Donate for the North Korean refugees!

Citizens’ Alliance accepts donations of medicine, new and/or used clothing, and money (from international donors money only). Until recently donors from abroad have found high charges for currency conversion and bank transfer unsatisfactory. Citizens’ Alliance can now accept donations by credit card. If you would like to send a little something to help the North Korean refugees in China and Russia please e-mail us the following:

1. Your name

2. Name of your credit card (American Express, VISA, etc.)

3. Credit card number

4. Expiration date of your card

5. Amount you wish to donate

And forward your payment to:

1. Account name: Citizens’ Alliance to Help Political Prisoners in North Korea

2. Bank name: Korea Exchange Bank, Sodaemun Branch

3. Account number: 071-22-01342-6

For any comments or questions about FNN, please write to Ms. Alexyss Kim.

E-mail: ([email protected]).

Fax: +82 2 723 1671

Tel: +82 2 723 1671, 2671  

Helping Starving North Korean Residents is God’s Will

By Kang Tae-uk, Newsweek Korea, February 7, 2001

“And if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.” (Isaiah 58:10) Tim Peters, 51, who is currently working as an English speechwriter and an adviser at the Federation of Korean Industries (KFI), takes the above passage from the Old Testament as his guiding star in life. Since June 1996, he has been managing a non-government organization called “Ton a Month Club” (http://ton-a-month.tripod.com) to help the starving North Korean residents. TMC is a kind of a non-profit Christian relief program, which has sent more than 90 tons of food to the North to date.

It was in May 1996 when he received a revelation from God to carry out relief activities for North Korea. At the time, he had been listening to a speech by Bernard Krisher, 69, a former Newsweek Tokyo bureau chief, at the Seoul Foreign Press Club. During his press conference, Mr. Krisher urged the world to invest an interest in North Korea's state of famine, which at the time had not been made public. After the speech, Peters rushed to the Shilla Hotel where Krisher had been staying and sought advice on giving food aid to the North. He felt “God's revelation” while praying at home with his wife and youngest son several days later, he said.

The root of this revelation goes back to May of 1972 when he had been a senior at the Michigan State University (MSU). Although he had grown up in a family of devout Christians, he felt disillusioned by the existing institutionalized religion, which he decided to abandon and join a “revolutionary” religious group called "Family Missions" (Helping Hand) instead. Family Missions believes that church has to extend a hand of salvation even to the hippies, to whom existing religions had denied help, and that it has to practice God's love for everyone by discarding all forms of discrimination, as stated in the New Testament. Soon he took a temporary leave of absence from school and spent nine months undergoing missionary training in Puerto Rico before he began to carry out missionary activities in such countries as Venezuela and Argentina. In 1974, he narrowly escaped death when a bomb exploded near him in Argentina, which had been in a state of social agitation over the return of Juan Peron from his asylum in Spain.

To preach his gospel, he came to South Korea in May 1975, which had been under the authoritarian rule of former President Park Chung-hee at the time. Unfortunately, the Park Chung-hee government decided that "Revolution for Jesus," the catchphrase Peters came up with for his missionary activities there, was reactionary and forcibly deported him (it was at this time of trial that he married Kim Son-mi, a Korean). He had a passion for Korea, however, and sought various ways for re-entry. In the end, he decided obtaining a visa for a teaching position would be the easiest way to do it. He returned to college, finished the final semester, and acquired a teacher's certificate. He then worked as a teacher in Dallas, Phoenix and Los Angeles, and returned to Korea in 1988 when the Roh Tae-woo government lifted him and his wife from a blacklist.

The TMC he founded five years ago collects donations mainly through personal networks and charity concerts. The personal network he refers to is highly simple. “It’s better for one thousand persons to donate one dollar each than for one company to give one thousand dollars,” he said. Charity concerts also usually take place at the voluntary participation of the performers, some of which include the charity solo given by the world-famous pianist Sam Rotman and a Korean soprano Chang Son-kyong at the Munhwa Ilbo Hall on November 18, 1999, and the concert by Jerusalem Philharmonic in the Hyatt Hotel Grand Ball Room.

The relief goods TMC sends to North Korea mainly comprise corn and flour, although they also contain clothing and medical supplies. The organization chooses these food items because they have high calories and are less liable than rice to fall into the hands of elite North Koreans, such as party executives and soldiers, Since they are also cheap, TMC can procure them in large quantities. “We can buy one ton of corn in China with 200,000 won ($170),” he explained.

Mostly TMC buys the food supplies from the areas bordering North Korea, such as Dalian, which are then offered to North Korean defectors through reliable ethnic Korean-Chinese. Some of the food are also sent directly to North Korea through ethnic Korean-Chinese who has an access to the North, and the South Korean Red Cross, and Jungto, a Buddhist relief organization for North Korea. He and his wife went to a noodle factory in Najin, North Korea, to directly deliver four tons of flour in June 1999, even though tensions between the two Koreas were running high—a naval skirmish between the North and the South had taken place at the West Sea only a few days before. He also visited to five cities near Yanbian to deliver relief goods last week.

When asked about the regulations China may impose on relief activities carried out in the country, he said, “In view of its relations with North Korea, China has signed an agreement to forcibly repatriate North Korean defectors, rather than granting them a refugee status. Even so, it has not tried to stop humanitarian relief activities.” Nevertheless, it is possible for China to take some measures for his efforts there, once it officially confirms his relief activities. But he did not seem fazed by the possibility. "More than three million North Korean residents have died of starvation during the last five years, and the number of North Korean defectors exceed 100,000. As long as this reality prevails, I will go wherever they are," he said. He will do so probably because he wishes to spend himself in behalf of the hungry as written in the New Testament.

Where Has the Aid Gone?

Not to save lives, says a German doctor who worked in the North. That, he says, is because aid agencies are afraid to stand up to Pyongyang

By John Larkin, Far Eastern Economic Review, January 25, 2001

TEN YEARS as a general practitioner in the central German university town of Goettingen left Norbert Vollertsen unprepared for what he saw in North Korea: malnourished children so emaciated that they looked half their age, watching their friends die through lifeless eyes; teenage girls trekking hundreds of kilometres in freezing winters and sweltering summers to scavenge for food for their families; hospitals without windows or toilets, the doctors often starving themselves. The memories keep the 42-year-old German awake some nights. But it's anger that drives him. 

Vollertsen spent 18 months in North Korea, from July 1999 to December last year, with German emergency medical-aid agency Komitee Cap Anamur, which works from 10 hospitals and three orphanages spread throughout the famine-wracked country. He wanted a change of scene from his comfortable, slow-paced life in Germany, where his 14-year marriage had ended in divorce.

He found just such a change in North Korea, gaining unusual access to many regions, thanks to his decision to supply some of his own skin to a burn victim in the port city of Haeju. For that kindness he became the first foreigner to be awarded a "friendship medal," which served as a passport to some of the suffering provinces. "The medal meant nobody stopped me when I went out by car," he says.

The medal became a ticket to a nightmare. Expecting to see conditions in the countryside reflecting the rising prosperity in Pyongyang, he found instead hospitals without basic medical equipment. "In the first four weeks I saw four children die and couldn't do anything about it," he says. "One 14-year-old girl was so thin she looked three years old. People are in such bad condition they have heart problems and brain defects due to lack of protein. Young adults have no hope, no future. You can see it in their eyes." Some find solace in a crude alcohol that dulls their sorrows, and ruins what's left of their health.

The scenes convinced him that much of the aid donated by the outside world wasn't saving the lives it was intended to save. Instead, he believes much of it is padding the pockets of ruling-party officials who cruise around town in latest-model Mercedes-Benzes and dine at fancy restaurants where they pay with U.S. dollars. Vollertsen, who admits that his evidence is anecdotal, says he has seen food and medical equipment supplied by his agency locked inside a warehouse when it should already have been distributed. On that occasion he kicked down the door. He accuses other aid organizations of not being as determined as they should be to hold Pyongyang to account for the aid it receives.

Vollertsen was forced by authorities to leave North Korea on December 30 and took a ferry from China to South Korea. In Seoul, he has declared opinions that have thrust him into the media spotlight--and set him at odds with much of the international aid community. He says international aid agencies are acting like "slaves" of Pyongyang by failing to confront North Korean authorities about patchy monitoring of aid deliveries and rampant human-rights violations, even though they have the leverage to do so.

"Foreign visitors to North Korea remark on the politeness with which senior aid workers speak to the North Koreans," Vollertsen says. "Nobody criticizes or tries to investigate where the food has gone. Pyongyang is fooling the world. Aid groups must insist on human rights and better monitoring. If they behave like slaves nothing will change."

He says United Nations agencies, in particular the World Food Programme, are too worried about getting expelled to risk annoying their hosts. But if they did try standing up to the authorities, he believes they would get a more positive response than they might expect. Though his contract with Komitee Cap Anamur ended on December 31, his views are supported by the group's founder, Rupert Neudeck, who told the REVIEW that the UN agencies' monitoring policies are "lousy."

Sitting in a hotel room in Seoul, Vollertsen still struggles to comprehend what he saw. He speaks of party officials at the airport with luggage packed with goods from Yves St. Laurent and Cartier. "An hour from Pyongyang, children are starving, and these officials are leading great lives." Fed up, he decided to start breaking the rules. He walked out of official functions before the inevitable toast to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. When U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Pyongyang in October, he drove a group of foreign journalists around miserably ill-equipped hospitals in defiance of orders that the press corps should not venture out unaccompanied. Intervention by the German government saved him from expulsion.

Later that month he angered his minders by insisting on examining and photographing the corpse of a soldier, apparently malnourished and tortured, lying at a roadside (a rare sight as most deaths from malnutrition occur at home and those that don't are quickly cleared away). In November, he sent a statement of humanitarian principles he believes are being violated in North Korea to Pyongyang's Foreign Ministry and to visiting U.S. Congressman Tony Hall.

That was the last straw. Vollertsen was confined to Pyongyang (and claims his car was sabotaged) until his visa ran out. Pyongyang would not renew it, and he says he didn't get any support from fellow aid workers, whom he suspects were glad to see him go.

Despite his qualms he doesn't believe aid should be stopped, and of course has no argument with the goal of saving lives. He differs with major aid organizations only on how this should be done. Anxious not to get kicked out of the country, the UN's agencies usually avoid public criticism of Pyongyang's recalcitrance so that they can work for improvements behind the scenes. In fact, the aid community can be divided into the majority who refrain from strong criticism of Pyongyang and those who choose to confront it. The latter include Médecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam and U.S. agency Care, which have pulled out of the country complaining of curbs on monitoring.

David Morton is the WFP's resident representative in Pyongyang, with the unenviable task of staying in the regime's good graces while ensuring effective aid deliveries. He also coordinates with other aid agencies working in the North, so not surprisingly he is a bit more diplomatic than Vollertsen. Nevertheless, he admits the WFP has always been dissatisfied with the controls placed by Pyongyang on monitoring food aid, which includes prior notification of inspection visits. In 1998 the WFP cut its aid programme by 60,000 tons to protest against such restrictions.

But Morton points out that since aid began in 1995, North Korea has gone from confining aid workers mostly to Pyongyang to allowing the WFP to open branch offices in the provinces of North Pyongan, North and South Hamgyong, Ryangan and Kangwon. "These are sensitive areas where few foreigners are allowed to visit," Morton explains. He says the WFP focuses its efforts on the hard-hit northeast, while Vollertsen's activities were centred in the west. Since 1995, the WFP has delivered $650 million in food aid.

Morton insists the WFP does what it can to monitor deliveries despite the restrictions. Monitoring visits to villages, schools and hospitals number around 300 a month. A waybill system tracks food from port to destination, where arrivals are checked against the distribution plan. Morton is categorical that the lives of many children, the main beneficiaries of WFP aid, are being saved and doesn't believe aid is diverted to the army. "Nowadays we see much healthier children and our conclusion is that the aid is in fact reaching them. Whilst I respect Norbert Vollertsen's views on health issues, I do not believe that he is sufficiently knowledgeable about the food-aid programmes to be a credible observer of these programmes."

But Vollertsen fumes: "Millions of dollars have gone into North Korea, but nothing has changed in the countryside." He says he plans to try to send truckloads of medical supplies to North Korea through the border village of Panmunjom--where he was arrested by South Korean authorities on January 13 after trying to make a speech about human-rights abuses in the North. He still hopes to re-enter North Korea one day. "The situation is worse than people think," he says. "My work there is unfinished."

Diary of a Mad Place

For 18 months, a German doctor had access to a North Korea few outsiders see. Appalled by the climate of oppression, he has decided to speak out

By Donald MacIntyre, Time Magazine, January 22, 2001

A day after arriving in North Korea in July 1999, Dr. Norbert Vollertsen made a visit to a hospital in Sinwon, a town near the southeastern port city of Haeju. As a volunteer for German Emergency Doctors, a non-profit medical aid group, his assignment was to assess and assist the North Korean medical system—or what passes for one. At the Sinwon hospital, doctors were preparing to perform an emergency appendectomy on a young North Korean girl. The anesthetic hadn't worked, but the doctors operated anyway. As the surgeons sliced into the girl's belly, her muscles tightened and tears poured down her face, but she didn't scream. Vollertsen took the girl's hand and held it throughout the half-hour operation: "I couldn't believe my eyes. She was so brave—I was nearly crying."
   The hospital had no drugs, disinfectant, syringes, IV drips or soap. The doctors worked without surgical gloves. There were no toilets inside the facility, and water had to be hauled in by bucket. The operating room's cement floor was stained with old blood, and the surgery was performed next to a window for light: the hospital didn't have electricity.

   That was the start of Vollertsen's mind-boggling, sometimes terrifying 18-month odyssey through a medical system on the verge of collapse. Along the way, the 42-year-old German won a "friendship" medal from the government for his services and became something of a celebrity in the North Korean press. Armed with his medal and an unusual amount of moxie, he crisscrossed the country, slipping behind the cordon North Korea erects to keep out foreigners and recording his experiences in more than a dozen notebook diaries. Vollertsen grew to respect North Koreans' bravery in adversity. But he also glimpsed glaring inequities in a society where the Elite are ferried around in Mercedes Benz cars while children die of hunger in the countryside not far away. When he came across the body of a soldier—lying in the middle of a highway north of Pyongyang—who had died of torture, he broke ranks with the international aid community and spoke out publicly about repression and human rights abuses. On Dec. 30, the North Koreans expelled him, and told him never to return.

 
   Vollertsen's treatment only made him more determined to tell people what he saw—making him one of the few who have had wide access to secretive North Korea and then talked. (North Korean defectors have provided glimpses of the country they left behind, but their accounts are often unreliable. Refugees often fear reprisals against family members still in the North.) That has put him at odds with former colleagues in North Korea, who feel they have to remain silent if they want to continue to help. "We believe that engagement and dialogue is the way to improve these programs," says David Morton, representative of the United Nations World Food Program in Pyongyang. "The kind of approach Dr. Vollertsen is taking runs completely counter to that. We're still here because there are people who are dying and we can't just run around and leave."

In fact, Vollertsen isn't running away. As early as this week, he hopes to take a load of drugs and medical equipment from Seoul to the demilitarized zone and, as he puts it, "toss it over the fence." Blond, hyperkinetic and an irrepressible talker, Vollertsen is trying to raise money and support for the stunt, which he openly concedes is aimed at generating media attention. He is unfazed by the criticism he has drawn from aid agencies—even his own group has distanced itself from his statements. "It is necessary to create some trouble," he says. Food and medical aid won't make much of an impact, he argues, if the outside world doesn't pressure Pyongyang to cease oppressing its citizens. With North Korea anxious to establish diplomatic relations with Western nations, especially the U.S., the world finally has some leverage that, Vollertsen argues, it isn't using. "The North Koreans are laughing at the international community," he says. "But if you apply pressure, they will respond. Now is the chance."

If Vollertsen wants to make noise, it is because his experiences were so deeply unsettling. North Korea's population has been weakened by years of famine and malnutrition, and diseases like tuberculosis are flourishing. Medical care is below basic. Hospitals lack the money to buy even rudimentary supplies. Many local doctors were trained in the former East Germany, but few know of the recent advances in medicine. During his 18 months in North Korea, Vollertsen says he never saw a major operation, such as heart surgery or even the removal of a gallstone: doctors didn't have the instruments or medicine to perform them. Operations without an anesthetic are the norm. At one hospital, the leg bone of a man who had been hit by a car became badly infected with bacteria. There were no antibiotics. Vollertsen watched as doctors liquored the man up with cheap rice wine and amputated his whole leg: "It was like the Stone Age."

As a troublemaker, Vollertsen has had a long career. In his first medical practice in Germany, he grew disenchanted with what he saw as a system that essentially pushed doctors to make money by ordering expensive treatments. He urged health authorities to give doctors incentives to spend more time with patients and prescribe fewer drugs; he even enlisted a few hundred of his own patients in a protest march. The press, he says, labeled him the "rebel communist doctor."

His big epiphany came during a screening of Patch Adams, an American film based on the true story of a doctor who eschews conventional medicine for a more hands-on, body-and-mind approach. At the end of the movie, a postscript challenges practicing doctors to try that technique. When the lights came up, Vollertsen told colleagues he planned to do just that. German Emergency Doctors, founded in 1979 to help the Vietnamese boat people, offered him a posting in either Sudan or North Korea. He was intrigued by the latter because, he says, "I couldn't find a single book about the place."

Vollertsen made the headlines shortly after his arrival. He was visiting a hospital in Haeju. It was hot and muggy, and the place was filled with exhausted-looking patients trying to escape the heat in non-air-conditioned wards. Vollertsen came across a male patient, wrapped in bloody, puss-encrusted bandages, abandoned in the corner of a ward. More dead than alive, the patient had burns over two-thirds of his body. "He looked more like a corpse from a Western horror film than a human form," Vollertsen wrote in his diary. When he inquired about the man, the hospital staff seemed surprised he was still alive. The North Koreans organized a graft operation. More than 150 doctors and nurses volunteered to donate skin. So did Vollertsen and a foreign colleague. (Without enough scalpels to go around, a doctor removed skin from Vollertsen's thigh with a razor blade.) The patient miraculously survived with a patchwork of Korean and German skin.

In recognition, Pyongyang gave Vollertsen a friendship medal. A glossy magazine ran a feature about him. And a local TV crew was filming when Vollertsen donated a second skin graft. The award came in handy after Vollertsen secured a North Korean driver's license and began touring the country without the requisite entourage of driver, translator and political minder. He carried the decoration with him, and it worked wonders: upon seeing it, truculent soldiers at checkpoints waved him through.

Initially, Vollertsen observed the rule common to aid workers in repressive countries like North Korea: keep quiet about what you see. But he gradually found it harder and harder to obey. When he drove into small towns, he was shocked to see surrounding hills dotted with fresh graves. Clinical depression was rampant, fueled by the mind-numbing rigidities and hopelessness of life in one of the world's last Stalinist states. Alcoholism also was common. Vollertsen found that, as in the former Soviet Union, cheap booze was almost always available to North Koreans, even when everything else had run out. "Anxiety is everywhere," he wrote in his diary. "Where does this inhuman fear in people's eyes come from?"

As a trained pediatrician, Vollertsen was particularly moved by the fate of North Korea's children. Outside Pyongyang, malnutrition is widespread and often severe. On trips to Nampo, a port city a short drive southwest of Pyongyang, he regularly spotted gangs of children working on a 10-lane highway, the kind of grandiose trophy project North Korea loves to build. There were thousands of kids, some as young as eight, breaking rocks with hammers and hauling them in wheel- barrows or makeshift backpacks.

Vollertsen was stunned by what he considered the wasteful obsession with the 55th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Workers' Party, which was held last October. On walks around Pyongyang, he would find parks and parking lots filled with children rehearsing for the celebration. The relentless training continued even during stretches of scorching heat and freezing cold—seemingly at all hours of day and night. "The children looked exhausted and fed up. There was very rigid discipline," he wrote.

A similar extravaganza was later organized for the benefit of U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who came to Pyongyang to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. But while Kim was pulling out the stops for his American guest, Vollertsen was visiting a children's hospital in Pyongsong, a town north of the capital. He walked into a room filled with young children with hollow eyes and skin stretched tight across their faces. To the German doctor, their faces and blue-and-white striped pajamas were horrifyingly familiar: "They looked like the children in Auschwitz and Dachau," says Vollertsen.

The doctor's frustration finally boiled over in November. A driver was taking Vollertsen and a German nurse to a hospital in Pukchang, about 50 km north of Pyongyang. On the way, they saw a body in the middle of the highway. Vollertsen asked the driver to stop, but he refused. When the doctor tried to insist, his translator and minder also objected. Finally, when Vollertsen threatened to jump from the car, the driver relented. The corpse was in uniform: it was a 20-something soldier. Beneath the soldier's shirt, Vollertsen found scars on the neck and back, some fresh. The nurse, who had been a dissident in East Germany, knew immediately that the man had been tortured. To Vollertsen, it amounted to an explanation for the fear in people's eyes, a glimpse into a shadowy world of labor camps and a nation in shackles. "I felt like I had come face-to-face with the violence behind the system," he says. "I thought, 'This is it, I have to act.'"

Back in Pyongyang, he wrote a harshly worded "statement of humanitarian principles," accusing the government of abuses ranging from the use of forced labor and arbitrary arrests to torture, and gave it to German journalists and a visiting U.S. Congressman. North Korean authorities responded by labeling him an "anarchist" and a public enemy. Meanwhile, Vollertsen says, he found that his car was being vandalized bit by bit. The brake fluid was gone one day; the tires were slashed on another. A few weeks later the government ran out of patience and put him on a train to China.

He immediately turned around and headed for Seoul, where he has set up a command post in one of the big downtown hotels that will be his home for the indefinite future. Vollertsen considers himself a rebel with a cause: to help the North Korean people. On Saturday he went to the border and was arrested while trying to give an impromptu speech on human rights in North Korea. He still hopes to return to the North—but it will take more than his friendship medal to get him there.

Dr. Vollertsen goes to Panmunjom

Since he first came to Seoul in early January Dr. Norbert Vollertsen has drawn much media interest from the international community. His accounts were reported in newspapers and magazines around the world, which the doctor himself hopes will attract the necessary attention to pressure North Korea to improve its deplorable human rights conditions. He chose to take even bolder actions when he went to Panmunjom. His original plan was to throw medicine and supplies from the southern side of the Panmunjom to the Northern. He failed to do this, but his primary goal of drawing media attention has met some success, even if he were arrested by the JSA guards to be turned over to the German Embassy in Seoul. Dr. Vollertsen remains in Seoul and his ties with the Komitee Cap Anamur has been severed.

The North Korean government appears indignant about the developments fueled by Dr. Vollertsen’s actions. Below is the reaction from the North Korea’s power center as appears on the Korean Central News Agency of DPRK website:  

Spokesman for DPRK FDRC on letter from German Cap Anamur Committee

January 16 2001. Juche 90. Korean News  

Pyongyang, January 16 (KCNA) -- A spokesman for the DPRK Flood Damage Rehabilitation Committee yesterday answered a question put by KCNA as regards a letter sent by the Cap Anamur Committee, a non-governmental aid organization of Germany, apologizing for the irresponsible remarks made by the former representative of its Pyongyang office. As already known, the Cap Anamur Committee recalled former representative of its Pyongyang office Norbert Vollertsen after dismissing what he did nothing in common with the aid work as a violation of the principle of humanitarian aid.
    This notwithstanding, he in an interview on the way home did not bother to let loose a spate of jargons absurdly asserting that aid materials are being diverted to other purposes in the DPRK and even slandering its socialist system.
    This was nothing but a silly act to improve through red herring his poor position in which he found himself after being forced to leave Pyongyang for his wrongs done there.
    In this regard the Cap Anamur Committee recently sent the FDRC of the DPRK a letter to the effect that what the former representative said did not represent the stand of the committee, it expressed sincere apology to the Korean people for it and it would respect the DPRK's system, strictly observe its law and order and positively contribute to the development of the relations between the two countries through aid activities.
    The DPRK would never pardon anybody infringing upon its sovereignty. 

Deported doctor reveals poor N.K. medical care

By Kim Ji-ho, Staff reporter, Korea Herald, 5 January 2001

        A German aid group doctor, who left North Korea Saturday after treating patients there for one and a half years, yesterday accused Pyongyang of committing "incurable" violations of human rights.

 

Norbert Vollertsen, 42, had treated the impoverished North Koreans since July 1999. In October, however, North Korean authorities ordered him to return home, criticizing him for bringing in a few Western journalists for a tour of Pyongyang without supervision.

 

The German government protested the move, and Vollertsen was allowed to stay but only under a tight surveillance. However, after he continued to denounce the lack of freedom and severe human rights abuses there, Pyongyang refused to extend his visa any longer, he said.

 

"I tried to help the North Koreans inside the country, but it was nearly impossible. So I decided to give them a helping hand outside of it," Vollertsen said in an interview with The Korea Herald.

He said his visit here is aimed at raising more attention to the poor human rights record in the isolationist country.

It was early October when Vollertsen, a member of the German Emergency Doctors, was enraged by Pyongyang's "blindminded, hush-hush" policy for the first time.

"I was on my way from Pyongyang to Haeju with my German colleague as well as a North Korean coordinator and driver," Vollertsen said. "Then we found a soldier lying on the road like a dead person, so we asked them to stop the car."

Although the North Korean driver ignored him, the German duo forced him to stop. "The soldier was dead, but we saw that his body had suffered from a terrible malnutrition and there were even signs of a bloody torture."

Vollertsen asserted he should examine the body and take pictures, but the North Koreans just blocked him and took away their cameras, triggering a violent fight. Police soon arrived and he and his colleague were forced to leave the place.

Before the incident, Vollertsen was a famous figure in North Korea who received a special "friendship medal," which had been given for the first time to a foreigner, after transplanting his own skin for a burned patient.

"In North Korea, it was common for the hospital staff to line-up for a skin graft whenever they had a burned victim," Vollertsen said. "I also offered my skin to show a sort of solidarity to the North Koreans, and I underwent grafts on three occasions."

"The medical condition in the North is really bad. No medicine, no electricity and light and no operation facilities there, and even doctors are starving," he said.

Vollertsen also found many North Koreans to be alcoholics.

"As they have no hope, no future, and food is much more expensive than liquor, most North Koreans drink at night," he said. "Many people are found drunk on the street at wee hours, and sometimes they fight each other."

Even though the citizens are starving, he went on to say, ranking officials seemed to enjoy affluent lives. "Whenever I went to the airport, I saw officials with huge bags carrying, no doubt, luxury goods they brought from China."

Vollertsen said, despite his deportation, he would try hard to inform the world of the situation in North Korea.

"I believe the more the North discloses its poverty and other bad conditions, the more aid it will get," he said.  

 

F or the Masses, 'Nothing Has Changed,' Expelled Doctor Asserts

By Don Kirk, International Herald Tribune Tuesday, January 9, 2001

SEOUL A German doctor who had spent 18 months in North Korea described a class-ridden society Monday in which the elite thrive on foreign aid while the vast majority live in fear of agents watching them on every street corner.
      Expelled from Pyongyang last week for trying to spread his views, the doctor, Norbert Vollertsen, said North Korean bureaucrats whom he had met "laugh at the whole world giving aid."
    They are "getting all the luxury goods they want," Dr. Vollertsen said, while "50 kilometers to the north people are dying."
     Dr. Vollertsen, 42, painted a picture of a society of stark contrasts marked by "a lot of changes in Pyongyang," the capital, including a new casino and nightclub, "many, many more cars, a lot of goods imported from China and much more people eating in restaurants."
     But the good life enjoyed by the top echelons of the Korean Workers' Party and the armed forces was not evident in the countryside, where, Dr. Vollertsen said, conditions had deteriorated during his tour as a member of a medical team from Komittee Cap Anamur, German Emergency Doctors.
    "Where has all the food gone to?" Dr. Vollertsen asked, referring to food shipments intended to rescue the North's sick and starving people.
     "For ordinary people nothing has changed," he said. "Nobody knows for sure where the food has gone."
     On weekly trips to the countryside, Dr. Vollertsen, trained in general surgery and paediatrics, discovered that conditions were "sometimes even worse" than when he first arrived in July 1999 after having practiced medicine for 12 years in Dusseldorf.
    "When you see the difference between the relative luxury of Pyongyang and these starving children," he said, "you are out of words."
    But Dr. Vollertsen said he did not believe reports that more than 2 million people had starved to death in the North over the past five years.
    The North Korean authorities, he said, had given Western aid organizations an exaggerated impression to obtain larger amounts of aid. The doctor arrived in Seoul by boat from China in the hope, he said, of conveying an accurate impression of life in North Korea, and of obtaining aid for hospitals where there is no medicine or even water or electricity.
    President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea, promoting his "sunshine" policy of rapprochement, has discouraged criticism of conditions in the North. He has expressed the hope that life there will improve as the country opens to trade, investment and other contacts springing from his summit meeting last June with North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il.
      In an interview Friday, Kim Dae Jung cited China, Vietnam and the former Soviet Union as examples of countries where a policy of rapprochement with non-Communist countries had led to easing of restraints imposed by dictatorial governments.
    Widely criticized by his opponents for ignoring reports of pervasive human rights abuses, Mr. Kim argued that North Korea would change after opening its doors.
    The alternative, he said, would be war - not an option, he added, that the South would use.

Citizens’ Alliance meets Dr. Norbert Vollertsen

Citizens’ Alliance on January 10 met Dr. Norbert Vollertsen in Seoul. As a member of the German Emergency Doctor he was awarded the Friendship Medal by the DPRK government for his humanitarian efforts in North Korea.

 

As a doctor he diagnosed the North Korean patients he cared for as being under great fear and depression. He emphatically asserted that efforts must be made to search out the root cause of their psychological instability and that the international community must raise voices of concern for these suffering North Koreans.  

 

Below is the Statement of Humanitarian Principles Dr. Vollertsen has drafted and handed to North Korean officials in person.

 

 

 

Statement of Humanitarian Principles

1. Constraints and difficulties of operating in the DPRK affect accountable humanitarian assistance. Knowledge about the overall humanitarian situation in the whole country is not available. Protection of the humanitarian interests of the population is not possible. The health and safety needs of the international humanitarian organizations are disregarded.

2. General social and political rights, as basic rights granted to human beings in freedom of speech, the press, assembly, demonstration, ideology and association are restricted in DPRK. As the freedom of speech and press is a primary index to democracy and a basis for democratic society there is inhuman violation of this freedom by the authorities of DPRK.

3. There is a serious infringement upon democracy and human rights viewed in the light of existing laws such as the civil law, the criminal law and the family law of DPRK.

4. The life of the workers has reached its limit, peasants’ life is in desperate condition too. Deprivation of the basic right to exist is obvious. One major problem is alcoholism. The main sickness is a “burn out syndrome”.

5. Violation of the freedom of personal inviolability and conscience by unwarranted arrest and detention seems to be common. The people are extremely fearful.

6. Sexual violence against women seems to be common. Seems to be common means that nobody is allowed to prove anything, but there are certain hints.

7. Forced labour, especially by women and children seems to be common.

8. Torture seems to be an important mean for maintaining the suppression of any opposition.

9. Repressive apparatus is acting whenever there is any criticism. The construction of human rights by intelligence surveillance, shadowing, wiretapping and mail interception is enormous. The oppressive nature of the police forces is evident. Local counterparts from FDRC (Flood Disaster Rehabilitation Committee) seem to behave simple-minded. The function and structure of the committee is mysterious.

10. After demanding respect for the human rights, cars, computers and work of a humanitarian aid organization have been sabotaged and aid workers have been confined to the capital, unable to continue their work distributing medicines, equipment, coal and food to hospitals and orphanages outside Pyongyang.

Norbert Vollertsen

General Physician

Munsudong, App. 929

Pyongyang, D.P.R.K.     

Visit to a hermit kingdom

By Duncan MacLaren*, The Tablet, January 6, 2001

 

I had my first intimations of Christmastide in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – not the first country you think of in that context. Visiting the food aid, agricultural and health projects supported by Caritas, I was in the countryside towards the east coast where the first flurries of snow and peppered the mountains.

Caritas decided to remain in North Korea when many other non-governmental organizations had left, despite all the difficulties of working in the world’s most controlled society, Juche, a philosophy of self-reliance mixed in with Confucianism, nationalism and Marxism-Leninism, is the main religion. In one school, I was shown two schoolrooms devoted to “Korean history”. In the middle of both was a huge rectangular structure covered in a muslin curtain with little chairs for the children surrounding it. The curtain was lovingly drawn back at Christmas to reveal not a crib but models of the birthplace of Kim Il-Sung, the republic’s founder, and Kim Jong-il, his son – the two Great Leaders, as they are always known. Going reverently out of the classroom, my colleague whispered: “It’s their Bethlehem.”

North Korea has been variously called the “hermit kingdom” and the “world’s most secluded society”. Kim Jong-il has been regularly demonized, yet when he appeared from the shadows with Kim Dae-jung, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning President of South Korea, Madeleine Albright, the United States Secretary of State, and Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, he charmed them. His policy seems to be to open up international relations, recently establishing diplomatic ties with Italy, Canada, the Philippines and Australia, while maintaining a regime of strict domestic control of the people, who can be seen in work-gangs by the side of the road or in the fields. His huge well-equipped army will ensure he is listened to.

Caritas responded to North Korea’s call for international aid in 1995 when severe flooding devastated harvests, and we have stayed because it has not been much better since. This year, North Korea will have to import 1.8 million tones of cereals in order to feed its people. A United Nations resident told me that only about 18 per cent of the land can produce crops. With help from the former Soviet bloc gone, North Korea has tried unsuccessfully to feed its 22 million population on its own. About 22 people rely on each hectare. If typhoons or floods – increasingly common – damage even one hectare, others must sacrifice some food or their neighbors will starve. People lack fertilizers and are trying to cultivate poor ground. But the authorities blame “natural disasters” for shortages.

Since 1995, food aid has amounted to $1.56 bn of which Caritas has contributed $20m. In the orphanages and kindergartens targeted by Caritas most children seem healthy, although the World Food Programme estimates that nationality more than 16 per cent of them are suffering from severe malnutrition. Past shortages of food have taken their toll – many children aged 14 have the physical appearance of eight-year-olds.

Hospitals are in a bad state. One that I saw, serving a large county, could afford to heat only a couple of rooms in its paediatric offshoot. The main hospital wards, housing pathetically antiquated equipment, were empty of patients; the sick stayed at home. In the paediatric unit a few women nursed their children, who were suffering from the common complaints of malnutrition and diarrhoea. One mother held on to her child, hooked up to a makeshift oral rehydration drip consisting of an old tube connected to a discarded beer bottle. Answering my questions with gentle dignity, she said that at least her child was being treated, the room was warm and the doctors cared, “I am sure my child will get better”, she said.

For part of my journey, I accompanied two diplomats from the Secretariat of State in the Vatican who were allowed to celebrate Sunday mass at Pyongyang’s Changchung Church, the only church in North Korea. It is claimed that there are 3,000 Catholics in the North, 800 of whom live in Pyongyang, though this is a figure which has not changed for some years. Before Mass, we talked to the Korean Catholic Association, which wants a priest, but one from within its own society, founded on Juche . They even had their candidate present who we were told had remained celibate and was studying theology on his own. There was no contact with the Mass-goers except for the sign of peace. (Behind our backs, humanitarian workers were called “sugar with poison”.)

Change can come only from within, pushed on by the “sunshine policy” of Kim Dae-jung of South Korea towards his northern neighbour. The international community should continue with aid, while exchanges between Korean families, separated for more than 50 years because of the civil war, should be fostered. In that way, we saw the seeds of hope, the greatest gift we could give to the long-suffering people of North Korea.  

* Duncan MacLaren is secretary general of Caritas Internationalis, the global network of 154 Catholic relief, development and social service organizations.  

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