Category: North Korean refugee

North Korean refugees arrested in China

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At least 13 refugees from North Korea have been arrested in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming while they were trying to reach South Korea, media reports said on Monday. Dong-A Ilbo newspaper which also reported the arrests put the number at 15.

Chinese police on Friday arrested the North Koreans who were trying to board a bus bound for an unidentified Southeast Asian nation, Yonhap news agency said. It cited South Korean activists promoting human rights for North Korean refugees.

“Most North Korean defectors travel in a group of five at most when crossing the Chinese border to a Southeast Asian nation,” said one activist quoted by Yonhap. “It appears that [the reason this group was larger than normal is] they were trying to save money for hiring brokers who could help them cross the border.”

Some 25,000 North Koreans have fled famine or repression at home to settle in the capitalist South over the past six decades. Almost all cross the North’s border into China. Many of them then secretly travel through China to a third nation – often in Southeast Asia – where they arrange to fly on to South Korea for resettlement.

China – the North’s sole major ally – considers the fugitives to be illegal economic migrants instead of refugees and repatriates those whom it catches. Rights groups strongly criticise Beijing’s policy. The fugitives can face severe punishment including a term in a prison camp once they are sent back to North Korea.

[AFP]

North Korea “executes 80 people for watching foreign films”

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North Korea has publicly executed 80 people for watching foreign television programs, a South Korean newspaper claims. JoongAng Ilbo daily reported that the killings were carried out in seven separate cities on November 3, with an alleged 10,000 people forced to attend one group execution held in a sports stadium in the eastern port city Wonsan.

Citing a “single unidentified” individual as the source of the story, the newspaper said the majority of those executed had been charged with “watching illicit South Korean TV dramas and some with prostitution”.

The story gained credibility when Daily NK – an online media agency run by North Korean defectors – said it had also heard the reports of mass executions taking place.

During the front page report, the JoongAng Ilbo reporter cites another defector group as saying it had warned of a forthcoming wave of executions several months ago.

A spokesman for North Korea Intellectual Solidarity reportedly said “The regime is obviously afraid of potential changes in people’s mind-sets and is pre-emptively trying to scare people off”.

Watching films or television from capitalist countries – especially South Korea – is a serious offence in North Korea, but despite the risk of execution, shows like Desperate Housewives from the US have acquired a large following.

It is thought the majority of the programs are smuggled into the country on DVDs, MP3 players and Flash drives.

[The Independent]

EU and S. Korea call for ban on forced repatriation of North Korean refugees

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South Korean President Park Geun-hye held summits with Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, and José Manuel Durão Barroso, president of the European Commission, on Friday and agreed to expand cooperation with the EU in the fields of small and medium businesses and science and technology.

During the summit with the EU leaders, an agreement was established that North Korea should abandon its program for nuclear and missile development “in a complete, verifiable and irreversible way.” They also expressed serious concerns over North Korea`s dire human rights situation. In particular, they shared the view that North Korean refugees` safety and happiness should be guaranteed and that the principle of no forced repatriation should be respected.

[Dong-A Ilbo]

North Korea says South Korean spy arrested in capital

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North Korea’s security agency said Thursday it arrested a South Korean spy in Pyongyang who intended to rally anti-government forces, a claim that intelligence officials in Seoul quickly called ridiculous and groundless.

Outside analysts usually view such North Korean antics as a way to strengthen domestic support for leader Kim Jong Un – but specific claims that an individual spy has been captured, especially before an investigation is concluded, are unusual.

The North’s claim comes amid worsening ties. The Koreas had turned to tentative diplomacy after a spring that saw a near-daily barrage of threats, including North Korean warnings of nuclear strikes on Seoul and Washington. But tension has renewed since North Korea canceled planned reunions in September of families separated by the 1950-53 Korean War.

The North Korean security ministry said that the South Korean initially said he was a Chinese citizen living in North Korea and then said he was a citizen of another country. The initial investigation found that the South Korean spent six years in a country bordering North Korea using religion to disguise anti-North Korea espionage activities, the North’s statement alleged.

Many South Korean missionaries work with North Korean defectors and border-crossers in China. One year ago, Kenneth Bae, an American missionary and tour operator, was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor after being arrested for alleged hostile acts in North Korea.

North Korea officially recognizes freedom of religion, but it tolerates only sanctioned churches, and activists and defectors call it one of the world’s worst places for religion.

[AP]

The North Korean Underground Church

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One of the first things Eric Foley, the co-founder of Seoul USA, learned about the North Korean underground church is that it is not a group to be pitied. About 10 years ago Foley asked a member of the underground church how he could pray for them. He recalls the North Korean’s response, “You, pray for us? We pray for you … because South Korean and American churches believe challenges in the Christian faith are solved by money, freedom, and politics. It’s only when all you have is God do you realize God is all you need.”

Unlike the Chinese underground church, North Korean Christians can’t risk gathering together because spies are everywhere. Instead, they worship in their own household or in the common areas, like while walking down the road out of earshot.

Foley estimates about 100,000 Christians live in North Korea, with about a third of them in concentration camps. Members of the church have told Foley they see concentration camps as just another mission field — North Korean officials have had to separate Christians from other prisoners because they keep sharing the gospel.

As North Korea fell under Communist rule after World War II, Christians realized they would soon face intense persecution. Some escaped to South Korea, where they could worship freely, but those who stayed chose four foundational pillars of Christianity they could pass on to future generations.

Physical copies of the Bible are rare for poor households, as government officials regularly check their homes. If officials find a Bible, the government will send the family to concentration camps or kill them. Seoul USA has been able to send Bibles over to North Korea using balloons — 50,000 Bibles dropped into the country this past year. The group also produces short-wave radio programs with North Korean defectors reading the Bible, as about 20 percent of North Koreans illegally own radios.

The government deems Christianity a threat because North Korea’s Juche ideology, which mixes Marxism with worship of the “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung and his family, is partially copied from Christianity. Kim, who attended church until eighth grade, took Christian concepts like the trinity, church services, and hymns and made it all about himself. If people found out about Christ, they’d see Kim and his lineage as the frauds they are.

With a zero-tolerance policy for Christianity, Christians are careful who they tell about their faith. They don’t reveal their belief to their spouses until years after marriage, and they can’t tell their children until they turn 15, as teachers are trained to extract such information from students.

Foley has also met defectors who “know Bible stories told differently or some Christian songs. North Korean Christians are very careful to pass on the treasure and for their family members to guard it and only over time realize what it is.” Seoul USA sees its role as discipling the church in North Korea by providing resources like the radio and Bibles, as well as starting Underground University to train North Korean defectors to become missionaries to their own people.

[Read full article] 

North Korean defector testifies at UN rights probe in Washington DC

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Jin hye Jo_north koreaHer father was tortured in detention in North Korea and died. Her elder sister went searching for food during the great famine of the 1990s, only to be trafficked to China. Her two younger brothers died of starvation, one of them a baby without milk whose life ebbed away in her arms.

North Korean defector Jin Hye Jo tearfully told her family’s story Wednesday to U.N. investigators during a public hearing in Washington, their latest stop in a globe-trotting effort to probe possible crimes against humanity in North Korea.

Jin is one of two defectors testifying at the public hearing at John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. The three-member panel has received evidence from dozens of others during hearings in South Korea, Japan and Britain.

Jin, 26, who has lived in the United States since 2008 and runs a charity for North Korean defectors, scoffed at the suggestion that the food shortages were due to natural causes, claiming that government officials drive BMWs and drink exotic whiskies while children die. She recalled how the shortages became very serious in 1996 and she would return from school feeling dizzy from hunger. Her parents made clandestine trips north to China to get food. But her father was arrested and, according to a fellow detainee, was beaten and killed, although authorities claimed he was shot trying to escape.

The family’s fortunes only got worse. In 1998, after Jin’s elder sister went missing, her mother went to China to try and locate the sister. Jin, then age 10, was left with her grandmother and two younger siblings to care for their newly born brother. Because of the father’s previous arrest, she said, the family was shunned by neighbors when they begged for food.

“My baby brother died in my arms because we had nothing to eat. Because I was holding him so much he thought that I was his mom, so when I was feeding him water he was sometimes looking at me, smiling,” Jin said, weeping.

She said her grandmother and her 5-year-old brother also starved. The remaining family members fled to China, but were arrested several times and repatriated before finally gaining asylum in March 2008 with the help of Christian missionaries.

[Read more at KBOI2]

UN acknowledges gross human rights violations taking place in North Korea

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The head of the Commission of Inquiry on human rights in North Korea says evidence collected so far points to apparently “large-scale patterns of systematic and gross human rights violations” in that country.

Commission Chairman Michael Kirby, an Australian judge with 35 years of experience, said testimony from witnesses and survivors was so shocking that it moved commission members to tears.

Torture, sexual violence, denial of food, arbitrary detention, abduction of foreigners, the return of refugees to certain imprisonment – these are just some of the grave human rights abuses that Commission members and the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in North Korea detailed Tuesday at the United Nations.

“Some testimony has been extremely distressing; testimony concerning the detention facilities, the lack of proper food in them, the fact that people are in the detention facilities who have committed no offense and no crime, according to their testimony, but who are simply there because of the notion of inter-generational guilt which is a feature of the system in North Korea,” said Kirby.

Kirby also said the commission has obtained satellite images that show at least four political prison camps that remain fully operational.  He said a fifth camp appears to have been significantly scaled-down, while another camp was closed.  He said the commission wants to know what happened to the prisoners in these two camps.

The Commissioners said the treatment of women in North Korea is a serious problem. Commissioner Sonja Biserko said women are victims at home and as refugees. “About 80 percent of refugees are women.  Not only do they undergo tough experiences, they very often have to accept to be trafficked and sold to Chinese men because they do not want to return.  But once caught by Chinese and sent back home they undergo severe punishments, either sent to prisons or kept in detention centers and treated in the most horrible way,” said Biserko.

[Read full VoA article]   

Perpetrators of North Korean human rights violations revealed

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Kim Ryeon-hee, who was pregnant when repatriated to North Korea after defecting from the communist country, was beaten for eating stolen corn, and had a miscarriage before dying. The suspected perpetrator in this case was Chae Myeong-il, then staff sergeant and guard at Songpyong Station of the People’s Public Security Bureau in North Hamkyong Province.

Won Myeong-hwa, who was detained at the Hoeryong City Jeongeori correction house in North Hamkyong Province, was severely beaten to death by a security guard in February 2011. The suspected perpetrator is Kim Chang-soo, a security guard in charge of the eighth chamber at Jeongeori correction house.

This information is part of a “case report on North Korean human rights,” recently released by the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, and the first time that detailed profiles of suspects involved in human rights violations in North Korea have been specifically documented.

The disclosure of the profiles of perpetrators in North Korea is aimed at sending both those individuals and the Kim Jong Un regime a message: “Personal profiles of those responsible for human rights violations are being accumulated, and those who are responsible will be brought to justice without fail.”

These efforts are also linked with a campaign by the U.N. Commission of Inquiry, which in July began to gather specific data required to substantiate Kim Jong Un’s crimes, leaving open the possibility of bringing the North Korean leader to the International Criminal Court.

Data contained in “Reports on North Korean human rights cases” have been gathered through interviews with North Korean defectors, and then undergone a review process by the verification committee within the Database Center. Of the 300 North Korean defectors surveyed, who suffered torturous acts at detention facilities in the North, half (49 percent) are still suffering physical and mental aftereffects.

[Dong-a Ilbo]

South Korean dramas provide real life influence on North Koreans

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The spread of relatively cheap, enhanced versatile disc (EVD) players in North Korea is making it harder for authorities to crack down on citizens watching South Korean-made videos, and fueling the spread of the “Korean wave” in the communist country, a South Korean scholar said Tuesday.

Kang Dong-won, a professor of international relations at Dong-a University, said that the arrival of cheap, Chinese-made “portable TVs” that started reaching the isolated country in 2005 has made it possible for people to watch various movies and dramas made in the South.

The latest assertions corroborate the first-hand accounts of many North Korean escapees who said they knew about the Korean wave even before they arrived in the South. The Korean wave, or “Hallyu” in Korean, is a word to describe the growing popularity of South Korean television shows and pop songs across the world.

“The advantage of the EVDs is that they can play various CDs, DVDs and USBs and are relatively cheap to buy,” the scholar said.

North Korean defector Lee Jung-chol, who lives in Seoul using an alias, said that North Korean authorities are aware of the spread of the Korean wave. Lee, who worked for the government before escaping from the North in 2011, said … “If you have not seen a South Korean drama in the North, you are treated as being out of touch.”

[Korea Herald]

North Korean defectors’ campaign to find a replacement for Kim Jong-un

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North Korean defectors have launched a tongue-in-cheek petition to get late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s eldest son, Jong-nam, to replace current leader Kim Jong-un.

Kim Jong-nam has lived in sumptuously-funded exile in China, Macau and Singapore for years since he fell from favor.

The tongue-in-cheek petition appears on a website with the same name as the North Korean propaganda site Uriminzokkiri. The website, which has one more “k” than the North Korean version in its URL, created a corner gathering signatures to support a takeover by Kim Jong-nam. It hails him as the “eldest son and true heir of the Baekdu blood” — a reference to nation founder Kim Il-sung’s alleged birthplace.

The website also praises Kim Jong-nam’s courage for criticizing the hereditary transfer of power from Kim Jong-il to his third son Jong-un, which he described as “a joke to the outside world.”

The website’s creator, who gave his name as Chung, said the petition is slightly mischievous. “Our purpose is to deal a blow to the Kim Jong-un regime by stressing the need for reforms, rather than actually getting Kim Jong-nam to become the new leader.” Chung added he wants to use humor to inform more young South Koreans what is actually happening in the North.

[Chosun Ilbo]