What is New about Defectors?

N.KOREAN DEFECTOR SAYS DISABLED NEWBORNS ARE KILLED

Reuters reported that the DPRK has no people with physical disabilities because they are killed almost as soon as they are born, a physician who defected from the state said on Wednesday. Ri Kwang-chol, who fled to the ROK last year, told a forum of rights activists that the practice of killing newborns was widespread but denied he himself took part in it. "There are no people with physical defects in North Korea," Ri told members of the New Right Union, which groups local activists and DPRK refugees. The practice is encouraged by the state, Ri said, as a way of purifying the masses and eliminating people who might be considered "different". ("N.KOREAN DEFECTOR SAYS DISABLED NEWBORNS ARE KILLED", 2006-03-22)

NUMBER OF DPRK REFUGEE-DEFECTORS TO ROK DECREASES

by Seo Dong-shin, Korea Times, 21 September 2005

The number of North Koreans defecting to the South reached 567 in the first half of this year, falling by a quarter from 760 over the same period last year, according to the Unification Ministry Wednesday. Lawmakers demanded reasons for the reduction, but a ministry official told The Korea Times the ministry could not provide any specific factors for it as there are too many variables. Media reports have speculated on the improving food situation in the impoverished North and tightened border controls as possible reasons.

With no major turnaround expected, the number of North Korean defectors this year is likely to mark the first fall since 1998, when the figure stood at 133. The number saw a steady increase until 2002, when it almost doubled from 583 in 2001 to 1,139. After 1,281 in 2003, the number reached 1,894 last year mainly due to a mass defection via a third country in Southeast Asia. The Seoul government airlifted 468 North Koreans at that time. But it was in July and had no influence over the figure during the first half of the year.

The report also showed that a large number of North Korean defectors in the South, who received settlement allowances, were given manufacturing jobs. Of 321 people who got work from January to July this year, for example, 173, or 53.8 percent entered the manufacturing industry. Those who are engaged in the health and hygiene industry followed with 23.7 percent, or 76.

During the recent five years, violence took up a majority of crimes committed by North Korean defectors in the South. Out of 426 cases of crimes committed by North Korean defectors over the period, 343 were linked to violence. There were 28 cases of injury, 24 of robbery, 19 of fraud, seven of rape and five of homicide. Among them, 27 were imprisoned, 67 were fined and 120 suspended of indictment. As for settlement terms, 295 were living in their own home as of June 2005. A majority of 5,656 were living in rented flats.

DPRK ASYLUM SEEKERS FAVOUR UK MOST

by Seo Dong-shin, Korea Times, 15 March 2006

Britain has emerged as the country that received the highest number of asylum seeking applications from North Koreans in 2004, beating Germany, which has topped the list since 1999. The Washington-based Radio Free Asia (RFA), quoting data it obtained from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), reported that 27 North Koreans lodged applications for asylum in the United Kingdom in 2004, an increase from 15 in the previous year.

North Korean refugees seeking asylum in Germany dwindled to 24 in 2003 and 25 in 2004, from more than 80 to 90 during the peak period between 2000 and 2002, according to the list of new asylum applications submitted by North Korean refugees in selected industrialized countries between 1995 and 2004. The list is posted on the Web site of RFA.

Switzerland and the Netherlands were also favored, with the number of North Koreans seeking refugee status there, marking 10 and eight each in 2004. The RFA reported last month that a total of 700 asylum seekers with North Korean nationality have filed applications for refugee status in seven West European countries such as Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium and Norway.

Investigations revealed that a total of 320 North Koreans were living in five West European countries, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom as of 2004, it said. Other than the West European countries listed above, countries such as Australia, Austria, Canada, France and Hungary have also been receiving applications, according to UNHCR data based on government sources. Last year alone, France received 16 applications, Austria four, Canada four and Australia two, Jennifer Pagonis, an UNHCR spokesperson, was quoted as saying by RFA.

While UNHCR collects statistics from the governments of some 150 countries at year-end, some of the key countries do not turn in their records. That means there is a possibility of even more North Koreans seeking refugee status, the report said.

DPR KOREAN DANCER SEEKS ASYLUM IN AMERICA

by Daniela Gerson, New York Sun, 15 March 2006

When starvation hit North Korea, Young Ae Ma watched countrymen who stole corn from fields being shot to death in public executions. On dozens of other occasions she witnessed official killings, including of friends and colleagues, for what seemed to be no reason at all. A diminutive dancer with striking presence, Ms. Ma worked as a spy for Pyongyang, a job she had no choice but to take. In 1999, during an intelligence gathering expedition to China, she received word that she would be imprisoned or killed if she returned because she had had contact with a businessman who fell out of favor with the regime. Ms. Ma never went back to North Korea. Her son thought she was dead.

She sought refuge in South Korea, entering by plane with a fake Chinese passport. After six months of resettlement education, including lessons in capitalism and South Korean customs, she received a permanent residency card. In Seoul, she settled into a new life, performing with a dance troupe of defectors, remarrying a fellow North Korean and eventually hiring a smuggler to kidnap her son so he could join her in Seoul.

Despite her relative prosperity, Ms. Ma was not satisfied. Seoul, she complained, in its eagerness to improve its relations with its northern neighbor, stifled her desire to speak out against the regime of Kim Jong II. "They told us not to talk about North Korean civil rights," Ms. Ma, now 39, said in Korean through a translator. She said she was desperate to let the world know "North Korean human rights is not secure. There is no freedom. The North Korean government contains them because they don't want them to not have exposure to the outside world."

In early 2004, Ms. Ma and her husband traveled to America with a performing arts group of North Korean defectors and never used their return tickets. Now, from her tiny home in northern New Jersey's Korea Town, Ms. Ma has launched a public campaign to pressure the American government into granting political asylum to her and her family. In doing so, she is providing a rare glimpse into the immigration challenges facing many North Korean defectors who are in the New York area illegally and avoiding the attention of authorities.

It's an uphill battle. While Washington is eager to provide refuge to North Koreans, particularly outspoken women like Ms. Ma who can shed light on one of the world's most secretive and feared countries, the likelihood of legal admittance is slim. No North Korean was granted refugee status last year, and just two Koreans of the 31 in removal proceedings who petitioned last year were granted political asylum.

A prime barrier keeping North Korean defectors out of America is that many, like Ms. Ma, first have found refuge in South Korea. According to international law, if a refugee has been firmly resettled, they are no longer eligible to receive refugee status unless they can prove they are being persecuted. No North Korean refugees were admitted to America last year, according to the Department of State, because none applied. Nor did any political asylum applicants who, as is Ms. Ma's case, were legally in the country.

A small, clandestine community of North Korean defectors appears to be growing in the New York area. Numbering roughly two dozen, most are illegal immigrants. Some entered America on tourist visas; most paid smugglers to bring them to New York via Canada or Mexico. A reporter for the Korea Times' Queens bureau who has covered Ms. Ma's case closely, Yongil Shin, said he started discovering North Korean defectors settling in New York about two years ago. Since then, he's interviewed about 20 in the New York area.

The Reverend Young Son, who said he is working with about a dozen North Koreans in the New York area and knows of at least a dozen more, said problems with the government is a main reason for coming to America. "Mostly they believe the South Korean government activity and government policy is anti-America, pro-North Korea," he said, adding, "Also, they heard the USA has more freedom and is richer than South Korea."

A spokesman for the South Korean consulate in New York, Suk Woo Kang, denied any mistreatment of North Korean refugees, saying they are treated "like any South Korean" and are granted complete freedom. Indeed, the vast majority of North Koreans, when looking for refuge, choose South Korea. Not only is it conveniently located, there are more opportunities afforded to them than in America, such as financial and employment assistance, and they are already fluent in the language.

Regardless, Ms. Ma's teenage son attempted to enter America illegally from South Korea. He was apprehended while trying to join her after sneaking across the border with Mexico. He now faces the threat of deportation to South Korea. It was the latest in a series of harrowing trials for her son, now a New Jersey public school freshman with spiky hair dyed a light orange that never would have been allowed in Pyongyang.

Four years ago, a smuggler snatched him off the street. The trip to China took 15 days, traveling by train, car, and foot to reach a flooded river marking the border. Then the smuggler rented a fishing boat to get them across. In China, Ms. Ma's son joined the estimated 10,000 to 500,000 North Koreans living in hiding in a country where the government violates international law by not providing protection and often repatriates them to potential death or torture. He was lucky: His mother provided him a plane ticket out.

Just as he was becoming accustomed to life as a North Korean refugee in Seoul, he suffered another readjustment. His mother left for America and did not come back. He tried to follow, but was denied a tourist visa. A few months later, Ms. Ma arranged for a Christian missionary to take him to Canada. When he arrived, he was told he was too young to immigrate without family and was sent back.

Next, he bought a ticket to Mexico City. When he arrived at the airport, not speaking Spanish, he just told a cab driver, "hotel." By good fortune, he said, there were some Koreans there who charged him $2,300 to fly to the border and then smuggled him across with two Mexican men. Luck was not with him when he crossed: He was detained at Southwest Key, a center for unaccompanied minors caught illegally entering the country and ordered removed in August 2005. His lawyer is appealing that decision with the federal Board of Immigration Appeals.

For now, dressed in slouching military pants, he could pass for any American teenager. While his mother makes ginger tea and shares her fears that the South Korean government would persecute her if she returned, he holes himself up in his room, surfing the Internet, one of many portals to the outside world he never knew existed while he was in North Korea.

A TALE OF TWO KOREAN BROTHERS

The International Herald Tribune, March 10, 2006

Korean brothers as different as North and South

One brother was a Communist spy from North Korea who served 27 years in a South Korean prison. At night, thugs would come to his solitary cell, barely larger than a coffin, and drag him to a dungeon under the watch tower. Muffling his cries of torture, they would beat him night after night until he signed a letter renouncing his political beliefs.

The other brother was a refugee from communism. After spending 10 years in prison and a labor camp in China, he led his family of four on a five-year odyssey through Southeast Asian jungles. When he reached his destination in 1994, South Korean newspapers and television networks hailed his as a "journey for freedom."

Today, the two brothers are free and live within two hours of each other. But they have yet to reunite. Their story is emblematic of the ideological enmity that still divides the Korean Peninsula, and a measure of how difficult it remains for the two Koreas to reconcile a past marked by war and mutual scheming.

"I have a brother here I cannot call a brother," said Moon Sang Bong, 80, the former spy who has rejected his younger brother's repeated appeals for reunion.

During an interview, the elder Moon at first did not acknowledge he had a younger brother in Seoul. When asked about Moon Choong Il by name, he showed little emotion. "He risked his life to come here," Moon Sang Bong said, "and I oppose the system here to the end."

"What am I supposed to do even if we meet - pat him on the back for making such a difficult trip to the South? Some people have tried to arrange a reunion, but I told them to leave me alone. I've got nothing to say to him or about him."

Moon Sang Bong was freed from prison in 1987, when human rights groups, encouraged by the easing of authoritarian rule in the country, began speaking out for old, tortured spies.

He is a waxen, feeble shadow of a fierce Communist spy. Nowadays, he can barely sit up by himself.

But he remains loyal to the North Korean regime, even when television images of his famished countrymen, contrasted with the capitalist affluence all around him, provide a daily reminder of which system is succeeding.

His hope is that this loyalty will one day bring him a final redemption: a trip home to the North and a reunion with his wife and two daughters, both toddlers when he last saw them, 46 years ago.

Until that day, he says, he will hold fast to the political conviction that first brought him to the South: that the capitalist South is "a colony of our sworn enemy, U.S. imperialists," that needs to be "liberated." All of which leaves the younger brother bewildered.

"What's good about the North Korean government, a regime of gangsters, which can't even feed its own people so that its citizens flee and wander around as refugees?" asks Moon Choong Il, 67. "My brother and I have completely different political ideas. But I pray for him. Ours is a tragedy of  a divided nation."

In 1941, the two brothers and their parents emigrated to China to escape brutal Japanese colonial rule at home. Shortly before the defeat of Japan and the liberation of Korea, their father went to Seoul, promising to relocate his family there. But the suddenness of the liberation and its political aftermath left the family in the Communist zone.

In China, Moon Sang Bong joined a People's Liberation Army unit of ethnic Koreans who were fighting for Mao Zedong. His outfit was later incorporated into the North Korean Army, which invaded South Korea in 1950 in an effort to unify the divided peninsula.

After the war ended in a stalemate that left the peninsula still divided, Moon Sang Bong became an agent who escorted North Korean spies into the South and picked up those returning from missions.

One night in 1960, South Korean soldiers ambushed his boat as it pulled in to pick up an agent. As flares illuminated the sky and mortar rounds pounded the water, Moon Sang Bong escaped but was caught after a month as a fugitive in the hills. Later that year he was sentenced to life in prison in South Korea.

In the same year, 22-year-old Moon Choong Il was imprisoned in China. Villagers witch-hunting for reactionaries turned him in for keeping a diary in which he longed for his father and a trip to South Korea, which then had no diplomatic ties with China. His mother had died two years earlier.

In prison, Moon Choong Il saw inmates die of hunger. He was eventually released, and later swam a border river into North Korea in 1973, hoping to live with his brother. But border guards sent him back to China - now as an illegal immigrant. He returned to his village in Inner Mongolia, where he worked in a collective farm under surveillance.

During the political thaw in the 1980s, Moon Choong Il wrote letters to South Korean radio stations looking for his father. He did not hear from his father (and has never been able to find any record of him), but South Korean missionaries sent him Bibles and cash, asking him to build underground churches.

"We didn't know how to do a service. So we sat around, played cassettes of sermons and hymns the missionaries sent us. We all sang along," Moon Choong Il said. "Around this time, I also located my brother's family in North Korea and exchanged letters and photographs. They said my brother was in South Korea, but didn't say exactly what he was doing there."

In the decades following the war, the two Koreas infiltrated each other with armed commandos and spies. In 2000, following a historic North-South summit meeting, South Korea repatriated 63 aging spies. But Moon Sang Bong was not among them because he had signed a "letter of ideological conversion" in South Korea, and was therefore not welcome back.

As their colleagues returned home to a heroes' welcome in North Korea, Moon Sang Bong and 27 other former spies, now in their 70s and 80s, were left behind, humiliated and regretful they had buckled under torture.

North Korea still demands the return of Moon Sang Bong and others. But it refuses to repatriate any of the hundreds of South Korean POWs and fishermen believed to be kidnapped there in postwar years, as well as an unconfirmed number of Southern spies. Conservatives and family members in the South oppose repatriating any more Communist spies unless the North reciprocates.

The North denies holding any South Koreans against their will, leaving Moon Sang Bong and his colleagues hostage to an unresolved past.

In 1989, two years after Moon Sang Bong's release from prison, Moon Choong Il fled China with his wife, son and daughter. After five years in Myanmar and Thailand, including two years in a mountain village controlled by a drug lord, he reached South Korea in 1994.

His arrival was sensational. He was the first North Korean native to defect via Southeast Asia - a route other North Korean refugees fleeing dictatorship and hunger in their homeland would follow later. But he found no trace of his father in the South, and his defection shook his brother's political belief to the core.

"Once I sent my son and daughter with clothes and a letter to see if my brother would at least meet his nephews," Moon Choong Il said. "But my children returned without seeing their uncle. He also returned the letter and package unopened. I understand why my brother hates me. I am no longer asking him to meet me. That's better for my brother."

Moon Sang Bong was refusing to meet his brother, a traitor by North Korean standards, partly because it might jeopardize his family in the North, said Shin Byong Chul, a Christian pastor who had met Moon Sang Bong in trying to arrange a reunion. "The old man didn't say it, but he had to choose between his brother and his own family and ideology," Shin said.

When Moon Choong Il left China, he took with him the letters and photographs he had received from his brother's family in the North. All were lost on the journey, except a 1987 black-and- white photo that shows Moon Sang Bong's wife holding a grandchild and two grown-up daughters with their husbands.

But Moon Choong Il could not deliver even that picture to his brother. "I pray that my brother will return home, meet his family and live his remaining days as a happy man," Moon Choong Il said. "But if the day comes when my brother crosses the border, I want to go and shout at his back, 'Why? Why should I and my brother live like this?'

Charles Jenkins: Prisoner of Pyongyang

The Independent, 07 March 2006
 

Charles Jenkins describes the moment in 1965 when he left his US Army post and defected to North Korea as the biggest mistake of his life. In the next 40 years he was beaten, starved and lost his identity. Now free and living in Japan, he granted a rare interview to David McNeill

It seems fitting that Charles Jenkins, a man who lived in such seclusion for four decades that most people forgot he existed, can now be found in one of the most inaccessible places in Japan: the remote former prison island of Sado, where he shares a small house with his wife, Hitomi, and daughters Brinda and Mika.

A shy man, Jenkins' whole demeanour, from the sad, wary eyes encased in a heavily lined face to the apologetic body language, seems crumpled, as though worn out from the 39 years, six months and four days he spent as a Cold War trophy in North Korea and the daily effort of having to readjust now, aged 66, to a very different life. "I got used to North Korea. You get beat in the face every day and you're expecting it. You don't care no more."

Jenkins' extraordinary life reads like a spy novel, and can be divided, like the best drama, into three distinct acts. The first was his upbringing in a poor community in North Carolina, where he dropped out of school, aged 15, to join the US Army. Act One ended on a freezing January night in 1965 when, drunk and unhappy, he deserted his post in the Demilitarised Zone which divides the two Koreas and defected to the North; one of the very few Americans to trade life under Uncle Sam for Uncle Kim. Today he calls that "the biggest mistake I ever made".

So began Act Two, behind the bamboo curtain, where he claims he was beaten, starved and robbed of his identity, eventually becoming Min Hyung Chang. He was saved, he says, by Hitomi Soga, the Japanese woman he married and who was 19 when she was abducted with her mother by Pyongyang's spies in 1978.

Soga Snr has never been found. "I think they hit her on the head and threw her in the sea," says Jenkins. "I know the way those guys work. They don't leave no witnesses."

Now Jenkins is in what seems certain to be the final act of his life, which began in September 2002, when an astonished world learnt of this Rip Van Winkle figure in the wake of a summit between the Japanese Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il. Jenkins stayed behind with his daughters when Pyongyang allowed his wife and four other Japanese to return home after admitting to its bizarre kidnapping programme. It took 21 months to reunite the family, during which Koizumi's loose strategy for normalising relations with Pyongyang fell apart amid a hardening of nationalist sentiments on both sides.

Finally though, after half a lifetime being buffeted between Cold War rivals, Jenkins and his wife were free, symbolised by a kiss in front of the media at Jakarta airport in July 2004. "In North Korea we didn't kiss in public," he says. "That's bad there."

Today, Jenkins lives on a five-year stipend from the Japanese government and on the proceeds of his Japanese book, which has sold more than 300,000 copies. From the hotel where we conducted this interview, he can see the spot where North Korean spies snatched his wife and her mother while they were walking home from a shopping trip. He says he still wonders whether something similar could happen to him now. "My life is not worth five cents, I know that. I don't think they have the nerve to come and get me, but they could assassinate me with a bullet through the head from a distance. But if it happens, everything I have written will come out."

The former sergeant served just 25 days in a US military brig in 2004 after being dishonourably discharged for desertion, and is thought to have bartered his freedom in exchange for information on North Korea. He says he was interviewed by the US military for almost two months, "every day from nine in the morning until five in the evening".

"They wanted to know where military installations were. I knew it all. I was told that they had an agent in North Korea for over 20 years who didn't give them one tenth of what I gave them."

Jenkins, who taught spies and military cadets English in the North, says he "would not be surprised" if Pyongyang has a nuclear weapon. "Close to my house was a mountain and Russia put missiles in there. Everybody knew that. Nobody goes up there or talks about it, but they're all aimed at Japan and South Korea. When Russia turned capitalist, all these scientists ran away."

He believes there are more Americans in the country. "I know they're there but can't prove it. They're left from the Korean and Vietnam wars. There is a place there where they got Americans farming."

But he is also critical of the country he left in 1965. "In my opinion, America made their first mistake when they didn't give North Korea the power plant they promised in the 1990s. America went back on its word. From that time on, relations got worse."

He says the Koreans were desperate to find replacements for old Russian power plants and did not even have the electricity to pump water. "I had to dig a well 10 metres deep to get water, but in the winter electricity was so weak it wouldn't pump the water. We all carried the water; it was hard work.

"America made me its enemy. I was the one hurting, just like in North Korea right now it's the people who are hurting."

Jenkins describes a heavily militarised state where "everyone was in the army" and which reached deep into the lives of its citizens via "leaders" who controlled everything from loose talk to bedrooms. He claims people are not free to choose a sexual partner, to talk to others or even to invite others for a private drink at home. "People get drunk and start talking," he says. "When Kim Jong Il first took over, about half a kilometre from where I lived was a scientific research centre, and these educated people, doctors, professors; they had a party and started drinking and talking about Kim and one of them squealed and all of them disappeared. They got sent to a concentration camp."

Pyongyang operates "five to seven camps," he says, and the camps have swallowed up whole families. "They found all that person's relatives and sent them too. I asked why one time and they said because your relatives will be against the government, so take them all."

Jenkins secretly indulged his love of American rock'n'roll by taking a screwdriver to his radio, which had been fixed so it couldn't be tuned. "I listened to and recorded Elvis, Beethoven, all kinds of music [broadcast from South Korea]. I took a thick piece of plywood, nailed it to the bottom of the wardrobe and made a compartment. I kept my videocassettes there: James Bond, Die Hard. I got them from foreign students. We watched the movies and hung a blanket over the window."

Above all, though, it is his graphic descriptions of poverty that stay in the mind. "We had rice and you'd wash it four or five times and it would still come out grey, it was full of bugs, rocks, four or five years old. You cook it and still break your teeth on the rocks. When I came to Japan I cooked my own rice and it was clean. I couldn't believe it."

In the 1990s Chinese and Russian support fell, leading to famine in the North. Jenkins says he stopped eating sausages after discovering they contained rat meat, and claims he was offered sexual favours for food. "My friend was a technician and he said: take my wife. I knew if I did we would not be friends no more."

Kim Jong Il called in the World Food Programme, "which his father would never have done. That helped a lot of people." He claims Kim Jnr also investigated the camps and freed many. "I say the son was better than the father."

He also sheds light on the desperation of his North Korean handlers after his wife said in 2003 that she was not returning from Japan. "They told me to choose one of my daughters to go to Japan," says Jenkins, who believes his handlers were grooming his children to become spies. "They said they would let her go to Japan. And I know what would have happened. She never would have come back, so they would have said: OK, she's got one, you've got one. It's finished. I said I'm not splitting my family."

He claims the Koreans then offered him incentives to stay in the country, including a new car, house and a 26-year-old bride. "There was a nurse in the hospital treating me [for kidney problems in April 2004] ... They would have given me her or any other woman I wanted if I had stayed and brought my daughters back. I knew too much."

When the family finally reunited in 2004 amid a blizzard of media coverage, one Japanese broadcaster said Soga's dream had finally come true, but sadly the third act in Jenkins' astonishing life has no fairy story ending. Sources close to the family say the transition to life in Japan has been a struggle. Jenkins speaks no Japanese, and relies on Korean to communicate with his family, a situation he describes as "difficult". "I've spoken more Korean than I have English; I've spoken it for 40 years. Sometimes I even think in Korean."

He spends a lot of time at home alone watching American movies while his wife works in an office in Sado City. "They live separate lives," says one source. The city wants him to teach English or become a tourist guide, but Jenkins' age and heavy accent would make either a challenge. He will apply for Japanese citizenship in July, but admits he does not know "how it's going to work". "I got to learn Japanese," he says.

His daughters have quickly become fluent and are settling down in Sado; Mika will begin training as a kindergarten teacher this year and Brinda wants to be a wedding planner. Their father says they liked America when they went last year to visit his ailing mother, but moving there is out of the question. "That would look bad in Japan."

It is hard to escape the impression of a man who is still not in control of his life, trapped this time not by the arbitrary demands of a nightmare Orwellian state but by the ties of the past, by mortality and of duty to the country that he believes saved him from dying in North Korea. "I'll always be grateful," he says as he walks toward the car he has only just learnt to drive.

Is there anything he wants to do before he dies? "I wish I could speak directly to Kim," he says. "But I promised America I would have nothing ever again to do with North Korea."

Officials tighten border security:

North Korean defectors use Mekong River to illegally enter Thailand from Laos

By Anucha Charoenpo, Bangkok Post, 19 February 2006

Officials in the northern border province of Chiang Rai are tightening up security measures to block North Koreans from using the Mekong River to illegally enter Thailand with the hope of eventually being resettled in South Korea. From 2003 to this year, 227 defectors from North Korea were arrested by authorities in Chiang Rai. They deemed the situation a threat to national security that needed immediate attention.

The Provincial Police Bureau, the Immigration Bureau and the National Security Council are working together closely and their officials are on full alert to prevent the figures from rising.

According to police reports from interrogations of the arrested North Koreans, most of them slipped into China to live with relatives there before boarding Chinese cargo ships to take them along the Mekong River to Muang Mom, a riverside village in Ton Phung district of Laos' Bokeo province.

Then they paid for long-tailed motor boats to take them on the 30-minute journey to Chiang Rai's Chiang Saen district. The defectors were fleeing hunger and oppression by the communist regime in North Korea. But at this stage the police investigation has not found any evidence linking their illegal entry with any human-trafficking gangs in Thailand.

''These North Koreans entered Thailand and later surrendered to local police because they believed that it was the only way to enable the Seoul government and the UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] to accept them as political refugees and send them to South Korea,'' said Jamnong Kaewsiri, the Chiang Rai police chief.

After turning themselves in to local police, the defectors were immediately sent to Immigration Bureau detention buildings in Bangkok. Pol Maj-Gen Jamnong said Thailand had no policy on welcoming North Koreans to use the country as a transit point to South Korea, and the government was deploying every means to block them from entering the kingdom. However, he said, it was not completely successful. Pol Maj-Gen Pornpat Suyanant, deputy commissioner of the Immigration Bureau, said all North Korean defectors sent to his office must face illegal entry charges.

After that they are given help by the South Korean embassy and the UNHCR. From 2003 to this year, 166 of the 227 North Koreans received help from the two agencies and the rest were being detained at the bureau. Diplomats from the North Korean and South Korean embassies in Bangkok refused to comment on the issue.

Measures used to end the problem include warnings issued by Thai police to owners of long-tailed boats, telling them not to bring defectors to Thailand or their boats would be seized.

Workers on Chinese cargo ships could face imprisonment under the Immigration Act or their ships' licences could be revoked if they take North Koreans from China to the Chiang Saen pier. Suspected boats and cargo ships will not be allowed to moor at the pier and could be sent elsewhere.

''We have also faced difficulties communicating with these North Koreans because of the language barrier, even though our interrogations were made via Korean-speaking Thai interpreters,'' Pol Maj-Gen Jamnong said.

A Thai businessman who worked in Wang Pong village of Burma's Tachilek township said he had witnessed Chinese cargo boats let North Koreans go up to the river banks at the village and also at Muang Mom, the Lao village opposite Wang Pong with only the river dividing them.

However, Lao officials in Muang Mom denied that the area was being used as a stopover for North Koreans heading to Thailand. ''We are very concerned over our national security, we will not let them stay in our land,'' one official said

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