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*North Korean Studies*January - September 2005
Yonhap News reported that nine people believed to be DPRK defectors were turned
away after forcing their way into a ROK international school in the PRC on
Monday, a local civic group that supports defectors said.- The group, including
a seven-year-old child and a one-year-old baby, entered the ROK international
school in Tianjin, northeastern PRC at around 10:40 a.m. on Monday, requesting
passage to the ROK, the activists said. ("N. KOREANS EXPELLED
AFTER ENTERING S. KOREAN SCHOOL IN CHINA",
2005-09-12)
Chosun Ilbo reported that two DPR
The Korea Times reported that the DPRK has introduced a new (high-tech¦ travel permit for citizens travelling abroad in an apparent bid to prevent forgery by would-be defectors.- NK Auction, an Internet site dealing in DPRK- elated products, unveiled Tuesday the new type of passport with a scanned photograph and typed personal details.- The new travel pass was introduced as a follow-up measure to Pyongyang¦s computerization of its identification system of civilians and soldiers.- The steps are intended to tighten state control over its people. ("N. KOREA UPGRADES TRAVEL PERMITS", 2005-09-06)
Chosun Ilbo reported that the US has added the DPRK and Burma to the list of nations covered by "Priority 3," meaning that nationals from those countries with family members in the US would be given priority screening when immigration determines whether to accept them as refugees. The US government recently revealed this in a plan on refugee acceptance in the 2006 fiscal year submitted to the US Congress in accordance with the US immigration and nationality law. Defectors already resettled in third countries like the ROK are excluded from possible refugee status. ("N. KOREANS, BURMESE REFUGEES TO GET PRIORITY IN U.S.", 2005-09-05)
The Japan Times: Aug. 26, 2005
North Korea has deported a Gunma Prefecture man who illegally entered the communist country, Pyongyang's state-run news agency, KCNA, reported Thursday. The man was handed over to the Foreign Ministry, according to the report. Following the report, Foreign Ministry officials confirmed the handover, but offered no further details. According to KCNA, Masahiro Sekiguchi had entered North Korea on June 7 to escape family problems in Japan. The agency said he was returned to Japan on Wednesday.
According to the KCNA report, Sekiguchi had traveled to China's Jilin Province and swam across the Yalu River to North Korea. The report stated that, having confirmed that the man had entered the country for purely personal reasons, North Korean authorities returned him to Japan. The man had reportedly sought asylum in Germany in January, but his request was turned down. In 2003, a Japanese woman, Kazumi Kitagawa, jumped off a ferry and swam across a river between China and North Korea to seek asylum in the latter.
Yahoo News, Aug 24, 2005
SEOUL (AFP) - North Korea has computerized its identification system of
civilians and soldiers in an effort to tighten state control over its people,
Yonhap news agency says. Using a software program dubbed "Chungbok 2.0," North
Korean police have been storing residents' personal information on computer
networks since December 2003, it said.
The South Korean agency said it had obtained a copy of the program, which
includes details on gender, age, date of birth or death, family members, address
and various demographical statistics. The program gives access to monthly
tallies of the number of participants in political rallies and details about
those who were punished for violating laws.
The computerization work is aimed at tightening the state's grip on its 23-million population amid an escalation in the number of North Korean defectors, Yonhap said. "The entry for tracking people's political activities shows what the real purpose of the computerization work is," a North Korean defector told Yonhap.
A growing number of North Koreans have defected to South Korea, mostly via
China, to escape famine caused by natural disasters and failed economic policies
in their Stalinist homeland.
Foreign influence is also seeping into the country along with increased trade
through its porous northern border with China.
Human rights groups say up to 300,000 North Koreans may have fled to China. Many
are seeking passage to South Korea.
Any North Koreans that China catches are regularly sent back to North Korea
where human rights groups say they face harsh punishment, including imprisonment
or even death.
About 5,000 North Koreans have defected to the South since the Korean War ended
in 1953.
By Gavan McCormack, July 2005
|
On 13 June 2005, the doors of the White House Oval Office opened to admit a young (37 year-old) Korean man named Kang Chol-Hwan, a refugee from North Korea and perhaps the first person from North Korea for the president to meet. Kang was slightly overwhelmed by the warmth of his welcome, not only from President George W. Bush but also Vice-President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Just three days earlier, in the same room, Bush had hosted a visit by South Korean president Roh Moo-Hyun. The welcome for Kang, the refugee, was by all accounts much warmer than that for the head of state, and at forty minutes lasted about as long. |
Kang may have been virtually unknown outside Korea prior to his White House
reception, but in South Korea he has become a representative of the community of
Talpukja, or “those who have fled the North.” He was invited to the White House
because Bush had just read his book, co-authored with Pierre Rigoulot, The
Aquariums of Pyongyang-Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag (New York, Basic
Books, 2001). He so much liked it that he had not only recommended it to his
close advisers but told Kang he wanted “all Americans” to read it.
Appearing on Japanese television some weeks after meeting the president, Kang
recounted Bush’s question: if the two were to change places, what would Kang
adopt as basic US policy on North Korea? Kang replied that he thought priority
should be given to human rights over nuclear matters since, he said, that was
what the people of North Korea most cared about. Bush, he said, responded with
enthusiastic agreement. About a month after the White House visit, Kang's call
for a hard-line approach to North Korea was featured in the Wall Street Journal
(14 July).
It was in itself a trivial episode, but it suggested that, when the Beijing
“Six-Sided” talks on North Korea begin again, as now seems likely, in the last
week of July, any simple “deal” to exchange North Korean nuclear weapons for
guarantees of security and diplomatic and economic normalization will be
difficult to negotiate. The president’s enthusiastic welcome for Kang suggests
he wants not merely to disarm North Korea but to transform it by the
introduction of “democracy” and “human rights;” in short his ultimate goal, as
he put it in his State of the Union address in February, is “ending tyranny in
our world.”
Kang was born into a well-to-do “Korean-in-Japan” family in Kyoto headed by
grandmother, a committed communist, and grandfather, a successful capitalist
with some gangster connections who had grown rich in postwar Japan on running
something described as a “gambling saloon,” presumably a pachinko parlor,
opposite the main railway station. Despite having bartered some of that wealth
into education and improved social status, the family was, nevertheless,
insecure. Japanese citizens during the imperial period from 1910, Koreans had
been deprived of that citizenship in the wake of the war, suddenly becoming
foreigners, deprived of various rights, discriminated against.
During the 1960s North Korea looked a more attractive option to some, and a
steady flow of such “Koreans in Japan” decided to “return” to it, despite the
fact that the family origin for almost all was in South Korea. They “returned,”
in other words, to a country they did not know, to join in construction of the
North Korean “fatherland” which they imagined as a socialist paradise, free of
the misery and discrimination they experienced in Japan. The Kang family packed
everything, even their late model Volvo (which at that time indicated quite
extraordinary wealth), and sailed for North Korea as part of this movement.
In North Korea, Chol-Hwan’s grandmother became a deputy to the Supreme People’s
Assembly. For a time the family retained a great deal of privilege, as well as
their Volvo, and lived near the embassy quarter. Chol-Hwan was born in Pyongyang
around 1968. His childhood and early boyhood seem to have been happy enough and
he writes warmly of his primary school teachers at “The School of the People” in
the Pyongyang of the early 1970s. In 1977, however, his capitalist grandfather
disappeared, apparently arrested for treason, and shortly afterwards the whole
family (with the exception of his mother) was sent to the countryside. Chol-hwan
was then 9 years of age. Yodok was to be his home for 10 years.
It was, says Chol-Hwan a little guiltily, “by no means the toughest camp.”
Mostly, it accommodated returnees from Japan, while other camps housed “members
of landowning families, capitalists, US or South Korean agents, Christians, or
members of purged Party circles deemed noxious to the state,” most likely
between 150,000 and 200,000 people in all.
Chol-Hwan spent his boyhood at Yodok, first in a school, though one that seemed
to practice routine brutality and have few pretences to education, then in
various work gangs. His energies were devoted to surviving: stealing food from
the camp kitchens or fields, searching out wild berries or hunting and catching
snakes, fish, frogs, or rabbits, raising rats to supplement the starvation
rations. It was a hard and unrelenting life, occasionally terrifying - he says
he witnessed 15 public executions - although there were also times that uplifted
his boyish spirit: the encounter with a bear in the mountains, his shared feast
with friends on a snake. The wondrous scenery also gave him joy. In his later
years in the camp, by then a teenager, he found himself at various times the
camp custodian of rabbits, bees, or sheep, and hunter for wild ginseng. His
uncle became manager of the camp distillery and seems to have wielded
considerable power. Eventually, inexplicably, the family was released, and after
some years surviving on his wits, trading on the black market and on moneys sent
him from Japan, Chol-Hwan escaped, first to China and then to South Korea.
The story is scarcely a classic but, written more than a decade after his
escape, it was one of the first North Korean refugee biographies to be published
in the West (first in French, then in English) and it offers a plain, grim,
moving story of prison camp life through the eyes of a child and boy. Kang’s
co-author, Frenchman Pierre Rigoulot, had been a contributing editor to the
Black Book of Communism (first published in France in 1997), and it was perhaps
his contribution to tailor Kang’s story so that North Korea is presented as one
more example of the monstrous perversion of communism. Kang and Rigoulot make no
attempt to locate North Korea in the context of the trauma and tragedy of Korean
history, the half century of Japanese colonialism, the externally imposed
division, the terrible civil war turned by external intervention into a
catastrophe, and the prolonged Cold War that continues on the peninsula to this
day.
In South Korea Kang has become a journalist and a severe critic of the South
Korean government policy of accommodation (“Sunshine”) towards the North. Late
in 2004, he was one of the organizers of an exhibition in Seoul under the title
“North Korean Holocaust.” By hosting him just days after his meeting with South
Korean president Roh, Bush was sending an unmistakable signal to the government
in South Korea. For both Kang and Bush, the Pyongyang regime is evil, there can
be no compromise with it, and “sunshine” is tantamount to appeasement.
By an odd coincidence, in the same year of publication of Kang’s book, 2001,
another Korean gulag story was published, also in New York. By an even stranger
coincidence it too tells the story of a Korean-in-Japan family, also from Kyoto.
Its author, however, Suh Sung, endured not 10 but 19 years of horror, in South
rather than North Korea, under even worse conditions including torture, before
being released just a little after Chol-Hwan, in 1990 (Suh Sung, Unbroken
Spirits: Nineteen Years in South Korea’s Gulag, New York, Rowman and
Littlefield, 2001). Author Suh, now a professor at Ritsumeikan University in
Kyoto, was convicted on apparently trumped-up political charges in 1971,
tortured, and not released from prison till 1990. His book was written a decade
later, published first in Japanese and Korean, then in English.
The Kang and Suh families in postwar Kyoto were on opposite sides of a Cold War
fence that divided communities in Japan as well as internationally, Kang’s was
affiliated with North Korea and Suh’s with South Korea. When Kang arrived in
Seoul, which seemed to him the epitome of freedom, Suh was still in his gulag,
gaining his release only after the US-supported military regime there was
brought to an end by massive popular protest.
The picture presented by Suh of his long imprisonment in South Korea is almost
the reverse image of Kang’s picture of North Korea. Where Kang attributed the
brutality and oppression of his gulag to “communism,” Suh attributes his to
anti-communism. One is blind to the gulags of the South, the other is blind to
those of the North; both illuminate the horrors of daily life in their
respective gulags, but tell us little of the structure in which both systems
evolved.
When Kang Chol-Hwan got to Seoul around 1989 he found freedom, coca-cola - his
first swallow was so wonderful that it cured his cold - and a job. South Korea
had just gone through a huge transformation (1987) tantamount to a democratic
revolution that brought the succession of military dictatorships to an end, yet
he seems to have been unaware of it. Suh Sung was still in prison, not released
till the following year. Freedom was a fresh shoot in South Korea, but for Kang,
enjoying his coke, simply being non- and anti-communist meant being free.
It is unlikely that Suh’s story will find its way on to the presidential
bookshelves, and doubtful anyway that President Bush would want to read much of
it. Kang’s simplistic tale of good and evil, freedom and communism, much better
suits his preconceptions than any complex historical insight into the Korean
division. Suh’s book would be much more difficult for him to understand, not
only because it tells of political prisons and immense suffering under a
US-installed “Free World” regime, but also because the repression described
there is now a thing of the past. With the presidential blessing, publishers
will no doubt take steps to make Kang’s book available to “all Americans.”
Bush’s understanding of Korea is probably widely shared in Washington. When both
houses of Congress unanimously adopted the North Korean Human Rights Law in July
2004, they were thinking along those lines. Under the banner of “human rights”
and “democracy,” US propaganda against the North Korean regime is now being
stepped up, radio receivers secretly infiltrated into the country, and funding
substantially increased for organizations, many of them of a fundamentalist
religious hue, to work with refugees, spread the gospel (creating 10,000
underground churches, as the General League of Korean Christians put it as far
back as 1997), and undermine the regime.
Kang’s book focuses necessary attention on the North Korean refugee problem.
There are basically two approaches to it. The one favored by Kang assumes the
impossibility of human rights concerns being addressed under the existing regime
and therefore calls for steps designed to maximize the flow of refugees with a
view to precipitating an “East German” type regime collapse. This is essentially
the view held by the prominent defector, Hwang Jang-Yop, formerly right-hand man
of Kim Il Sung and architect of the North Korean “Juche” ideology, who defected
to South Korea in 1997 and was welcomed in Washington in 2003 (though not by the
White House), and it is the basic view underpinning the Human Rights Law.
For most of those who live in the surrounding region, however, especially the
governments in Seoul, Beijing, and Moscow, such a collapse offers the nightmare
prospect of millions fleeing on foot or by boat from a disaster zone or becoming
dependent on international relief organizations as the economy and society
spirals into chaos and die-hard North Korean military groups engage in violent
resistance, with or without nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction.
The alternative is to strive to “normalize” North Korea, negotiating to address
its security concerns and persuade it to renounce its nuclear ambitions in
exchange for diplomatic, political and economic recognition and assistance
packages aimed at integrating it within a booming Northeast Asian region. The
refugee problem is large, but not of massive proportions: about 6,000 Talpukja
in South Korea (where they have proved extremely difficult to assimilate and
most live precariously on welfare), and somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 in
China, especially Northeast China which is just a river crossing away, where
they are treated as illegal immigrants, extremely insecure and liable to arrest
and repatriation. Most of these have fled from severe economic conditions,
especially famine, that have prevailed in certain parts of the country for a
decade, and only a small proportion for political rather than economic reasons
(two out of a sample of 63 in a 2004 study by Refugee International).
The North Korean economic collapse of the 1990s occurred for a complex of
political, economic and ecological conditions, for only some of which the regime
could be held directly responsible, and despite the severe sanctions under which
the country still labors the reforms adopted in the last few years seem to have
arrested the decline. Most observers believe the transition to market mechanisms
is now probably irreversible, although a real revival of the country is
impossible so long as sanctions, isolation, and military confrontation with the
US, persist.
The preferred solution in this view is precisely the opposite of the Kang, Bush,
and Congressional view. It is to depoliticize the humanitarian crisis, to
persuade the Chinese government to guarantee the rights of refugees, including
by the grant of provisional residence status, and North Korea to guarantee
non-punishment of those who wish to return (along the lines of the “Orderly
Repatriation Program” under which 72,000 refugees returned to Vietnam between
1990 and 1995), within the frame of a comprehensive settlement of the many North
Korea-related problems on the table of the Beijing Conference. [This discussion
benefits from reading an unpublished paper by Chung Byung-ho of Hanyang
University.] South Korea would, in this view, play the key role, and the aim
would be a “soft landing” for North Korea. Reconstruction of the country through
the ending of sanctions against it and its admission to international financial
and economic cooperation institutions would open the way, first, to solving the
basic problem of physical survival, and then those of political and social
rights. The Koreans themselves will have to play the central role in this
process. The rhetoric of “human rights,” presently strongest among
neo-conservative ideologues and fundamentalist Christians in Washington and
Seoul, should not be allowed to disguise the likelihood of the disastrous
consequences such policies would entail for those it would pretend to aid.
It is good that President Bush has read at least one book on Korea, by a Korean,
even if one cannot help wishing he had read two. The one he read can only
confirm his simplistic view of the Korean problem, while the one he did not read
might have helped him to realize that human rights abuses on the Korean
peninsula are rooted at a deeper level than the confrontation between communism
and anti-communism, and that the original sin from which half a century and more
of militarization, confrontation and denial of human rights have flowed is none
other than division itself. The abolition of the gulag in South Korea owed
nothing to foreign intervention, and it is likely to be the same for North
Korea. What has maintained the dictatorship in the North for so long has been
above all the uncompromising hostility of its enemies, allowing the regime to
capitalize on national pride and determination to remain independent. Rather
than more intervention – to bring about “regime change” – what Korea needs is to
be left alone to redress the long-continuing trauma caused by the massive
interventions of the past. Since the South-North summit of June 2000, the Korean
people have been making substantial progress in precisely this direction.
*Gavan McCormack is professor of social science at International Christian
University, Tokyo, the author of Target North Korea: Pushing North Korea to the
Brink and a Japan Focus coordinator. Posted at Japan Focus on July 17, 2005.
Book review by Gavan McCormack for ABC Radio National, “Book Talk” (Jill Kitson: presenter),
broadcast Saturday 1 March 2003, 1:30 pm, repeated Thursday 6 March, 2:30 pm
After Iraq, North Korea, or so at least it seems is likely. North Korea is part
of the “axis of evil,” a “rogue state,” “a looming threat to all nations,” that
may possess nuclear weapons and missiles capable of reaching Alaska or
Australia. What little is known about it is mostly dark: it seems to be a kind
of Confucian-fascist family state, built around the cult of the father, Kim Il
Sung, and his son, Kim Jong Il. It is steeped in famine and poverty, given to
extraordinary political rhetoric and bizarre mass games and rituals. Now we have
for the first time in English an account of its gulag system, a detailed memoir
by a survivor who lived in one for a decade from 1977.
Kang Chol-Hwan, the main author, was born into a well-to-do “Korean-in-Japan”
family headed by grandmother, a committed communist, and grandfather, a
successful capitalist with some gangster connections who had grown rich in
postwar Japan on running something described as a ‘gambling saloon’ opposite
Kyoto station. Bartering the wealth into education and improved social status,
the family was, nevertheless, insecure. Japanese citizens during the imperial
period from 1910, Koreans had been deprived of their Japanese citizenship in the
wake of the war; their status in Japan was uncertain. Their country of origin
was divided after 1945 into separate northern and southern systems, from 1948,
rival states, which were at war from 1950 to 1953. The line of division drawn at
the end of the war has remained to this day. Koreans, though born and raised in
Japan, were not Japanese citizens.
During the 1960s the North looked an attractive option and there was a steady
flow of such ‘Koreans in Japan’ who “returned” to it, to a country they did not
know, to join in construction of the North Korean fatherland as a socialist
paradise. The Kang family packed everything, even their late model Volvo (which
at that time indicated quite extraordinary wealth), and sailed for North Korea
as part of this movement.
Chol-Hwan’s grandmother became a deputy to the Supreme People’s Assembly, and
for a time the family retained a great deal of privilege, as well as their
Volvo, and lived near the embassy quarter. Chol-Hwan was born in Pyongyang
around 1968, and his childhood and early boyhood seem to have been happy enough.
He writes warmly of his primary school teachers at ‘The School of the People’ in
the Pyongyang of the early 1970s. In 1977, however, all of this ended. His
capitalist grandfather disappeared, apparently arrested for treason, and shortly
afterwards the whole family (with the exception of grandmother) was sent to the
countryside. Chol-hwan was then 9 years of age. Yodok camp was to be his home
for 10 years.
Yodok was, says Kang even a little guiltily, “by no means the toughest camp.”
Mostly, it accommodated returnees from Japan. Other camps housed “members of
landowning families, capitalists, US or South Korean agents, Christians, or
members of purged Party circles deemed noxious to the state,” most likely
between 150,000 and 200,000 people in all. Things may indeed have been worse in
some of them.
At Yodok, Chol-Hwan spent his boyhood, from age 9 to 19, first in a school more
noted for its brutality than for any educational quality, then in various work
gangs. Throughout, his energies were devoted to surviving: stealing food from
the camp kitchens or fields, searching out wild berries or hunting and catching
snakes, fish, frogs, or rabbits to supplement the starvation rations. It was a
hard and unrelenting life. It was occasionally terrifying - he witnessed 15
public executions - but there were also times that uplifted his boyish spirit:
the encounter with a bear in the mountains, his shared feast with friends on a
snake, his joy at the wondrous scenery. In his later years in the camp, by then
a teenager, he found himself at various times the camp custodian of rabbits,
bees, or sheep, and hunter for wild ginseng. His uncle became manager of the
camp distillery and seems to have wielded considerable power. Eventually,
inexplicably, the family was released, and after some years surviving on his
wits, trading on the black market and on moneys sent him from Japan, Chol-Hwan
escaped to South Korea.
The story is scarcely a classic, though readers will be moved by its grim, sad,
angry, honest account of the life of the child survivor. For this reviewer, the
problem of the book is not the moving descriptions of camp life but the frame
within which it is presented, as one more example of the atrocity of communism.
One assumes that this is principally the contribution of co-author, Frenchman
Pierre Rigoulot, a contributing editor to the Black Book of Communism.
By an odd coincidence, however, another Korean gulag story was published in the
very same year, 2001, also in New York, also dealing with a former Kyoto
resident, one who endured not 10 but 19 years of horror under even worse
conditions including torture, before being released just a little after
Chol-Hwan, in 1990. This account, however, is of a gulag in South Korea (Suh
Sung, Unbroken Spirits: Nineteen years in South Korea’s Gulag, translated
by Jean Inglis and with introduction by James Palais, New York, Rowman and
Littlefield, 2001). Unbroken Spirits: Nineteen years in South Korea’s Gulag
tells the story of a political prisoner in South Korea. Suh Sung, now a
professor at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, who was convicted on trumped-up
political charges in 1971 and not released from prison till 1990. When Kang
arrived in Seoul, which seemed the epitome of freedom, Suh was still in his
gulag.
Kang and Rigoulot present their picture of wickedness and cruelty, roguishness
or ‘evil’, in simple terms that even George W. Bush would understand. What is
missing is any sense of Korean history, the half century of Japanese
colonialism, the externally imposed division, the terrible civil war, turned by
external intervention into a catastrophe, the prolonged Cold War. Paradoxically,
the picture presented by Suh Sung is almost the reverse image of this: of
brutality and oppression under anti-communism. Even writing in 2000, ten years
after his release, Suh can focus only on his South Korean gulag, seemingly blind
to the problem of North Korea’s gulag system. Both accounts, in other words,
while illuminating the horrors of daily life in their respective gulags, remain
steeped in Cold War thinking.
As for Kang Chol-Hwan, his escape into South Korea almost coincided with the
victory of the democratic revolution in that country, yet he seems to have been
unaware of the huge transition that had just taken place. All he tells us is
that when he got to Seoul around 1989 he found freedom, coca-cola - his first
swallow was so wonderful that it cured his cold - and a job. At the time, Suh
Sung was still in prison, released the following year. Freedom was a fresh shoot
in South Korea, but for Kang, enjoying his coke, it is as if the free world,
being non- and anti-communist, was unconditionally and indisputably free. Suh
could tell him that democracy was all too recent, and had been won at a high
price.
One dearly wishes therefore for a book that would offer us a dialogue between
Kang, prisoner in the North Korean labor camp for 10 years, and Suh, political
prisoner in South Korea for 19 years. When each can feel grief and outrage over
the brutality and violence inflicted on the other, perhaps then Korea north and
south will be able to move towards its democratic future, one without gulags of
any kind.
By Barbara Demick, LA Times Staff Writer, July 4, 2005,
Jinna Park of The Times' Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.
Part 2.
Hunger is driving North Koreans to capitalistic enterprises and weakening the communist regime's iron grip.
For most of her life, Kim Hui Suk
had spouted the sayings of North Korea's founder Kim Il Sung and never for a
moment harbored a doubt: Capitalists were the enemy. Individualism was evil. But
then disaster rained down on her hometown, Chongjin, on North Korea's remote
east coast. Factories ran out of fuel. Food rations stopped. Watching her family
slowly succumb to the famine — her mother-in-law, husband and son eventually
would die of starvation — Kim realized she had to change.
Once a stickler for following the rules, she bribed a bureaucrat so she could
sell her apartment. Then, with no business skills other than the ability to
calculate on an abacus, she used the proceeds of the sale to set herself up in a
black market business, hawking biscuits and moonshine she brewed from corn.
Kim could have been sent away for life for such crimes. But obeying the rules
would have meant a death sentence.
"The simple and kind-hearted people who did what they were told — they were the
first to die of starvation," said Kim, a soft-spoken grandmother who now lives
in South Korea and has adopted a new name to protect family members still in the
North.
The famine that killed 2 million North Koreans in the mid-1990s and the death of
the nation's founder, Kim Il Sung, in 1994 sparked vast changes across the
secretive communist country.
Markets are springing up in the shadows of abandoned factories, foreign
influences are breaching the borders, inflation is soaring and corruption is
rampant. A small nouveau riche class has emerged, even as a far larger group has
been forced to trade away everything for food.
This is the picture of life in North Korea as painted by more than 30 people
from Chongjin, the nation's third largest city. Some are defectors living in
South Korea. Others were interviewed in China, which they had entered illegally
to work or beg. Accounts of aid workers and videos taken illegally in Chongjin
by disgruntled residents were also used to prepare this report.
Although the North Korean regime has a reputation as the ultimate Big Brother,
people from Chongjin say the public pays less and less heed to what the
government says. There is little that might be called political dissent, but
residents describe a pervasive sense of disillusionment that remains largely
unspoken.
"People are not stupid. Everybody thinks our own government is to blame for our
terrible situation," said a 39-year-old coal miner from Chongjin who was
interviewed late last year during a visit to China. "We all know we think that,
and we all know everybody else thinks that. We don't need to talk about it."
Kim Sun Bok, a 32-year-old former factory worker who came to South Korea last
summer, said the country was "changing incredibly."
"It is not the same old North Korea anymore except in name."
Just a decade ago, when people in Chongjin needed new trousers, they had to go
to government-owned stores that sold items mostly in drab browns or a dull shade
of indigo. Food and other necessities were rationed. Sometimes the government
permitted the sale of home-grown vegetables, but even a hairbrush was supposed
to be purchased from a state-run shop.
Today, people can shop at markets all over Chongjin, the result of a burst of
entrepreneurship grudgingly allowed by the authorities. Almost anything can be
purchased — ice cream bars from China, pirated DVDs, cars, Bibles, computers,
real estate and sex — for those who can afford the high prices.
The retail mecca is Sunam market, a wood-frame structure with a corrugated tin
roof that is squeezed between two derelict factories.
The aisles brim with fresh cucumbers, tomatoes, peaches, scallions, watermelons
and cabbage, as shown by rare video footage taken last year by the Osaka,
Japan-based human rights group Rescue the North Korean People. Everything else
comes from China: belts, shoes, umbrellas, notebooks, plates, aluminum pots,
knives, shovels, toy cars, detergents, shampoos, lotions, hand creams and
makeup.
Each of Chongjin's seven administrative districts has a state-sanctioned market.
Sunam, the city's largest, is expanding, and some say it has a wider variety of
goods than the main market in Pyongyang. Many vendors wear their licenses pinned
to their right breasts while the obligatory Kim Il Sung buttons remain over the
heart.
Although markets have been expanding for more than a decade, it was only in 2002
and '03 that the government enacted economic reforms that lifted some of the
prohibitions against them. Most of the vendors are older women such as Kim Hui Suk, a tiny 60-year-old with short, permed hair and immaculate clothing.
She was working in the day-care center of a textile factory in the early 1990s
when production ground to a halt. Men were ordered to stay in their jobs, but
Workers' Party cadres at the factory started whispering that the married women,
or ajumas, ought to moonlight to provide for their families.
"It was clear that the ajumas had to go out and earn money or the family would
starve," Kim said.
She first tried to raise pigs, locking them in a shed outside her downtown
apartment building and feeding them slop left over from making tofu. But the
electricity and water were too unreliable to keep the business going.
In 1995, Kim sold her apartment in the choice Shinam district and bought a
cheaper one, hoping to use the proceeds to import rice from the countryside. But
that too failed when she injured her back and couldn't work.
The family's situation became dire. Her husband's employer, a provincial radio
station, stopped paying salaries, and food distribution ended. In 1996, her
mother-in-law died of starvation, and her husband the following year.
"First he got really, really thin and then bloated. His last words to me were,
'Let's get a bottle of wine, go to a restaurant and enjoy ourselves,' " Kim
recalled. "I felt bad that I couldn't fulfill his last wish."
In 1998, Kim's 26-year-old son, who had been a wrestler and gymnast, grew weak
from hunger and contracted pneumonia. A shot of penicillin from the market would
have cost 40 won, the same price as enough corn powder to feed herself and her
three daughters for a week. She opted for the corn and watched her son succumb
to the infection.
But Kim did not give up. She swapped apartments again and used the money to
start another business, this time baking biscuits and neungju, a potent corn
moonshine. If buyers didn't have cash, she would accept chile powder or anything
else she could use.
"We made just enough to put food on the table," said Kim.
Much of Chongjin's commerce is still not officially sanctioned, so it has an
impromptu quality. Money changes hands over wooden carts that can be rolled away
in a hurry. Those who can't afford carts sell on tarpaulins laid out in the
dirt.
Fashion boutiques are slapped together with poles and clotheslines, enlivening
the monochromatic landscape with garish pinks and paisleys. Some clothes have
the labels ripped out and vendors whisper that these items came from araet
dongne or the "village below," a euphemism for South Korea, whose products are
illegal in the North.
Shoppers can buy 88-pound sacks of rice emblazoned with U.S. flags, and biscuits
and corn noodles produced by three factories in Chongjin run by the U.N. World
Food Program — all intended to be humanitarian handouts.
Some people cut hair or repair bicycles, though furtively because these jobs are
supposed to be controlled by the government's Convenience Bureau.
"They will bring a chair and mirror to the market to cut hair," Kim said. "The
police can come at any moment, arrest them and confiscate their scissors."
Another new business is a computer salon. It looks like an Internet cafe, but
because there's no access to the Web in North Korea, it is used mostly by
teenagers to play video games.
More products are available, but inflation puts them out of reach for most
people. The price of rice has increased nearly eightfold since the economic
reforms of 2002 to 525 won per pound; an average worker earns 2,500 won a month
— about $1 at the unofficial exchange rate.
World Food Program officials in North Korea say the vast majority of the
population is less well off since the economic changes, especially factory
workers, civil servants, retirees and anybody else on a fixed income. But there
are those who have gotten rich. Poor Chongjin residents disparage them as
donbulrae, or money insects.
"There are people who started trading early and figured out the ropes," said a
64-year-old retired math teacher who sells rabbits at the market. "But those of
us who were loyal and believed in the state, we are the ones who are suffering."
If Chongjin's economic center is Sunam market, its political heart is Pohang
Square, a vast plaza dominated by a 25-foot bronze statue of Kim Il Sung.
The grass here is neatly mowed, the shrubbery pruned and the pavement in good
repair. Even when the rest of the city is without electricity, the statue is
bathed in light. Across the street, a tidy pink building houses a permanent
exhibit of the national flower, a hybrid begonia called Kimjongilia, named for
current leader Kim Jong Il.
Since the practice of religion is barred, Pohang Square stands in as a spiritual
center. Newlyweds in their best clothes pose for pictures, bowing to the statue
so that their union is symbolically blessed.
When Kim Il Sung died on July 8, 1994, half a million people came to Pohang
Square to pay their respects in the pouring rain and stifling heat. But among
the adoring multitudes, there were malcontents.
One was Ok Hui, the eldest daughter of entrepreneur Kim Hui Suk. Though she
dutifully took her place in the throng, any sadness she felt came from a
foreboding that Kim Jong Il would be worse than his father.
"I went day and night along with everybody else. You had to…. But there were no
tears coming from my eyes," recalled Ok Hui, now 39, who did not want her family
name published.
Ok Hui worked for a construction company's propaganda unit, a job that entailed
riding around in a truck with a megaphone, exhorting workers to do their best
for the fatherland. But she didn't believe what she preached.
Her father had taught her to doubt the regime. As a reporter and member of the
Workers' Party, he knew more about the outside world than many people and
realized how far North Korea lagged behind South Korea and China.
"He and his friends would stay up at night when my mother was out, talking about
what a thief Kim Jong Il was," Ok Hui said.
Her mother, though, remained a firm believer. "I lived only for the marshal. I
never had a thought otherwise," said Kim Hui Suk. "Even when my husband and son
died, I thought it was my fault."
Ok Hui and her mother frequently clashed. "Why did you give birth to me in this
horrible country?" Ok Hui remembers taunting her mother.
"Shut up! You're a traitor to your country!" Kim retorted.
"Whom do you love more? Kim Jong Il or me?" her daughter shot back.
The regime was probably less beloved in Chongjin than elsewhere in North Korea.
Food had run out in its province, North Hamgyong, earlier than in other areas,
and starvation rates were among the highest in the nation.
Chongjin's people are reputed to be the most independent-minded in North Korea.
One famous report of unrest centers on the city. In 1995, senior officers from
the 6th army corps in Chongjin were executed for disloyalty and the entire unit,
estimated at 40,000 men, was disbanded. It is still unclear whether the incident
was an attempted uprising or a corruption case.
Chongjin is known for its vicious gang wars, and it was sometimes difficult to
distinguish political unrest from ordinary crime. There were increasing
incidents of theft and insubordination. At factories, desperate workers
dismantled machinery or stripped away copper wiring to sell for food.
Public executions by firing squad were held outside Sunam market and on the lawn
of the youth park, once a popular lover's lane.
In a village called Ihyon-ri on the outskirts of Chongjin, a gang suspected of
anti-government activities killed a national security agent who had tried to
infiltrate the group, former kindergarten teacher Seo Kyong Hui said.
"This guy was from my village. He had been sent to inform on a group that was
engaged in suspicious activities," she said. "They caught him and stoned him to
death."
Work crews went out early in the morning to wash away any anti-regime graffiti
painted overnight, according to human rights groups, but most people were too
scared to express their discontent. Badmouthing the leadership is still
considered blasphemy.
To discourage anti-regime activity, North Korea punishes "political crimes" by
banishing entire families to remote areas or labor camps.
"If you have one life to live, you would gladly give it to overthrow this
government," said Seo, the teacher. "But you are not the only one getting
punished. Your family will go through hell."
Even as Kim Jong Il's regime weakens, many of its stalwarts are growing richer.
Many of Chongjin's well-to-do are members of the Workers' Party or are connected
to the military or security services. In the new economy, they use their ties to
power to trade with China, obtain market licenses, extract bribes and sell
bureaucratic favors.
"Those who have power in North Korea always figure out ways to make money," said
Joo Sung Ha, 31, who grew up in Chongjin and now works as a journalist in Seoul.
Joo was the pampered only son of a prominent official, and his family lived in
Shinam, in the city's northern hills overlooking the ocean. By the standards of
South Korea or China, the single-family homes with lines of fish and squid
drying from the roofs are nothing special. But for North Koreans, these are
mansions.
The Joo family had a 2,000-square-foot cement-block house and a walled garden
about twice that large. The garden proved crucial in protecting the family
against the famine, though they had to contend with hungry soldiers who would
scale the walls and steal potatoes and cabbages.
North Korean families like to measure their status by the number of wardrobes
they own, and Joo's family had five — plus a television, a refrigerator, a tape
recorder, a sewing machine, an electric fan and a camera. They didn't have a
phone or a car — at that time those were unthinkable even for a well-off family
— but they did have a bicycle.
"The appliances were of no use after the electricity ran out," Joo said. "The
bicycle was the most important thing, because the buses and trams stopped
running."
Joo attended the best elementary school in Chongjin, the city's foreign language
institute, and eventually the country's top school, Kim Il Sung University in
Pyongyang. He never met a native English speaker in the North, or any foreigner
for that matter, but he trained his ear with videotapes of the BBC and banned
Hollywood films.
"I sometimes watched 'Gone With the Wind' twice a day. Anybody else would have
been arrested for watching Hollywood movies," he recalled.
Joo's glimpses of Western culture eroded his loyalty to the system. "I saw
myself 20 years down the road in the prime of my career and North Korea would be
collapsing," he said.
While many of his classmates went to work for the regime's propaganda news
service after graduating, Joo arranged to return to Chongjin, where he taught
high school until he escaped in 2001.
"The people from our neighborhood couldn't understand," said Joo, who stays in
contact with his family. "They thought I had everything."
Kim Hye Young, an actress, was also a child of privilege. Her father, Kim Du Seon, was an official of a trading company that sold mushrooms and fish in
China. He learned how to navigate the bureaucracy, using his connections with
the army and security services.
"If one of [the officials] had a wedding in the family, they would come to me
for a couple of cases of wine," the older Kim said.
As trade with China became more important, the family prospered. They took
drives in a company car and ate at Chongjin's nicest restaurant.
Growing up, Kim showed a flair for theater, and through her acting became a
member of the elite in her own right. Her best-known role was in a play called
"The Strong and the Righteous," in which she portrayed a spy who sacrifices her
life for North Korea.
When the production won first place in a Pyongyang drama festival in 1996, she
got to meet Kim Jong Il. Still breathless with the memory, she said the leader
shook her hand and gave her a fountain pen.
"I knew that I, as an actress, had an important role to promote the ideology of
my country," Kim said.
Kim and her sisters were largely oblivious to the famine, and their mother said
she took pains to shelter them.
"My daughters don't know to this day how many children in our neighborhood
starved to death," said her mother, Choe Geum Lan. She also didn't tell them
that their father, as a result of his business trips to China, had become
increasingly pessimistic about North Korea's future.
In 1998, when Kim was home from Pyongyang on vacation, her parents told her the
family was going to visit an aunt in Musan, a city near the Chinese border. It
was not until they had crossed to the other side that Kim and her teenage
sisters, were told they had defected.
Kim, now 29 and advertising toothpaste on South Korean television, is one of the
few defectors who says she didn't want to leave.
"I was content with my life," she said.
Today, North Korea's elites are even better off, buying telephones for their
homes and even cars.
"For $4,000 or $5,000, anybody can buy a car now. It used to be that you weren't
allowed to register your own car. We couldn't dream of it," said Kim Yong Il, a
defector from Chongjin who lives in Seoul.
Recently, he arranged to have a computer smuggled from China to his relatives in
Chongjin. North Korea's state-run companies don't have computers, so they're
eager to hire people who do. "If you have a computer, you can get a job," he
said.
Visitors have been shocked to glimpse the new conspicuous consumption in
Chongjin.
Jeung Young Tai, a South Korean academic who was in Chongjin delivering South
Korean government aid, noticed a paunchy man standing in front of the Chonmasan
Hotel next to a new Lexus.
And at a hot spring in Kyongsong, on the city's outskirts, he saw a woman
carrying a lap dog — a striking sight in a country where there is so little food
that the only pets usually are goldfish.
"You get the sense that there is a tremendous gap between rich and poor and that
the gap is growing," Jeung said.
The flip side, of course, is that the poor are getting poorer.
In Chongjin, those at the very bottom of the heap can be found at the train
station.
The cavernous building boasts a large portrait of Kim Il Sung above the entrance
and a granite-faced clock that rarely tells the right time. In front is a vast
plaza crammed with people waiting for trains — sometimes for days, because the
trains have no fixed schedules — and people waiting for nothing at all.
These are the homeless, many of them children. They're called kotchebi, or
swallows, because they wander the streets and sometimes between towns in search
of food. Many gravitate to Chongjin station, because it is a major hub and the
travelers have more to give.
A video shot last year by a military official and sold to Japan's NTV television
captured barefoot children near the station in torn, filthy clothing fighting
over a nearly empty jar of kimchi. One boy scooted along the pavement on his
buttocks; the narrator said his toes had been eaten away by frostbite.
Kim Hyok knows how easy it is for a child to end up at the station; he spent the
better part of two years living there.
"If you can't find somebody or they left their home, chances are you can find
them at the station," said Kim, now 23 and resettled in South Korea.
Kim's mother died when he was a toddler, and he was raised by his father, a
party member and an employee of a military unit that sold fish in China. During
his early childhood, Kim, his father and elder brother lived in relative comfort
in a high-rise apartment in the Sunam district.
When the government stopped handing out rations in 1993, Kim's father used his
connections to place his sons in an orphanage 60 miles away.
Kim, who was about 12 at the time, wasn't sorry to be sent away. It was
considered a privilege because the orphanages had food.
In 1997, just before his 16th birthday, Kim "graduated" from the orphanage. He
caught a train back to Chongjin, but when he got to his neighborhood, things
looked unfamiliar. The electricity was off. Many apartment buildings had no
glass in the windows and appeared vacant.
Climbing the eight flights in pitch dark to his family's unit, he heard a baby
crying and wondered whose it might be. Confused and scared, he knocked on the
door.
A young couple opened the door and told him his father had moved long ago but
left a message: Look for him at the train station.
The phenomenon of vagrancy is testament to how much North Korea has changed.
Before the famine, the government controlled people's movements so strictly that
they could not dream of visiting a relative in a nearby town without a travel
permit, let alone selling their homes. Not showing up for work could bring a
visit from police.
But as people embarked on increasingly desperate hunts for food, families broke
apart. With few telephones and a barely functional postal service, parents and
children became separated.
"People just started wandering around because they were hungry," Kim said. "They
would sell their apartments for a few bags of rice."
Kim never found his father. He also never found his brother, who had left the
orphanage a year earlier.
With no place to go, Kim ended up at the train station. By night, he slept
squeezed into a narrow space designed for a sliding iron gate. By day, he
loitered near the food vendors on the plaza. He often worked with a gang of
other kids — a few would topple a vendor's cart and the others would scoop up
whatever spilled.
"If you're not fast, you can't eat," said Kim, who even today in South Korea
bears the signs of chronic malnutrition, with a head that looks oversized on a
shockingly short frame.
Kim began hopping the slow-moving trains that pass through Chongjin on their way
to the Chinese border. Once on board, Kim would scramble up to the top of a car,
flatten himself to avoid the electric lines above and, using his pack as a
pillow, ride for hours.
At the border, he would wade across the river to hawk the items in his pack:
household goods on consignment from Chongjin residents, who were selling off
their possessions.
In 1998, Kim was arrested by Chinese authorities, who do not recognize North
Koreans as refugees. He was sent back to North Korea and spent two years in a
prison camp before escaping again in 2000 to China, where he was eventually
taken in by missionaries and brought to South Korea.
For every homeless person who survived, many more likely died. Kim Hui Suk
recalled a particularly ghoulish scene at the train station.
"Once I saw them loading three bodies into a cart," Kim said. "One guy, a man in
his 40s, was still conscious. His eyes were sort of blinking, but they still
were taking him away."
Although the ranks of the homeless have thinned since the height of the famine,
North Korean residents say their numbers are still considerable.
"If somebody disappears, you don't know whether he dropped dead on the road or
went to China," the coal miner said.
About 100,000 North Koreans have escaped to China in the last 10 years. Many
have ended up returning to North Korea, either because they were deported or
because they missed their families. They often back bring money, goods to trade
and strange new ideas.
Smugglers carry chests that can hold up to 1,000 pirated DVDs. South Korean soap
operas, movies about the Korean War and Hollywood action films are among the
most popular. Even pornography is making its way in.
This is a radical change for a country so prudish that until recently women were
not permitted to ride bicycles because it was thought too provocative.
Seo Kyong
Hui, the kindergarten teacher, said that when she left North Korea in 1998, "I
was 26 years old, and I still didn't know how a baby was conceived."
Even today, women are prohibited from wearing short skirts or sleeveless shirts,
and both sexes are forbidden to wear blue jeans. Infractions bring rebukes from
the public standards police.
But it is a losing battle to maintain what used to be a hermetic seal around the
country. Just a few years ago, ordinary North Koreans could make telephone calls
only from post offices. Dialing abroad was virtually impossible. Now some people
carry Chinese cellphones and pay for rides to the border to pick up a signal and
call overseas.
Smugglers also bring in cheap Chinese radios. Unlike North Korean radios, which
are preset to government channels, the Chinese models can be tuned to anything,
even South Korean programs or the Korean-language broadcasts of Radio Free Asia.
In the past, being caught with such contraband would land a person in political
prison. Nowadays, security personnel will more likely confiscate the illicit
item for personal use.
When a policeman caught Ok Hui, the entrepreneur's daughter, with a Chinese
radio in 2001, the first question he asked was, "So how do you work this thing?"
She wrote down the frequencies for South Korean radio stations.
"Don't you have earphones so you can listen without anybody hearing you?" the
officer then demanded.
North Korea instructs its citizens that the country is a socialist paradise, but
the government knows outside influences can puncture its carefully crafted
illusions.
"Bourgeois anti-communist ideology is paralyzing the people's sound mind-set,"
warns a Workers' Party document dated April 2005. "If we allow ourselves to be
affected by these novel ideas, our absolute idolization for the marshal [Kim Il
Sung] will disappear."
Among those who make it to China, many describe a moment of epiphany when they
find out just how bad off North Koreans are.
Kim Ji Eun, a doctor from Chongjin, remembers wading across the partially frozen
Tumen River in March 1999, staggering to a Chinese farmhouse and seeing a dish
of white rice and meat set out in a courtyard.
"I couldn't figure it out at first. I thought maybe it was for refrigeration,"
recalled Kim, who now lives in South Korea. "Then I realized that dogs in China
live better than even party members in North Korea."
Many Chongjin residents who are caught trying to flee the country end up back in
the city, behind the barbed wire of Nongpo Detention Center.
It sits near the railroad tracks in a swampy waterfront area. Prisoners are
assigned back-breaking jobs in the nearby rice paddies or brick factory, where
the workday begins at 5 a.m.
Ok Hui was one of those who served time in Nongpo. A rebel by nature, she had
become fed up with North Korea and a difficult marriage.
In September 2001, during one of several failed attempts to escape, she was
arrested in Musan and brought back to Chongjin by train. Guards tied the female
prisoners to one another by tightly winding shoelaces around their thumbs.
In Nongpo, the inmates bunked in rows of 10, squeezed so tightly together that
they had to sleep on their sides. Newcomers sometimes had to bed down in the
corridor near overflowing toilets. Meals consisted of a thin, salty soup,
sometimes supplemented by a few kernels of raw corn or a chunk of uncooked
potato.
"The walls were very high and surrounded by wire," Ok Hui said. "One woman tried
to climb the wall. They beat her almost to death. You can't imagine. They made
us stand and watch."
One day, when she was assigned to work in the fields, she spotted an old woman.
She took off her underwear and offered it to the woman in exchange for sending a
message to her mother. Underwear is scarce in North Korea, so the woman accepted
and agreed to send a telegram to Ok Hui's mother.
With her market earnings, Kim Hui Suk bought 10 packs of cigarettes for a
security official to arrange her daughter's release.
Some days later, the prison administrator came to talk to Ok Hui and other
female prisoners who were picking corn. They were all due to be freed shortly,
and the administrator urged them to resist the temptations of capitalism and
imperialism, and to devote themselves to North Korea.
Then, he asked for a show of hands: Who would promise not to run away again to
China?
Not a single woman raised her arm.
"We were all just thinking that our whole lives we had been told lies," Ok Hui
recalled. "Our whole lives, in fact, were lies. We just felt this immense rage
toward the system."
The prison administrator looked at the women squatting sullenly in silence in
the cornfield.
"Well," he said, "if you go again to China, next time don't get caught."
*Forty days after her release, Ok Hui escaped again to China and made her way to
South Korea. She used $8,000 in resettlement money from South Korea's government
to pay a broker to smuggle her mother out of North Korea. Today Ok Hui works in
a funeral home and her mother as a housekeeper.
NORTH KOREA: Glimpses of a Hermit Nation
By Barbara Demick, Times Staff Writer, July 3, 2005 latimes.com
Part 1. A decade after a massive famine, North Koreans are still struggling. In Chongjin, deprivation spurs change.
His day begins at 4:30 a.m. The
64-year-old retired math teacher doesn't own a clock or even a watch, but the
internal alarm that has kept him alive while so many of his fellow North Koreans
have starved to death tells him he had better get out to pick grass if his
family is to survive. Soon the streets of his city, Chongjin, will be swarming
with others doing the same. Some cook the grass to eat. The teacher feeds it to
the rabbits his family sells at the market.
At 10 a.m., he eats a modest meal of corn porridge. A late breakfast is best as
it allows him and his wife to skip lunch. Then he goes with a hand cart to
collect firewood. He has to walk two hours from Chongjin, mostly uphill, to find
a patch that has not been stripped bare of vegetation. "There is no time for
rest. If you stand still, you will not survive," said the teacher, a lean,
soft-spoken man with salt-and-pepper hair who could be described as elegant if
not for his threadbare trousers and his fingernails, as gnarled as oyster shells
from chronic malnutrition.
Later, if it is one of the rare evenings when there is electricity, he might
indulge in reading Tolstoy. More often than not, he collapses for a few hours of
sleep before the routine is replayed for yet another day. Such is the quest for
survival in North Korea, an impoverished country that is the most closed in the
world.
Although North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons has captured the world's
attention, outsiders know relatively little about its people or the miseries
they have endured since a famine in the mid-1990s wiped out an estimated 2
million people. In the rare instances in which foreigners are admitted to the
totalitarian country, it is on strictly escorted tours of the capital,
Pyongyang, and a few other carefully selected sites.
To penetrate the secrecy, the Los Angeles Times spoke in China and South Korea
with more than 30 people from Chongjin, North Korea's third-largest city. Their
stories, along with hours of surreptitiously shot video, present a portrait of
the city and of daily life in a nation struggling with deprivation and change.
Most of the factories in Chongjin, a former industrial port, are rusting into
ruin. Those still operating can barely pay salaries; the average worker's wage
amounts to $1 per month at current exchange rates.
Even with international aid, many people go to bed wondering whether they will
eat the next day. Residents, along with officials of the United Nations World
Food Program, say food shortages have grown worse again in the last year. "Maybe
people are not dying today out in the streets like they were before," said a
coal miner who lives in Chongjin, "but they are still dying — just quietly in
their homes."
The prolonged hardship has left North Koreans increasingly disillusioned with
leader Kim Jong Il and the ideology of national self-reliance that once held the
nation together. People say the regime has less and less control. With
corruption running rampant, the state is no longer solely in charge of commerce.
People hustle to sell anything they can — prohibited videos of South Korean soap
operas, real estate and official travel documents. In this free-for-all, some
people have prospered. Many more are just a step ahead of starvation.
Like the retired math teacher, many of the people interviewed are Chongjin
residents who have slipped into China temporarily to work or beg. Others are
defectors who live in South Korea. They may have prejudices. Current residents
may minimize their difficulties out of lingering loyalty to their country. Some
refuse to be quoted by name, fearing that they or their family members in North
Korea might be punished — unauthorized contact with foreigners is a serious
crime in North Korea. Defectors are often bitter, sometimes recalling only the
darkest aspects of their lives in North Korea, and may exaggerate hardships to
win sympathy.
To a great degree, however, their stories are supported by the few foreigners
who have visited the area. And their reminiscences overlap. The retired math
teacher, a well-spoken man who seems like he should be on a college campus,
receives a monthly pension of 700 won, about 30 cents at the unofficial exchange
rate. It is not even enough to buy 2 pounds of rice. Although his wife, son and
daughter-in-law work as hard as he does, the teacher's family survives on
various "substitute" foods, mainly ground corn — not corn meal, but a powder
made from the entire plant, including husks, cobs, stems and leaves. "We fry it
like pancakes, we make it into cakes. We drop it in water like noodles," said
the teacher, who cried unabashedly as he described his life in Chongjin. "We try
to cook it this way or that, but it still gives you indigestion."
At first glance, visitors say, Chongjin almost looks like a pleasant place to
live. The coastline in this remote northeastern stretch of the country is as
rugged as Maine's, the ocean waters a vivid aquamarine. Although Chongjin is
only 275 miles from the capital as the crow flies, the journey takes three days
by car, or about 27 hours by train. Most visitors arrive from the south on a
treacherous dirt road that twists around the mountains girding the city of
600,000.
On the outskirts of Chongjin, the road widens into a boulevard lined with trees,
a video taken by a visitor in 2001 shows. But newcomers soon sense something
strange: In a city nearly as populous as Boston, there are almost no personal
cars, only military and government vehicles. The roadway is so empty that
schoolchildren stroll blithely down the middle. Power lines are strung overhead
for trams, which run infrequently and are so crowded that people hang off the
back. Even bicycles are a luxury, so most people walk, often with improbably
large bundles on their backs. Since there are no taxis, some people make hand
carts and hire themselves out as porters. They wait at the roadside for
customers. Many are homeless, so at night they sleep on their carts.
There are other oddities. The upper floors of an 18-story apartment building
along the main boulevard are unoccupied because there are no elevators. There is
a zoo, but it has no animals. There's hardly any garbage because there is too
little to go to waste. Women have set up makeshift eateries on vacant lots,
ladling out soup cooked over charcoal stoves, using hand-cranked blowers on the
fires. Customers eat squatting at tables fashioned from wood planks propped on
buckets.
Nowadays, Chongjin is not the worst-off place in North Korea, because its
proximity to the Chinese border, 50 miles away, offers access to consumer
products. Its markets are believed to be the largest in the country outside of
Pyongyang. But as an industrial city in an area with little arable land, it was
particularly vulnerable to famine. Disaster struck in the early 1990s.
Chongjin's outmoded and inefficient factories had limped along on spare parts
and cheap oil from the Soviet Union. When the communist bloc collapsed, suddenly
there was no fuel for the power plants. Factories stopped. Farms couldn't
produce because they depended on chemical fertilizers and electric irrigation
systems. Heavy rains and floods in the summer of 1995 exacerbated a famine
already underway.
Chongjin used to be a busy port, with Japanese and Soviet ships loading products
from the factories. Now it is filled with flimsy squid-fishing boats; most of
the larger vessels in port are bringing in humanitarian aid. The foreign sailors
are not permitted to disembark. Aside from a small, ragged seafood market at the
east end of the harbor, the waterfront is desolate. The government has installed
high fences to keep residents from leaving or fishing, which is illegal for
individuals.
Perched above the port, in the style of the Hollywood sign, giant letters
crumbling into the hillside proclaim, "Long Live Kim Il Sung," referring to
North Korea's founder, who died in 1994. Other signs throughout the city herald
his son and successor, Kim Jong Il, as the "Son of the 21st Century." The city,
though, looks like it never emerged from the 1960s. Most buildings are
whitewashed cinderblock apartments or row houses built after the area was
heavily bombed by the United States during the Korean War, and they give
Chongjin a monochrome bleakness. Even the red paint of the propaganda billboards
— "We are happy," and "We have nothing to envy," read two of the slogans — has
faded in the sun.
"I had the impression of a ghost town. It was really colorless, gray. There was
no life," said Violaine de Marsangy, a French aid worker who spent six weeks in
Chongjin in 1999. The big power plant on the waterfront operates at about 25% of
capacity, so when dusk falls, swaths of the city vanish into darkness. Kathi
Zellweger of the Catholic charity Caritas recalls being driven into Chongjin:
"It's pitch dark at night, so dark you can't even tell there is a city."
West of the port is an industrial area, home to Chongjin Steel Co., Chemical
Textile Co., May 10 Coal Mine Machinery Factory and Kimchaek Iron & Steel. These
were once the pride of North Korea's industrial sector. No longer. "Chongjin was
like a forest of scrap metal, with huge plants that seem to go on for miles and
miles that have been turned into rust buckets," said Tun Myat, who in 1997
became one of the first senior U.N. officials permitted to visit the city. "I've
been all over the world, and I've never seen anything quite like this."
In a working-class neighborhood in southern Chongjin, the 39-year-old coal miner
lives in a squat, drab house. The homes in Ranam are organized in blocks,
usually with five units on either side of an alley and an outhouse at one end
shared by the 10 families. His only piece of furniture is a wooden table with
folding legs. He has one cooking pot. One knife. A couple of bowls. A cutting
board that he made himself. A large urn to store water he brings from the well.
He has four pairs of chopsticks and four spoons — exactly enough for himself,
his wife, 12-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son. He traded away his extra
utensils for food years ago.
When there is electricity, he screws a bare lightbulb into a wall socket. His
children have no toys or books. Each member of the family owns two sets of
clothes — one for summer and one for winter — that they store on a homemade
hanger suspended from a nail in the wall. On the opposite wall hang the
obligatory framed portraits of Kim Jong Il and his late father, Kim Il Sung, who
seized power in the northern half of the Korean peninsula after World War II.
The government forbids people to put family photos or other decorations on the
same wall. Party cadres used to drop by almost daily to make sure residents kept
portraits free of dust, but that stopped two years ago. "They don't worry so
much about ideology now," he said. "All anybody cares about is finding enough
food to get through the day."
The miner is a pleasant man with a broad, welcoming smile, handsome despite a
missing bottom tooth. He seems cheerful by disposition, but when he talks about
the famine, a scowl spreads across his face. The miner estimated that four or
five of his housing block's 30 residents, and half of his 3,500 co-workers at
the Poam coal mine, had died of starvation and related illnesses since the
mid-1990s.
For years, one of the hallmarks of North Korea's government was its public
distribution system, which doled out food and other goods to citizens nearly for
free. The regime considered coal mining a strategic occupation, and miners were
given extra rations. But in the early 1990s, the lights in the mines went out,
as did the pumps that kept the shafts dry. Beams rotted and equipment corroded.
As the mines ceased production, the rations stopped.
The children were the first to start dying, then the elderly. Next to perish
were men, who seemed to need more calories to survive than women. Chongjin
residents learned to recognize the stages of starvation. First, the victims
become listless and too weak to work. Their vision grows blurry. They become
bone-thin, then startlingly, their torsos bloat. Toward the end, they just lie
still, sometimes hallucinating about food. While some people seem to fade away,
others die in agony, their intestines blocked when they can't digest substitute
foods, such as corn powder and oak leaves. Particularly lethal to children's
digestive systems are ersatz rice cakes — molded out of a paste made from the
inner bark of pine trees.
Among the victims was the miner's 60-year-old father, an otherwise strong and
robust man who had never been ill as long as he could remember. The miner's best
friend, a co-worker and childhood buddy, dragged himself out to the mountains to
look for food and never returned. The miner also vividly recalled his daughter
running home screaming because her best friend, the 5-year-old boy next door,
had died of a blockage. "He died on his father's back while he was carrying him
home from the hospital. My daughter saw his body and came home crying. She said
Myong Chol was lying still and not moving," the miner said. "Five or six of her
friends died after that. We just had to tell her they moved away to another
neighborhood."
Like everyone in his housing block, the miner and his family sleep on blankets
on the vinyl-covered concrete floor. In a traditional style that vanished
decades ago in South Korea, they cook on big pots over a fire whose hot air is
directed under the floor to warm it. But the miner rarely has much firewood, so
his wife often cooks outdoors on a neighbor's portable charcoal stove. The
neighbors try to help one another. During Chongjin's bitter winter, when
temperatures can plunge to 10 below zero, they pool their firewood to heat one
unit where everybody sleeps. But people rarely have enough food to share. "We
have a saying that a full heart comes with a full stomach," he said. "If you
can't help your own child who is hungry, you won't help your neighbor's."
Officially, he still works for the mine. But he hasn't received a salary since
May 2003, so he seldom shows up for work. He taught himself to recognize
medicinal herbs, and now he hunts them in the mountains to sell. Looking for
more money, he jumped a freight train to the Chinese border and sneaked across
the Tumen River last August to work illegally in the fields. On days that he
found work, he made about $1.80, which he considered a fortune. He planned to
return to his family in Chongjin over the winter.
Three years ago, the miner and his wife decided to have another baby. "North
Koreans aren't having many children because they can't afford to feed them," the
miner said. "But my daughter complained she was lonely, and we really wanted to
have another child." The baby, a boy, was born at home, a neighbor helping with
the delivery. He was full-term but weighed just 3+ pounds at birth and had
difficulty nursing from his undernourished mother. The child, unable to digest
powdered corn, remains underweight.
The miner said the food situation in Chongjin had gotten worse in the last year
because of inflation. "There is food in the market, but people can't afford to
buy it," he said late last year in China. People are "getting weaker physically,
financially." "In North Korea," he added matter-of-factly, "I don't remember a
single day when I had a normal, happy life."
North Korea's schools are free, but children in Chongjin have to buy their own
books and uniforms and bring firewood for heat. The World Food Program is
supposed to supply 632 nursery and primary schools around Chongjin with biscuits
and other food, but that aid is often suspended because of insufficient
contributions. When the food runs out, many children stop coming to class. The
nation once boasted near-universal literacy, but now it is common to see kids
working in fields or markets during the day. Children get leave from school in
the autumn to collect acorns for food.
Seo Kyong Hui watched as the students vanished. She was a feisty and idealistic
21-year-old graduate of Chongjin's Kim Jong Suk Education College — named for
Kim Jong Il's mother — when she was assigned in 1994 to teach in a mining
village on the southern outskirts of the city. Her school had 50 pupils then,
but by the time she left the country in 1998, enrollment had fallen to 15. The
Saenggiryong Mine Kindergarten was housed in a dank, concrete building. Seo had
little equipment, save for an accordion, which all kindergarten teachers were
required to play so they could lead their pupils in songs praising the Kim
family. Her kindergartners sat at worn wooden desks, often wearing heavy
overcoats and hats to stay warm.
Until 1995, a full-time cook prepared lunches of soup and rice. But as the
crisis worsened, the school closed its cafeteria and asked children to bring
their own meals. Many came empty-handed. "We would take a spoonful from each kid
who had lunch and give it to the one without," Seo said. "But the parents didn't
like that, because they didn't have enough for themselves." Seo could tell when
a pupil was in trouble. His hair would turn dry and yellowish, and his eyes
would sink into their sockets. At recess, while the better-fed children ran and
squealed, the hungry child would lie on a mat. Sometimes the child would flop
over in his chair during a lesson, cheek pressed against the desktop.
"One girl I remember used to be pretty as a doll, with black eyes and long
lashes," Seo said. "But her ribs showed, and her belly was swollen like one of
those Somalian kids. She would doze in class. I remember I once picked up her
head off the desk and looked at her face. It was yellow, as though she were
jaundiced, and her eyes were half-closed." The girl stopped coming to class. Seo
assumes she eventually died of starvation. Others dropped out, in what became a
pattern.
"The first time I saw a dead body, I shuddered with fear. But with time, you get
used to it. You become … insensitive," Seo said. "It was really strange. If only
one or two students had died, I would have been shocked. It would have been a
big tragedy and I'd have gone to the home to pay condolences. But when there are
so many, you get numb."
The students who remained received an education heavy with propaganda; course
materials depicted the U.S. soldiers who fought in the Korean War as wolves who
had massacred the general population. More important than math or even the
Korean language was the study of juche, the national ideology of self-reliance
put forth by Kim Il Sung. "Eight boys and nine girls are singing anthems in
praise of Kim Il Sung. How many children are singing in total?" is one question
from Primary School Grade 1 Mathematics, published in 2001 — or Juche 91 under
the North Korean calendar, which begins with the year of Kim Il Sung's birth.
"There is so much emphasis on ideology that other areas of education invariably
suffer," said Seo. Having escaped North Korea in 1998 with her mother and two
sisters, she lives in a suburb of Seoul and studies child welfare. "At the time
I didn't know. I just thought, 'This is how education is done.' "
Physician Kim Ji Eun worked for nearly a decade at Chongjin's Provincial
Hospital No. 2. It is the teaching hospital for the city's main medical school
and is located in Pohang, the district of the party elite. In the 1960s, much of
its equipment and some staff came from Eastern Europe. Older Chongjin residents
still proudly refer to it as the Czech hospital. But Kim, 40, cringes with
embarrassment as she recalls its privations.
Her patients were expected to bring their own food and blankets. There often
were no bandages, so they would cut strips of their own bedding. To hold their
intravenous fluid, patients usually brought empty bottles of Chongjin's most
popular beer, Nakwon (Paradise). "If they would bring in one beer bottle, they'd
get one IV. If they'd bring two bottles, they would get two," Kim said.
It wasn't always that way. Until the 1990s, North Korea provided free healthcare to its citizens and its pharmaceutical factories produced medicines. But when the economy collapsed and the factories closed, drugs became scarce. Doctors could prescribe medicine, but the prescriptions could be filled only if the patient had the money and the luck to find the pills at a private market.
Traditional remedies began to play
a bigger role. Twice a year, in spring and autumn, the physicians at Kim's
hospital would be required to travel into the mountains for up to five weeks to
hunt for medicinal plants. They would collect peony root to treat nervous
disorders, and wild yam, dandelion and atractylodes for digestive disorders.
Each doctor had a quota, and the herbs were weighed and inspected for
cleanliness by the hospital's chief pharmacologist. But herbs could not take the
place of powerful anesthetics. Doctors would use acupuncture for simple
surgeries such as appendectomies. "When it works, it works very well," Kim said.
As for when it doesn't, she said, "North Koreans are tough and used to bearing
pain. They're not like South Koreans who scream and shout about the slightest
thing."
Kim had wanted to be a teacher or journalist. But North Koreans aren't allowed
to chose their own professions, and because of her good grades in science, she
was assigned to medical school. She graduated in 1988. Early in her career, Kim
recalled, she saw a 27-year-old patient recently released from a prison where he
had been sent for "economic crimes." That meant he had engaged in private
business. He was malnourished and badly bruised from a beating. The hospital
director forbade Kim to give him medicine. "He's a convict," the director told
her. "Let's save it for someone else." Kim protested.
The clashes with her boss prompted
Kim to switch to pediatrics. But she found that even more frustrating. "I saw a
lot of 2-year-olds to 4-year-olds dying of malnutrition. Often it was not the
starvation itself. They would get a minor cold that would kill them," said Kim.
"They would look at you with these big eyes. Even the children always knew they
were dying."
She switched again, to research. But by this time, Kim was hungry herself. Her
salary had been discontinued. She clearly remembers the first day she went
without food. It was Sept. 9, 1993. She and her family had hiked into the
countryside to search for something to eat. Finding a single rotting pear on the
ground, they boiled it and split it five ways, among her parents, her sister's
husband and two children. Kim and her sister got none. Hunger made people
callous. Her best friend's husband and 2-year-old son died of starvation within
a few days of each other. Kim went to pay a condolence call. "Oh, I'm better
off. There are fewer mouths to feed," her friend told her.
Kim started accepting food from people in exchange for doctor's notes so they
could skip work and search for food. (Those who shirk work in North Korea can be
sent to prison.) But eventually the patients had no food to give doctors and
were so desperate they no longer bothered with notes. Kim and other physicians
stopped going to work. She fled North Korea in 1999 and now lives in Seoul.
Since then, North Korean hospitals have not improved, despite some international
aid. People die of treatable illnesses such as tuberculosis and even diarrhea.
"The hospitals are no better. The equipment is in a state of disrepair," said
one aid worker who had visited hospitals in Chongjin and elsewhere in the region
and spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize his work. "In most
hospitals," he said, "there is a pharmacy with a little carousel that might only
have as much [Western] medicine as you have in your medicine cabinet at home."
Some doctors support themselves by moonlighting. Abortions, though illegal, can
be obtained in Chongjin for a bucket of coal or a few pounds of rice.
As of last summer, the only major
factory in town with smoke regularly coming out of its stacks was that of
Chongjin Steel Co., which dominates the city's skyline. Kimchaek Iron & Steel,
which once had the largest factory in North Korea, with a workforce of 20,000,
operates only sporadically, as do some other small plants. But just because
Chongjin's factories are largely idle doesn't mean their workers stay home. In
what might seem an exercise in futility, Kim Sun Bok would put on her uniform
each morning and walk 50 minutes to the 2nd Metal Construction Factory. She had
to be there by 7:30, dressed in regulation indigo blue slacks, cap and canvas
shoes. But more often than not, she didn't get to perform her job, which was
making machine parts.
Instead, she and her co-workers were assigned to tend rice paddies or a cabbage
field. Sometimes she performed construction labor. Kim, a bird-like woman who
weighs barely 100 pounds, was told to haul paving stones and sacks of gravel for
a road that was being built entirely by hand. "Even if there is nothing to do,
they'll create tasks for us. And you have to come to work," said Kim, 32, who
fled North Korea in 2003. "People constantly visit your home to make sure you're
coming."
Before the workers could go home, there was an hourlong lecture in the factory's
auditorium that ended about 6 p.m. A common theme was the importance of the
collective over the individual. At least once a week, there was another hourlong
session in which workers had to criticize themselves and one another and promise
to do better. The trick, Kim said, was to pick a relatively innocuous failing.
"I should have worked harder to meet my quota" was a popular confession. Factory
workers had one day off per week, but workers often came in on that day anyway
to clean the plant. For their efforts, the 3,000 employees received hardly any
salary, but there was a powerful incentive to show up: The factory would often
dole out food. It was rarely rice and often animal feed, but it was better than
nothing.
Kim had been assigned to work there from the age of 18, and much of her social
life revolved around the plant. On the biggest public holidays, such as Kim Il
Sung's birthday, April 15, there might be a company outing in the mountains or
at a youth park on the waterfront. The workers would bring soju, a Korean grain
alcohol, and an accordion or guitar so they could sing songs. As other factories
were closing, Kim's boss tried to keep the plant going and find food for his
workers. He would cut his own deals with shipowners to make metal parts in
exchange for something to eat. "Our manager was a quick thinker. He knew how to
run the place so our factory wasn't as much of a basket case as some others,"
Kim said. "People who worked at other factories got nothing at all."
Other factory managers also began to take matters into their own hands,
sometimes with terrible consequences. Some of the factories were so
dysfunctional that desperate managers dismantled their machinery and sold it as
scrap metal or bartered it in China for food. At times, authorities looked the
other way; in other cases, they cracked down. Chongjin residents recall that
from 1995 to 1997, factory personnel accused of dismantling their factories were
executed. Kim remembers that managers of Kimchaek Iron & Steel were executed by
a firing squad on the banks of Suseong Stream, which cuts through the center of
town. One of them was her neighbor's son-in-law.
Residents were ordered by party leaders to come out and watch. "Everyone thought
it was a great pity," Kim said. "They knew he was not a hardened criminal or
common thief, but somebody who did it because his family was starving." Chongjin
residents were learning a lesson at odds with the ideology they had been taught
since they were children: The collective wouldn't save them. Individuals had to
do what they could to survive. "We didn't think of it as change at the time. But
we were learning we had to survive. We had to create something out of nothing,"
Kim said. "The individual had to change."
By Choe Sang-Hun International Herald Tribune, APRIL 29, 2005
SEOUL To supporters, they are heroic saviors who risk their lives to help North
Koreans escape a country that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice of the United
States called an "outpost of tyranny." To critics, they are despicable swindlers
who have commercialized human rights. To most people, they are simply known as
"brokers."
Years ago, North Korean defectors were so rare that the South Korean authorities
welcomed them with outdoor rallies, car parades and a lecture circuit filled
with anti-Communist propaganda. Recently, however, their arrivals have become so
routine they hardly draw much attention.
Leading this phenomenon is a network of "brokers," or people who specialize in
helping North Korean defectors reach South Korea. Their fees range from two
million to 20 million Korean won, or about $1,995 to $19,950.
Hundreds of brokers - many of them North Korean defectors with South Korean
passports or ethnic Koreans in China - operate in China and Southeast Asia.
Armed with global positioning devices, cellphones and local handlers, they
organize months-long covert operations. Some work independently; others with
missionaries and human rights activists.
These specialists seek out and train groups of North Koreans to climb walls,
smash through gates and sneak past guards into diplomatic missions in Beijing,
where they are often granted asylum and passage to South Korea. Other asylum
seekers are taken across China - through jungles, guard posts and minefields -
into Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia and Thailand, and then to the final destination
they are determined to reach at whatever cost: South Korea.
But not everything goes as planned or as promised. Many get arrested by the
Chinese police, who repatriate them for punishment in labor camps in Communist
North Korea. Some are raped, robbed or abandoned on their trek to freedom.
Brokers hold defectors hostage and blackmail their relatives in South Korea for
more money.
"They are like ticks sucking blood off the poor defectors," said Kim Dong Han,
president of the Seoul-based Law and Human Rights Research Institute. "What they
do is make money in the name of human rights."
Human rights activists say there are cases of rape, extortion and blackmailing.
But they warn that Seoul's recent decision to step up the monitoring of brokers
may have been a politically inspired move to discourage asylum bids that have
strained relations between the two Koreas.
For North Koreans who fled their homeland and live in hiding in China, rights
advocates say, brokers are the only hope for reaching South Korea.
"Have you been beaten so hard in jail that your bones were broken?" asked Lee Su
Chul, a North Korean defector, during a recent seminar on brokers. "Have you
seen your daughter kidnapped and sold into a brothel in China but you couldn't
do anything about it? If you do, you will understand why you need brokers."
Lee works for Durihana, a South Korean missionary group that helps North Korean
defectors reach the South.
Not all of these operators are profit-driven, said Kwak Dae Jung, a
representative of the Seoul-based Daily NK, an online newsletter dedicated to
human rights in North Korea. In January, Jeffrey Bahk, a 63-year-old
Korean-American missionary, was lost while crossing a river between Myanmar and
Laos with six North Korean defectors.
"Many North Koreans in China want to come to South Korea, but they don't know
how, without brokers," Kwak said. "These people could face death if caught and
repatriated home."
The controversy over brokers mirrors a larger debate in South Korea about how to
change North Korea. Some say that triggering an exodus of refugees - the kind
that preceded the collapse of the former Soviet Union - is the surest way of
toppling the totalitarian regime in Pyongyang. Others, like Kim, fear that such
tactics will force North Korea to retreat deeper into isolation and become
harsher in punishing citizens who cross into China to seek food, work or a trip
to South Korea.
Few North Koreans can slip across the border with South Korea, a strip of no
man's land sealed off on both sides by barbed wire, minefields and nearly two
million troops. Instead, food shortages and political repression are driving
more North Koreans into China, but the Chinese government does not recognize
them as refugees. The North Korean government accuses U.S. and South Korean spy
agents of kidnapping its citizens in China, and considers any discussion of its
human rights an attempt to topple its regime.
"We will accept all the North Korean defectors who arrive here, but the
government cannot organize or encourage these defections," said Chung Dong Moon,
an official at South Korea's Unification Ministry, reflecting Seoul's sensitive
relations with China and North Korea. Chung said that the brokers' role was
"inevitable."
Of the 1,890 North Koreans who reached South Korea last year, 1,500 arrived with
the help of brokers, according to the Unification Ministry. These people paid an
average of 4.5 million won to their brokers.
The recent surge in asylum bids began in March 2002, when human rights activists
helped 25 North Koreans reach the Spanish Embassy in Beijing.
The tactic was later copied by brokers, who scout and select vulnerable
embassies and schools in Beijing and elsewhere. They often invite journalists to
report on their operations.
When the Chinese authorities increased security in Beijing, the brokers smuggled
people into Mongolia, and then into Southeast Asian countries, bribing border
guards when necessary. As more brokers became available, their prices declined
to about 2.5 million won.
The plight of North Koreans in China - who number anywhere between 10,000 and
300,000 - is one of the most neglected human rights issues in the region,
causing a desperate demand for brokers, experts say.
Lee Woo Young, a professor at Kyungnam University in South Korea, compared the
conditions for some North Korean women in China, who were kidnapped by human
traffickers, with those of "comfort women," or Asian women who were forced into
sexual slavery for Japan's colonial army in the early 20th century.
Park Chul Min, a 43 year-old North Korean defector who arrived in South Korea
last June, said he appreciated the role of brokers, but complained that they
charged too much.
"After living in China for seven years without knowing the language and without
a single document that can prove who I am, I would give anything, pay anything
to come to South Korea," Park said. "But what about those women raped by
brokers? What about those who stepped on mines and died? Brokers demand money
but they never take responsibility for these things."
Park agreed to pay his broker six million won once he arrived in South Korea and
received customary financial assistance from the Seoul government. Defectors use
much of the aid to pay off brokers and to smuggle more relatives from the North.
So far Park has paid only one million won and said he has been harassed by his
broker.
The South Korean government has recently cut its cash assistance to North Korean
immigrants by half, to 13 million won, to discourage brokers from making big
profits. The police are investigating several brokers accused of using violence
on defectors who refuse to pay once they arrive in South Korea.
Oh Young Pil, a South Korean journalist, said he had witnessed the unethical
side of the operations that helped North Korean refugees. He said he had been
paid by a Japanese television journalist to guide North Korean defectors into
the Japanese consulate in Guangzhou, southern China, in 2003, and to record the
process on video.
The plan failed when the Chinese police arrested him and the North Koreans. Oh
spent 16 months in a Chinese prison.
"I thought I was helping the North Koreans. Now I can't sleep very well when I
think about what could have happened to the North Koreans," Oh said. "There was
a financial and political motive behind the project. And I feel guilty to have
been part of it."
SEOUL To supporters, they are heroic saviors who risk their lives to help North
Koreans escape a country that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice of the United
States called an "outpost of tyranny." To critics, they are despicable swindlers
who have commercialized human rights. To most people, they are simply known as
"brokers."
Years ago, North Korean defectors were so rare that the South Korean authorities
welcomed them with outdoor rallies, car parades and a lecture circuit filled
with anti-Communist propaganda. Recently, however, their arrivals have become so
routine they hardly draw much attention.
Leading this phenomenon is a network of "brokers," or people who specialize in
helping North Korean defectors reach South Korea. Their fees range from two
million to 20 million Korean won, or about $1,995 to $19,950.
Hundreds of brokers - many of them North Korean defectors with South Korean
passports or ethnic Koreans in China - operate in China and Southeast Asia.
Armed with global positioning devices, cellphones and local handlers, they
organize months-long covert operations. Some work independently; others with
missionaries and human rights activists.
These specialists seek out and train groups of North Koreans to climb walls,
smash through gates and sneak past guards into diplomatic missions in Beijing,
where they are often granted asylum and passage to South Korea. Other asylum
seekers are taken across China - through jungles, guard posts and minefields -
into Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia and Thailand, and then to the final destination
they are determined to reach at whatever cost: South Korea.
But not everything goes as planned or as promised. Many get arrested by the
Chinese police, who repatriate them for punishment in labor camps in Communist
North Korea. Some are raped, robbed or abandoned on their trek to freedom.
Brokers hold defectors hostage and blackmail their relatives in South Korea for
more money.
"They are like ticks sucking blood off the poor defectors," said Kim Dong Han,
president of the Seoul-based Law and Human Rights Research Institute. "What they
do is make money in the name of human rights."
Human rights activists say there are cases of rape, extortion and blackmailing.
But they warn that Seoul's recent decision to step up the monitoring of brokers
may have been a politically inspired move to discourage asylum bids that have
strained relations between the two Koreas.
For North Koreans who fled their homeland and live in hiding in China, rights
advocates say, brokers are the only hope for reaching South Korea.
"Have you been beaten so hard in jail that your bones were broken?" asked Lee Su
Chul, a North Korean defector, during a recent seminar on brokers. "Have you
seen your daughter kidnapped and sold into a brothel in China but you couldn't
do anything about it? If you do, you will understand why you need brokers."
Lee works for Durihana, a South Korean missionary group that helps North Korean
defectors reach the South.
Not all of these operators are profit-driven, said Kwak Dae Jung, a
representative of the Seoul-based Daily NK, an online newsletter dedicated to
human rights in North Korea. In January, Jeffrey Bahk, a 63-year-old
Korean-American missionary, was lost while crossing a river between Myanmar and
Laos with six North Korean defectors.
"Many North Koreans in China want to come to South Korea, but they don't know
how, without brokers," Kwak said. "These people could face death if caught and
repatriated home."
The controversy over brokers mirrors a larger debate in South Korea about how to
change North Korea. Some say that triggering an exodus of refugees - the kind
that preceded the collapse of the former Soviet Union - is the surest way of
toppling the totalitarian regime in Pyongyang. Others, like Kim, fear that such
tactics will force North Korea to retreat deeper into isolation and become
harsher in punishing citizens who cross into China to seek food, work or a trip
to South Korea.
Few North Koreans can slip across the border with South Korea, a strip of no
man's land sealed off on both sides by barbed wire, minefields and nearly two
million troops. Instead, food shortages and political repression are driving
more North Koreans into China, but the Chinese government does not recognize
them as refugees. The North Korean government accuses U.S. and South Korean spy
agents of kidnapping its citizens in China, and considers any discussion of its
human rights an attempt to topple its regime.
"We will accept all the North Korean defectors who arrive here, but the
government cannot organize or encourage these defections," said Chung Dong Moon,
an official at South Korea's Unification Ministry, reflecting Seoul's sensitive
relations with China and North Korea. Chung said that the brokers' role was
"inevitable."
Of the 1,890 North Koreans who reached South Korea last year, 1,500 arrived with
the help of brokers, according to the Unification Ministry. These people paid an
average of 4.5 million won to their brokers.
The recent surge in asylum bids began in March 2002, when human rights activists
helped 25 North Koreans reach the Spanish Embassy in Beijing.
The tactic was later copied by brokers, who scout and select vulnerable
embassies and schools in Beijing and elsewhere. They often invite journalists to
report on their operations.
When the Chinese authorities increased security in Beijing, the brokers smuggled
people into Mongolia, and then into Southeast Asian countries, bribing border
guards when necessary. As more brokers became available, their prices declined
to about 2.5 million won.
The plight of North Koreans in China - who number anywhere between 10,000 and
300,000 - is one of the most neglected human rights issues in the region,
causing a desperate demand for brokers, experts say.
Lee Woo Young, a professor at Kyungnam University in South Korea, compared the
conditions for some North Korean women in China, who were kidnapped by human
traffickers, with those of "comfort women," or Asian women who were forced into
sexual slavery for Japan's colonial army in the early 20th century.
Park Chul Min, a 43 year-old North Korean defector who arrived in South Korea
last June, said he appreciated the role of brokers, but complained that they
charged too much.
"After living in China for seven years without knowing the language and without
a single document that can prove who I am, I would give anything, pay anything
to come to South Korea," Park said. "But what about those women raped by
brokers? What about those who stepped on mines and died? Brokers demand money
but they never take responsibility for these things."
Park agreed to pay his broker six million won once he arrived in South Korea and
received customary financial assistance from the Seoul government. Defectors use
much of the aid to pay off brokers and to smuggle more relatives from the North.
So far Park has paid only one million won and said he has been harassed by his
broker.
The South Korean government has recently cut its cash assistance to North Korean
immigrants by half, to 13 million won, to discourage brokers from making big
profits. The police are investigating several brokers accused of using violence
on defectors who refuse to pay once they arrive in South Korea.
Oh Young Pil, a South Korean journalist, said he had witnessed the unethical
side of the operations that helped North Korean refugees. He said he had been
paid by a Japanese television journalist to guide North Korean defectors into
the Japanese consulate in Guangzhou, southern China, in 2003, and to record the
process on video.
The plan failed when the Chinese police arrested him and the North Koreans. Oh
spent 16 months in a Chinese prison.
"I thought I was helping the North Koreans. Now I can't sleep very well when I
think about what could have happened to the North Koreans," Oh said. "There was
a financial and political motive behind the project. And I feel guilty to have
been part of it."
By SIOBHAN McDONOUGH, Associated Press Writer , Fri Apr 29, 5:06 PM ET
WASHINGTON - Soon Ok Lee remembers her years in a North Korea prison camp as brutal. From 1986 to 1992, she said, she experienced and witnessed atrocities in prison camps where people like her were forced to live as slaves under the military dictatorship of Kim Jong Il.
Soon and others who escaped North Korea announced Friday the opening of a Washington office of the Exile Committee for North Korean Democracy, a new umbrella group for dissidents.
The committee is made up of 6,300 defectors — almost all of whom live in South Korea — and aims to expand the anti-Kim Jong Il forces within North Korea and form a united front with them, according to Dong Chul Choi, Soon's son and the group's representative in Washington.
The most important task for the committee is "to enlighten North Korean people with genuine spirit of human rights and democracy against the blind loyalty to Kim and idolatry of the dictator," the group said in a statement.
"We are working to topple Kim's dictatorship," said Seong Min Kim, an army captain who fled communist North Korea. "This is a milestone, a starting point. We want to solidify the anti-Kim Jong Il movement in North Korea."
Soon recalled her experiences at a news conference launching the office. She spoke of hunger, long hours of labor and brutality after she was imprisoned on accusations of stealing from her job as a supplier of clothes and other items to government officials. Now 59, she was sentenced to 13 years in prison and spent several years behind bars before being granted amnesty in 1996.
"Once you end up in prison camp, after three months, the body falls apart," she said, describing meals amounting to no more than a pinch of corn. "After six months to a year, the shape changes. You have only a skeleton and skin.
"All the prisoners eventually die of disease, torture, starvation," Soon said. "Until the moment they die, they are brainwashed so they thoroughly claim loyalty to the party."
She said if one member of a family was accused of a political crime, three generations of the same family might be punished. Dong, Soon's only son, was plucked out of university and forced to work on a farm.
Christians seemed to get the worst treatment, Soon said. "They are beaten nonstop, forced to do labor 16 to 18 hours a day. They become disfigured."
After her release, she escaped with her son to South Korea and moved after a few years to the United States. She now works as a church missionary in Virginia.
by Gavan McCormack, Japan Focus, 18 April 2005.
On 14 April, the 61st session of the United Nations Human Rights Commission
meeting, adopted a resolution drafted and submitted jointly by Japan and the EU
on the situation of Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea
(North Korea). It called on North Korea to immediately return Japanese abductees
and on the UN General Assembly to take up the question of North Korean human
rights violations in general.[1]
The No 1 abductee whose return is sought by Japan is Yokota Megumi, abducted
from the Japan Sea coast in Niigata prefecture on 15 November 1977, when the
13-year old schoolgirl was returning home from a badminton match. She would be,
if indeed still alive today, a woman in her early 40s.[2]
In 2002, when Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro made his dramatic
day-trip to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and try to normalize
relations between the two countries, North Korea admitted and apologized for
this (and other abductions), explaining that during the two and half decades
since the event, the girl had married a local Korean, Kim Chol Jun, in 1986,
given birth to a daughter the following year, but suffered depression and had
committed suicide while undergoing hospital treatment in March 1993.[3] In 2004,
Two years later, at a subsequent meeting between the two sides and after further
investigations, North Korea revised the date of Megumi's death first to March,
then to April 1994. When the Japanese side demanded evidence of her death, her
supposed husband, Kim Chol Jun, handed over ash and bone fragments. He said he
had kept her body buried in his garden for two years, then dug it up and
cremated it, keeping the remains in his own possession.
In Japan, the National Research Institute of Police Science declared that it
could not extract any DNA from the samples it received, but at Teikyo
University, a private university said to have a high reputation in the field of
mitochondrial DNA analysis, the medical department succeeded where the Police
Institute had failed. The government concluded from the Teikyo study that the
remains were not those of Megumi (whose family had kept her umbilical cord) but
of two unrelated people. It insisted that there was "absolutely no
evidence" to support North Korea's claim that Megumi (and seven others) had
died. Therefore, since there was the "possibility of them being still
alive," it demanded their return.[4] Megumi's parents became the central
figures in a burgeoning national movement demanding that Koizumi's government
impose sanctions or other forms of retaliation against North Korea. For many,
nothing short of the end of the Kim Jong Il regime would suffice.
North Korea reacted with anger to the outcome of the Japanese investigation. Its
formal response, on 24 January, took the form of a North Korean Central News
Agency "Memorandum."[5] It insisted its explanations had been
truthful, and suggested Japan's government must have rigged the tests, using
other bones. It stressed the fact that the Japanese Police Institute and Teikyo
University analyses had come to different conclusions and argued that it was
unscientific and improper to place absolute weight on one conclusion only. It
was "common sense" that DNA material could not be extracted from human
remains cremated, as according to North Korean custom, at 1200 degrees
centigrade. North Korea also protested against the refusal of the Japanese side
to acknowledge its sincere effort to resolve the abduction problem. No sooner
had the Japanese delegation returned from North Korea in November 2004, it
protested, than "some politicians" were calling for economic
sanctions. It denounced the Japanese side for breaking the promise, made in a
statement signed by the head of the Japanese delegation at the time when the
bones were handed over, to the effect that "[w]e promise to hand these
remains directly to Yokota Megumi's parents, and not to publish the
matter." It concluded by dismissing the outcome of the analysis as "a
fabrication by corrupt elements," saying that "[n]ot only has Japan
gone to the lengths of fabricating the results of an analysis of human bones and
refused to concede that the abduction problem has been settled, but it also
completely denies our sincerity and effort. It is they who have pushed North
Korea-Japan relations to this worst-ever pitch of confrontation."
It goes without saying that North Korean statements have little credibility in
Japan. In the dispute over the technical, scientific matter of mitochondrial DNA
analysis, the Japanese government's pronouncements were taken, at least
initially, as definitive. It was assumed, not only in Japan but around the
world, that North Korea's deception had been exposed because Japan's level of
technology was above anything North Korea could imagine.
Observers in Japan and elsewhere also noted that North Korea's story had little
credibility because its account of the abductions had been full of
inconsistencies from the start. The alteration of the date of Megumi's death,
confusion over the hospital at which she had been receiving treatment, the
inherently improbable story that she had been strolling in the hospital grounds
with a doctor when she escaped his attention and hanged herself from a pine
tree,[6] using a rope she had made out of her clothing, beggared belief. There
had also been major discrepancies in the accounts of the fate of other abductees,
who were said to have died in strange traffic accidents (in a country with
little traffic), or of heart attacks or liver failures (when young and
apparently healthy) or from poisoning by a defective gas heater. In two other
cases, apart from Megumi's, in both 2002 and 2004 North Korea provided remains
that it said were "probably" those of a man abducted from Europe in
1980 (Matsuki Kaoru) who is supposed to have died, with his wife and one child,
in 1988, but on both occasions DNA tests showed, apparently conclusively, that
the remains were unrelated.
It was hard in Japan to believe North Korea's account that the remains of all
the deceased abductees had been lost in the floods, dam bursts and landslides of
the mid-1990s. Furthermore, the scraps of evidence relating to Megumi that the
"sincere reinvestigation" promised by Kim Jong Il turned up late in
2004 -- hospital records, traffic accident records, doctors' accounts -- all
seemed to the Japanese implausible. The North Korean attempt to explain the
lacunae in terms of being hampered by the "special agencies of state"
originally responsible for the abductions, which were said to have burned all
relevant documents, carried little water. It was indisputable that the 1990s had
been a decade of acute social and economic crisis in North Korea, in which
hundreds of thousands had died of famine or in extremely straitened
circumstances and much of the country had indeed been devastated by floods and
landslides, yet the Japanese authorities still insisted on verifiable material
evidence.
Japan's government therefore denounced North Korea's 2004
"reinvestigation" as unsatisfactory and "extremely
insincere." Since Pyongyang persisted in denying knowledge of other
Japanese strongly suspected to have been abducted, and since its explanations of
the fate of those it admitted to abducting were implausible, the conviction grew
in Japan that the victims were not dead at all but were being held,
involuntarily, perhaps because they knew too much. Kim Chol Jun, who was
described in 2002 as an employee of a trading company, himself transmogrified by
2004 into a member of a "special agency of state," the very group
responsible (according to Kim Jong Il's 2002 explanation) for the abductions in
the first place. According to several of the abductees who returned to Japan in
2002, his real name was actually Kim Yon Su, and he had been separated from
Megumi for around one year before her supposed death.[7] If that were so, the
story of his having buried, exhumed, cremated, and then retained her remains,
became even more unlikely. Megumi's case became central. Shocked by the
seemingly irrefutable evidence of a North Korean attempt to deceive Japan, and
with no shadow of doubt over the outcome of the DNA tests in the Megumi case,
the Japanese government, under a rising wave of angry public and media pressure,
suspended the humanitarian aid that Koizumi had promised in May 2004 and turned
its attention seriously towards punitive economic sanctions.
However, while North Korea's protestations were dismissed in Japan, they gained
some support from an unexpected quarter. An article in the 3 February 2005 issue
of the prestigious international scientific journal, Nature, revealed that the
DNA analysis on Megumi's remains had been performed by a member of the medical
department of Teikyo University, Yoshii Tomio.[8] Yoshii, it later transpired,
was a relatively junior faculty member, of lecturer status, in a forensic
department that had neither a professor nor even an assistant professor.[9]
Remarkably, he said that he had no previous experience in the analysis of
cremated specimens, described his tests as inconclusive and remarked that such
samples were very easily contaminated by anyone coming in contact with them,
like "stiff sponges that can absorb anything." In other words, the man
who had actually conducted the Japanese analysis pronounced it anything but
definitive. The five tiny samples he had been given to work on (the largest of
them 1.5 grams) had anyway been used up in his laboratory, so independent
verification was thereafter impossible. It seemed likely as a result that nobody
could ever know for sure what Pyongyang's package had contained.
When the Japanese government's chief cabinet secretary, Hosoda Hiroyuki,
referred to this article as inadequate and a misrepresentation of the
government-commissioned analysis, Nature responded, in a highly unusual
editorial (17 March), saying that:
"Japan is right to doubt North Korea's every statement. But its
interpretation of the DNA tests has crossed the boundary of science's freedom
from political interference. Nature's interview with the scientist who carried
out the tests raised the possibility that the remains were merely contaminated,
making the DNA tests inconclusive. This suggestion is uncomfortable for a
Japanese government that wants to have North Korea seen as unambiguously
fraudulent. ...
The inescapable fact is that the bones may have been contaminated. ... It is
also entirely possible that North Korea is lying. But the DNA tests that Japan
is counting on won't resolve the issue. The problem is not in the science but in
the fact that the government is meddling in scientific matters at all. Science
runs on the premise that experiments, and all the uncertainty involved in them,
should be open for scrutiny. Arguments made by other Japanese scientists that
the tests should have been carried out by a larger team are convincing. Why did
Japan entrust them to one scientist working alone, one who no longer seems to be
free to talk about them?
Japan's policy seems a desperate effort to make up for what has been a
diplomatic failure ... Part of the burden for Japan's political and diplomatic
failure is being shifted to a scientist for doing his job -- deriving
conclusions from experiments and presenting reasonable doubts about them. But
the friction between North Korea and Japan will not be decided by a DNA test.
Likewise, the interpretation of DNA test results cannot be decided by the
government of either country. Dealing with North Korea is no fun, but it doesn't
justify breaking the rules of separation between science and politics."[10]
Apart from a brief reference in one weekly journal, no word of this
extraordinary exchange penetrated into the Japanese mass media. Three weeks
after it, the Foreign Minister told the Diet, in answer to a question, that he
knew nothing about the Nature article.[11] Meanwhile, anger at North Korea
mounted and preparations went ahead for what was expected to be the largest-yet
protest meeting scheduled to be held in Tokyo, on 24 April. As for Mr Yoshii,
one week after the Nature editorial he left Teikyo hospital, promoted from lowly
university lecturer to the prestigious position of head of the forensic medical
department of the Tokyo metropolitan police department. Nature reported, in its
third discussion of the case (7 April), that it had been told Yoshii was
therefore not available for media comment.[12] The suggestion, in a
parliamentary question on 30 March, that this smacked of government complicity
in "hiding a witness" drew outrage and the comment from the Minister
of Foreign Affairs that it was "extremely regrettable" for such
aspersions to be cast on Japan's scientific integrity.[13]
Beyond the immediate parties to the dispute, South Korean forensic scientists
also expressed skepticism about the Japanese findings, on grounds of the low
possibility of DNA material surviving cremation and the high probability of
contamination,[14] and Time magazine (4 April) reported that the technique that
Yoshii had used, known as "nested PCR," was one that professional
forensic laboratories in the US avoided because of the risk of
contamination.[15] Early in April, the head of the Japan section of the North
Korean Foreign Ministry told a visiting group of Japanese academics that Japan
must return the Megumi remains, which would then be submitted for analysis to
some independent institution.[16]
The stalemate in Japan-North Korea relations continued. Japan pressed ahead
towards sanctions, even though such a course was not favored by any of the other
parties, including the US, to the Beijing "Six-Sided" conference on
North Korean nuclear questions, and towards further isolating and pressuring the
Pyongyang regime. However, its refusal to address the issues raised in the
international media, especially in the journal of the international scientific
community, undermined its case. It can be assumed that, in pressing the UN Human
Rights Commission to adopt the resolution calling on North Korea to return the
abductees, including Megumi, Japan did not feel any need to draw the Nature
critique to the attention of delegates.
While it may be true that North Korea "routinely and egregiously violates
nearly all international human rights standards,"[17] that does not
diminish the requirement for scrupulousness on the part of the Japanese
government in presenting its case. The Japanese government presumably thought
its claim to the moral high ground in a dispute with North Korea would go
unchallenged, yet the bureaucratically controlled, peer-unsupervised, analysis,
by a single researcher without experience in work on cremated remains, whose
findings could not be confirmed and who was promptly removed from public
accountability when doubts were raised about his work, served to complicate the
issue and to give comfort rather than to undermine the regime in North Korea.
[1] "Statement by the Press Secretary/Director-General for Press and Public
Relations, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on the adoption of the resolution on the
situation of human rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea at the
U.N. Commission on Human Rights," 15 April 2005.
[2] For general details on the abductions, Gavan McCormack, Target North Korea:
Pushing North Korea to the Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, New York Nation Books,
2004, chapter 6, and Gavan McCormack and Wada Haruki, "Forever Stepping
Back: The Strange Record of 15 Years of Negotiations between Japan and North
Korea," forthcoming in a volume edited by John Feffer.
[3] For details of the abductions and the various statements by the two
governments, see, for the Japanese side, the Japanese government's Ministry of
Foreign Affairs web-site and for the North Korean side, statements as reported
in the Japanese media.
[4] Japanese government statement of 24 December 2004.
[5] "Biboroku," Asahi shimbun, 28 January 2005.
[6] Japanese officials, shown the tree in November 2004, estimated that its
trunk was a mere 10 centimeters in diameter, a circumstance that deepened their
doubt about the suicide story. ("Rachi higaisha seizon no kanosei,"
Asahi shimbun, 3 April 2005.)
[7] NHK television, 27 March 2005.
[8] David Cyranoski, "DNA is burning issue as Japan and Korea clash over
kidnaps," Nature, Vol. 433, 3 February 2005, p. 445.
[9] "Netsuzo wa, kiji ka kantei kekka ka," Shukan gendai, 19 March
2005.
[10] "Politics versus reality," Nature, Vol. 434, 17 March 2005, p.
257.
[11] Machimura Nobutaka, Foreign Minister, in response to question in the House
of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee, 23 February 2005.
[12] "David Cyranoski, "Geneticist's new post could stop him
testifying about DNA tests," Nature, Vol. 434, 7 April 2005, p. 685.
[13] Machimura, in response to question in the House of Representatives, 30
March 2005.
[14] "'Nicho ikotsu kantei kobo' senmonka kenkai," Seoul, Yonhap, 25
January 2005.
[15] Donald Macintyre, "Bones of Contention," Time, 4 April 2005, Vol.
165, No. 13.
[16] "'Nihon gaimusho to awanu' meigen," Asahi shimbun, 3 April 2005.
[17] "North Korea: Human Rights Concerns for the 61st Session of the U.N.
Human Rights Commission," New York, Human Rights Watch, 4 April 2005.
Gavan McCormack is professor in the Research School of Pacific and Asian
Studies, Australian National University and visiting professor in social
science, International Christian University, Tokyo. He is author of Target
North Korea: Pushing North Korea to the Brink, and of other essays on North
Korea and Japan-related topics. He is a Japan Focus coordinator. Posted at Japan
Focus on April 18, 2005.
Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), Pyongyang, 1 April 2005
A DPRK delegate, participating in the discussion on item 9 "Human rights
performance in all countries of the world" at the 61st meeting of the UN
Commission on Human Rights in Geneva on March 23, accused the EU of its
dastardly act of seeking only its selfish political purpose, backing the US
hostile policy toward the DPRK. He said: The United States is so foolish as to
work hard to apply to the DPRK the "human rights" standards it has
used for launching aggression and war against other countries and toppling their
governments, turning a blind eye to its poor human rights record. The US adopted
the ill-famed "North Korean Human Rights Act" last year, a typical
example of its attempt at "bringing down" the system of the DPRK under
the pretext of "human rights". Its behaviour forcing other countries
to change even their political systems and ways of life is nothing but the
gravest human rights abuse. The present reality teaches a lesson that it is the
only option for protecting the genuine human rights to struggle against the US
with physical strength as long as its policy remains unchanged. The evermore
undisguised policy pursued by the US and the EU to isolate and stifle the DPRK
under the pretext of its "human rights issue" will only harden the
resolution and will of the Korean people to defend the socialist system chosen
by themselves and their independent life and prompt them to fight against the
policy to the last.
Yonhap, Geneva, 29 March 2005
The United Nations' Special Rapporteur on human rights in North Korea
recommended international protection for defectors from the impoverished
country here Tuesday. Vitit Muntarbhorn, who was appointed to the position by
the UN Commission on Human Rights last year, said in his official report that
the forced repatriation of North Korean refugees should be stopped, while refuge
camps or protection facilities should be provided to them. His report appeared
aimed at China and Russia, two countries that have been criticized for forcibly
repatriating refugees to North Korea in accordance with respective bilateral
agreements with the last Stalinist state and for refusing to grant them refugee
status.
Muntarbhorn, a former law professor from Thailand, also called on North Korea to allow non-governmental organizations unlimited access to the country which had rejected his own proposed visit. He wrote his report based on interviews with government officials, civic organizations and other sources. He also pointed out the distribution of food aid in North Korea should be delivered in a transparent manner to its intended recipients. The UN official also asked North Korea to return any remaining Japanese abductees as soon as possible. The UN body endorsed resolutions against North Korea in 2003 and 2004, urging the country to cooperate with the international community in the investigation of allegations of human rights violations there. North Korea rejects such resolutions as the fruit of a political conspiracy.
By DONALD MACINTYRE, TIME, Monday, Mar. 28, 2005, With reporting by Michiko Toyama/Tokyo
In 2002, Kim Jong Il deep-sixed relations with Japan by admitting that North Korea kidnapped 13 Japanese citizens in the 1970s and held them for decades. He tried repairing the damage by sending five of the abductees home in the following months. The remaining eight, according to North Korea, had died. Last November, Pyongyang returned to Japan the cremated ashes and bone fragments of Megumi Yokota, who was kidnapped in her hometown of Niigata in 1977 at the age of 13, and allegedly committed suicide in 1994. Tokyo ran DNA tests on the remains and announced they weren't Yokota's. Public anger ran white hot: conservative politicians and Yokota's parents called for sanctions against North Korea and the government blocked rice shipments. Pyongyang angrily disputed Japan's DNA test, but nobody paid any attention.
It turns out the remains might have been Yokota's after all. In February, the British scientific journal Nature published an article in which the scientist who did the tests admitted they were inconclusive and that the remains could have been contaminated with foreign DNA. "The bones are like stiff sponges that can absorb anything," Teikyo University DNA analyst Yoshii Tomio told a Nature interviewer. The technique Yoshii used, known as "nested PCR," also raised doubts: professional forensics labs in the U.S. don't use it because of the high risk of contamination, according to Terry Melton, a DNA expert at Pennsylvania-based Mitotyping Technologies. Yoshii has declined comment and Japan won't release his results. A Foreign Ministry spokesman says the remains were consumed in the tests, so there is no way to redo them. Yokota's father, Shigeru Yokota, tells TIME he doesn't really understand the issues surrounding the DNA tests but that he's "angry that Japan now looks foolish in its negotiations with North Korea." In a toughly worded editorial in its March 17 issue, Nature said an inconclusive test result might be "uncomfortable," but urged the Japanese government to get serious with its science. "Dealing with North Korea is no fun," it wrote, "but it doesn't justify breaking the rules of separation between science and politics."
NATURE, No.434, p. 257 (17 March 2005)
Japan's politicians have to face scientific uncertainty, no matter how uncomfortable it may be. They should mobilize diplomatic means, and not sacrifice scientific integrity, in their fight with North Korea.
The cabinet of Japan's prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, is "burying its head in its hands" in frustration, in the words of one popular Japanese weekly, over a news article that appeared in Nature last month. At issue is whether Megumi Yokota, a Japanese woman kidnapped by North Korea in 1977 at the age of 13, is still alive. In 2002, North Korea admitted to abducting 13 Japanese nationals, several of them taken from beaches while on dates. Since then, North Korea's half-hearted efforts to account for the victims have caused turmoil in the relationship between the two countries (see Nature No.433, p.445; 2005 below).
Claims that most of the victims, including Yokota, have died are unconvincing. North Korea says the remains that it passed to Japan last year are hers. But Japan's tests show that the DNA is someone else's raising the spectre that the North Korean military is still using her to train spies. Japan is right to doubt North Korea's every statement. But its interpretation of the DNA tests has crossed the boundary of science's freedom from political interference. Nature's interview with the scientist who carried out the tests raised the possibility that the remains were merely contaminated, making the DNA tests inconclusive. This suggestion is uncomfortable for a Japanese government that wants to have North Korea seen as unambiguously fraudulent.
The government has responded sharply to the article. At a press conference, Japan's chief cabinet secretary, Hiroyuki Hosoda, reportedly alleged that Nature's article contained "inadequate expressions" and that it misrepresented the scientist's statements. The opinions expressed in the article were "general knowledge" but were not meant to apply to the case at hand, Hosoda said, adding that his statements were checked with the scientist. The scientist himself, meanwhile, is apparently no longer available for interviews.
The inescapable fact is that the bones may have been contaminated. Who knows what they have been through during this hellish episode? According to North Korea, the body was buried for two years before being dug up and cremated at 1,200C, and then kept at the woman's husband's home, before a small sample was passed to Japan. It is also entirely possible that North Korea is lying. But the DNA tests that Japan is counting on won't resolve the issue.
The problem is not in the science but in the fact that the government is meddling in scientific matters at all. Science runs on the premise that experiments, and all the uncertainty involved in them, should be open for scrutiny. Arguments made by other Japanese scientists that the tests should have been carried out by a larger team are convincing. Why did Japan entrust them to one scientist working alone - one who no longer seems to be free to talk about them? Japan's policy seems a desperate effort to make up for what has been a diplomatic failure - or more precisely, a failure of the security alliance between Japan and the United States. The alliance gives the United States rights to place unpopular bases in Japan in exchange for its role in contributing "to the security of Japan and the maintenance of international peace and security in the Far East".
Could Japan, with US backing, have pulled other levers with North Korea? The answer is not clear, but the question can be put another way. If a totalitarian country had abducted US citizens from a beach and carried them back to teach language to potential spies for 25 years, would George Bush or any other US president be standing there with a bag of ashes haggling over DNA test results?
Part of the burden for Japan's political and diplomatic failure is being shifted to a scientist for doing his job - deriving conclusions from experiments and presenting reasonable doubts about them. But the friction between North Korea and Japan will not be decided by a DNA test. Likewise, the interpretation of DNA test results cannot be decided by the government of either country. Dealing with North Korea is no fun, but it doesn't justify breaking the rules of separation between science and politics.
by David Cyranoski, Tokyo,
NATURE, Vol.433, 3 Feb. 2005 (p.445)
A bitter dispute has erupted between Japan and North Korea over DNA tests used to
establish whether cremated remains belong to a Japanese citizen abducted in 1977.
The argument is the latest twist in an episode that has soured relations between
the two countries for years. During the 1970s and 1980s. North Korea was believed to have
abducted at least 13, and perhaps as many as 100, Japanese citizens to work in its
espionage programme. Now the two nations are falling out over the feasibility of correctly
identifying DNA from the ashes of one of those abducted.
In the autumn of 2002, North Korea ended years of denials and admitted that members of
its armed forces abducted 13 Japanese citizens from Japan and Europe. The North Korean
leader, Kim Jong-il, claimed mat the abductions were carried out by the military without
government permission. Japan says it has evidence of two more abductees, and believes
that there were in fact many more.
Pressure on North Korea to release survivors has since seen five abductees return to
Japan accompanied by their families. Information on eight others, which North Korea
says are dead, has been slow to arrive, leading to speculation that some of them are still alive.
On 15 November last year, Japanese officials returned from talks in Pyongyang carrying what North Korea claimed to be the
cremated remains of Megumi Yokota, who was abducted in 1977 at the age of 13. According to North Korean reports, Yokota married a North Korean, but later killed herself after entering a mental hospital.
At Teikyo University in Tokyo, tests on five samples of the ashes found DNA from two sources — but neither of them matched
DNA from Yokota's umbilical cord, which had been kept by her parents, as is common in Japan. In December, these results were
passed to North.Korea, but on 26 January the Korean government issued a statement that branded them a "fabrication".
According to Hatsuhisa Takashima, a spokesman for Japan's foreign ministry, North Korea called into question the methods used in the tests and
claimed that the remains, which had been heated to 1,200 °C, could not contain any surviving DNA. The North
Korean statement also asked why researchers at Teikyo University were able to extract DNA
when the National Research Institute of Police Science in Tokyo, which also had five
samples to work with, had been unable to do so.
Sample survival
Teikyo University's Tornio Yoshii, one of Japan's leading forensics experts, says there
are several reasons why he managed to extract DNA from all five of his samples. These include the fact that he used a highly sensitive process called the nested polymerase
chain reaction (PCR), which amplifies DNA twice instead of once as in conventional PCR, and the possibility that
his original samples were of better quality than those at the other lab. "Everyone has
their own method" of handling DNA samples, he notes. "There is no standardization."
Little forensic work has been done on cremated specimens in Japan, and most experts,
including Yoshii, thought it unlikely that DNA would have survived cremation at 1,200 C. "I was totally surprised," says Yoshii. But DNA could survive if exposed to such
heat for only a short time. "You can't tell anything from temperature alone," says Hirofumi Fukushima,
a forensics expert at Shinshu University.
Nonetheless Yoshii, who has no previous experience with cremated specimens, admits
his tests are not conclusive and that it is possible the samples were contaminated. "The
bones are like stiff sponges that can absorb anything. If sweat or oils of someone thatwas
handling them soaked in, it would be impossible to get them out no matter how well they
were prepared,"he says.
Takashima says that North Korea has sent remains that it said belonged to an abductee
in the past, only to admit later that they were from another source.
The Japanese government responded to the current incident on 26 January by calling
North Korea's handling of the situation "deplorable", It threatened "stringent actions"
that, according to Takashima, may include the cancellationof 125,000 tonnes of foodaid and
other trade sanctions.
Japanese officials also say that they want to retest the DNA in question. But Yoshii says his
five samples — the largest of which weighed only 1.5 grams — were used up in his tests.
And that, observers say, leaves little prospect of the disagreement being resolved
by James D. Seymour
In the wake of the North Korean famine, which began in 1995, hundreds of thousands of people fled to northeast China. Although many returned and a
smaller number went to third countries, many tens of thousands remain. They face two main problems. First is the mistreatment they sometimes receive.
China does not recognize them as refugees, or even the legality of their being in the country, so they are forced into an underground existence,
making them targets for economic and sexual exploitation.
Secondly, Chinese authorities take the position, at least implicitly, that
their obligation to return these people to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea supersedes any obligations they would have under the international
human rights covenants and refugee conventions. Thus, many people have been forced back to North Korea against their will, where some have been
imprisoned and apparently sometimes executed for the “crime” of leaving the country. Although this situation may have improved somewhat, the refuge
seekers in China live in constant dread of being returned to North Korea,
and are thus in a position to be blackmailed or otherwise abused.
China has been reluctant to allow these people to move on to other countries, and absolutely unwilling for them to travel directly to the
Republic of Korea. For its part, South Korea has been willing to accept them, at least at recent levels (1,040 in 2003), but takes the position
that the real solution to the problem is improving economic conditions in the North.
The international community has gradually been taking a more proactive stance. The United Nations through UNHCR is speaking out more forcefully
than in the past. However, China has generally been unwilling to permit access to the North Koreans in the northeast. It is primarily in the case
of those seeking refuge in diplomatic compounds that the UNHCR has been able to be helpful.
Non-governmental organizations have been active in the northeast, but they operate under severe constraints, and are only able to reach about a fifth
of the local North Korean population. The United States Congress has recently taken a forceful position, and
opened up the possibility of substantial funding to assist these people. However, the measure is widely perceived as part of a religious and
anti-communist agenda, and has been rebuked both by China and Pyongyang.
The paper concludes by outlining some measures that could be taken by China, by the two Koreas, and by the international community to ameliorate
the situation of the North Korean refuge seekers... Read the entire report at: http://www.nautilus.org/napsnet/sr/2005/0527A_Seymour.pdf
James D. Seymour, is a research scholar at Columbia University and the co-author of "New Ghosts, Old Ghosts"
by Aidan Foster-Carter, Pacific Forum CSIS
In a cliche beloved of British soccer commentators, inter-Korean relations in 2004 were a game of two halves. Until mid-year all seemed to be going
well, including unprecedented military talks to ease border tensions. On land, symbolically, propaganda loudspeakers fell silent along the
Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), while at sea, substantively, direct radio contact between the KPA and ROK navies began, so as to avoid clashes. Meanwhile
the usual channels of Seoul-Pyongyang dialogue at various levels met routinely, appearing to make progress on a range of substantive issues, such as
cross-border road and rail links.
But July saw a U-turn. Angry on several fronts (more on motives below), North Korea pulled out of most of its hitherto regular talks with the
South. By early 2005 it had not relented, and showed no sign of doing so. Of course, Seoul was not the only one to feel Pyongyang's wrath. On a
wider canvas, the North also notoriously refused to return to Six-Party Talks (both Koreas, the U.S., China, Japan, and Russia) in Beijing on its
nuclear issue, so a fourth round, due by September, failed to take place. Kim Jong-il was widely assumed to be awaiting
the U.S. presidential election - and praying for Kerry. Yet on this front too, as of early January
Pyongyang is still stalling, saying it now wishes to see the character and policy
contours of the second Bush administration. For good measure, as reported elsewhere in this issue of Comparative Connections, North Korea is also
embroiled in a row with Japan - over its continued failure to come fully clean on the fate of most of the young Japanese
whom it admits to kidnapping in the 1970s and 1980s.
In that sense, the current stasis in inter-Korean ties partly reflects the fact that right now North Korea is no mood to talk seriously to anyone
about anything. But there are also specific aspects to this always distinctive relationship between two halves of a divided land. Rather than
discuss non-events - such as rumors throughout the quarter of plans for a second inter-Korean summit - it seems more sensible this time to focus on
two specific matters. One is the refugee issue: a salutary reminder that there is more to inter-Korean ties than merely what the two governments
cook up between them, or fail to. The other is the one field of cooperation that Pyongyang is still keen on, doubtless because there is money in it.
The first goods made by an ROK firm in the Kaesong Industrial Zone (KIZ) - saucepans, as it happens - hit the stores in Seoul just in time for
Christmas, and sold out in two days. So maybe an otherwise bleak New Year is not wholly without hope after all.
Reality Check: Just in Case...
The quarter began with a rare glimpse of plans behind the scenes in Seoul, just in case the hoped-for soft landing fails to arrive. On Oct. 4, to
official alarm (he was threatened with arrest), an opposition MP, Chung Moon-hun,
revealed in Parliament details of secret Southern contingency plans for various Northern scenarios. One,
code-named "Chungmu 3300," designates schools, stadia, and other public facilities to house up to
200,000 North Koreans in the event of mass defections. More radically, "Chungmu 9000" envisages South Korea filling
any power vacuum in Pyongyang. The Unification Ministry (MOU) would establish an emergency headquarters,
with the minister wielding governor-like powers, followed in due course by other ROK ministries. North Korea,
predictably if implausibly, accused the South of wishing this to happen - when in reality it must know that this
is (war apart) Seoul's worst nightmare. This is one of several cases where Pyongyang's professed take on Southern
motives and goals has become decidedly perverse of late.
Refugees Just Keep on Coming
Defectors are a particularly sore point currently. As discussed last quarter, July's airlift of 468 North Koreans
from Vietnam to South Korea infuriated Pyongyang, even though Seoul tried hard to keep it low-key.
With typical paranoia, the North saw a plot linking this to the new U.S. North Korean Human Rights Act
(NKHRA), which
President George W. Bush signed into law Oct. 18. While it is unclear if Pyongyang really believes its own
propaganda, if it has any grasp at all of Southern politics it must be aware of the Roh
Moo-hyun administration's hostility to the NKHRA - one of a range of issues that exemplify a growing divergence of outlook between
Washington and Seoul - as well as Roh's general refusal to prioritize or aid Northern refugees more than the bare minimum.
Lest there were any doubt at all on this, Unification Minister Chung Dong-young - tipped as a contender to
succeed Roh as president in 2008 - spelled it out in a radio interview Jan. 4: "The North's perception that
we are trying to shake the Pyongyang regime by bringing defectors to Seoul is quite different from our policy. We
disapprove of the mass defections. There will be no more large-scale arrivals of defectors in Seoul." Two
weeks earlier, as described below, his deputy announced new measures to curb the refugee flow.
Yet still they come, in growing numbers. Despite tighter security in Beijing's diplomatic quarter, autumn saw a
revival of sanctuary-seeking there. After a group of 29 entered a Japanese school in Beijing on Sept.
1, a further 44 got into the Canadian embassy on Sept. 29. On Oct. 15 another 20 made it into the South Korean consulate. A
week later 29 broke into an ROK school in Beijing, whose extra-territorial status was less clear. On
Oct. 25 Chinese police nabbed three of a group of 14; the rest got into the ROK consulate, which not for the first time had
temporarily to suspend normal operations and close while it processed some 130 North Koreans for
onward travel to Seoul.
Seeking Sanctuary
Further bids were foiled on Oct. 26, when Chinese police arrested 63 DPRK migrants and two ROK activists in
pre-dawn raids on two apartments in Beijing's Tongzhou area. Chinese media, normally silent on such matters,
gave this much publicity; no doubt pour encourager les autres. The North Koreans are believed to have been sent
back home in November to an uncertain fate; their Southern helpers remain in Chinese custody.
With the alternative a long onward trek to seek sanctuary in either Mongolia or Southeast Asia, deterrence may
not work. On Dec. 17 four North Koreans sought asylum at the French embassy in Hanoi; the ROK embassy had
allegedly turned them away, citing "bad circumstances." There was also a fresh, if small, spate in China: the
same day seven more North Koreans, including a female polio victim and a child, fled into the Japanese school
in Beijing (again). A day earlier, four North Koreans got into a South Korean school there; its Chinese owner
then blocked the entrance, closing it for a day.
Overall, the South's Unification Ministry said on Dec. 30 that 1,890 North Korean defectors reached Seoul in
2004: up by nearly half from 2003's 1,281, itself not much more than 2002's 1,139. (Without the Vietnam
airlift, comprising almost a quarter of the total, the rise would have remained at just over 10 percent.) Figures of this
magnitude - still small compared to most global refugee flows - are very recent: cumulative
arrivals in the half century since the Korean War ended in 1953 total barely 6,000. In another new trend, some two-thirds are now
female: 1,167 as of November, compared to 601 males.
Seoul Plays Scrooge
Numbers could well mushroom in future: a South Korean parliamentary report predicts annual arrivals of over
10,000 soon. To prevent this, ROK Vice Unification Minister Rhee Bong-jo cast himself as Scrooge this
Christmas, announcing on Dec. 23 tightened procedures for future would-be defectors.
Intensified screening at embassies abroad will weed out fake asylum seekers (e.g ethnic Koreans from China; 24 slipped in last year) as
well as "murderers [and] criminals sought by international police." According to
MOU, 11 percent of 2004's arrivals had criminal records: Rhee said that henceforth these "will be punished according to domestic law."
Even the law-abiding will have their resettlement subsidy cut by almost two-thirds, from an already meager 28
million won ($26,700) to just W10 million; the remaining W18 million will be conditional on job training.
This move is aimed against brokers, to whom 83 percent of 2004's arrivals paid commission averaging W4 million; in
practice, earlier arrivals often use their grant to pay brokers to bring out family members. Seventy-one
defectors are under surveillance, with several banned from leaving the country. Most are suspected of acting as brokers,
but some might be spies: an ex-sergeant in the KPA security arm who defected in 2003 is being
probed after an illicit trip back to the North last April.
Mean and Short-sighted
Security is of course a proper concern. Yet this set of measures, which
Rhee said will "have a deterrent effect," seems both mean-spirited and short-sighted. Maybe illegal, too: the ROK constitution still formally
claims jurisdiction over the entire Peninsula and all its inhabitants, so can a state seek to exclude its own citizens?
Questionable too, both legally (double jeopardy) and politically, is the idea of re-punishing
those who had fallen foul of Kim Jong-il's regime: some will not be common criminals, and all have arguably suffered enough.
Training is useful, but making life even harder for Northerners to get by in a society where most
already feel alien and unwelcome seems both perverse and cruel.
To do all this from a selfish wish to repel boarders makes mockery of the lip-service paid to unification as the
ultimate Korean dream. Finally, to make Kim Jong-il's victims suffer yet more, in the hope of wheedling their
tormentor back to the table, suggests a failing of not only moral judgment but common sense. Seoul should know
by now that Pyongyang cynically switches its umbrage on and off at will, largely regardless of actions by
others.
Mixed Feelings, and Motives
Still, for an unpopular government it helps that such moves command public support. An opinion poll published on Dec. 30 showed that only 32 percentof South Koreans support NGOs who try to help North Koreans defect,
while 62 percent oppose this. Overall, 50 percent now say they support official policy toward the North; 43
percent are against, down from 57 percent in February. Some 45 percent want Seoul to be more proactive, but 23
percent would halt aid until Pyongyang returns to negotiations. Sixty percent believe the North has changed, up 4
percent since February. Sixty-four percent would buy Northern-made goods, but 34 percent refuse to do so.
Other surveys have looked at defectors themselves. A large-scale study by MOU of 4,072 who arrived since
2000 found that 55 percent gave poverty as their main reason to leave North Korea, while 20 percent left to join
family members in the South. Nine percent cited political discontent, while another 9 percent said they fled to
evade punishment; 3 percent mentioned family troubles. But the ministry's self-serving inference - "Political
oppression is not playing as big a role as we thought" - seems tendentious. A regime that starves its people
surely oppresses as well as impoverishes them. It also creates enemies by brutalizing returned deportees from
China. If they were apolitical before, this turns them; they flee again, this time
for good.
Another, smaller survey found that fully 40 percent of DPRK defectors now in South Korea are unemployed.
Twenty-seven percent have temporary jobs, 11 percent work part time, 5 percent have small businesses, and just
15 percent enjoy stable employment. Seventy-eight percent earn under W1 million monthly, with 15 percent
wholly dependent on state handouts. Partly inspired by the NKHRA, a growing trickle is trying to slip into the
U.S., viewed as a land of more opportunity and less prejudice.
Seoul Even Ignores its Own
But Seoul is equally reluctant to help its own. While Japan mulls sanctions to force North Korea to come clean
on the fate of barely a dozen kidnap victims, putting this issue at the top of its bilateral agenda, South
Korea ignores the 486 abductees that it officially records as held by Pyongyang.
So it was embarrassed at fresh revelations in December about two priests kidnapped in China. Ahn
Seung-un, who vanished in 1995, is said to
be working for the official DPRK Christian federation; his family does not believe he defected. Also in
December, the arrest in Seoul of a Chinese-Korean implicated in the abduction of another ROK priest, Kim
Dong-shik, from China in 2000 has revived criticism of the government for not pressing Pyongyang on this and
other cases. A monthly magazine had named nine of the alleged kidnappers in 2003; several are said to be now
resident in South Korea. A forum on Kim's case, held at the National Assembly in Seoul on Jan. 6, heard claims
from NGOs that he probably died from ill-treatment in 2001. One opposition MP said he will introduce a
bill to compensate families of those abducted by Pyongyang.
The figure of 486 abductees is post-Korean War (1950-53), so it excludes thousands of ROK POWs illegally
detained in the North after the 1953 Armistice. In the past decade 41 of these now old soldiers have escaped,
mostly after a lifetime toiling in the mines of North Hamgyong province in the DPRK's remote and famished
northeast. Even these complain of getting little help or compensation for their sacrifice from their government.
Rare Signs of Backbone
In a rare sign of official vertebracy in Seoul on refugee issues, ROK Foreign Minister Ban
Ki-moon on Dec. 14
criticized the Chinese embassy in Seoul for telephoning an opposition lawmaker, Hwang Woo-yea, to complain
at his chairing a new coalition of 22 South Korean NGOs working to aid DPRK fugitives in China. The caller
reportedly threatened that Beijing would react by taking a harder line on refugees.
Three days later a Seoul court did its bit: awarding compensation of W104 million to the South Korean widow
of Lee Han-young, nephew of Kim Jong-il's former consort Song Hye-rim. Lee had defected secretly via Geneva
in 1982; he surfaced in Seoul in the mid-1990s, only to be murdered in February 1997
by unknown assailants. The court blamed the government for not protecting him against DPRK agents, his presumed assassins.
[...]
As John McEnroe would say: You cannot be serious. Even by Pyongyang's standards this is nonsense. All serious analysts regard Roh Moo-hyun as continuing the Sunshine policy, whether or not they approve. (One might hope that so ungrateful a slap in the face might prompt a rethink in Seoul, or at least some fine tuning; but don't hold your breath.) What then is the North's game? Playing for time, probably, or driven by policy disagreements or even - it is rumored - power struggles. That could result in policy paralysis, or at any rate putting everything on ice until the dust settles and a clear line emerges. Watch this space.
Donga Ilbo reported that Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported yesterday that DPRK laborers dispatched to Russia turned down a return to their homeland
and formed quasi refugee camps, hoping to go to a third country. The news medium, which covers news in socialist countries, quoted Pastor Douglas
Shin, the leader of DPRK defector support group Exodus 21, as having said, “North Korean laborers working in construction sites or farms in the
Maritime Provinces of Siberia rejected a return home after their contracts terminated or had escaped from their
workplaces and lived in a camp in some places.”
Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported yesterday that North Korean laborers dispatched to Russia turned down a
return to their homeland and formed quasi refugee camps, hoping to go to a third country. The news medium, which covers news in socialist countries, quoted Pastor Douglas Shin, the leader of North Korean defector support group Exodus 21, as having said, “North Korean laborers working in construction sites or farms in the Maritime Provinces of Siberia rejected a return home after their contracts terminated or had escaped from their workplaces and lived in a camp in some places.”
“They hoped to go to South Korea because camp life in Russia is freer and more comfortable than that in the North, but cannot guarantee a future,” said the RFA. “Some camps formed self guard corps or hired Russian gunned guards, preparing against arrests by the North Korean authorities.”
("NORTH KOREAN LABORERS IN RUSSIA FORM REFUGEE
CAMPS", 2005-01-04)
December 30, 2004 ㅡ The U.S. 8th Army confirmed yesterday that a South Korean, Kim Ki-ho, 59, who North Korea on Tuesday said had defected to the North, worked at the U.S. 6th Ordnance Battalion from 1984 to 2003 as a quality assurance specialist.
A South Korean intelligence official said the North provided detailed background information on defectors to provide credibility to their claims. North Korea cited Mr. Kim's work records and personal information such as birth place to back its statement.
The apparent defection followed the discovery in October of holes cut in wire fences along the Demilitarized Zone.
It is unknown whether Mr. Kim was involved, but at the time the Defense Ministry said a civilian who had served with an Army unit was the most likely suspect to have cut the fences and then headed to the North.
By JAMES BROOKE, New York Times, January 3, 2005
VLADIVOSTOK, Russia - The Russian woman in the cafe was in tears, her tea cooling, her potato salad untouched. She had just endured an
hour-long interrogation by a South Korean investigator about her role in sheltering a North Korean defector.
"I had no idea they could talk like that to a Russian citizen," said the woman, who asked only to be identified by her first name, Katia, the gold cross on her sweater flashing as she trembled from her ordeal at the South Korean Consulate here.
In a new twist, diplomats from South Korea now work to discourage defectors from North Korea.
Under new rules, South Korea is reducing resettlement payments to North Koreans by two-thirds. Defectors are to be scrupulously investigated. South Korea says that will help weed out criminals, spies and ethnic Koreans from China.
Human rights advocates say South Korea's stricter policy is intended to curry favor with China and North Korea, and to slow a rising influx of refugees, which hit a record high of 1,850 at the end of 2004.
"The situation in South Korea itself has changed," said an ethnic Korean-Russian travel agent here who used to help North Koreans get to Seoul. "Now it seems that North Koreans are not welcomed there anymore."
South Korea's new restrictions come as new American legislation goes into effect easing admission of North Korean defectors into the United States. One candidate could be a North Korean construction worker who has lived in the United States Consulate here since taking shelter there last autumn.
About 2,500 North Koreans, largely construction workers, work in the Maritime Territory, which includes Vladivostok and borders on China and North Korea. With North Korea planning to open a consulate here in 2005, South Korean diplomats are lowering their profiles in some ways.
Yet in this rough and tumble Pacific port, attitudes toward North Koreans seem to be souring.
A series of murky episodes, including the deaths of four North Korean diplomats in highway accidents here in 2004, have reinforced the sense that North Koreans are less welcome.
In September, five teenage Russians shouting white-pride slogans attacked two groups of North Korean workers here, killing one and injuring another.
The attacks seem to be the tip of an iceberg of racial fears that a collapse of North Korea could bring an uncontrolled flood of Korean refugees to this region, historically an area of Korean migration. Civil defense and military authorities have been drilled on stopping North Koreans from crossing the border.
In the mid-1990's, the Russian authorities were relatively lax about North Korean workers who managed to flee Siberian logging camps.
"I personally signed many such documents, quietly allowing them to go to South Korea or wherever they wanted to go," said one high-ranking Russian diplomat in the region. "We didn't want attention."
But in October, it was front-page news here when 45 North Korean laborers were arrested in Kamchatka, hundreds of miles from their work sites. They apparently hoped to stow away on foreign fishing boats.
In November, when the authorities of the Amur region signed contracts in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, for 2,000 North Korean lumberjacks, guarantees against flight were a top demand by the Russian side.
North Korea's determination to prevent defections by its contract workers in Russia could be seen in the drama surrounding the escape of Hwang Dae Soo, a 28-year-old translator, from confinement in a North Korean apartment here. In November 2003, he avoided forced repatriation by tearing the photograph off his passport just before he was to be placed on a North Korean plane here.
Held in a third-floor apartment, he managed to make a call to his friend Katia, who had worked in a nearby office, said Douglas E. Shin, a Korean-American pastor, who also assisted Mr. Hwang when he was in hiding for a year here.
When Mr. Hwang's Russian friends came to the apartment to demand his release, he broke a window and jumped three stories to the ground, breaking both ankles. Two North Korean guards jumped after him, suffering injuries to their legs.
Katia said she helped her injured friend into the back seat of her brother's car. But one North Korean guard tossed the Russians aside and led a group "yelling at him, trying to beat him, trying to drag him out of the car."
After the Russian police arrived, Katia and her brother drove Mr. Hwang to a hospital and then helped shelter him for a year. Her fears that North Koreans would discover his hiding place increased when Mr. Hwang's North Korean foreman appeared at her office, asking for her.
Fear of discovery prompted Mr. Hwang to have a friend ask South Korean officials about asylum.
"The South Koreans received a direct order not to take care of this issue any more," Mr. Hwang said in a telephone interview in early November. "After I heard this, I was in shock. They did not offer any help, nothing monetary, no advice."
On Nov. 15, though, he gambled and sought asylum at the South Korean Consulate here. When he asked for help, he carried a cellphone, surreptitiously keeping a line open to Mr. Shin, who recorded the encounter. On the tape, Mr. Hwang can be heard arguing that South Korea's Constitution guarantees North Koreans the right to asylum. A consulate official can be heard responding with curses.
When consular officials realized that the exchange had been taped for possible broadcast on South Korean radio, they relented and allowed him to stay, Mr. Shin said. He was finally allowed to fly to Seoul on Dec. 18.
But with security tightening at the South Korean Consulate, the message is clear in Vladivostok: North Korean defectors are not wanted.
"For one year, I feared the North Koreans would try to kill me," said Katia, still distraught after one hour of talking in the cafe. "It never occurred to me that I would have the South Koreans against me."
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