Tag Archive: refugee

North Korea Gulag Nation – Part 3

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As he sits in a smoky Seoul coffee shop and recounts his past, Lee, 40, can hardly believe his good fortune. Lee once worked at the heart of power in Pyongyang, a trusted agent for Kim Jong Il in the years before Kim succeeded his father, Kim Il Sung. The names “Kim Jong Il” and “Kim Il Sung” were carved on Lee’s pistol; he considered it “the greatest honor” to serve in Pyongyang’s security elite. Lee was isolated from his family, but he enjoyed the rare perks of good food and clothing.

It was not to last. When officials discovered that one of Lee’s cousins was a driver for Kim Jong Il, he was dismissed for security reasons because of possible collusion. He returned to his hometown and became an executive in the local branch of the Communist Party. But he was shocked to see people eating grass because of crippling food shortages. He began listening to South Korean radio–a grave offense–and in 1994 decided to defect. Lee made his way into China but was tricked by North Korean agents, who smuggled him back over the border. He says that only an order from Kim Jong Il spared him from death.

He was sent to the No. 15 prison camp at Yodok. A banner greeted unlucky arrivals: “You shouldn’t negotiate with class enemies.” Lee, like the other unfortunates, received a ration of 4.5 ounces of corn powder, a few cabbage leaves, and salt. His fellow prisoners included ex-military officers, professors, and others who fell under suspicion after living abroad. They toiled in coal mines, forests, and farm fields. Beatings were routine: Lee rolls up his pants to show the grayish-brown scars on his right leg, reminders of blows from long wooden sticks. He lost most of the sight in his right eye, his teeth were broken, and blood still oozes out of his left ear at times. Of the 1,000 people in his prison unit, he says, about 200 died every year. “It was beyond my imagination. The officers treated prisoners not even like animals but like bugs. They stepped on them,” he says.

But Lee was luckier than most. He was released without explanation in 1999–his weight having fallen from 207 to 119 pounds–and returned to his home village. But he became frightened when rumors circulated that he was a South Korean agent, and he decided to flee through China again–this time successfully. Lee now runs an organic food store.

Kang Chul Hwan is also a veteran of the No. 15 camp at Yodok. Now 34, Kang had a comparatively privileged start in life. He lived in a comfortable Pyongyang apartment assigned to his grandparents, pro-regime Communists of Korean descent who had returned from Japan. In grammar school, he considered himself one of Kim Il Sung’s “little soldiers,” a member of the Pupils’ Red Army, marching with fake machine guns. But when his grandfather came under suspicion–for reasons still unknown–Kang, along with his family, was packed off on a truck to Yodok at the age of 9. From then on, he says, “I can’t believe what happened to me.”

The young Kang was ensnared in a signature feature of North Korea’s political prisons: guilt by family association. Kim Il Sung, say human-rights monitors and former prisoners, declared that three generations of a political enemy’s family can be jailed–without trial. Political rehabilitation is possible in principle, but apparently few endure the years of harsh treatment. Kang and other camp survivors say that sexual intercourse is forbidden (though some women are forced to have sex with camp guards). Women who become pregnant would swallow poison or take falls in attempts to abort. Otherwise, the fetuses are killed–sometimes by the camp doctors, themselves prisoners. Asserts Kang, “The government’s policy was to extinguish all the seeds of all the political prisoners.”

Kang says he nearly died of malnutrition. Survival depended on finding food beyond the meager diet of corn and salt, so he and others laid traps for snakes, rats, and bugs–eaten cooked or raw, if need be. Hunger dictated. “I wanted to eat anything,” he recounts matter of factly.

Ultimately, though, Kang was also one of the lucky ones. He says he wasn’t beaten severely, and part of his sentence was served on relatively light duty at a recycling center for shoes and clothing. At age 19, he was released on Kim Jong Il’s birthday. Five years later, in 1992, he escaped the country, helped by ethnic Koreans living in the borderlands of northeastern China. Now, Kang is a reporter for the Seoul newspaper Chosun Ilbo. His life experience is now his professional beat: North Korean affairs.

Another graduate of the prisons, Lee Soon Ok, had a rougher time of it. She had handled accounting and managerial work at a party distribution center. But when she rebuffed a security chief who demanded an extra jacket, Lee’s fate was sealed. She was accused of embezzlement and disobeying party policy. The result: seven years at the No. 1 prison camp at Gaechun. “My family was split apart in one day,” she says grimly.

At the camp, Lee was tapped to supervise production of exported goods: artificial silk flowers bound for France, handmade wool sweaters for Japan, decorative needlework for Poland. Suits and dress shirts were sold through Hong Kong, getting their origin labels there, before shipment to Europe. If quotas were missed, Lee says, she faced torture. Guards stepped on her head, knocking out teeth and skewing the left side of her face. During one beating, her left eye started to pop out of its socket. She pushed it back in with her fingers. Her arms were injured after she was hung in chains from a ceiling. Even now, she has difficulty sitting or standing for long periods.

In interrogations aimed at forcing a confession, Lee, now 56, was also subjected to water torture. She says guards force-fed her water by pushing the spout of a canister into her mouth. They laid a wooden plank across her abdomen–and pressed down, forcing water out through her mouth, nose, and bladder. “It feels like your intestines are exploding. There’s no way even to describe the pain you feel,” she recalls, with no trace of emotion.

Tears well up, however, when she ponders why a true believer in the system like herself was punished. “I believed that Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il were basically gods,” she says quietly. “I was so loyal to the party, and I don’t know why they put me through this.”

Lee won release in 1993, apparently for her success in meeting production quotas, she says. The earnings had gone into a fund to celebrate Kim Il Sung’s 80th birthday the previous year. By then, though, Lee was in no mood to celebrate. “As soon as I got out of prison, I decided I didn’t want to live in that hell,” she says. Lee fled with her son in 1995. She converted to Christianity, having marveled at jailed Christians who refused to renounce their faith in the face of torture and execution. Lee moved to an apartment block on the outskirts of Seoul. Still, she is plagued by feelings of guilt about those left behind. Her new life’s mission is to expose the terrors of the camps. “I want the world to know how evil Kim Jong Il is,” she says. “The world needs to put more pressure on North Korea.”

“It was a system to kill us.” Lee Young Kook, jailed after trying to flee North Korea.

—An US News and World Report article by Thomas Omestad

50 fold increase in North Korean defectors to Thailand

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Yonhap News agency claims that the number of North Korean defectors to Thailand has jumped more than 50 times since 2004.

Radio Free Asia (RFA), citing a Thai newspaper, the Bangkok Post, said the number of North Koreans who illegally entered Thailand and were arrested soared from 46 in 2004 to 2,482 in 2010.

Thailand is a frequent destination for North Koreans escaping through China. North Koreans are not granted refugee status in Thailand, but after serving their prison sentences for illegal entry, they’re deported to South Korea.

 

North Korea Prisoner Nation – Part 1

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Dr. Norbert Vollertsen, a physician from what was East Germany, had the unique experience of working in hospitals in North Korea from July 1999 through December 2000. Following is a Wall Street Journal article by Dr. Vollertsen:

A human tragedy of hellish dimensions continues in North Korea. For nearly a decade, an unknown number of North Koreans, possibly as many as 300,000, have defected to China. These brave men, women and children risk their lives to flee the mass starvation and brutal oppression brought upon them by Kim Jong Il’s Stalinist regime. Sadly, Beijing’s official policy has been, and remains, to arrest the refugees and forcibly return them to North Korea, where they face imprisonment, torture and in some cases execution.

Until recently, these refugees’ stories and China’s practice of refoulement, or forced return, went largely untold. Mercifully, this is beginning to change. Now, action by human-rights campaigners from around the world –including my own small efforts– helps some of these refugees to seek asylum, and to publicize their brutal treatment at the hands of Chinese and North Korean officials. President Bush is right to call the regime in Pyongyang “evil.”

I know, because I have seen the evil with my own eyes. From July 1999 to December 2000, I traveled with the German medical aid group, Cap Anamur, and gained access to some of the country’s most secretive regions. What I witnessed could best be described as unbelievable deprivation. As I wrote for this newspaper in April 2001, “In the hospitals one see kids too small for their age, with hollow eyes and skin stretched tight across their faces. They wear blue-and-white striped pajamas, like the children in Hitler’s Auschwitz.”

While western critics denounced President Bush’s decision to include North Korea in the Axis of Evil, the long-suffering people of North Korea cheered it. I know: refugees have told me. They know how Ronald Reagan’s description of the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire” was an early and important step toward its collapse. Moreover, the Axis of Evil remark proved prescient after North Korea’s confession that it had a large, covert nuclear-weapons program. More and more high-ranking defectors have told us that Kim Jong II’s government is in a desperate situation, much closer to collapse than the outside world knows. This, they say, is why he needs the fear of nuclear annihilation to win concessions from the West, prop up his regime, and subjugate his own people.

One must remember that the famine in North Korea is not a natural disaster, but a man-made one. The North Korean dictator uses food as a weapon against his own people, keeping them weak and dependent on the state. From 1994 to 1998 (the most recent reliable data the outside world has), at least two million North Koreans perished from starvation and related diseases. Nearly 50% of all North Korean children are malnourished to the point that it threatens their physical and mental health.I worked in North Korea for 18 months until I was deported in late 2000, for publicly denouncing the regime for its human-rights abuses and failure to distribute the massive amounts of food aid to the people who needed it most. After leaving, I knew the only way I could help the people of North Korea was to tell the world what I had witnessed and work to free the 23 million people who remain prisoners in their own country.

In 2001, I interviewed several hundred North Korean defectors in Seoul, as well as near the Chinese-North Korean border, plus in several other locations where they were hiding. Many of them had spent years in concentration camps and spoke of mass executions, torture, rape, murder, baby killing and other crimes against humanity. Most were imprisoned for “anti-state criminal acts.”

During my interviews, I met with many human-rights activists who had devoted their lives to helping the North Korean refugees. Hiroshi Kato, a Japanese journalist and organizer of Life Funds for North Korean Refugees, based in Tokyo; San Hun Kim, a South Korean former UN official and human rights volunteer; Chun Ki Won, a South Korean Christian missionary; and many others. We realized from our experience in the field in China that the North Korean defectors had risked their lives fleeing starvation and oppression.

In China, most of the refugees live in utterly primitive circumstances. They have little food, no medicine, and lack proper shelter. Many live in the woods, sleep in makeshift huts, and cook in holes in the ground. Those in urban areas are sold like slaves to Chinese businessman, and the young women are forced into prostitution.     Continued

North Korea Prisoner Nation – Part 2

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Dr. Norbert Vollertsen, a physician from what was East Germany, had the unique experience of working in hospitals in North Korea from July 1999 through December 2000. Following is part two of a Wall Street Journal article by Dr. Vollertsen:

My fellow North Korean activists and I have appealed to Beijing numerous times, asking them to change their policy toward the refugees; but to this day we have yet to receive a response. In late 2001, we agreed that helping North Korean defectors enter a foreign embassy in Beijing would be an effective way to bring the issue to international attention. Encouraged by other international and South Korean aid workers, who were consulted in the weeks that followed, we arranged a plan of action and made several trips to China to go over the logistics.

Kim Hee Tae, a South Korean humanitarian aid worker operating in China, joined us on condition that the operation be carried out on humanitarian grounds. We agreed, and thus 25 North Korean defectors were interviewed and selected from a great many defectors, all anxious to leave China at any risk. On March 15, 2002, we launched our first operation, sending all 25 defectors into the Spanish Embassy in Beijing. Several similar operations followed.

Our plan was to conduct as many operations as possible, to keep the issue in the news, and ratchet up international pressure on Beijing. Then, a plan to send a group of refugees into the Peruvian Embassy last September was aborted when the Chinese authorities arrested the chosen refugees and the activist Kim Hee Tae in late August. Things then went from bad to worse. In early November, Mr. Kato was detained by the Chinese police, very severely interrogated, even tortured, and finally released because of increasing international pressure, mainly from the Japanese media. Because the police confiscated his notebook, our whole network suffered a huge setback.

Another strategy of ours was to create a flood of North Korean “boat people.” We made extensive plans for vessels to carry refugees across the Yellow sea from China to South Korea. Once again many activists and even a freelance photographer for the New York Times got arrested. Beijing treats the North Korean refugees—and increasingly those who help them as well—like criminals. China continues to prop up Kim Jong II’s evil regime even as thousands sneak over the border to escape it.Even worse, the South Korean government has largely turned a blind eye to the plight of their “brothers” to the north, and in many cases has actually hindered their escape. Our plans to cross the Yellow Sea were foiled in part by South Korean authorities who used surveillance, interception and minders to disrupt our plans. Read this again, for I wish to stress the shame of it: South Korean authorities worked actively to foil our attempts to bring North Korean refugees to freedom. But under South Korean law, North Korean refugees cannot be turned away. It is time for Seoul to live up to this promise.

And it’s not just the officials. South Korean students spend their time and energy denouncing the presence of U.S. troops, instead of denouncing the evils of Kim Jong II. What many foreigners fail to understand is that the student movement in Seoul is heavily influenced by North Korean propaganda, and quite possibly given logistical and financial support through spies from the North.

This is similar to the espionage and propaganda that was so pervasive in Europe during the cold War. As a German who witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, I understand the destabilizing impact an exodus of refugees can have on totalitarian regimes. Despite arrests and beatings, my friends and I will continue our efforts to create a stead flow of refugees through Western embassies in China, by boat across the Yellow Sea, and at the North Korean-Russian border.

As a German, I also know about Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy towards Nazi Germany, how badly it failed, and how disastrous were its consequences. The only way to truly help the North Korean people and to end Pyongyang’s nuclear blackmail is to hasten the collapse of Kim Jong II’s murderous regime. As President Bush said of Iraq in his State of the Union address, so too should it be said of North Korea: the real enemy of the North Korean people is not surrounding them but ruling them.

-Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2003

North Koreans economic migrants or political refugees?

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China defends the repatriations of North Korean refugees back to North Korea by claiming that the refugees are simply “economic migrants”.

Writes Suzanne Scholte of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, “Yet as soon as a North Korean crosses the border, they immediately fit the definition of a political asylum seeker because it is a crime against the state for a North Korean to leave the country.

“We know from eyewitness testimony that when North Koreans are repatriated they are subjected to harsh sentences, in some cases they are executed.”

 

Perilous odyssey of a North Korean refugee

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Meet another North Korean refugee, Choi Kyong-chol, via this Christian Science Monitor article:

In an upscale coffee shop, Choi Kyong-chol clutches his knapsack. All his worldly valuables are in the small black bag.

A North Korean refugee – a farmer who escaped to Seoul  – Mr. Choi is still a bit dazed by the big city. A year ago, Choi lived on a pig farm in north China with his family, also escapees from hunger in North Korea. But one day, Chinese police came to the family hut, handcuffed the five Chois, and sent them home.

Arriving at a North Korean jail, they were made to stand and sit until Choi’s mother fainted. Weeks later, they were released, “dumped into an empty field,” as Choi says. Immediately they plotted to go back to China. “We had no money, no food, no future.”

On March 14, 2002 Choi and 24 other North Koreans rushed into the Spanish Embassy in Beijing, as TV cameras rolled. That dash marked the first sight, for much of the world, of a special problem – runaways from the world’s last Stalinist regime – that until recently had not even been identified.

Since the mid-1990s, North Korean runaways have been voiceless and largely powerless pawns in a geopolitical conundrum: China doesn’t especially want them, and the North will punish them if they return. They live in a silent daily struggle along China’s border, where crossing a small river is a ticket to a new world, albeit one where they might be arrested.

Since the Spanish Embassy event, the policing of illegal Koreans in China has intensified. Along the border, China has heightened a two-year crackdown – with stepped-up house-to-house searches, leaflets warning villagers not to help, and bounties paid to informants, according to seven recent escapees interviewed for this report.

China has been cracking down on the underground railroad – run mostly by Christians from South Korea. “About 95 percent of the people over there helping are Christians,” says one such worker. “We act in cells. We don’t want to compromise each other.”

According to Tim Peters, an aid worker in Seoul, some Chinese make up to 2,500 yuan ($400), to identify any of the missionaries who troll the border.

Choi and his sister dug a hole at the foot of a hill outside one border town, where they could sleep. Choi soon felt he needed to move away from the border, deeper into China, but travel was difficult. “You need to travel, and you need to go by bus or train. But you get nervous when you go to buy a ticket. The number of checkpoints is higher. The police stop and search buses, and then there is nothing you can do. You are caught.”

Before he could go, Choi got word that his father was impatient and wanted to leave North Korea. To this day, he hasn’t seen them.

Eventually Choi met a railroad worker in China. Choi will say nothing about these contacts, other than that they took place through someone who knew his father.

Over the course of several “interviews,” Choi says he was asked by railroad workers what he wanted. He said, “freedom.” Did he want to escape? “Yes.” He was then asked how he felt about a risky plan to go to South Korea by way of Beijing. He said, “I feel doomed anyway. I can sit here and be doomed, or I can go forward. I want to go forward.”

Until Choi got to Beijing, he says, he didn’t really understand the plan, did not realize that Norbert Vollertsen, part of an international group of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), had cased the German Embassy the night before and found the security too tight. Not until the Koreans rushed the Spanish Embassy, their alternate plan, did Choi grasp what he was part of.

 

Why do North Koreans flee North Korea?

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First question: Why would a North Korean defect their country, North Korea? Meet Lee, and hear her story via this Washington Post article:

Lee’s crime was that she was hungry. After years of meager rations in North Korea, the 22-year-old woman with curly hair left her peasant family’s home and slipped across the border into China, hoping to find something to eat. She was caught and sent back, handcuffed, to a North Korean prison camp — a world of cruelty.

She was worked to exhaustion, forced to run in her bare feet as she carried heavy bricks at a construction site. Her food was a bowl of watery soup every day with cabbage and a few rotten corn kernels.

There was no escape. “I didn’t feel anything,” said Lee, now 28 and safe after an escape that brought her to Seoul four months ago. Beaten, starved and assaulted by horrors, “you just don’t think about anything. You really have no fear of death. At that point, you’re just a machine with no emotion.”

The U.N. Commission on Human Rights condemned North Korea’s human rights record, answering years of demands by activists that the world confront the abuses.

The commission expressed “deep concern” about conditions in the country, including torture, public executions, political executions, use of political prison camps and selective provision of food.

The vote is a response in part to the harsher tone adopted by the Bush administration in dealing with North Korean abuses. Previously, the United States and other countries had been reluctant to push the human rights issue with the prickly North Korean government, arguing that it would have little effect.

But to the dismay of activists, South Korea and its new president, Roh Moo Hyun, a human rights lawyer, abstained from voting.

“South Korea should be ashamed that foreign countries are saying what we are afraid to say on behalf of fellow Koreans,” said Chun Ki Won, a South Korean Christian aid worker who has been jailed in China for his work helping North Koreans escape.

Human rights activists estimate there are about 200,000 prisoners in at least five large North Korean camps, some confined for trying to escape like Lee, others for political offenses that make it likely they will die in prison.

Rights activists were especially critical of South Korea’s position, saying they expected more from South Korea’s new government.

“It will go down as a stain on South Korea’s history,” said Tim Peters, director of Helping Hands Korea, which assists defectors. “There should be outrage toward the government here. Nothing can top the irony of a human rights Nobel laureate [former president Kim Dae Jung], followed by a human rights lawyer, and neither of them raising the issue of human rights.”

Roh, in a recent interview with The Washington Post, defended his position. “Rather than confronting the Kim Jong Il regime over human rights of a small number of people, I think it is better for us to open up the regime through dialogue,” he said. “I think this will ultimately bring broader protection of human rights for North Korean people as a whole.

“As in Iraq, I don’t think the North Korean human rights conditions can be changed by pressure from international public opinion,” Roh added. “If I bring up the human rights [issue], it will not help improve human rights conditions in North Korea. Rather, it will be an obstacle to bringing an ‘opening up’ or peace in North Korea.”

Lee saw the horror of those human rights conditions during her imprisonment in North Korea. The young woman cannot give her full name; her mother and three siblings still in North Korea would be in grave danger. Sitting in an activist’s office in Seoul, her pretty smile dissolves into tears at recalling her months in prison.

Each night, she said, the 160 women in the camp lined up, heads bowed, as a guard whipped those who had not worked hard enough and slammed the heads of others against the wall. Fifty women were packed into a tiny room, forced to sleep while sitting.

“You go to sleep, and the next morning the person next to you is cold, dead,” she said. “The older women would die right away.” She said that a fellow prisoner, desperate with hunger, bit off half the ear of a woman who had died, and put it in her pocket to eat later.

Two sisters who tried to escape were caught and brought back to the camp to serve as a lesson. Lee said they were forced to lift a heavy log until it fell, crushing them. Other prisoners were ordered to stomp on the sisters’ hands to break their bones. Finally the two women were strapped to a wall to be starved to death.

“After a week their bodies were gone. They had died,” said Lee.

Lee became so weak in the camp she was sent home to die. Instead, a trader carried her on his back across the river to China, where she recovered her strength. A Christian activist gave her false papers, and Lee lived illegally for four years in eastern China, despite regular roundups by Chinese authorities to force North Koreans back across the border.

She finally joined the long smuggling route, an “underground railway” for North Koreans, that took her to Mongolia and eventually to South Korea. Only when she was safe did she throw away the rat poison she planned to take if she was forced back to North Korea again.

Lee arrived in Seoul to find physical comfort, but also referred to the loneliness that many other defectors describe when they finally reach safety. After two months in South Korea’s reeducation camp, the government gave her an apartment and a monthly stipend. She is trying to learn secretarial skills and is contemplating life in a society where her accent and communist education set her apart.

“I thought when I came to South Korea everything would be happy. But I realize that’s not true. I didn’t know where to go or how to behave,” she said.

She is sending money back through the smugglers’ route so her mother and siblings can buy food in North Korea. “If my family is hurt, all my hope would be gone,” she said.

“To be honest, sometimes I try to forget that happened to me,” she said. “Now I realize how revolting it was. There, I was just numb. It’s human to try to forget it.”