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*North Korean Studies*
By Kanako Takahara, The Japan Times, January 30, 2003
The high-profile case of a Japanese woman who returned to Japan on Wednesday after fleeing North Korea has rekindled debate over the government's lack of adequate support measures for others in similar circumstances, as well as its reluctance to accept refugees.
The woman, who arrived in Tokyo, married a North Korean and moved to North Korea in 1959 along with her husband under a repatriation program. She fled to China in November and sought refuge in Japan via a group of supporters.
While the government acknowledged earlier this week that dozens of people have been placed under protective custody after fleeing North Korea, many experts say that the real problems begin after these people arrive in Japan.
Kenkichi Nakadaira, leader of Life Funds for North Korean Refugees, a Tokyo-based nongovernmental organization that supports refugees from North Korea, urged the government to take legislative action to provide financial and other support to asylum seekers.
"Foreign Ministry officials have been doing their utmost to help (North Korean refugees) enter Japan," Nakadaira said. "But officials refuse to provide further support once they do get here."
These asylum seekers often have a hard time settling in Japan, especially because many do not speak Japanese and most want to hide the fact that they fled North Korea, he said.
Nakadaira said the government should provide Japanese language lessons and job training programs in addition to financial support to start a new life in the country.
Since its foundation in 1998, Nakadaira said his group has helped 24 refugees of several nationalities, including Japanese, to seek asylum in Japan and eventually settle down here.
On Monday, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe indicated that the government should consider drafting legislation to support Japanese and Koreans with permanent residency who flee North Korea. But government officials remain skeptical of such legislation on the grounds that it could set a precedent.
"Unlike Japanese nationals abducted by North Korea, these people went to the North of their own will," said a senior government official who asked not to be named. "If the government supports them, there would be debate that we should provide similar support to Japanese who once settled in South America and came back."
The woman who returned Wednesday is eligible for welfare assistance such as food and housing under current laws. However, new legislation is necessary for further support.
But while the Foreign Ministry's division for the protection of Japanese nationals overseas says that the government will grant protective custody to Japanese as well as Koreans who have permanent Japanese residency on humanitarian grounds, many pundits say that Japan may soon see a flood of asylum seekers from North Korea.
This in turn could affect Japan's refugee policy. In 2001, the Justice Ministry granted refugee status to 26 people -- an unusually low figure among industrialized countries.
There are three types of asylum seekers who flee North Korea and try to enter to Japan: those with Japanese nationality, ethnic Koreans with permanent residency in Japan, and others.
Although the government is expected to urge the third category of asylum seekers to seek refugee status, a policy review may become necessary if they come en masse.
The 1951 Convention on Status of Refugees, which Japan ratified in 1982, obliges signatories to protect asylum seekers who fear persecution in their home countries.
But under Japan's current policy, in most cases, asylum seekers from North Korea who fled due to economic difficulties are not granted the status, as they would not be seen as fleeing persecution, pundits say.
But Nakadaira said North Korean refugees would be severely punished for treason just by crossing the North Korean border. He said Japan should offer protection regardless of nationality.
"If they are repatriated, they will face heavy penalties," he said. "In that sense, they are political asylum seekers."
By Sang-Hun Choe, The Associated Press, January 29, 2003
SAMIL- PO, North Korea - A lone child clutched an old, unpolished trumpet to his chest. Cheeks ruddy from sunburn, he gazed across the thick blanket of snow covering the field he must traverse to school. Behind him, smoke rose from a cluster of identical houses, flimsy low-slung structures of concrete blocks and gray tiles that blended in with the gray winter landscape. From his vantage point on a stream bank, a soldier in an olive-drab uniform and with "a hawk's eyes," as one South Korean tour guide put it stood watch over the village.
Villagers walking on a road avoided looking at the South Korean tourists riding in heated buses. One South Korean tourist kept shouting, "We love you!" A few Northern women waved back, breaking into brief smiles. Farther up the road, some Northerners dropped their bags and hid behind pine trees until the alien vehicles had passed. "This is like Korean War days, when we ran for cover from air raids," Oh Sung-young, a Southern tourist in her 70s, whispered at the surreal scene. "This doesn't look like a place where people live."
Diamond Mountain tours run by the Hyundai conglomerate under the auspices of the South Korean government, which hopes to encourage rapprochement, and the North Korean regime, which needs hard currency traverse routes fenced off with barbed wire and guarded by angry-looking communist soldiers. Heading to the scenic Samil-po coastal lake, a convoy of tourist buses passed several North Korean villages, where new cinderblock walls had been erected to block the view from outside gawkers. Still, there were ample opportunities to glimpse what the world's most isolated, totalitarian country was like in this winter of unusually heavy snowfall:
A country in the cold
"Our country is a little short on energy," a communist minder acknowledged. That means you have to eat your $25 dinner wearing your overcoat on the unheated floor, watching your breath pierce the cold. The Diamond Mountain Restaurant was unlit when buses carrying South Korean tourists pulled up for dinner. The lights went on only after a clerk, peeking through curtains, saw the guests had arrived. Outside, the temperature was 14 degrees.
The tourists ate fish, rice and clam soup, pork and cold potato noodles a luxury in this impoverished country. Clerks accepted only U.S. dollars. A small bar sold foreign as well as North Korean liquor. "For reunification!" the South Koreans toasted. Hardly had the guests left than the lights went off in the restaurant. "They are so poor, and it breaks my heart when I see no lights in the villages at night and think about those kids," said Chung Kook-hyun, a 57-year-old South Korean teacher. Most hills were barren where people had chopped down trees for firewood.
Southern tourists slept at a hotel powered by a Hyundai generator. Inside, a Filipino singer crooned an old American standard: "I may take a plane, I may take a train but if I have to walk, I'll get there just the same. Kansas City, Kansas City, here I come."
A country of slogans
"Let's live according to our own way!" The slogan barked from an arch over a road, an anachronistic and paradoxical cry that defied reality in a country where people die of hunger. Yet the Stalinist regime grimly hangs onto "juche," it's philosophy of self-reliance. Red-and-white slogans were everywhere, at the entrance of a village, on the wall of the only barbershop, where everyone gets a free haircut, on the gates of schools and military units, on a navy boat. They espoused loyalty to a regime built on a personality cult.
"Long live Gen. Kim Il Sung!" read one. After a half-century rule, Kim died in 1994, handing over power to his son, Kim Jong Il. "Let's defend General Kim Jong Il's political philosophy with our lives!" read another. "Let's become the proud sons and daughters of the Great General!" read the sign at a primary school. In the unheated classrooms, children in overcoats gathered at the windows to watch the tourist buses.
A Hollywood-like billboard on a roadside bank urged people to become "human rifles and bombs." Below it, villagers marched toward a frozen stream bed where people were laboring under red flags. A densely written sign read: "U.S. imperialist aggressors, our sworn enemy, let's kill them all!"
A country on foot
Early morning frost covered roadside trees like cherry blossoms. Bundled-up villagers waited as the driver looked under the hood of an old truck that refused to move. A cow stood beside a cart with wooden wheels. In North Korea, where fuel is short and cars are scarce, everyone walks. Bicycles are luxuries and have license plates in line with communist authorities' tight control over the population's movements.
Villagers walked in quick steps along a snow-swept road that stretched miles ahead. All carried knapsacks on their backs, military-style. Parents stopped, calling to children to run and catch up. The grim scene prompted a South Korean tourist to joke: "If you walk like that, you don't have to diet."
A country of soldiers
"Our military is the thorn stuck in the United States' eye," Chun Kyong Ok, a communist minder, said proudly. It was clear that soldiers were the pride of North Korea. They wore fur hats, boots and greatcoats, and swaggered. At the entrance of every village, a soldier checked traffic. Military olive is the favorite school uniform color for children, said South Korean tour guide Lee Yon-sook.
One large sign said, "Military and civilians are one and the same." Kim Jong Il rules his country as chairman of the National Defense Commission, which oversees the North's 1.1 million regular army and several millions of reserve forces in a country of 22 million people.
Diamond Mountain is close to the border with South Korea. Shore guns protruded from coastal cliffs. Roads were guarded by tank-traps. At a radar base surrounded by a bamboo grove, a rusty antenna spun. "In the end, it's the military that you can depend on. It's our lifeline," Chun said.
By John Pomfret, Washington Post Foreign Service, January 27, 2003
YANJI, China -- Six months after North Korea announced unprecedented wage and price increases to jump-start its miserable economy, runaway inflation is emptying millions of pocketbooks and bottlenecks in production are causing widespread shortages, according to Chinese and North and South Korean sources.
The black market price of rice, the staple of the Korean diet, has jumped more than 50 percent over the past three months in most parts of the country while tripling in others, according to North Koreans, Chinese businessmen and Western aid agency workers. Some factories in poorer parts of the country, such as the heavily industrialized east coast, have stopped paying workers the higher salaries that were a cornerstone of the reforms, recent North Korean arrivals to China said. Others have taken to paying workers with coupons that can be exchanged for goods, they said, but there are no goods in the stores to buy.
"Their new economic policy has failed," said Oh Seung Yul, an economist at the government-funded Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul. "The hopes that were raised in July are today pretty much dashed." The apparent failure of North Korea's attempt to promote economic activity and improve living standards constitutes an important backdrop for its recent threats to resume a nuclear weapons program, according to the sources.
On one hand, Oh and others said, North Korea's isolated government needed a scapegoat. On the other, according to Chinese sources close to the secretive government of Kim Jong Il, Pyongyang has determined that it risks economic collapse without security guarantees and access to international lending institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, to which the United States holds the keys. So Kim manufactured a crisis to win concessions, they said.
"Now the economic situation is more precarious than before the reforms. They can't do this halfway," said Cui Yingjiu, a Chinese Korean economist and adviser to the North Korean government. "They risk social chaos and economic collapse."
The crisis has been exacerbated by a drop in the humanitarian aid that had kept North Korea on life support since 1995. Because of a shortage of donations, the World Food Program has cut back the number of North Koreans it is assisting this year from 6.4 million to 3.5 million of the country's estimated 22.6 million inhabitants. In September, the elderly and primary school-age children on the west coast were cut off. In October, kindergarten-age children, pregnant women and nursing mothers there lost out. In November, nurseries were scratched from the list.
"It's a tough call deciding who has to be deprived," said Gerald Bourke, an official with the World Food Program in Beijing. Bourke said the recent "very rapid inflation" of rice prices is "putting food way beyond the pale for a lot of people." The World Food Program has 25,000 tons of food in North Korea and pledges of 75,000 additional tons, he said. It needs 511,000 tons this year.
North Koreans traveling over the border to Yanji, about 700 miles northeast of Beijing, said an initial wave of hope triggered by the changes announced in July is gone in almost all parts of the country except the capital, Pyongyang. Lee Xiangyu, a North Korean refugee in China, was arrested by Chinese border police and returned to North Korea last summer, when the changes began. After a short stint in jail, the 19-year-old returned to her home town, Musan, along the border with China. By October, she said, the lumberyard where her father worked had stopped paying him and other workers the huge raises they had received as part of the effort to promote some aspects of a
free-market economy.
But prices continued to rise. "There was no money in my house, and now the prices are so high," she said. Lee sneaked back into China in December. "It's not like it was in 1997 when people were starving to death," she said, speaking of the famine that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. "But it's worse in a way. Because everybody had hope for a little while and now they are desperate again."
North Korea's announcement of economic reforms was front-page news, in part because the measures fit into a series of other moves that led some observers to conclude Kim was ready to lead his country out of isolation. The steps included expression of regret following a clash between North and South Korean naval forces in June, the suggestion that North Korea would hand over Japanese Red Army members wanted in Japan for hijacking a Japanese airliner in 1970, an informal meeting in July between North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, transportation links between North and South Korea, a summit between Kim and Japanese Prime
Minister Junichiro Koizumi and talk of establishing as many as five special zones for foreign investment.
The economic changes included raising prices and wages, devaluing the North Korean won against the dollar and cutting state subsidies for failing businesses. Wages were increased between 900 percent and 1,500 percent. Prices, which are in theory set by the state, went up as well. Rice went up 4,000 percent, corn 3,700, pork 700, diesel fuel 3,700, electricity 5,900, apartment rent 2,400 and subway tickets 900.
The government announced that factories with bloated workforces could effectively lay off unnecessary workers so they could concentrate on making things again -- a step North Korean industry had not taken since economic troubles began in 1995. The main motivation for increasing the price of rice was to prompt farmers to plant more food. But Cui, who attended a conference on North Korea's economic changes last fall in Pyongyang, said farmers were not happy. "Grain prices went up, but so did prices for inputs like fertilizers and seeds," he said. "So all gains were canceled out."
Another issue, Cui said, is electricity. North Korea has good hydropower resources, but as farmers become interested in planting more crops, they will want to use water in reservoirs for irrigation, not for power generation. "There are a whole series of these conundrums and Catch-22s," Cui said. He said North Korean factories have yet to begin producing goods people want to buy. That is why trucks rolling into China from the Dandong border crossing, 350 miles southwest of Yanji, now carry clothes, television sets, shampoo and other consumer goods.
The changes befuddled Western and Chinese economists from the beginning. Chinese experts noted that when China undertook its first major economic reform in 1979, it increased the price of grain by only 25 percent. Second, they said, when China began this process, 80 percent of its population lived in rural areas, so there was a huge pool of potential beneficiaries from the liberalized agricultural policies. But North Korea is highly industrialized: Two-thirds of its people live in cities.
Marcus Noland, at the Institute for International Economics in Washington, speculated that the changes were either a desperate attempt to jump-start a half-dead economy or a backhanded attack against North Korea's nascent private economy. Increasing prices would reduce the value of currency held outside the state system, breaking the back of private entrepreneurs.
But then again, he said in a recent paper, "the possibility that economic decisions are being made by people who do not grasp the implications of their actions should not be dismissed too hastily." Correspondents Doug Struck and Peter S. Goodman in Seoul contributed to this report.
By Staff Writer, January 28, 2003, The Japan Times
Japan has placed under its protective custody dozens of people who have fled North Korea, including Japanese spouses of Koreans and former Korean residents of Japan, a senior Foreign Ministry official told the Diet on Monday. Asked about reports of such clandestine activities that also involve China, Mitoji Yabunaka, the director general of the ministry's Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau, told the House of Representatives Budget Committee "there have been dozens" of cases. It is the first time a government official has formally acknowledged that Japan has protected such people.
Many people fleeing North Korea escape to China and wait for an opportunity to seek asylum at foreign diplomatic establishments. Yabunaka said that in many cases the Chinese government has "responded positively to requests for cooperation." There have been reports of cases in which children of Japanese spouses of Koreans were secretly brought to Japan last summer with help from the government, and a North Korean agent who was formerly a resident of Japan similarly made his way back here in 1999.
Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi told the committee that Japanese spouses who have escaped from North Korea must be offered the same protection offered to Japanese nationals overseas, and that the government has been seeking cooperation from Beijing on this matter. Government sources have suggested the people placed in protective custody are being secretly brought to Japan. Under a "repatriation" program for Koreans residing in Japan, some 93,000 pro-Pyongyang Koreans and their Japanese spouses and children went to North Korea between 1959 and 1984.
Kawaguchi said the government cannot reveal how many Japanese have been placed under protective custody or when, citing the sensitive nature of the matter. "For the Chinese government, the asylum seekers from North Korea are illegal entrants, and there also is the relationship between China and North Korea," Kawaguchi said.
Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe suggested the government will have to consider enacting a law to stipulate how it would support the Japanese spouses and others who have fled North Korea. "I am aware that it is debatable as to whether we should use the same program that we have for the abduction victims," Abe said. "Generally speaking, we must seriously consider the matter, looking comprehensively into such factors as the safety of the individuals involved and humanitarian aspects." The government had legislation enacted last year to facilitate assistance, including financial support, for Japanese nationals abducted to North Korea. It also dealt with abductees'
offspring who hope to move to Japan.
By Richard Lloyd Parry, Times Online, January 28, 2003
NORTH KOREAN refugees in China are preparing to escape by sea in deliberate imitation of the “boat people” of Vietnam. A group of international humanitarian groups, including the French group Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), are collaborating in the scheme, which aims to draw attention to the plight of those fleeing economic collapse and political repression in North Korea.
The supporters of the so-called “boat people project” intend to smuggle thousands of refugees through Chinese ports and into international waters, from where they will seek asylum in South Korea and Japan. Their plans have been criticised by other aid groups, which claim that they will endanger the lives of those few who attempt to escape, and bring reprisals and increased repression to the many who remain behind.
The project got off to a disastrous start earlier this month when dozens of asylum-seekers were arrested by Chinese authorities as they prepared to embark on two fishing boats. “We are prepared to die doing this,” the Rev Douglas Shin of the Los Angeles-based Korean Peninsula Peace Project, one of the organizers of the boat people scheme, said. “We will try again soon, maybe a month from now, or maybe a few days.”
Nobody knows how many people have fallen victim to the floods and food shortages that have ravaged North Korea since the mid-1990s but estimates by diplomats, academics and NGOs range from a few tens of thousands dead to as many as three million. Between 100,000 and 300,000 others are thought to have escaped illegally over the country’s northern land border with China. There they live as outlaws, struggling to survive and to avoid the Chinese authorities, who repatriate captured refugees.
Back in North Korea they face imprisonment and, for repeat offenders and those who have had contact with non-Chinese foreigners, death sentences. Those still at large are prey to hunger, disease and the predations of Chinese human traffickers. “They live like animals,” Marine Buissonière of MSF said: “They live in hiding, they live in fear, they live with bounties on their heads.”
The boat people project was devised last summer by a group of activists including Mr. Shin and Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor who formerly worked in North Korea. Last spring some of the same activists organized a series of incidents in which North Korean refugees fled into foreign embassies and consulates in China. The embassy “raids” attracted international attention and embarrassed and enraged the Chinese Government, which has given a promise to North Korea that it will repatriate all refugees. Mr. Shin insisted that the boat people project would not be abandoned. The organizers of the project are now trying to raise money for future escapes by boat, having spent nearly £25,000 on this month’s abortive attempt in the port of Yantai.
By Min Seong-jae, Joong Ang Ilbo, January 28, 2003
Activists and family members of Seok Jae-hyun, a Korean photojournalist detained in China after he tried to photograph North Korean refugees two weeks ago demanded his release yesterday. In a press conference at the Seoul Foreign Correspondents' Club, Mr. Seok's wife, Kang Hye-won, James Brooke of the New York Times, which frequently buys Mr. Seok's photos, and others urged Mr. Seok's release.
The photographer left for China on Jan. 13 to cover a seaborne escape bid by North Korean refugees. Five days later he and 48 refugees were arrested trying to board fishing boats at the port city of Yantai, Shandong province. Charged under Chinese law with human trafficking, Mr. Seok remains in prison in Yantai. He is not permitted visitors and, according to Mr. Brooke, could be held indefinitely without trial.
"He left for China to document the wretched conditions faced by North Korean refugees," Ms. Kang said . "My husband's commitment was based purely on a determination to act as a communication bridge to the international community by documenting this delicate issue. The Chinese government should protect a journalist's right to cover the issues and release him." Ms. Kang criticized the Korean government and media for showing little concern for the case. "More than 16 Japanese media and many international NGOs are following the issue closely," she said.
"Every journalist in North East Asia wonders: today Mr. Seok, tomorrow me?" said Mr. Brooke. He and Ms. Kang along with other activists said they would visit the Chinese Embassy in Korea to urge Mr. Seok's release. After earning a master's degree in photography in the United States in 1997, Mr. Seok worked as a lecturer in Korean universities. He has been working for the New York Times as a freelance photographer since 2001. "My husband went into the field saying that there is a big difference between sitting here reading news papers, and being out there taking photographs." Ms. Kang said.
Washington Post, Editorial, January 27, 2003
"WHEN I WAS 10 years old, we were put to work digging clay and constructing a building. And there were dozens of kids, and while digging the ground, it collapsed. And they died. And they buried the kids secretly, without showing their parents."
That is one of many horrific stories told by Kang Chol Hwan, a North Korean now resident in the South. As a child, Mr. Kang was imprisoned for 10 years, along with his entire family, in Yodok, one of Pyongyang's most notorious forced-labor camps. They suffered from terrible beatings, starvation, deprivation and a work regime that rivals anything designed by Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong. Nor were they unique. According to human rights groups in Seoul, some 200,000 North Koreans are now imprisoned in similar camps scattered across the country.
They may soon be joined by several dozen more inmates. Last week, Chinese officials detained a group of North Korean refugees who, having escaped their own country, were boarding fishing boats that would take them to safety in South Korea and Japan. If the Chinese behave as they have in the past, they will send all of them back. If the North Koreans behave as they have in the past, the returnees will then be immediately imprisoned in camps like Yodok, if they are lucky. In North Korea, defection is punishable with seven years of forced labor -- or execution.
Many people will be complicit in these deaths: the North Korean regime above all, but also the Chinese government, which appears to be playing a double game on North Korea, cooperating with Western diplomats at times and working behind their backs at others. The South Korean government bears some responsibility too: Why has Kim Dae Jung, outgoing South Korean president and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for human rights promotion, not taken up this human rights issue on his doorstep? Perhaps it is because the realities of life in impoverished North Korea conflict with the new, more favorable image of the country that the South Korean government wishes to promulgate in
keeping with its "sunshine policy" of gradual thaw.
Elsewhere, the response has been anemic at best. Since refugees first began coming over the border in the mid-1990s, the Chinese, signatories to the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees, have refused to give the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) access to them, on the spurious grounds that they are "economic" and not political refugees. Although the UNHCR has made representations to the Chinese government, the agency has mostly soft-pedaled the problem, failing to list North Koreans in its refugee statistics, refusing to use the tougher weapons in its legal arsenal. The United States has done no better: Neither human rights violations inside North Korea nor
refugees from there have ever been an American priority on the Korean Peninsula.
There may, of course, be more than one hidden agenda here: After all, a massive exodus from North Korea could destroy its regime, just as a similar refugee exodus once helped destroy East Germany's. And, rhetoric aside, nobody -- not South Korea, not China and not the United States -- is really prepared for that. Only the North Koreans would benefit.
By Staff Writer, Reuters, January 27, 2003
SEOUL (Reuters) - Twenty-eight North Korean asylum seekers flew into Seoul on Monday, the first large batch of refugees from the impoverished North to reach South Korea this year. The group, including several children, arrived at Inchon International Airport outside the South Korean capital on an overnight flight from Manila after leaving China. ``We are happy to be here in South Korea,'' Han Jong-sook told reporters as the group was led through the airport to waiting buses. ``We have been dreaming of the South.''
Last year, more than 1,000 North Koreans reached South Korea via China and other countries after fleeing hunger and repression in their communist homeland, which is embroiled in a dispute with the international community over its nuclear program. Activists say as many as 300,000 North Korean refugees are living in China. Their precarious situation there was highlighted by the arrest of 48 asylum seekers on January 18 as they tried to board a fishing boat in the eastern Chinese port city of Yantai.
Refugee supporters in Seoul stepped up a campaign on behalf of the 48 North Koreans, as well as for two South Koreans also taken into custody at Yantai -- a photojournalist detained while trying to document the failed exodus and an aid worker. The detention of Seok Jae-hyun, who often worked for the New York Times, prompted the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists and the Seoul Foreign Correspondents Club to appeal to the Chinese government for his release.
On Monday, Seok's wife Kang Hae-won held a news conference in Seoul and called on South Korea's government to pay more attention to her husband, accused by China of engaging in human trafficking. ``I need your help so I can once more embrace my husband, who volunteered to go on a dangerous path with the North Korean defectors, and the activists, who were arrested with my husband,'' Kang told reporters. ``And I also ask for your help, especially for the defectors, who will surely die after being sent back to North Korea,'' she said.
Beijing, a close ally of Pyongyang, has an agreement with its fellow communist neighbor to repatriate North Koreans, whom it views as economic migrants rather than refugees. But faced with international pressure, China has allowed some North Koreans passage to South Korea through third countries. Defectors say North Korean refugees who are sent home face detention in labor camps, enduring hardships that are even greater than in the country at large, where famine is estimated to have killed as many as two million people since 1995.
By Philip Brasor, The Japan Times, January 26, 2003
The Foreign Ministry's lack of a coherent policy with regard to North Korea was obvious back in autumn, when public opinion forced the government to renege on its promise to Pyongyang that the five Japanese abductees would return to the communist nation after a two-week visit to Japan. The five are now permanently repatriated, and the Japanese government's decades-long avoidance of a consistent stance toward North Korea is now coming back to haunt it. The ministry's problems have less to do with Japan's wallflower status in the current diplomatic dance between the United States, South Korea and North Korea than it does with the ever-widening refugee crisis.
As a result, the complicated, and as yet unresolved, case of the "Japanese wife" who escaped from North Korea and is currently in the hands of the Chinese authorities has occasioned a great deal of conflicting media coverage. Two weeks ago, the magazine Shukan Shincho and TV Asahi blasted the Foreign Ministry for effectively ignoring the woman, a Japanese national who fled North Korea late last year. Shincho's headline called the ministry "cold-hearted" while "News Station" announcer Hiroshi Kume stated that TV Asahi would not rest until the government did something about the woman's plight.
The magazine Shukan Bunshun then blasted the two news organizations for bringing the woman to the attention of the Chinese authorities and, by extension, to North Korea. Shincho, who ran an exclusive interview with the woman and printed her Japanese name, brushed aside the criticism. TV Asahi did not respond, but it also hasn't complained any more about the Foreign Ministry's neglect.
The woman was brought out of North Korea by a man who himself had escaped the country and is now settled in South Korea. He had sneaked back into the North to retrieve relatives, but couldn't find them. He happened upon the 64-year-old Japanese woman, who had married a Korean man in Japan and moved to North Korea when she was 22. He smuggled her out.
Once she was in a safe house in China, he went to the Japanese Embassy in Seoul with the woman's papers and a letter. He asked for money but, according to Shincho, the Japanese Embassy refused. Based on a source in the Foreign Ministry, Asahi Shimbun reported that the man and an accomplice had already received money from the woman's family in Japan but wanted more from the government.
Shincho, who interviewed the woman in China along with other reporters, took her letter to Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi. TV Asahi asked Kawaguchi what the ministry planned to do about her and the foreign minister replied that she was aware of the woman's situation but could not comment.
According to NGOs, the Japanese government has surreptitiously helped more than 20 North Korean refugees "return to Japan" over the past decade or so. They do it secretly for two reasons: One, they don't want to upset China, which has a pact with North Korea to return any defectors; and two, they don't want to encourage a flood of refugees coming to Japan.
In the end, it was the Japanese government who informed the Chinese authorities of the woman's whereabouts on the premise that the two Korean men had "kidnapped" her and were demanding a ransom. She and the two men were picked up Jan. 15 and are now being detained in China. Shincho claims that the ministry is trying to "save face," not only its own, but China's too. In its latest issue, the magazine says that the Foreign Ministry doesn't want to deal with any defectors, Japanese-born or otherwise, and does so only when there is no danger of drawing attention to the fact.
Shincho and the Mainichi Shimbun have quoted one NGO which said that another Japanese wife contacted a Japanese consulate in China back in the '90s, but that efforts to help her "failed" and she was sent back to North Korea. On the other hand, when the most famous defector, Kensho Aoyama (a pseudonym), called the Japanese Embassy in China to ask for assistance, he was told there was no "route" for defectors; that is, until he said he had information about North Korea's nuclear program.
No Japanese media reported those incidents at the time, and the few defectors who do make it to Japan are instructed by the Foreign Ministry not to tell anyone. The coverage of the current "Japanese wife," as contradictory as some of it is, has forced the government to act, especially since Shincho published her name. A deal may very well have already been cut for the woman's repatriation to Japan.
Behind all this is an event that has generally gone unremarked on for the past 40 years. In the 60s, about 96,000 people left Japan for North Korea. Some, like the woman in question, were Japanese married to Koreans. Others sincerely believed in Kim Il Song's socialist experiment and wanted to help build "a new utopia." And then there were Koreans who believed anywhere was better than Japan, where they suffered discrimination.
The Pyongyang-affiliated Korean residents organization at the time pledged that anyone could return to Japan for a visit. No one did, but obviously not because they didn't want to. Then as now, the Japanese government had no policy with regard to these people, because they had chosen to leave.
The media's focus on the "Japanese wife" should force the government to clarify its position vis-a-vis Japanese nationals and "quasi-Japanese" (the government term for ethnic Koreans born in Japan) in North Korea, because there will certainly be more of them trying to escape in the future. A more significant development would be a coherent policy on all refugees, but maybe that's hoping for too much.
By Philippe Pons (Translated by Jackie Lee), Le Monde, January 23, 2003
China’s arrest and imminent repatriation of the 78 North Korean refugees who were captured as they were getting ready to flee by sea to South Korea and Japan again gives the Korean crisis its often neglected dimension: behind threats and diplomacy, there is a humanitarian drama.
“While those countries donating food aid debate the dissuasive effect that comes from North Korea’s repression, these are 6 to 8 million people whose lives are in danger,” declared the UN secretary general’s envoy Maurice Strong in Beijing last week upon his return from Pyongyang. The arrested refugees—around 30 others who were captured over the weekend were added to those 48 that Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres: MSF) had mentioned Saturday—are among those whom international aid does not reach and who escape their misery by going to China.
In Tokyo on 21 January, five humanitarian organizations made an appeal to the international community to put pressure on Beijing so that these refugees are not repatriated. “They risk ending up in labor camps,” declared Chun Ki-won, a South Korean pastor. “In May, four Christians who were returned to North Korea were executed,” added Tim Peters of the organization Helping Hands.
“The UNHCR Failed Its Mission”
In a verbal note, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR] asked China to protect the 78 refugees and to not repatriate them. However, the passivity of the UNHCR, which only intervenes in specific and spectacular cases, is criticized. “The UNHCR failed its mission,” maintains Douglas Shin, a Korean pastor with American citizenship who denounces [the UNHCR] in addition to the Beijing-Pyongyang complicity in the suppression of refugees: it must have been Kim Jong-nam, the eldest son of the North’s leader, who orchestrated, from China, the “hunt” for refugees with the assistance of the Chinese police. “In China, asylum applicants and those who assist them
are considered criminals when it comes to North Koreans,” says MSF’s Marine Buisonniere. She says, “The UNHCR, [whose help is] solicited many a time, has turned out to be incapable of ensuring their protection.”
Ever since refugees entered diplomatic missions in China last year, the [Chinese] police cordoned off the areas around embassies and consulates and stepped up their suppression [of the refugees] in the region bordering North Korea. Networks aiding refugees were destroyed by arrests. The number of [North Korean] refugees on the Chinese side of the border is estimated to be 300,000. Since September, 3,200 have been repatriated and 1,200 await the same fate in their detention centers.
If the recently arrested refugees who had to board fishing boats in the Chinese port of Yantai had succeeded in reaching South Korea, it could have started a movement reminiscent of the Vietnamese boat people’s exodus. “The operation must have been financed by American, South Korean, French, and Japanese humanitarian organizations,” suggests the South Korean news agency Yonhap. “This failure prompts us to be more efficient next time,” says Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor who launches campaigns against human rights violations in North Korea.
By Staff Writer, The Japan Times, January 23, 2003
The adult child of a Japanese woman who accompanied her Korean husband to North Korea decades ago under a repatriation program secretly entered Japan last summer with the help of the Japanese government, sources said Wednesday. The government acted in the name of protecting the person, who is in their 50s, was born in Japan and can claim Japanese nationality by birthright, the sources said. It is the first time that a Japanese who has fled North Korea has been confirmed to have re-entered Japan, the sources said.
The person, whose gender was not revealed, fled to China to escape poverty and hunger in North Korea. A nongovernmental organization assisting such refugees contacted Japanese officials, the sources said. Previously, a former Korean resident of Japan who went to the Korean Peninsula under the government-supported repatriation program that began in 1959 was granted asylum and allowed to return to Japan on the grounds that he was "quasi-Japanese." While it is believed that more than 20 such Korean nationals have re-entered Japan, it is rare for the government to be involved in the return process, the sources said.
Refugee Help Sought
Japanese leaders said Wednesday they hope humanitarian measures will be taken to deal with the growing number of North Korean refugees in China, blaming the problem on Pyongyang. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said, "I hope for humanitarian measures" to deal with the refugees, who reportedly include Japanese nationals, without elaborating. Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe told a news conference the North Korean government only has itself to blame for the many people trying to leave their homeland.
"It is a grave decision for people to abandon their country," he said. Abe declined to comment on how the safety of Japanese nationals among the refugees would be secured. The Japanese are believed to be mostly women who went to the secretive state after marrying North Koreans decades ago. Abe said many people are leaving the North to escape its dire economic situation, especially amid the freezing winter. North Korea is also likely facing an energy shortage, especially after the United States suspended free oil shipments in December. when Pyongyang admitted to having a secret nuclear weapons program, he added.
By Jim Randle, Voice of America, January 23, 2003
China has rejected a U.N. refugee agency request not to send some North Koreans back to their starving homeland. China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue says 78 detained North Koreans are not refugees entitled to special protection and help. Ms. Zhang says they are instead illegal economic migrants looking for work and should be sent back to North Korea as soon as possible. She also confirmed that two South Koreans are being held in "criminal detention" and are suspected of smuggling a number of North Koreans into China.
Tuesday, the U.N. refugee agency pleaded with Beijing not to send the asylum-seekers back to North Korea. Aid groups say China has shipped thousands of North Koreans back across the border in recent weeks. Activists who help the asylum-seekers say North Koreans returned home might face imprisonment or torture. China says it handles these cases "according to international and Chinese law, in a humanitarian fashion."
Up to 300,000 North Korean migrants are thought to be hiding in northeastern China near the border with North Korea, driven out of their homeland by hunger and political oppression. More than 100 of these migrants have come to international attention in the past year by scrambling into embassies in Beijing and demanding political asylum in South Korea. China eventually permits such migrants to leave via a third country to avoid angering its ally, North Korea. Human rights groups and U.N. officials say there is a growing humanitarian crisis under way in the isolated communist state.
By Niva Whyman, Voice of America, January 23, 2003
China has condemned international organizations, which help smuggle North Koreans in and out of China. Authorities have arrested scores of North Korean refugees since last week. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said Beijing is launching an investigation into organizations that help smuggle North Koreans into China on their way to asylum in third countries. She told reporters in Beijing Tuesday that the Chinese government will continue to crack down on such illegal activities. She said these actions disturbed public security in China and warned that security officials will do what is necessary.
Chinese police posing as smugglers last week arrested dozens of North Korean refugees who were about to leave China by sea to seek asylum in South Korea or Japan. In the latest incident, 48 North Koreans were detained along with three aid workers after they arrived in the port city of Yantai, in Shandong province, south of Beijing. The international aid group Doctors Without Borders said more than 3,000 North Koreans have been arrested since December as China stepped up a crackdown on illegal immigrants. They said they will face a grim fate back in North Korea.
Some 300,000 North Koreans are believed to be hiding in northeastern China, escaping famine and repression at home. China has a treaty with Pyongyang requiring it to repatriate any illegal North Koreans whom Beijing considers economic migrants not asylum seekers. Aid workers are now saying China has destroyed 80 percent of the refugee support networks on the border of China and North Korea.
Activists held a news conference in Tokyo Tuesday to blast China for its actions. Norbert Vollertsen is a medical doctor and prominent campaigner for North Korean refugees. "China is our main target. They are denying human principles and rights. They want to be a member of the international community, look what they are doing," Mr. Vollertsen said.
South Korean Pastor and activist Chun Ki-won, who had been detained in China previously, said Chinese authorities are setting traps for desperate North Koreans.
Pastor Chun said police are conducting a house-to-house campaign along the border, forcing Chinese residents to sign pledges not help North Koreans or face a stiff fine. He said rewards are also being offered for information on any illegal arrivals. Aid workers believe the campaign is timed to take advantage of the nuclear crisis in northeast Asia and the possible war against Iraq, which is diverting attention away from the plight of North Korean asylum seekers.
Yonhap News, By Staff Reporter (Translated by Seun Park), January 15, 2003
BEIJING – A North Korean refugee entered into the Embassy of Germany in China on January 15th, and asked for asylum, hence joining the other four North Korean defectors who have been waiting for departure since last December. China has been investigating those North Korean defectors who ask for asylum, and sent them to the path to South Korea via a third country, after checking their identification. Since last Spring, more than 160 North Korean defectors, who requested for asylum at the foreign Embassies in China, have left China.
By Sang-don Park (Translated by Kim Hyun Jung), Yonhap News Agency, January 16, 2003
MSNBC, a news specialized site, lighted up the misery of North Korean political prisoner camps in Northern area. MSNBC have conducted an interview with former prison guards or inmates for a month with an analysis of the satellite pictures, provided by the U.S. Digital Globe, and it found out several facts of the realities at the camps. According to MSNBC, the North Korean State Political Affairs Agency runs about a dozen of political prisoner camps and more than 30 labor camps, and the number of inmates including women and children comes to be approximately 200,000.
It reported that the political camp no.22 in Hoeryong holds about 50,000 inmates, 20~25 percentage of whom are dying every year. At least two political prisoner camps including the camp no. 22 are as large as Washington D.C. In addition, it briefly suggested some arguments that (1) products made by enforced labors could be displayed in front of the U.S. stores through Chinese industries; (2) women are exploited by biochemical experiments or forced to have an abortion. According to the satellite pictures obtained from the U.S. Digital Globe, the camp is surrounded by 3-meter height of wire entanglements, with several land mines and traps laid.
Myung-chul Ahn, who worked at the political prison camp No.22 in Hoeryong from 1987 to 1994 and left out of North Korea in 1995, said, looking at the pictures, that there is no change at all even now after the lapse of 8 years. He pointed at one place and stated, “Once transferred to this building, the person would be found dead within 3 months or, otherwise crippled.”
In reference to this, MSNBC reported that President Bush talked to the prominent journalist of Washington Post, Bob Woodward at his interview that he knew the misery of political prisoner camps. His book says that President Bush expressed at that time, “he loathes Jong Il Kim.” The U.S. officials related that the straight talk would explain why President Bush included North Korea as an “axis of evils” at the President’s annual State of the Union Message to Congress, last year.
By Amy Bickers, Voice of America, January 16, 2003
World Bank President James Wolfensohn says North Korea urgently requires humanitarian aid. Mr. Wolfensohn was speaking in Tokyo to introduce a major new study on East Asia's future economic development. Mr. Wolfensohn says North Korea's hungry people are in dire need of international aid. He says the bank awaits the United Nations' assessment on the North's humanitarian needs. His comments Thursday come as U.N. envoy Maurice Strong visits the impoverished North, which is now locked in a stand-off over its nuclear weapons development with the United States and its allies.
Mr. Wolfensohn said at a news conference in Tokyo that he expects no good news from the United Nations delegation. At least one-third of the population depends on international food aid as the government spends heavily to maintain one of the world's largest armies. Drought, floods and inefficient central planning have also taken a heavy toll. "I spoke to Maurice [Strong] two days ago before he went. My expectation is that he will come back and say the conditions are pretty bad," says Mr. Wolfensohn. "I have spoken to the World Food Program people and they would confirm that conditions are pretty bad."
The WFP, a U.N. program, was recently forced to slash aid to the North because funds from donor countries have dried up. Japan, formerly a large donor, gave nothing last year and says it will only change its policy when bilateral ties are normalized. The United States has also made significant cutbacks. But President Bush says he will consider reviving a plan to help North Korea if the communist government stops making nuclear weapons.
Mr. Wolfensohn says that when the nuclear issue is resolved, North Korea will require development funds to rebuild its ailing economy. The World Bank chief spoke at the introduction of a new book on East Asia's development prospects. The study, released Thursday in Tokyo, says Asian nations must embrace technology and innovation and invest heavily in education to thrive. In the past, the study notes, Asia depended largely on exports, but with competition from lower cost countries, a new "Asian model" is needed. The study recommends deregulating markets and dropping trade barriers to increase competitiveness.
Mr. Wolfensohn urges Japan, Asia's largest economy, to follow through with aggressive structural reforms to boost the economy, which has been in a slump for more than a decade. "Everyone is hoping that some of these steps will be taken. It is of course up to the Japanese to decide at what pace and how they can implement the changes that they themselves have identified." Mr. Wolfensohn also suggests the Bank of Japan set an inflation target to help revive the economy, which has been plagued by deflation for three years. Some Japanese officials fear doing so could lead to rocketing prices and cause further economic weakness.
By Young-gi Chun, Joong Ang Ilbo, January 17, 2003
More than half of voting-age South Koreans said Seoul should provide as much aid as it can to North Korea regardless of Pyeongyang's developing nuclear weapons, a recent poll showed. About half of the 1,500 people surveyed said they strongly support the idea of revising the Status of Forces Agreement governing the legal rights of U.S. troops here even if it means risking a disruption of Seoul's alliance with Washington. Only 5 percent said they strongly disagreed with the idea. More than a quarter said they partially agreed and 12 percent said they partially disagreed.
The poll was conducted the week following the Dec. 19 presidential election by the JoongAng Ilbo and a research team led by Kim Byung-kook, a professor of international politics at Korea University and a director of the East Asian Institute. Respondents were not required to answer every question and the largest share, almost a quarter, of those polled said that the political party they disliked most is the opposition Grand National Party.
More than 40 percent of respondents said Seoul should not interfere with local corporate operations, but 48 percent said the government should make companies reform. Almost 6 out of 10 of the people polled supported upgrading the social safety net even if it means paying more tax; 37.5 percent said taxes should not be raised to expand welfare programs. More than 40 percent said they support the current presidential system, while 23 percent said they preferred a parliamentary system.
By Andrew Wald, Financial Times, January 19, 2003
The US on Sunday offered North Korea the prospect of economic co-operation if the communist state abandoned its nuclear weapons program. The pledge was among Washington's most explicit signals to date that it is prepared to compensate Pyongyang for abandoning its nuclear ambitions. Thomas Hubbard, US ambassador to South Korea, said Washington was prepared to make "a broad approach to North Korea that would entail in the final analysis some economic co-operation".
Mr Hubbard said on South Korean television: "We would like to solve this problem peacefully through diplomatic co-ordination. The United States, as President Bush has said, is prepared to talk to North Korea." He stressed that aid to North Korea would be conditional on the poverty-stricken country first halting its nuclear activities.
However, the comments represented a further softening of Washington's policy towards Pyongyang. Until earlier this month, the US had ruled out talks with North Korea and refused to offer economic incentives for Pyongyang to scrap its weapons program. Washington originally insisted that there would be no repeat of a 1994 deal, brokered by former US president Bill Clinton, under which North Korea was granted billions of dollars of energy aid in return for a halt to nuclear proliferation.
The 1994 deal, known as the Agreed Framework, unravelled late last year when Pyongyang admitted that North Korea had revived its nuclear program. The crisis deepened earlier this month when North Korea expelled United Nations inspectors from a mothballed nuclear reactor and withdrew from the international nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
Mr. Hubbard's comments, together with remarks by Richard Armitage, US deputy secretary of state, suggested that the US was preparing the ground to strike a fresh bargain with North Korea. Mr. Armitage told Japan's Kyodo news agency that Washington was considering a comprehensive deal with North Korea, including a written assurance that it had no aggressive intentions. Pyongyang has demanded a non-aggression pact with the US as a condition of nuclear disarmament.
The White House stressed over the weekend that the US was not considering military action against North Korea. "The president has made it clear the United States has no intention of invading North Korea and he has indicated he wants to find a peaceful resolution," it said.
The frenzy of diplomatic activity surrounding North Korea continued over the weekend as James Kelly, US assistant secretary of state, talked about the crisis with Yoriko Kawaguchi, Japan's foreign minister, in Tokyo, while Alexander Losyukov, Russia's deputy foreign minister, visited Pyongyang. No firm proposals emerged from either meeting. The diplomatic moves came as about 30,000 people rallied in central Seoul to oppose any withdrawal of US troops from South Korea and to demand that North Korea reverse its withdrawal from the non-proliferation treaty.
By Staff Writer, Japan Times, January 19, 2003
BEIJING (Kyodo) Chinese authorities in Jilin Province have detained a 64-year-old Japanese woman who fled North Korea last November only to be held by extortionists involved in the escape of North Korean refugees. Japan has asked the Chinese government to hand the woman over to Japanese authorities, sources close to the matter said Friday. The woman, who went to North Korea in 1959 with her North Korean husband, sought protection from the Japanese government after she fled to China at the end of November. Before she was detained by Jilin security authorities on Wednesday, it was believed the woman was being held by people who have demanded a large sum of money from the
Japanese government in return for her freedom.
Officials at the Japanese Embassy in Beijing said they cannot comment on whether Chinese authorities have the woman in custody as that information is highly sensitive and could affect the woman's safety. It appears that the woman was taken into custody together with the people who were holding her. After receiving the demand for money, the Japanese government refused to negotiate with the people involved and asked Chinese authorities to take the woman into custody and hand her over to Japan. It is not known when, or whether, the Chinese government will hand the woman over to Japanese authorities. People familiar with North Korean refugees who have fled to China say the
North Korean government may demand that the Chinese government send her back to North Korea.
To date, dozens of Japanese nationals in similar situations have made their way to Japan, although their returns have not been widely publicized, apparently out of consideration for China's relations with North Korea. China officially agrees to send North Korean refugees back to North Korea. The latest case, however, is likely to be the first in which a Japanese from North Korea is publicly sent back to Japan. Diplomatic sources say North Korea may harden its stance on the issue as the case has been widely publicized. China has been hit in recent years by a flood of North Korean refugees trying to seek asylum by entering foreign embassies in China. The escape of some
North Korean refugees is reportedly being organized by North Koreans who fled their country. These groups typically demand large sums of money from foreign governments in return for the refugees.
By Kyung-nam Um (Translated by Seun Park), The Christian Press, January 20, 2003
Eight months have passed since Min-sung Park (alias, 18) fled from North Korea. Escaping from the fear of death by hunger, he had chosen to cross the Chinese-North Korean border and wandered around in China, finally setting his foot on South Korean soil. However, things were not all that pleasant. Though North and South Koreans are one nation, South Korea is only a foreign country for Park. There are vocabularies he simply does not understand such as note, page, remote control, supermarket, take-out coffee and etc.
On top of that, how unfamiliar the behaviors of his South Korean peers are… Going to school has become very perplexing, with full of incomprehensible and hard vocabulary and class courses, not to mention the puzzling egotistic behavior of his peers. What’s even worse is his having to endure being treated as an inferior just because he is from North Korea. Occasionally, there are classmates and teachers who discriminate against him openly in public. Once he had risked his life to look for a place to live, but as time goes by in his life in South Korea, his confidence has been weakening.
Park has found an exit to his frustrating sense of alienation. It is the ‘Hankyoreh Winter School for North Korean youth defectors’. It is the winter and summer school, which was established by the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights (the Representative Rev. Yoon) two years ago. Marking the 4th class this winter, the school provides the North Korean youth defectors with additional tutoring class and various programs to help them adapt to South Korean society.
For those North Korean youth defectors who lack basic academic knowledge, the school offers academic assistance through classes of Korean language, English Language, Mathematics, Social Science Studies, Science, Democratic Civil Education and etc. Courses such as acting, hip-hop dance, Taekwondo and etc are provided as well in order to help them understand South Korean peers and school. Every Saturday, through volunteer activities and retreat to the historical places, they have the opportunity to experience South Korea as well.
In order to assist the 15-21 year old North Korean youth defectors of approximately 30 students who attended this short-term winter school, the former and current teachers and university or grad students have sacrificed their vacation to volunteer at the camp. The school began in January 6th to be continued for three weeks at the Unification Education Center (통일교육원). For Park, this winter school is the great opportunity. He can now ask as many questions as he has regarding things he did not learn in North Korea such as English language and Democratic Civil Education, and confess his heartfelt sorrow or frustration to the volunteering teachers to forget his loneliness. It
could not be easy to digest everything he learns in three weeks, however, the winter school teaches them how to studying by themselves and what they need to require for the virtue in order to live in South Korean society. Indeed, it is the opportunity to meet South Koreans in a safely protected environment and to prepare for the life in South Korea.
Being deprived of proper education due to the extreme poverty in North Korea and life as a wanderer in China, these North Korean youth defectors, often times, academically fall behind the South Korean youth of the same age. Consequently, they tend to hide their age to avoid being looked down or treated as inferiors. Obviously, they do not endure the school life for long and soon take a path of qualification examination to replace the school diploma. The cultural difference due to the shift from the socialist country to the capitalist country is also an huge obstacle along with the language gap between the South and the North Koreans.
As the number of North Korean defectors has increased, last year alone witnessed over 1,000 defectors who entered South Korea, among whom approximately 20% were the youth population. However, there is no institutional framework for these North Korean youth defectors as yet. Some religious groups or NGOs have been providing assistance individually. However, the lack of structural approach which has not been able to systemize into an effective model.
Under such circumstances, Hankyoreh Summer and Winter School is being a great help. “What I learn at Hankyoreh Winter School is a good guidance for me to adjust in the South Korean society” said Park, “Above all, having to know that there are some South Koreans who truly welcome us in this society really gave me a lot of hope.” Park further confessed.
On the other hand, the school has been taking a role of bridging the gap in South Koreans’ understanding of North Korean people. A teacher who participated as a volunteer said, “Through Hankyoreh Winter School, I was able to gain more understanding of North Korean children and their culture. Through this opportunity, I washed away my prejudice towards North Koreans, and realized that South and North Koreans are one people.” Understanding that North Korean youth defectors are the future workers for unification of Korea, Hankyoreh School is realizing a small unification
By Niva Whyman, Voice of America, January 21, 2003
China has condemned international organizations, which help smuggle North Koreans in and out of China. Authorities have arrested scores of North Korean refugees since last week. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said Beijing is launching an investigation into organizations that help smuggle North Koreans into China on their way to asylum in third countries. She told reporters in Beijing Tuesday that the Chinese government will continue to crack down on such illegal activities. She said these actions disturbed public security in China and warned that security officials will do what is necessary.
Chinese police posing as smugglers last week arrested dozens of North Korean refugees who were about to leave China by sea to seek asylum in South Korea or Japan. In the latest incident, 48 North Koreans were detained along with three aid workers after they arrived in the port city of Yantai, in Shandong province, south of Beijing. The international aid group Doctors Without Borders said more than 3,000 North Koreans have been arrested since December as China stepped up a crackdown on illegal immigrants. They said they will face a grim fate back in North Korea. Some 300,000 North Koreans are believed to be hiding in northeastern China, escaping famine and repression at
home.
China has a treaty with Pyongyang requiring it to repatriate any illegal North Koreans whom Beijing considers economic migrants not asylum seekers. Aid workers are now saying China has destroyed 80 percent of the refugee support networks on the border of China and North Korea. Activists held a news conference in Tokyo Tuesday to blast China for its actions. Norbert Vollertsen is a medical doctor and prominent campaigner for North Korean refugees. "China is our main target. They are denying human principles and rights. They want to be a member of the international community, look what they are doing," Mr. Vollertsen said.
South Korean Pastor and activist Chun Ki-won, who had been detained in China previously, said Chinese authorities are setting traps for desperate North Koreans. Pastor Chun said police are conducting a house-to-house campaign along the border, forcing Chinese residents to sign pledges not help North Koreans or face a stiff fine. He said rewards are also being offered for information on any illegal arrivals. Aid workers believe the campaign is timed to take advantage of the nuclear crisis in northeast Asia and the possible war against Iraq, which is diverting attention away from the plight of North Korean asylum seekers.
UNHCR News Stories, January 21, 2003
BEIJING/GENEVA, Jan 21 (UNHCR) – The UN refugee agency's Beijing office today urged the Chinese government to give UNHCR officials access to 48 North Korean asylum seekers held since last Saturday. The 48, including children, were arrested as they tried to board fishing boats in the port of Yantai in China's Shandong province, 500 km south-east of Beijing.
In a note verbale sent to the Chinese foreign ministry, UNHCR called on China to refrain from sending the North Koreans back. The agency pointed out that China is a signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention that prohibits "refoulement" – sending asylum seekers back to their countries where they could face persecution.
UNHCR offered to assess the asylum claims of the North Korean asylum seekers jointly with the Chinese authorities. The agency's officials said they were worried that the group could be deported to North Korea without the chance to have their cases heard. On several occasions in the past, China had sent back North Korean asylum seekers.
According to various estimates, there are tens of thousands of North Koreans in China, mostly in areas bordering North Korea. However, for the past several years, UNHCR officials have been barred from the border area despite repeated requests for access.
The Chinese authorities describe the North Koreans as "economic migrants", claiming that none of them are refugees. UNHCR officials say some may indeed be migrants, but it is also likely that among them are refugees fleeing persecution in their country.
By James Brooke, New York Times, January 21, 2003
TOKYO, Jan. 21 ?Human rights campaigners warned today that China planned to send home the 78 North Korean refugees captured last weekend when the police foiled their exodus from China. The attempt last weekend to bring boatloads of the refugees to South Korea and Japan was financed and supported by 21 aid groups from South Korea, France, Japan and the United States. In a news conference here today, five nongovernmental groups demanded the release of the 78 North Koreans and 3 South Koreans, including a news photographer.
Alarmed by Chinese television reports that the refugees would be sent back shortly, Doctors Without Borders charged that over the last month China has forcibly returned 3,200 North Korean refugees and detained 1,300 more in camps. "Eighty percent of the support networks have collapsed," Marine Buissonni?e, the group's Korea spokeswoman, said at the news conference. "All the Chinese and foreign aid workers have been arrested and some are still in prison." Norbert Vollertsen, a German campaigner against North Korean human rights abuses, who has been involved in several attempts to find refuge for North Koreans, said: "This was only the first step. You can be sure we will
try again."
Today, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman would not confirm a Chinese report that the refugees would be deported this week. But the spokeswoman, Zhang Qiyue, did castigate foreign aid groups for helping the North Koreans, whom China views as economic migrants. "I want to point out that recently some international organizations or citizens used the North Korean illegal immigrants to steadily create trouble," she said. "These organizations' actions violate China's laws and harm social stability. These actions are illegal in China, and any country should fight against them." China fears that a trickle of refugees could become a flood, leading to the destabilization of
North Korea.
The Rev. Douglas E. Shin, a Los Angeles-based pastor, accused China of "double standards," contrasting its speed in deporting refugees to North Korea to its reluctance to impose economic penalties on North Korea over the resumption of its nuclear weapons program. Cooperation between the North Korean and Chinese police is so tight, Mr. Shin charged, that Kim Jong Nam, the oldest son of North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, is "in Beijing, taking care of this refugee roundup."
Chun Ki Won, a South Korean Christian missionary, warned, "These refugees will end up in political prison camps when they get back." "Up until now there has been some occasional leniency on those forcibly sent back to North Korea," continued Mr. Chun, who spent 220 days in Chinese jails for helping refugees. "But currently, there is no trial, no legal procedure when they are sent to the political prison camps."
Tim Peters, an American Christian aid worker from Seoul, said punishment of returned refugees in North Korea could be as severe as execution. Four refugees whom he had cared for until they were sent back last May were shot by firing squads for carrying Bibles, he said. "The North Korean refugee in China is hunted like an animal ?he is under a bounty," continued Mr. Peters, who runs a nongovernmental organization, Helping Hands Korea.
"The bounty for turning in North Korean refugees has recently been raised three or four times from what it was last summer, to 3,000 yuan" or $362. The reward for turning in an aid worker helping North Korean refugees is 10 times higher, he said. The boat evacuation plan derailed last weekend, Mr. Shin said, because "it turned out to be a setup." The human rights workers urged the United Nations High Commission on Refugees to intervene to prevent the forced repatriation of the 78 arrested last weekend.
By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times, January 22, 2003
SEOUL -- One of the largest attempted defections by North Koreans was foiled in recent days by undercover Chinese police, who arrested 61 people and confiscated two fishing boats in which the defectors had hoped to sail to safety, activists said today.
The plan was for the North Koreans to sail from the Chinese city of Yantai on the Yellow Sea in two separate groups to South Korea and Japan. But Chinese authorities were tipped off and arrested most of the participants at a boat terminal in Yantai on Saturday.
We fear for their lives," said Douglas Shin, a Korean American pastor who was one of the organizers. Shin said that North Korea, with the help of China, has launched a crackdown in the last month for fear that a massive number of defections coinciding with the current international standoff over Pyongyang's nuclear program could trigger instability in North Korea.
"Tensions are very high. The North Koreans are afraid that there could be a stampede of people escaping and that could bring about the collapse of the regime in Pyongyang," Shin said. "They are cracking down, and China is collaborating."
The Chinese government had no immediate comment on the arrests. The international aid group Doctors Without Borders today called on the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to press China to release those detained Saturday and other North Koreans who have been caught trying to defect. The group said 1,300 North Koreans are in detention centers in China, while 3,200 have been sent back to North Korea.
Those arrested in the escape attempt included 58 North Korean defectors, two human rights activists and one freelance photographer. The North Koreans ranged in age from 8 to 97. They had been in China for varying lengths of time -- some for as little as a few weeks, others for as long as seven years.
The plan had been for two separate groups to sail Saturday night from Yantai to Chuja, an island off South Korea's southern coast, and Sasebo, a port city on the southernmost main island of Japan, Kyushu. The two fishing boats had been purchased by human rights activists last year for $40,000.
The same group of activists -- which includes Americans, South Koreans, Japanese and Europeans -- has helped dozens of North Korean defectors storm into embassies in Beijing to demand asylum. The boat escape was to have been their largest operation.
Tens of thousands of impoverished North Koreans sneak into China each year. But they are denied refugee status and must live clandestinely because of a treaty between China and North Korea that requires that they be repatriated.
By Jung Jin Cho (Translated by Hyun Jung Kim), Segye Times, January 22, 2003
It was reported on January 9, 2003 that the North Korea-China Joint arrest team commenced a mopping-up operation of North Koreans at three northeastern provinces including Jirin, arrested and repatriated thousands of North Korean defectors since last December.
According to Chinese high-ranking officials and activists for North Korean human rights, North Korea and China rushed into so-called ‘100 Days War’ (The Segye Times, December 19, 2002: front page) to ferret out the defectors, and operated the repatriation of North Koreans. International countermeasures should be taken immediately in that while international community concentrating on the North Korea’s nuclear development issues, North Korea and China are making a sweeping roundup of North Korean defectors.
Both countries planned to hunt and repatriate North Koreans to North Korea from December 5 to March 15, in accordance with ‘Mutual Cooperation Protocol for the Work of Maintaining National Security and Social Order in the Border Areas’ signed in 1986.
North Korean government delegated three thousands of staffs working at State Security Protection Agency, the People’s Safety Agency and National Border Patrol to three northeastern provinces such as Heilongjiang, Liaoning and Jirin.
It was announced that the joint investigation team exerts their efforts to arrest North Korean defectors, steadily moving from three northeastern provinces to Bejing like a hare hunting. At present, dozens of trucks are sending arrested North Koreans in custody at any time.
Chinese government gives a prize of 3,000 reminbi, corresponding to 6-month wages for laborers, to the citizens who reported North Korean defectors. On the other hand, whoever is revealed to hide North Koreans would be fined 3,000 reminbi.
Chul Hwan Kang (Translated by Hyun Jung Kim), Chosun Ilbo, January 22, 2003
Recently, the North Korean government has begun clamping down on North Korean defectors to prevent escape from North Korea as more and more North Koreans flee due to repeated failure of crops and suspension of foreign aid. The North Korean government increased punishment for those who had been repatriated from China by ridding the normal three to six months of labor education system and directly transferring them to an “Enlightenment Center” or political prison camp.
In the beginning of this year, Ki-ryong Shin (alias), who succeeded in his second escape from North Korea, said, “Until a few month ago, the North Korean defectors who left North Korea only in search of food were released after several months of compulsory labor in a labor training camp. But now, they are dispatched to an “Enlightenment Center” after their heads have been shaved. Some people who have become Christian or were caught on the way to South Korea, in particular, are isolated from the others and transferred to a political prison camp never to return to society.”
Furthermore, nationwide investigations have been conducted regarding missing persons. A Korean-Chinese acting as intermediary for separated families between China and North Korea said, “There were not a few cases that a good many missing, affirmed to be dead from starvation, were found in South Korea and China, and the operation of confirming missing persons has been made.” The State Political Security Affairs Agency employs the tactic in many cases of North Korean defectors, unlisted on the missing list, of enticing their families in North Korea out. Then the Agency keeps close watch on the families of the missing. In the border areas, where any have been reported
missing, North Korea is transferring the remaining families to the inland, in order to prevent them from leaving out of North Korea. In addition, the authority releases propaganda, which states that whoever crosses the border would be brought back to North Korea without any punishment. Most North Korean defectors without any guardians, in reality, were caught and repatriated to North Korea in the border areas where the crackdown on North Korean defectors has been tightened as much as before.
According to a Chinese security official concerned, North Korean defectors caught on the way to South Korea are branded as a political prisoners without quesstion, since Chinese security officials send the result of investigations over to North Korean government. Chinese security official had previously never passed such information over to North Korea, but now they transmit to North Korea the investigation materials regarding North Korean defectors who were seized on the spot with the failure of entering into foreign embassies, or arrested on the way to third countries.
By Radek Sikorski, National Review, January 27, 2003
I am a friend of North Korea. Or rather, that's what it probably says in my file in the North Korean ministry of foreign affairs. It happened like this. In 1992, as deputy minister for defense in Poland's first democratically elected government, I received an invitation to North Korea's embassy in Warsaw to celebrate the birthday of the Great Leader. Thinking that it would be my last chance to attend a Stalinist event, I went. The North Koreans were delighted to land such a "big fish." And when I told the ambassador, truthfully, that they must not allow ideological slackness or they would end up like Poland, he positively glowed. A laudatory telegram must have gone to
Pyongyang, for each time I subsequently met a North Korean diplomat, he told me I was a good egg, who respected them at a time when even so-called Communists turned their backs.
So, vibes were good when I went to Pyongyang on an official visit, this time as my country's deputy foreign minister, almost ten years later. Rules are rules, though, and the North Korean diplomatic protocol informed us that cell phones could not be taken into the country (even though they don't work there) and would be confiscated irrespective of rank. I left mine in that oasis of liberty, Beijing. Jimmy Carter once claimed that there are supermarkets in North Korea just like Wal-Mart, but I cannot confirm this. I saw people weakened from malnutrition wander from shop to empty, dimly-lit shop. There is nothing to buy even in the "dollar shops," unless you count liquor
with a snake in the bottle or cigarettes. The only reasonably well-stocked shop I saw was a bookstore selling the literary labors of the Great Leader and his son, the Dear Leader. I purchased a work entitled The Great Teacher of Journalists, which opens with the immortal line, "Today, in Korea, the press is in its heyday and journalists are giving full scope to their talent in their worthwhile activities, for the Party and the revolution."
Foreigners move in North Korea as though enveloped in a smelly cloud--crowds part at their approach, pedestrians take a detour just to avoid being within talking distance. Apparently, if a Westerner so much as asks the time of day, locals have to report it to the secret police. I started reprimanding one of our diplomats for the fact that the information display (containing maps of Poland, articles, and the like) on the embassy perimeter wall was out of date. "It is pointless, Minister. People are not allowed to walk on our side of the street." Interestingly, foreigners cannot buy regime newspapers--diplomats might glean too much from the vagaries of the changing party
line.
Tell me: Have you ever driven on a four-lane highway with no other traffic on it? And I don't mean light traffic, I mean none whatsoever. For the first half-hour it's pleasant, but then the creepiness sets in. Private cars are banned in North Korea, so a car is by definition an official car. At the sound of an approaching vehicle, the teams of women with shovels and rakes who keep flowerbeds along the road in immaculate condition stand to attention with their backs to the motorcade.
I was being taken to the House of Gifts to the Great Leader. A vast steel door--as if this were a nuclear bunker rather than a museum—leads into a spacious tunnel. A hundred yards into the mountain, a cathedral-sized cavern opens up in the rock and a huge marble statue of the Great Leader greets the visitor. We bowed and scraped. Another hundred yards in, we reached a second vast chamber, where the Great Leader, as if alive, stands in the midst of an idyllic meadow. We bowed and scraped before a Chinese-made wax doll.
From there, we entered a labyrinth of hundreds of large, brightly lit rooms where 241,000 gifts have been lovingly preserved in glass display cases. Carpets from Iran, mosaics from Arabia, tea sets from the Soviet Union, ebony sculptures from Africa--the usual diplomatic-circuit junk, including several rooms of what must be the largest collection of objects from East Germany, mostly hunting rifles. A medal from Jimmy Carter and a trinket from Billy Graham get special attention.
I bore my own gift. My suggestion of donating a portrait of Lech Walesa had been deemed too provocative, so I took a distinctly feudalist engraving of Warsaw's Royal Castle. "Would you like your name etched on the plaque that will describe the gift, or would you prefer just your function?" my hosts inquired. "Our diplomatic protocol forbids displays of bourgeois individualism," I said, chuckling inwardly.
Poland being a potato superpower, I had previously secured 50 tons of prime seedlings as our food aid for North Korea, which now gave me the right to inspect the project. On the farm, I was shown rows of potatoes grown from seedlings from different countries. By happy coincidence, Polish potatoes, explained the farm manager, who held a healthy plant with nice big bulbs dropping dirt, came up the best. We should intensify the cooperation between our countries in the field of agriculture, swooned my minders.
Finally, we got to meet the president. No, not the Dear Leader, whom the outside world erroneously assumes to be in charge of the country: This was an audience with Kim Il Sung, the Great Leader himself. That he had been dead five years did not seem to upset our plans. We approached the presidential palace by way of a fully air-conditioned tunnel half a kilometer in length with marble walls and airport-style moving walkways. Eventually we reached the inner sanctum. Entering through an air sluice to prevent bacteria from polluting the air, we emerged into a chamber the size of the Reich's chancellery but made of the same red granite as the Lenin mausoleum. We bowed
solemnly four times as we made our way around a reinforced glass coffin containing the mummified corpse of the Great Leader. This was our audience with Kim Il Sung, president-for-eternity of the Democratic Republic of North Korea. In Warsaw, we received letters of accreditation of the North Korean ambassador signed by the Great Leader two years after his earthly demise.
After visiting the president, one signs his visitors' book. One's embassy naturally prepares an anodyne formula about the friendship between our peoples and our respect for the Great Leader, but I had a moral conflict. As a lifelong anti-Communist, I could not put my name to a lie; as a public servant, I had to. I wrote in what the embassy had prepared. Then, in a flash of inspiration, I added, "I am personally impressed by what I have just seen. Humanity has seen nothing like this since the Egyptian pyramids." Contrary to the fears of my delegation, the North Koreans were delighted.
In recent weeks, discussions of North Korea in Washington have been dominated by technical issues--how many warheads do they possess, how many can they manufacture from the restarted facilities, can they put them on missiles, how far can the missiles reach? An old truth is in danger of being lost: It is not weapons, but people, who kill. It is the nature of the North Korean regime, and not its armaments, that threaten us. And that regime is beyond evil; it exists in a parallel moral universe. We can only be secure when it finds itself on the ash-heap of history where it belongs.
By Kwang-in Kim (Translated by Seun Park) Chosun Ilbo, January 15, 2003
It is known that North Korea is going ahead with its plan to expand the portable service into important provinces, following Pyongyang and the free economic zone Rasun (Rajin-Sonbong). North Korea co-founded the Northeast Asia Telephone and Telecommunication (NEAT&T) with the Loxley Group in Thailand last August, and has been testing the European model Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM), opening the service targeting the official residences in Pyongyang since mid November.
According to a South Korean government official on Monday, “North Korea has been providing the portable service in Pyongyang and Rasun. Followed by their plan to expand the service into the cities of Kyesung and Nampo, North Korea has embarked themselves in preparing the business to include the Special Administration Region (SAR) Sinuiju and Chungjin in North Hamkyung province since the end of the last year.” In addition, “if this plan is carried out smoothly, it has been said that the service expansion would then further include Wonsan in Kangwon Province”, he noted.
A North Korean officer who came to China at the end of the last year confirmed this expansion plan of the portable service to important cities in North Korea. He said, “Since last December, North Korea has begun construction of a transmitting tower, which would enable the portable service in Chungjin, North Hamyung Province, expected to be completed this year.” Consequently, “as the portable service expands its coverage to the wider areas, the cellular phones will be provided to party and government officials of city and district units”, he noted.
Furthermore, the earlier mentioned South Korean government official said “Those who are eligible to receive the provided portable service have been above low level officers of labor party, People’s Committee (Administrative Branch), the People’s Safety Agency (Police) and the State Security Protection Agency (Intelligence Agency), and the frequent usage has not been high as well.” In addition, mobile phones are used limited to official work purpose, and making an internationally call is yet impossible as it is under the North Korean government control.
By Staff Writer, Agence France-Presse, January 14, 2003
An envoy sent by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan left Beijing for North Korea as part of efforts to avert a "humanitarian crisis" in the famine-hit country. "There is a very acute humanitarian situation evolving there and we want to find out from the DPRK (North Korea) how they think we can best help to avoid a humanitarian crisis," Maurice Strong said here before boarding a flight to Pyongyang.
North Korea has relied heavily on outside donations to feed its 23-million population over the past seven years because of a failed centralized economic policy and a series of natural disasters.
The United Nations' World Food Programme (WFP) said last week that it urgently needed 80,000 tonnes of food to feed some three million North Koreans who have not received food aid since the autumn.
There are fears that outside food donations will dwindle in the coming months as North Korea receives US-led global condemnation over its decision last month to restart a nuclear program and recent moves to withdraw from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and kick out international nuclear monitors.
Strong said Tuesday the food shortage could result in a "significant crisis" in the coming months if donations were not made soon.
"It could get worse because the pipeline is drying up and unless new humanitarian supplies start to move quickly there could be a significant crisis in March or April and we are seeking to consult with our DPRK friends on how we might help them to avoid such a situation," Strong told reporters.
A UN spokeswoman said last week that while Strong's main purpose was to assess humanitarian aid, he was willing to listen to any subject put forward, when asked whether he would discuss the crisis over North Korea's nuclear program.
Strong said he would convey some messages from Annan, but stressed that he would not be urging the North Koreans to do anything. "I'm not urging them. I'm listening," he said. Strong said he will meet some senior officials but was not scheduled to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il.
A former Canadian businessman, Strong, 74, was the first director of the UN Environment Programme in the 1970s and later presided over the Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero in 1992.
By John Burton, Financial Times, January 13, 2003
For most of the world, North Korea's nuclear stand-off with the US amounts to a non-proliferation issue. But for Pyongyang, it is a struggle for economic survival. As the North ratches up its game of nuclear brinkmanship, it is seeking concessions from the US - a non-aggression pact and normalized ties - that it considers vital to its fledgling programme of economic reforms.
The North has suggested to South Korea that a US security guarantee would allow it to reduce defense spending, which has placed an enormous burden on the economy. Plans would include cutting its 1.1m-strong military by 300,000 soldiers, who would be employed to man factories in proposed special economic zones supported by foreign investment, according to officials in Seoul.
Pyongyang believes US diplomatic recognition would give it access to funds from the Asian Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund needed to save its collapsing economy.
There are clear signs that Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader, realizes that a policy of muddling through, with the economy dependent on international aid, no longer works.
Much of population remains malnourished after a devastating famine in the mid-1990s that killed up to 2m people, the result of an inefficient agricultural sector. Infant mortality has soared, while life expectancy has shrunk. Factories are barely operating because of energy shortages and ageing machinery, which has made it difficult for the North to earn foreign currency from exports.
Instead, North Korea has become an international pariah by trying to plug the holes in the economy by selling high-valued contraband products, mainly illegal drugs and weapons.
In July, the North took its boldest step towards a market economy by increasing prices for rice, diesel and other staple goods and ending rationing for some products. It also devalued the currency, legalized private farmers' markets and made state companies responsible for their own profits and losses.
But the reforms may have made economic problems worse by unleashing rapid inflation. Analysts say North Korea is trying to do too much too quickly without an adequate understanding of how market economies operate.
That scenario worries Seoul, which would have to bear most of the economic burden if the North collapses. The "sunshine policy" of constructive engagement with the North announced in 1998 by Kim Dae-jung, the South Korean president, was meant to achieve a "soft landing" for North Korea while preparing the way for gradual reunification.
The two Koreas have negotiated the opening of cross-border road and rail links and Seoul is supporting the construction of an industrial park for South Korean businesses in the North Korean border city of Kaesong.
Roh Moo-hyun, South Korea's president-elect who will take office next month, is planning to invest billions in government funds to help rebuild the North's infrastructure and develop tourism and industry.
Doubts have arisen over whether constructive engagement will succeed in transforming North Korea because Kim Jong-il appears worried that widespread foreign investment will result in political contamination that will undermine his regime. But the North's biggest worry now appears to be that it running out of time even before the economic reforms take effect.
"By North Korean standards, it has done a lot in the past year in changing the system. But it has felt its efforts have been slighted by its neighbours, which has increased its sense of desperation," says an aide to Mr. Roh. The result is that North Korea has embarked on a risky strategy of nuclear brinkmanship to obtain the economic support it quickly needs. The effort could easily backfire. If the North continues to escalate the crisis, the US will likely push for economic sanctions in the UN Security Council - dealing a potential death blow to the North Korean economy that Pyongyang has been seeking so frantically to avoid.
By Christopher Torchia, Associated Press, January 12‚ 2003
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - The United States is willing to consider energy aid for North Korea if it ends nuclear weapons development, a U.S. envoy said Monday. The comments by Assistant U.S. Secretary of State James Kelly raised the possibility that the United States was willing to make a deal with North Korea to resolve concerns over its nuclear activities.
"Once we get beyond nuclear weapons, there may be opportunities with the U.S., with private investors, with other countries to help North Korea in the energy area," Kelly said at a news conference in Seoul.
U.S. officials previously said they would not reward North Korea for abandoning its nuclear programs, saying discussions of aid and better ties must follow steps to dismantle those programs. But Kelly appeared to be offering a "carrot" to North Korea, which insisted Sunday that it never admitted having a secret nuclear program, sending another conflicting signal in the escalating crisis over its alleged plans to build nuclear weapons.
"We are willing to talk to North Korea about their response to the international community," on the nuclear issue, Kelly said, echoing recent comments by other U.S. officials. "I think we're just going to wait to see."
In October, the United States said North Korea admitted having a weapons program. That announcement touched off the latest standoff, which has led to North Korea's decision last week to withdraw from the landmark Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
"The claim that we admitted developing nuclear weapons is an invention fabricated by the U.S. with sinister intentions," South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted the official Rodong Sinmun newspaper as saying. It was not clear if the statement was aimed at influencing a new round of talks on resolving the crisis.
Kelly arrived in South Korea on Sunday and met President-elect Roh Moo-hyun, who believes diplomacy is the only solution to the current crisis. Kelly also planned to meet Foreign Minister Choi Sung-hong and two presidential security advisers - Yim Sung-joon and Lim Dong-won.
Kelly will travel Tuesday to China, as well as Singapore, Indonesia and Japan. The United States believes North Korea has one or two nuclear weapons and could make several more within six months if it extracts weapons-grade plutonium from spent fuel rods at a reprocessing plant.
The North Korean newspaper blamed the United States for the current crisis and warned: "If the United States evades its responsibility and challenges us, we'll turn the citadel of imperialists into a sea of fire."
In the October announcement, the United States said the North admitted having an atomic weapons program in violation of a 1994 accord, under which Pyongyang pledged to freeze operations at its nuclear facilities in exchange for energy supplies.
In response to that admission, the United States suspended fuel shipments and the North said it would bring reactors at its Yongbyon nuclear facility back on line. After announcing its withdrawal from the treaty Friday, North Korea ratcheted up tensions even further by suggesting it might resume missile testing.
On Saturday, North Korean leaders vowed at a rally attended by 1 million people to "smash U.S. nuclear maniacs" in a "holy war." But North Korean Deputy U.N. Ambassador Han Song Ryol told New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, that the country had no intention of building nuclear bombs.
"He told me that in a dialogue with the United States, North Korea would discuss America's concerns over verifying its nuclear program. I think that's positive," Richardson said Saturday at the end of three days of meetings with the North Koreans. Kelly said the North Korean envoys did not cover any new ground.
"It was a little disappointing, because we really hadn't heard anything from the North Koreans speaking to him that we hadn't heard in their public pronouncements before that," he said.
Also Saturday, a North Korean official said its nuclear plant north of Pyongyang was ready for operation. The threat of new missile tests came from the North's ambassador to China, Choe Jin Su, who said tests could resume if U.S. relations do not improve. New tests would be the first since 1998, when North Korea shot a missile over Japan into the Pacific. Pyongyang later set a moratorium on tests which was to last into 2004.
Another official left open the possibility of the North reprocessing spent fuel rods from its nuclear reactor to make atomic bombs. Son Mun San, who oversees Pyongyang's relations with the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, said in Vienna, Austria, that the reprocessing plant now stands in a state of "readiness."
Since the nuclear standoff resumed, the North has removed seals placed on one of its nuclear facilities by IAEA monitors and expelled two U.N. inspectors. During a visit to Russia that ended Sunday, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi urged North Korea to rescind its decision to pull out of the treaty. "That is what's best for North Korea, for the international community," he said. "And this is true for the United States as well."
By Lee, Dong-Hyun, Joong Ang Ilbo, January 10, 2003
The U.S. government repeated that it would not cut off or reduce food aid to North Korea for "political reasons," as tension between Washington and Pyeongyang grew over the North's nuclear program. The announcement was largely taken as an attempt to separate the nuclear issue from humanitarian aid to the North, out of consideration for the children, who are often hit the hardest by food shortages there. .
Reports by international aid agencies forecast continued food shortages in the North, although not approaching the levels of the worst years, from 1995 to 1997. The executive director of the World Food Program, James Morris, said after his visit to the North in November that about 4 million North Korean children could die of starvation this year. The organization's spokes-man, Gerald Bourke, reported that nearly all of the 25 students in a third-grade class at a primary school in Gimchaek, North Hamgyeong province, were eating mostly maize. Only three of them reported having eaten meat in the previous month, and the rest had eaten an egg and some vegetables on just one
occasion during the month..
The World Food Program tried to address the situation by asking Tuesday for urgent donations. It asked for 80,000 tons of food for distribution to the areas suffering the most. The European Union said Wednesday that it would pay for 39,000 tons of food to be distributed primarily to children and pregnant women.
.An official report by Pyeongyang in May 2000 said 45 percent of children 5 years old or younger suffered from chronic malnutrition. A survey by the World Food Program, the United Nations Children's Fund and the European Union conducted in September and October 1998 painted a similar picture throughout North Korea. Nearly two-thirds of the country's children aged between 6 months and 7 years old were reported to be suffering chronic malnutrition at the time. Sixteen percent of them suffered from dangerous degrees of malnutrition. One in three orphans, aged 12 to 24 months, suffered from acute malnutrition.
In June, North Korea had a bumper crop of row vegetables, wheat and barley, and raised daily food rations from 250 grams to 350 grams -- still far short of the World Health Organization's recommended 700 grams.
The situation has reportedly deteriorated following economic reform measures adopted in July. The changes practically ended rationing, making food that much harder to come by. The secretary-general of the Korean Welfare Foundation, Kim Hyoung-suk, said inflation in the North has skyrocketed since then, worsening the pain and suffering for children. Hundreds of thousands of people, including many children, are believed to be wandering the forests and coasts looking for food, Mr. Bourke of the World Food Program said.
Two-thirds of the North's one million children under age 5 are believed to be infected with respiratory diseases and 20 percent with intestinal ailments, said Medical Aid for Children of DPRK, a private organization here. These types of diseases have increased sharply since 1995 and their mortality rate is believed to be nearly 80 percent, according to at least one study.
Only about a third of North Korean infants younger than a year old received a full inoculation regime last year, the group said. Very few children brought into hospitals are given intravenous drips because little medicine is available.
By James Brooke, The New York Times, January 9, 2003
SEOUL, South Korea-The Bush administration is now willing to talk to North Korea about its nuclear bomb program. Next week, South Korea will send the North 11,800 tons of rice. But in interviews, three recent defectors from North Korea drew on their experiences to give their own proposals for how to deal with the unpredictable government of their impoverished homeland. The proposals included closing China's five border bridges and imposing an economic quarantine; undermining the leadership cult by smuggling in radios tuned to South Korean stations; and, in the words of one woman, by "bombing the North with ladies' handbags."
"My eyes were opened when, through a trader friend, I got hold of some South Korean clothing," recounted the woman, Lee Ji Young, 31. "I was surprised that they were very good clothes. I had to scissor off the labels, of course."
"Before, I had believed what they told us about the food donations from South Korea and the United States: `Because we are so strong militarily and strong ideologically, they send us all this tribute,' " Ms. Lee said, smiling at the memory.
Six months after escaping from North Korea, she sat in the office of a human rights group here, happily wearing a gray wool jacket, with a stylized American flag patch on the left arm and, on the back in large black script: New York Yankees.
The Kim family's Communist dynasty - founded by Kim Il Sung and continued by his son, Kim Jong Il - has ruled North Korea for the last half century by maintaining what may be the world's tightest monopoly on information about the outside world. That grip will loosen, defectors say, when North Koreans learn such basic facts as their rank as Northeast Asia's poorest nation. Per capita income in South Korea is 13 times the level in North Korea.
Military pressure, the defectors warned, will have little effect on one of the most militarized societies in the world. In the mid-1990's, during a famine, Ms. Lee recalled, "they had this slogan: `Without the candy bowls, you can still live; but without the bullets, you cannot survive.' "
But behind the fire-breathing rhetoric, "the North Korean Army is in shambles," she added. "The North Korean military elites are skimming from their budgets, cutting down the average ration for soldiers," said Ms. Lee, whose husband served in the military. "The soldiers have become very undisciplined. They steal piglets."
Economic sanctions, if applied by China, North Korea's largest trading partner, might force Kim Jong Il to mothball his nuclear bomb projects, said the defectors, who all escaped through China. But according to a report released last week by South Korea's National Statistical Office, only 14 percent of North Korea's limping economy depended on foreign trade in 2000, compared with 69 percent in South Korea.
"When China and Russia stop giving aid, North Korea is bound to halt its nuclear weapons program," said Ma Young Ae, 39, a former counterintelligence agent who now runs a restaurant here with her new South Korean husband.
"Most of the food in Pyongyang is from China," she said, referring to North Korea's capital. "The best way to stop the nuclear program is to stop the aid."
But Ms. Ma, who said she did undercover work in China before she defected in 1999, said that merely persuading China to close the five river bridges would not seal off North Korea. "A lot of private boats cross the river," she said. "Unless they put up an electrified barbed wire fence, they will keep doing it."
An economic quarantine was also recommended by Park Soon Duck, a former Korean Workers' Party secretary at an iron mine. "North Korea has to be sanctioned economically - that is the right way to bring down the regime," argued the energetic Ms. Park, who works as a janitor and writes for a defectors' journal in her spare time. "They can't survive on their own. The fundamentals of self-reliance are in shambles." The end of the Communist government would be the only guarantee that the nuclear weapons production would stop, she said. Ms. Park said she had no patience with young South Koreans who muse that a North Korean nuclear bomb is really a "Korean bomb."
"That's a 3-year-old kid talking, someone who doesn't know about politics," retorted Ms. Park, whose two sons - a seminarian and a street vendor - are in Seoul.
All three women agreed that the slower, but more effective way to undermine North Korea's system would be to break the information monopoly that the government holds over the nation's 22 million people.
"Churches in South Korea say it has to be the Bible, others say the culture has to go in," Ms. Ma said . "In my case, as a Christian, I believe the Bible will enlighten the people very quickly." But she conceded, "If you are caught with a Bible, you can be executed or sent to political prison camp." In South Korea, when winds are blowing north, Christian groups sometimes tie Korean-language Bibles to balloons and send them over the border. The South Korean government has largely ended such activities, believing that it undermines its policy of peaceful coexistence with North Korea.
Ms. Ma urged the Bush administration to flood North Korea with radios equipped with long-lasting batteries (solar cells? CB) that would allow North Koreans to listen to South Korean stations and to Radio Free Asia, which is supported by the United States. "Radios, tape cassettes, magazines - that's what I mean by cultural penetration," she said. In North Korea, "all the tape recorders and radio have to be registered," said Ms. Lee, who was a housewife until she left 18 months ago. "At registration, they cut off and solder the tuning dial to make sure you don't have a `free' radio. If you have a cassette player, sometimes the police come to your apartment to check your
cassette library."
To fight ideological contamination, North Korea's government for years taught citizens that goods from South Korea were laced with cyanide. "North Koreans are brainwashed to believe that everything from the South has poison on it," Ms. Lee continued, admitting that this legend might prevent people from picking up radios or handbags left scattered over the countryside. But that taboo is wearing down with the influx of foreign aid and goods from China.
As North Korea became an international charity case in the late 1990's, she said, foreign goods became increasingly common: medicines at her local hospital, children's clothes handed out at kindergartens, winter boots and blankets distributed at an old people's home. "We were able to see at the public distribution center bags of rice with the U.S.A. logo on it, that said in Korean, `Gift from the United States,' " she continued. But Ms. Lee, who is now studying at a cooking school in Seoul, said: "They warned us: `Just because you are getting their food, don't have any fantasies about the U.S.A. This aid will not last. They may turn into a wolf at anytime and bite us.' "
"I believed all that until I got to South Korea," she said.
Arirang TV, January 9, 2003
As North Korea faces a worsening food crisis, following cutbacks by the US and Japan, the European Union granted 9.5 million euros, or nearly US$10 million in humanitarian aid to the Stalinist regime, Wednesday.
In a statement the EU said the money will be used to buy and distribute 39,000 tons of cereals to help the most vulnerable survive through the winter, especially children and mothers of newborn babies.
The latest aid, to be disbursed through the United Nations' World Food Program, will raise the EU's emergency assistance to North Korea to almost 60 million euros since 1996.
By Staff Writer, Joong Ang Ilbo, January 9, 2003
The World Food Program repeated its calls Tuesday for food aid for North Korea. The UN agency said it needs 80,000 tons of grain immediately to avoid a new crisis. At a press briefing in Geneva, Christiane Berthiaume, the World Food Program spokeswoman, said the agency has received pledges of only 35,000 tons of food for the first quarter of this year, less than one-third of the food it needs to keep starvation at bay. Unless new aid is provided, the agency said, it would have to cut back its programs for the second time since September. The World Food Program said it had failed to attract its food aid quota for the North last year for the first time since it began working in the North in 1995. The agency has also recently issued urgent appeal for help in Africa, where it says drought and crop failures have put 38 million persons at risk of starvation.
By Kang Chol-Hwan, Chosun llbo, January 8, 2003
With living conditions seriously deteriorating in North Korea due to repetitive poor harvests and suspended overseas food aid, caused by tension over its nuclear development program, North Korea is known to have drastically stiffened penalties on those who attempt to flee from the country in an attempt to thwart defections.
Those who migrated to China merely for economic reasons and those escapees who did not attempt to seek asylum in the South used to be punished with hard labor for three to six months. They are now confined in prisons or concentration camps from the moment of their arrest, according to a North Korean source.
"Until a short time ago, most people who temporarily fled to China merely to get food were freed after three- to six-months hard labor," said a North Korean who managed to flee to China on a second occasion this year, "But now such people have their hair cut and are sent to prisons. And those who contacted Christian missionaries and attempted to go to the South in China are sent to places from which they cannot ever return to society (concentration camps)."
At the same time, a survey of the missing is said to be underway in the North. "Such a survey is conducted because quite a few of those listed as missing when the food crisis peaked have been found to be living in China or South Korea, or engaged in smuggling their families out of the country," said a Korean-Chinese who arranges reunions between separated North and South Korean family members. In the border area, where many people are reported missing, the authorities are evacuating the remaining families to areas far away from the border in an effort to block them from escaping into China, added the source. They are also said to tell the people: "Even if you escape to
China, you are bound to be caught and sent back home."
A Korean-Chinese official who had served with the police said that North Korean escapees sent back home after having been caught in China, while attempting to go to the South, are branded as political criminals on the basis of the police records accompanying them. The Chinese police used not to hand their records over to the North on deported North Korean escapees. With the practice changed, Chinese police records on those North Koreans who were caught while attempting to sneak into foreign mission compounds in China or third countries are delivered to North Korean authorities without fail, added the official.
By Howard W. French, New York Times, November 19, 2002
SEOUL. The last time Kim Tae Ok saw her son, he was happily heading off with his best friend for a weekend of camping on an island off the southwestern coast famous for its camellia forests and exotic rock formations. The two friends, both 18 at the time, vanished, never to be seen again in South Korea. Although a quarter century has already passed, Ms. Kim, the 70-year-old mother, now a widower, still fights back tears whenever she recalls her son's hurried farewell.
For years, the disappearances, in 1977, remained a puzzle with no clues. South Korean military intelligence officers would occasionally visit the young men's families and sternly urge them to report any sightings of their sons, but they refused to answer any questions. Then, 20 years later, a television network reported that the two young men had been kidnapped by North Korean agents, along with scores of other people around the same time. Later, a North Korean spy whom she visited in prison here told Ms. Kim that her son had been his teacher at a secret school in North Korea for infiltrators and saboteurs. But it was not until the last few weeks, when North Korea
surprised the world with the admission that it had kidnapped 13 Japanese, that Ms. Kim has finally begun to feel a measure of certainty about the mystery surrounding her son's fate.
The five survivors from the Japanese group, who were also captured in the late 1970's, are now visiting their homeland for the first time since their disappearance, and their future has become the focus of high-level negotiations between Japan and North Korea. Instead of providing some relief, however, the news from Japan has enraged Ms. Kim and the relatives of nearly 500 South Koreans who went missing over the last quarter century, and are believed to be held against their will in North Korea. Indeed, some believe that the true number runs into the thousands. Eager to defuse tensions with its heavily armed neighbor, the South Korean government, unlike Japan, has never
made a public issue of the kidnappings, and despite hundreds of millions of dollars in aid provided to North Korea in recent years, has never demanded their return.
"This matter should be on the front-burner between the two governments, but North Korea just continues to deny the existence of cases like these, and our government refuses to take it up," Ms. Kim said. "There are so many secrets involved that I am sure that North Korea will not let my son return home, but couldn't they at least arrange a place for me to see him again before I die?" While Ms. Kim spoke in a downtown coffee shop, Choi Jun Hwa, the 73-year-old father of her son's best friend, looked on, bowing his head to conceal his mournful face behind the bill of a baseball cap. "My wife is hospitalized with heart disease and is very ill," he said. "Before she passes
away, I would like her to see her son again. It is my biggest wish."
In recent weeks, two associations of relatives of missing persons have stepped up a campaign to force the South Korean government to take up the issue more forcefully, staging demonstrations outside the Unification Ministry, which handles relations with North Korea, and writing letters to President Kim Dae Jung. With Mr. Kim stepping down as president in March, the unresolved fate of the kidnapped South Koreans is a potentially embarrassing blemish to the legacy of his policy of reconciliation with North Korea, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000. South Korean officials deny that they have ignored the missing persons issue, but say that in dealing with
North Korea they must grapple with a host of complex issues, from the military face-off across the world's most heavily armed border to the separation of thousands of families since the Korean War.
"We understand the families' concerns, but there are many issues to deal with and we must focus first on areas where we can cooperate," said a Unification Ministry official. "This is a very difficult matter to address with the North Koreans, who say they went there voluntarily." Rather than placate, explanations like these tend to infuriate relatives of missing people, who, like other critics of the president's policies toward North Korea, say the countries' relationship has become badly unbalanced, all give and no take.
Lee Seok Hwan, a 35-year-old businessman, is familiar with North Korea's explanations for why hundreds of South Koreans are living in North Korea. His older brother, Lee Jae Hwan, who would be 40 today, disappeared during a trip to Austria in 1987, after earning a degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Just weeks later, his family received a call from the National Security Agency in the United States telling him that he had been kidnapped and taken to North Korea.Ever since, Mr. Lee's family has petitioned the United Nations Security Council, the president of M.I.T. and the International Society of the Red Cross to do something about his brother's
disappearance.
The Red Cross told him that it could act only if South Korea made an official request, Lee Seok Hwan said. But his government, he said, has been silent about his brother's fate. "They have always taken a lukewarm attitude toward the matter," Mr. Lee said. "The Unification Ministry has never lifted a finger." Frantic for word of their missing relative, the family interviewed defectors from North Korea in China, hoping for a sighting, but heard nothing more than rumors. Then in 1999, the National Security Agency said it had learned that their relative was being held in a detention center for political criminals in North Korea.
The South Korean intelligence service told the Lee family that North Korea claimed in statements broadcast over loudspeakers across the demilitarized zone that their missing relative was a defector. Later, without saying how it knew, South Korea's intelligence service reported that Mr. Lee was dead. "North Korea claims that he went there on his own, but that is impossible to believe," said Mr. Lee. "If I could speak to the North, I would say that all of your crimes are unforgettable, but not unforgivable. Give me back by brother, and if he has died, just tell me where and when."
By Staff Reporter, JoonAng Ilbo, November 19, 2002
All is not well for many North Korean defectors who managed to find new lives in South Korea, according to the findings of psychiatrist team at Yonsei University's Severance Hospital. "Most of the newly settled people feel their quality of life has improved dramatically compared to back home but they are suffering sense of deprivation when they compare themselves to the society around them," the psychiatrist team led by professor Min Seong-gil said Tuesday, after conducting various psychological tests on 43 North Korean defectors in Seoul.
The defectors said things like convenient transportation, medical service, freedom of religion and the opportunity to rise in social status were some of the things that make their escape from the North worthwhile. But when asked if they're satisfied with their own economic power, most answered they felt somewhat bitter and deprived compared to average South Koreans. Their satisfaction with their jobs, personal relationships, sleep and leisure activities have decreased since settling in the South.
Most of the defectors said single, healthy men fare best in the South, when compared to married couples or those with health problems. "They're not satisfied financially because they're unfamiliar with the capitalist way of division," professor Min said. He advised that it is important for South Korean society to ease their inner conflict and assist them in financial and medical ways. Then there's defectors' associations in the South that try to advise the newcomers from the neighboring communist regime to view things in new respect and not to hope too much.
"Consider your new life in the South as a second escapade and give it your best shot. Even if this society is not what you've imagined don't get angry or be disappointed and make efforts to adapt," those are the exact words Woo Yoon-geun chairman of the sponsoring association of North Korean defectors would like to tell every defector. He and his colleagues recently published a book that contained advice and encouraging words from 22 renowned social celebrities in the nation and life stories of eight North Korean defectors who successfully made new lives in the South.
The book encourages the defectors to make friends with more South Koreans instead of just hanging out with fellow defectors, get over the sense of privilege that you're a defector and adopt keen eyes to perceive reality in the responsible democratic society, choose an occupation that suits you instead of aspiring for something beyond reach, think positive and be patient. "Heaven helps those who help themselves," said Kim Min-ha vice chairman of the advisory on Democratic Peaceful Unification using one of Korea's favorite old phrase. "Even if one faces discrimination from other people never forget there are still others who wish to be help to defectors and remain hopeful
for the future."
"The defectors need to interact with South Koreans as frequently as possible. Also it is twice the risk for North Koreans who try to jump into starting own business dreaming of get-rich-quick scheme. In most case it should be one step at a time choosing an occupation similar to what one did at home," said Kwon Jong-dal head of Korea Freedom League.
Lee Gi-young professor of Pusan National University stressed to be thrifty in the very beginning. "Always be frugal in the beginning. Those friends who advise you to save money is the most trustworthy person. Keep yourself on par with an example of self-made figures." "It would be outrageous to complain the state is not funding you or your families enough while failing to work harder yourself. In South Korea, there are others worse off than you. Those who drop out of hard-earned work places introduced by the government or demand high-paying jobs regardless of one's capability are totally absurd," warned Yoo dong-ryol, a senior official of an association for patriots and
veterans.
For example, some defectors advised that it is inappropriate for defectors to try to push their children to attend top-notch universities in the South. They say they must realize that children who were not born here are already behind and will have a tough time catching up in the highly competitive world of South Korean education. A well known defector, Park Soo-hyun, who became the first North Korean to pass the South's rigorous Oriental medicine licensing exam, asked North Koreans to be more patient, although it is understandable to want to return back home after failing in the South. They must also restrain themselves from using violence in the work place, he said.
Lee Young-hoon, another successful North Korean defector working in trade company said to just follow common sense -- be kind, stay away from drugs, alcohol and disorderly sexual affairs easily found in the South and try to choose a South Korean as a spouse. He hinted that it would be beneficial to be on good terms with the police, too.
By Mike Jendrzejczyk, International Herald Tribune, November 19, 2002
WASHINGTON-The head of the United Nations food program was in Beijing last week, pleading for China's help to prevent more death and famine in North Korea. Facing a funding deficit, the world body has suspended humanitarian assistance to 3 million North Koreans in the western part of the country. More aid cuts may come. Emergency shipments of Chinese grain could ease the crisis. But to stabilize the situation on its border, China must also address the rights of thousands of North Koreans who have fled into China. In a new report to be released on Tuesday, Human Rights Watch has documented the refugee crisis and its human toll. A former detainee in a North Korean logging
camp described how prisoners survived, catching rats using shoes as traps, then roasting and eating them secretly.
The embarrassing rush of North Koreans into diplomatic compounds in China beginning last March provoked the Chinese authorities to tighten border security, to search for North Koreans in hiding and to go after those suspected of helping them. Hiding in villages among Chinese citizens of Korean descent, North Korean asylum seekers are victimized twice. Once they make it into China, they are highly vulnerable to abuse, extortion and exploitation. Desperate women sell sexual services through prostitution or arranged marriage. Or they are sold or abducted into sexual slavery. Some are beaten by violent Chinese husbands after seeking shelter with church groups who tell them
marriage is the only way to avoid detection. At any moment, North Koreans risk being picked up by Chinese authorities and returned to North Korea under the terms of a secret 1986 agreement between Beijing and Pyongyang. Yet under the UN Refugee Convention, to which it is a party, China is obligated not to push back asylum seekers in danger of persecution. In North Korea, anyone leaving the country without authorization is subject to three years in a labor camp, or even the death penalty.
A comprehensive strategy is needed to address the human rights disaster in North Korea and the impact on neighboring countries. North Koreans are entitled to leave their homeland under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Pyongyang must immediately cease punishing those who flee and also stop persecuting their family members. China should halt the forcible return of North Koreans, and begin a high-level dialogue with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to establish a screening mechanism for asylum seekers. Countries that hold bilateral talks with China including the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom and Australia should raise this issue with Beijing. As an
interim step, Beijing should be urged to grant all North Koreans an indefinite humanitarian status and allow aid groups to operate in border areas without intimidation or arrest. Addressing the refugee crisis must be part of a broader strategy to bring North Korea out of its isolation. Giving humanitarian aid is one answer. Exposing North Korea's human rights violations, now largely hidden, should also be a priority.
By Donald Macintyre,TIME ASIA,November 4, 2002/ Vol. 160 No. 17
* With reporting by Kim Yeoshin/Seoul and Kim Yooseung/Yanji
North Korea is a monolithic black box to the rest of the world, but stress cracks can be seen in the aspiring nuclear power The teenager looks at least three years younger than his 17 years. His eyes dart around or lock on his shoe tops when he talks. But when you take him to a neighborhood restaurant and put a steaming plate of dumplings in front of him, he suddenly perks up and starts to look you in the eye. Walking for a day from his village in North Korea, he crossed the Tumen River into China in early October, hoping to earn some money to buy food for his parents. He doesn't want you to use his name or take his picture. If a copy of this magazine were to fall into the hands of North Korean authorities, "they'll really beat me up," he says. Jae Young — a pseudonym he agrees to — has heard about the economic reforms unveiled by his country's leaders in July. But all that's happened in his village, Jae Young says, is that the price of grain has gone up, leaving his family hungrier than before. He falls silent at the mention of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, the man all North Koreans are taught to revere as a demigod. Jae Young has nothing to say on that topic except "There is nothing to eat."
Without knowing it, the stunted, starving young man speaks for a nation that is beginning to show the stress cracks of a bankrupt leadership. On Oct. 4, North Korea acknowledged that it was secretly trying to build nuclear weapons. The shocking admission, to senior U.S. diplomat James Kelly, was not made as a threat or a taunt. It was as much as anything else the distressed cry of a beleaguered nation running out of options. In fact, North Korea's nuclear confessions were among a stream of pronouncements issued from Pyongyang over the past few months, each one more surprising than the last. The country is scrambling to prop up its collapsed command economy with a dose of capitalism. The centerpiece of the reform efforts—a Chinese-style special economic zone in the northwestern town of Sinuiju—will probably never get off the ground, according to businessmen across the river in the Chinese city of Dandong. For one thing, the Chinese entrepreneur appointed to run it has been arrested by the mainland for unspecified wrongdoings. For another, the nuclear disclosure has put North Korea in U.S. President George W. Bush's gunsight. Who would invest there now?
To some observers, the reform efforts, however botched, are an indication that North Korea is opening up. Others see the moves as the first visible spasms of a dying regime. It's difficult to know what goes on inside this black box of a nation, where people can be dragged off to prison for making the slightest criticism of the Dear Leader. But if you talk to enough people—defectors in South Korea, border jumpers in China and aid workers—it's possible to catch a glimpse of life on the inside. And there are signs, such as rumors of failed coups, that Kim's position is not secure. An aid worker who has worked in Pyongyang for several years says the country reminds him of East Berlin just before the fall of the Wall. There are beggars in the streets and people are dying unnecessarily for lack of medicine, he says, while the regime tinkers with reforms that have come far too late. Average citizens still look cowed, but lower-level officials show increasing frustration with Pyongyang. "It looks explosive," he says. "The cracks in the system are getting bigger."
Instead of improving things, reforms have made life more harsh, driving up food prices while eroding spending power. The regime's perennial failure to feed its people is undermining Kim's authority. Discontent has been growing steadily for years, and government propaganda is losing its ability to allay dissatisfaction. Information is seeping into the country through capillaries censors can't plug: aid workers and returning North Koreans are entering the North with stories of China's boomtowns and even bootleg Hollywood movies. Titanic was a big hit in Pyongyang. Kim's formidable security apparatus still ruthlessly sets upon anyone foolhardy enough to complain in public. But even at the top of the leadership chain, "there is growing instability because the Dear Leader has fewer goodies to pass around to keep the élite happy," says Choi Jin Wook, a North Korea expert at the Korea Institute for National Reunification in Seoul. "The regime is at a very critical point. There is a good chance we could see a coup attempt from within the leadership."
Other North Korea watchers say not enough is known of the workings of the ultrasecretive North Korean military to suggest that Kim might be toppled. But the possibility that the regime is unraveling was likely to have been a consideration when the top leaders from South Korea, Japan and the U.S. met to discuss the nuclear issue on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Mexico last weekend. Washington made it clear that Pyongyang must abandon its nuclear arms program, or face the consequences. But Bush kept the rhetoric low-key, stressing he would use tough diplomacy and not cruise missiles to pressure Pyongyang. North Korea, for its part, demanded on Friday a "nonaggression" pact with the U.S. as a prerequisite to negotiations. Only then would it consider scrapping its nuke development.
Pyongyang's eagerness to strike a deal smacks of even more desperation: it badly needs aid from Japan and South Korea to finance its reform efforts, which turn Stalinist orthodoxy on its ear. Pyongyang said it would raise everybody's salaries and start charging more for food and other commodities. Factories would have to sink or swim on their own. North Korean officials called it "price adjustment measures." But it looked like Kim had finally decided to jettison his failed command-economy model, and introduce market reforms like neighbor China did 20 years ago. Sweeping reform is wrenching even in a robust, modern economy. In an already bereft system headed by cadres with only the barest idea of how a market economy works, it is like jumping on a bus without knowing its destination. "The bus has left the station," says Marcus Noland, an expert on the North Korean economy at the Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C. And the North's leaders "don't know if they can keep it on the road or if they'll drive it into the ditch."
The ride was already too bumpy for Choi (a pseudonym), who abandoned North Korea for China a month ago. She wasn't starving, yet. But she was tired of "always having to worry about where the next meal was coming from." With carefully stenciled eyebrows, red lipstick and a red jacket, she is petite and pretty but nervous as she tells her story to a Westerner—the first she has ever met. Speaking near the safe house where she is hiding from Chinese police and North Korean agents, she says the government increased salaries in her hometown north of Pyongyang. After that, however, nobody was paid except the teachers, and they have only been paid once since the raises were announced in July. Yet prices went up sharply. The government tried to shut down the town's black market but traders and customers found places to deal in secret. The authorities later allowed trading in rice but tried to cap the price at 50 won (33¢) a kilo, posting guards to check transactions. When traders refused to sell at that price, the authorities relented. Now the black market is open again but rice is 86¢ and rising. "Things have got worse," says Choi. "This was a reform for the rich."
The rich live in Pyongyang, an oasis of relative luxury where only Party members and the most loyal citizens have the right to reside. Checkpoints keep the masses out of this stately city of grandiose monuments, soaring apartment blocks and broad, leafy avenues. Much of the traffic consists of army vehicles and chauffeur-driven Mercedes, a perk for top party officials. The city's 2 million residents get the best food, and a regular flow of trucks hauls in goods from China—electric generators, blankets and boxes full of everything from bananas and oranges to wine and cigarettes. While meat and even white rice are rare for millions of North Koreans, restaurants and outdoor eateries in the capital offer grilled beef, fresh fruit and other treats to anybody with enough U.S. dollars to pay. The supply of electricity is unreliable, but it's far better than in places like Sinuiju, which are unlit at night.
Pyongyang isn't quite a worker's paradise, but for people like Li (a pseudonym), life there can be quite pleasant. Fashionably dressed and carefully coiffed, she is the kind of hip twenty something single you might see on the streets of Seoul. She's even had her eyelids tucked Western-style, a popular form of cosmetic surgery in the capital. She uses eye shadow from South Korea, watches Western and South Korean movies on her VCD player and enjoys dining out, although she complains that the restaurants charge expensive prices in dollars these days. Speaking with a foreigner over dinner in China where she spends part of her time, she complains constantly about the quality of the food even as she's wolfing it down. Asked if she knows how people live in the North's provinces, she says she avoids leaving Pyongyang when in her home country. "I hate spending money where it is so boring," says Li. "There is no culture there. They eat and sleep. They live like pigs."
But Li's friend, who is wearing a vinyl windbreaker—a trendy item in Pyongyang right now—says many citizens, even those living in the capital, face hardship. Top Party and military officials still get government handouts of meat and eggs and other rations. Most people, however, stopped receiving these perks 20 years ago, she says. The average worker's wages went up from 66¢ to $11 a month recently, but now everything from utilities to kindergarten fees is no longer free. Prices for food and household goods are 30 times higher than before the reforms. "People feel nervous and off-balance," she says. "Life is more difficult."
North Korea has always been a class-conscious society. In the late 1960s, the government categorized all individuals by their songbun (background) and graded them according to their political reliability, says Helen-Louise Hunter, a former North Korea analyst for the cia. About a third of the population were considered loyal communists—with a little work they could land plum jobs reserved for the élite. Another third or so were considered fairly reliable and could move up in society with a little luck. The bottom third—the deposed, pre-revolution privileged class and their descendants—were barred from university and the army, and were usually assigned to collective farms or factories. Party apparatchiks even had an informal terminology for their communist-style apartheid. The die-hard believers were "tomatoes": red to the core. Those in the broad middle class were "apples": red on the outside but in need of a little ideological buffing. People in the pariah class were called "grapes": no red in them at all.
While color coding was abandoned in the 1980s, songbun still rules. When a newborn is registered, files on his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents are attached to his record, according to a North Korean doctor now living in Seoul. But there are fewer tomatoes and a lot more apples and grapes these days, say North Korea watchers and defectors in Seoul with contacts in the North. Kim has a different kind of family background problem. He comes from the right one, of course. But he has never commanded as much respect as his father, Kim II Sung, did. The Great Leader fought the Japanese during the colonial period, founded North Korea with Soviet help, and is still the official President even though he died in 1994. His son merely inherited the top position. He consolidated his hold on power by currying favor with the military and promoting scores of officers loyal to him.
But to run a dictatorship you need to be able to keep your people ignorant—blissfully so. These days, it isn't just the élite in Pyongyang that has access to the outside world. Chinese Koreans are bringing in cell phones and leaving them with North Korean relatives living near enough to China to piggyback their calls on the mainland cellular network. North Koreans are watching South Korean TV in China, then going back into the country and spreading the word about life on the outside. The regime's propaganda machine used to claim that South Koreans were beggars living under the oppressive heel of capitalists and American imperialists. These days, North Koreans know South Koreans and Chinese are rich. Many dream of escaping to those countries, says Yu Jong San, a defector who arrived in Seoul earlier this year. "Seventy percent of North Koreans know what is going on outside (their) country. They aren't brainwashed robots anymore."
Defector Choi says even an average person can buy goods smuggled in from the South and Japan, at least if they act before merchandise sells out. She doesn't have a VCD player, but she watches banned Western movies at the house of a family friend who is among the 1 in 70 households with such equipment. She can't understand the English dialogue, but a university student is usually around to translate. Choi admits to being moved by what she sees. "All human beings feel the same way," she says. "When we see people enjoying a high standard of living, of course we want to live like them too."
Most people are too focused on whether they can afford their next meal to worry much about life on the outside. Inside the country, faith in the Dear Leader is eroding. Traveling on business inside North Korea earlier this year, a Chinese human rights activist stayed with the family of a North Korean she had met in China. She says they were destitute, the children had no shoes and were clothed in rags. The family had no blankets and the concrete floor of the building they occupied had no mats—the family had sold everything to buy food. The activist bought them two kilos of rice and two pairs of shoes. The family told her they didn't believe the Party line that North Koreans are doing well. "What is the point of just saying we are well-off," they said, "when people are so hungry. We don't need Kim Jong Il."
None of this means revolt is imminent. Any such uprising would most likely be crushed, says Lim Young Sun, head of research at the Commission to Help North Korean Refugees, a private aid group based in Seoul. Protests against the regime are dealt with severely. A pervasive security apparatus is supplemented with informants in every town and village. North Koreans know that troublemakers disappear into the gulag, usually with their families. An example of one testament to the dangers of speaking out: an estimated 200,000 political prisoners languish in the country's prisons, according to human-rights experts. Despite the extreme risks, however, tentative public protests do occur. A former state security agent in northeastern Hamgyong province before he defected in 1998 says that every six months or so his office would find antigovernment leaflets left on the streets. Antigovernment graffiti and posters appear periodically.
Change would have to come from the élite, who cling to Kim Jong Il for their own survival. There has been discontent in the military for years according to Lim. He was a young army officer in the early 1990s when he fell in with an underground group of 30 to 40 military men and Party members opposed to Kim Jong Il. He says the group's activities consisted mainly of getting drunk and shouting brave epithets such as "Let's kill Kim Jong Il." But in 1991, the Communist Party began talking about starting a war against South Korea and the U.S. The underground group, who called themselves "The Supreme Council of National Salvation," decided to distribute antigovernment leaflets on the day when they believed Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il were going to visit their ancestors' graves, a key date in the Korean calendar.
They came into possession of a Chinese typewriter. But they learned from a friend in a printer's shop that every machine had slightly different type so that it could be identified by government security agents. The group innovated, cutting characters out of rubber bicycle-tire inner tubes to make a primitive typesetting device. Then they mimeographed hundreds of leaflets reading: "The Supreme Council of National Salvation demands the execution of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. We appeal to soldiers of the People's Army and the people to join our struggle." On Sept. 23, Lim went to Pyongyang station and boarded the train for Musan near the Chinese border. He tossed leaflets out of the window. When the train stopped in one town, he bribed a truck driver to ferry him around while he threw leaflets into the street.
That quixotic uprising caused a sensation in the upper levels of the regime, according to Lim. But most of the conspirators were arrested. (Lim managed to escape to China and, later, to a sanctuary in South Korea.) Pyongyang also crushed two other known coup attempts against Kim Jong Il in the 1990s, according to a former North Korean border guard whose father was a senior military official. North Korea watchers say rebellion—whether it is a mass revolt or a surgical strike from inside the Party or military—can only occur if people are prepared to die for it. They say it is impossible to predict when or if North Koreans will achieve the mix of desperation and bravery necessary for combustion, the same fusion that brought down other dysfunctional communist regimes more than a decade ago.
But one cannot talk to Jae Young, the 17-year-old border jumper, without wondering whether he is the explosive type. In the dumpling shop, he is discussing his village again. He remembers what it was like during the famine in 1996. He talks about the three executions he has witnessed. Villagers caught stealing corn were led up into the mountains and given a last meal of white rice and booze—all they could eat and drink. Then the soldiers shot them. Still, Jae Young won't stay in China. He misses his parents and he's frightened that border guards will murder them if they, too, try to cross the river. For now, his dream is to get enough money to take his parents to the black market. "I'll buy them some corn and corn soup so we won't be hungry," he says. Not white rice, he adds—that is too expensive. Maybe one day, when the Dear Leader's regime has finally become a distant, painful memory, he'll be able to dream bigger than of a bowl of soup.