attack me,” Kang continued, moving his right hand Eminem-style.

“Give me back that dirtied money. Show me the money,” he concluded, to cheers from the humanitarian workers, foreign diplomats and academics in the gallery, and from people who happened to be walking along Insadong-gil, a central Seoul street lined with art galleries and tourist shops.

Kang is one of a generation of North Korean defectors coming of age and finding his voice in South Korea. And his triumph is even more noteworthy given that he was a kkot-jebi, or “flowering swallow,” the term used in North Korea for homeless children, a reference to their constant hunt for food and shelter.

Kang ran away from his home in a northern North Korean province at age 13, and finally arrived in the South three years later, in 2001. He is now in his senior year as a fine-arts major at Hongik University, one of the South’s top creative colleges.

Kang also had his artwork on display in the exhibition, organized by the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, a nongovernmental organization, to draw attention to the hardships that children in North Korea face. A set of his drawings — illustrations for a Southern children’s book called “Do You Know How Happy You Are?” — shows skinny kids in tattered clothing searching for food and sleeping on the street.

“People here don’t know anything about what’s going on in North Korea,” Kang said in an interview at the exhibition, “so I’m trying to show what is really happening there.”

[Washington Post]

Pope calls on both Koreas to reject “suspicion and confrontation”

Posted on by

Pope Francis ended his first official visit to Asia on August 18th by urging Koreans — from both the North and the South — to reject “suspicion and confrontation” and find new ways to build peace on the divided peninsula.

“Let us pray, then, for the emergence of new opportunities for dialogue, encounters and the resolution of differences, for continued generosity in providing humanitarian assistance to those in need, and for an ever greater recognition that all Koreans are brothers and sisters, members of one family, one people,” Francis said.

He delivered the message at a moving reconciliation Mass at Seoul’s main Myeong-dong Cathedral attended by South Korean President Park Geun-hye, as well as North Korean defectors.

As the pope flew across Chinese airspace on his return flight to Rome, he sent a telegram — his second during the trip — to President Xi Jinping, expressing his “divine blessings” for the powerful leader and the Chinese people.

Francis was the first pope in history to be granted permission to fly over China, and he used the opportunity in both directions to create the opportunity for new dialogue. China’s Foreign Ministry has reacted positively to the pope’s telegrams and already indicated it wants to promote dialogue with the Holy See after decades of frosty relations.

[Washington Post]

North Korea’s no. 1 role in the persecution of Christians

Posted on by

The normally diplomatic Pope Francis recently asserted: “The persecution of Christians today is even greater than in the first centuries of the Church, and there are more Christian martyrs today than in that era.”

To those familiar with the true history of early persecution — when Christians were habitually tortured to death, set on fire, fed to lions and dismembered to cheering audiences — his statement may seem exaggerated.

But even today, as in the past, Christians are being persecuted for their faith and even tortured and executed. A January, 2014, Pew Research Center study on religious discrimination across the world found that harassment of Christians was reported in more countries, 110, than any other faith.

Open Doors, a nondenominational Christian rights watchdog group, ranked the 50 most dangerous nations for Christians in its World Watch List. The No. 1 ranked nation is North Korea, followed by a host of Muslim countries. North Korea, amongst other Communist countries, is intolerant of Christians; churches are banned or forced underground, and in North Korea, exposed Christians can be immediately executed.

Nothing integral to the fabric of these societies makes them intrinsically anti-Christian. Something as simple as overthrowing the North Korean regime could possibly end persecution there — just as the fall of Communist Soviet Union saw religious persecution come to a quick close in nations like Russia, which if anything is experiencing a Christian Orthodox revival.

[CNN] 

Why timing of China crackdown on North Korea border?

Posted on by

It is not immediately clear why China, North Korea’s main ally and economic benefactor, is cracking down on missionaries in the region at this time, though experts said it had cooperated with North Korea in the past along the border.

While China can be suspicious of Christian groups and President Xi Jinping has launched a wide crackdown on underground churches, foreign missionaries usually operate without too much harassment.

The crackdown on the groups, many of which had been established in the region for years, has taken place over the last six months, foreign Christian sources working near the border told Reuters.

Beijing has not charged anyone with any crime, but two sources with direct knowledge say a Korean-American man who ran a vocational school in the border town of Tumen is being investigated by Chinese authorities. And earlier this month, China said it was investigating a Canadian couple who ran a coffee shop in Dandong city on suspicion of stealing state secrets.

“There has been a mass exodus of South Korean missionaries,” said the owner of a Christian group business in Yanji. “Many organizations are pulling people out because they’re scared, and certain blocks of people have just disappeared.”

The issue could come up during a three-day visit to China by Robert King, the US special envoy on human rights in North Korea. King’s visit starts on Monday.

[Reuters]

China crackdown on Christians along North Korea border

Posted on by
1

China is cracking down on Christian charity groups near its border with North Korea, missionaries and aid groups say, with hundreds of members of the community forced to leave the country and some who remain describing an atmosphere of fear.

The sweep along the frontier is believed to be aimed at closing off support to North Koreans who flee persecution and poverty in their homeland and illegally enter China before going on to other nations, usually ending up in South Korea.

As many as one third of the 3,000 South Korean missionaries working in China, largely near the North Korean border, have been forced out, most by having their visas refused, said Simon Suh, a Christian pastor who runs an orphanage in Yanji, a city near Tumen.

“Peter Hahn’s school in Tumen and Kevin Garratt’s coffee shop were two organizations that were really well known,” said Suh. “Both of them being cracked down on is a huge blow to everyone, to every activist who is involved with North Korea.”

The missionaries in the remote and mountainous region are usually reserved, but during a recent visit by a Reuters reporter, they seemed especially fearful of speaking to outsiders and appeared to be worried about being followed by security forces.

South Korean and Western missionary groups run schools, orphanages and cafes in the region and channel food and other aid into North Korea. But some of them have also been caught up in helping North Koreans who have fled their isolated country.

There was no firm evidence, however, that Hahn or the Garratts were involved in the so-called underground railroad, helping people escape from North Korea and clandestinely facilitating their journey to the South, usually through a third country.

“Obviously, the screw is tightening all along the border,” said a Christian activist in South Korea, who did not want to be named due to the sensitivity of the situation. “There has been a concerted effort to break up the network of people who help North Koreans—on either side of the border.”

Another source working in the region said: “I believe that the D-Day has come or is coming soon for individuals, businesses and schools who have set up fronts to do North Korea-related humanitarian and refugee works.”

[Reuters]

Silicon Valley “Hack North Korea”

Posted on by

Silicon Valley temporarily turned its focus to North Korea. Over the weekend, about 100 hackers, coders and engineers gathered in San Francisco to brainstorm ways to pierce the information divide that separates North Korea from the rest of the world.

The event, dubbed “Hack North Korea” by organizers at the Human Rights Foundation, is part of a broader effort to channel the wealth, ambition and know-how of Silicon Valley to address difficult real-world problems — and few topics are knottier than North Korea.

The Human Rights Foundation hackathon follows a balloon launch earlier this year that brought democracy leaflets, South Korean soap operas on DVD and USB drives loaded with the Korean Wikipedia over the demilitarized zone that separates the two Koreas.

During the two-day “Hack North Korea” event, the participants were briefed by defectors on the situation in the country. They then pitched ideas for ways to use technology to get information into the country, and broke into groups to turn those ideas into rough prototypes.

A pair of teenage siblings who flew in from Virginia for the event presented a prototype of a system that could allow North Koreans to get real-time information more easily inside the country, using micro-radio devices the size of credit cards, which they said could pick up signals from the South and which could be delivered into the country by smuggling or balloon drop.

Alongside this, the team would target South Korean satellite television broadcasts aimed at China, which pass over the North. Using what they described as “easily concealable” satellite receivers, North Koreans would be able to directly plug their televisions into the receivers.

For their efforts, this winning team won a trip to South Korea to meet with defectors and try and turn their idea into a reality.

Of course, North Korea is no stranger to cyber warfare. It has its own legions of computer-savvy hackers, who have been fingered in a number of attacks on the South, though the North has denied involvement.

In June, a Seoul-based defector group said that Pyongyang had issued an order signed by the country’s leader Kim Jong Un to insulate the country from the South’s cyberattacks.

[Wall Street Journal blog] 

Michael Kirby wants action on North Korea human rights abuses

Posted on by

It’s one thing to bring down a comprehensive and definitive UN report on vile human rights abuses in North Korea. It’s quite another, especially in the fast-moving 24-hour news cycle, to keep the horrors of it in the public eye.

But the former High Court judge Michael Kirby, who chaired the UN Human Rights Council inquiry into North Korea, is determined that the report of the UN Human Rights Council will not be forgotten, and he wants action.

This was Michael Kirby’s response when I asked him to compare North Korea’s prisons to World War II concentration camps:

MICHAEL KIRBY: There are many similarities. I remember one witness who came before us who told of his job, which was to pick up the bodies every day because people just died of hunger and starvation and to put them into wheelbarrows and wheel them to a vat and put them in the vat and turn the vat on and reduce them to ashes and liquid and then to pick up the remains, including legs and arms that hadn’t quite incinerated, and then put all of this into the nearby fields where some food was grown, mainly for the guards, as fertilizer.

The prisoners themselves lived on grass, leaves and items that they could gather and rodents that were in abundance over the fields. And it’s a really horrible story. As you say, no gas ovens, that type of thing, but still people and their families…

MARK COLVIN: So back to the UN. A lot of people are cynical about what the UN can and will do. Do you think that in this case, in the case of North Korea, there’s a prospect of action?

MICHAEL KIRBY: I believe there is. Some people say that’s a naïve belief but I believe that in the end the power of the report which has been produced, the testimony, the findings that these are cases of crimes against humanity which activates the so-called principle of the responsibility to protect: that was what happened with Gaddafi in Libya. That did ultimately secure the support of the permanent five: those who have the veto under the charter.

The Chinese government must be aware of the dangers to them of a country so unstable that it could remove the second or third most powerful man in the land – Jang Song-Thaek, the uncle of the supreme leader – drag him out of the politburo under the television cameras, put him before judges who screamed and shouted at him according to the North Korean reports, calling him a traitor and a dog, and then executed him by firing squad within a matter of three or four days.

I mean, that way of resolving a political dispute essentially, as one understands it, Jang saying, “We should go down the China model and we should engage with the world and we should get a market system,” and the way that was resolved was by simply killing him, and it’s a sign of the instability of the politics of that country.

MARK COLVIN: I was just wondering if you think, maybe, that people – the media – tend to concentrate on the almost comic opera aspects of the Kim dynasty?

MICHAEL KIRBY: Well, they certainly do.

[Excerpt of ABC interview]