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The Daily Yomiuri, 28 March 2002. A high-ranking diplomat once remarked: "Do you think it acceptable to have our country's talks on diplomatic normalization with North Korea stalled solely for the sake of 10 or so Japanese thought to have been abducted by agents from Pyongyang?" There is probably no other statement in Japan's diplomatic history that compares to this remark in injuring public confidence in this country's diplomacy. The remark was made in December 1999 by Kunihiko Makita, then chief of the Foreign Ministry's Asian Affairs Bureau and currently ambassador to Singapore. It came when a suprapartisan group of Diet members headed by former Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama was sent to Pyongyang to facilitate resumption of normalization talks with North Korea.
Makita's remark was in response to suggestions by Liberal Democratic Party Diet members, including Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, that Japan should not shelve the issue of the suspected abduction of its citizens in a bid to restart long-suspended normalization talks with North Korea. As a matter of course, one of the state's top priorities is protecting the lives and property of its people. This is also one of the major purposes for which a state undertakes diplomatic efforts. Makita's remark makes it sound as though efforts to protect the lives of those Japanese who have most likely been abducted and taken to North Korea should be regarded as less important than ensuring a diplomatic channel of dialogue with that country.
What did Makita mean? Many people must wonder what Makita really meant by his remark. Strangely, however, few officials in the Foreign Ministry attach much importance to the consequences of Makita's remark. Hitoshi Tanaka, chief of the ministry's Asia-Pacific Affairs Bureau, called on Abe on March 18 to "be quiet--at least for the moment-- over the matter." It seems that the ministry is seeking to shield Makita from criticism. Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi has gone on the record as saying her ministry will conduct an "investigation" into the Makita remark, but she does not appear to be enthusiastic about the probe. The ministry has long said that no solution to the abduction issue can be hoped for as long as negotiations with North Korea are suspended. The ministry also maintains that efforts to keep channels for dialogue open with North Korea are essential to ensuring peace and stability for Japan and the rest of northeast Asia.
Every time North Korea sought aid from Japan, threatening to refuse negotiations to normalize diplomatic ties unless aid was granted, the ministry bowed to Pyongyang's demands arguing that the assistance should be regarded as the price Japan must pay in exchange for ensuring its security. Defense, not tribute, the answer. Such thinking is badly off the mark: The nation's security should be ensured not through monetary or material assistance, but through firm defense arrangements. The question of the suspected abduction of Japanese nationals by North Korean agents is definitely one directly involving Japan's sovereignty. Little can be expected of diplomats who lack a clear awareness of sovereignty issues or the resolve to protect the nation's sovereignty. The ministry's responses to the abduction problem and requests from Pyongyang for aid are just typical examples of the lack of principles in Japan's diplomacy.
Politicians should be taken to task for this state of affairs. A case in point is a 1997 statement issued by a group from the then ruling coalition of the LDP, Social Democratic Party and New Party Sakigake (Pioneers) at the conclusion of its mission to North Korea. Concerning Pyongyang's attitude toward the abduction issue, the statement quoted the North Korean side as saying, "Although what is referred to by Japan as 'missing Japanese' has nothing to do with our country and is nothing other than a fabrication, we, taking into consideration Japan's earnest proposal, have agreed to engage in investigations concerned with the matter of searching for the missing in general." According to the minutes of the Japanese mission, the North Korean side had initially reacted harshly to the mission's reference to the abduction problem, to the extent of threatening to cut off the talks.
Compromise a betrayal. One of the mission members, Masaaki Nakayama, an LDP member of the House of Representatives, proposed that North Korea handle the problem as one involving a search for missing persons, according to the minutes. North Korea agreed to accept a list of the "missing" Japanese, saying that Pyongyang's Red Cross Society would undertake the search, the minutes said. Nakayama made the proposal apparently out of a desire to see some progress, however small, made on the abduction problem. However, the term "missing" differs greatly in meaning from "abducted." Referring to the missing Japanese citizens as having been abducted means not only that their human rights have been violated, but also that Japan's sovereignty has been infringed upon in that North Korean agents are suspected to have committed the crime in, among other places, Japan by forcibly taking the
abducted to North Korea.
Japanese politicians are supposed to share the role of the state in protecting the lives and property of the Japanese people. Those who propose replacing the term "abducted" with "missing" should be criticized for neglecting the issue of infringement on state sovereignty. Regarding its "investigations concerning missing Japanese," North Korea subsequently alleged that none of the missing Japanese had been found, claiming repeatedly that Japan's accusations of abduction were nothing but fabrication.
The Japanese government, which nonetheless continued sending rice to North Korea, must have been seen by Pyongyang as a pushover. The government is strongly urged to abandon such a weak-kneed stance, since the abduction issue must be resolved at any cost, even if the normalization talks between Tokyo and Pyongyang should collapse as the result of North Korea's failure to work toward a solution.
Reuters reported that the DPRK criticized on Saturday Japan's stance on the issue of Japanese nationals Tokyo believes were abducted in the 1970s and 1980s, a dispute that has hampered efforts to normalize ties. The DPRK's official Rodong Sinmun newspaper said the abductions were "invented" by Japan, adding that Tokyo was using the issue as a bargaining chip. "It is childish and maladroit of Japan to raise the 'kidnapping' issue as a 'bargaining chip'," Rodong Sinmun said. The criticism of Japan comes after the DPRK's Red Cross Society said on March 22 that it would resume the investigation into "those missing" although it denied Tokyo's long-standing charge that the DPRK was behind the kidnapping of at least 11 Japanese citizens. The DPRK has repeatedly denied the kidnapping charges, but has agreed to investigate the case. ("N.KOREA SLAMS JAPAN'S STANCE ON KIDNAP CASES," Tokyo, 03/30/02)
Joongang Ilbo, March 27, 2000. Because of the yellow sand blowing from mainland China last week, both North and South Korea seemed to be bathed in perpetual twilight. But the yellow sand wasn't the only thing that blew in from China. Beijing spoke angrily about 25 North Korean defectors who rushed the Spanish Embassy seeking asylum. The Chinese government said the issue of the defectors should have been resolved quietly, but it became a messy public situation that made the Chinese government uncooperative.
I doubt that I was the only person to feel thankful to the Chinese government for its humanitarian action when it said, immediately after the 25 defectors stormed the grounds of the Spanish Embassy in Beijing, that it would not force the defectors to return to North Korea. But Beijing refused refugee status to them. The Chinese authorities also warned civic organizations not to violate Chinese law. Several groups announced that they had helped North Koreans travel to Beijing and enter the Spanish Embassy to seek asylum. Now, reports have said, Beijing has started an extensive crackdown on the organizations. China and Korea established diplomatic ties 10 years ago. Beijing and Seoul had a very close relationship until the communists took over China in 1949. Close ties were re-established only after the Cold War ended. In the last decade, the two countries' economic, social and cultural relations grew rapidly. The political dialogue, including meetings between the two nations' leaders, helped greatly in thawing relations and increasing mutual understanding. So it was disappointing to Koreans when the Chinese began to crack down on defectors from North Korea.
The asylum issue is not one of national gains or losses－it is a matter of fundamental values. How the Chinese authorities deal with North Koreans in their country says a lot about the values that Beijing holds important. Does Chinese culture respect human rights and value personal freedoms? Or does it place more value on the interests of the group than those of any individual? We can gain some understanding of the Chinese culture's inclinations concerning values by watching whether the Chinese government would choose to deal with the issue of North Korean defectors in a humanitarian manner or whether it elevates its national relationship with North Korea to the top of the list of its priorities.
Historically, Korea has been very much influenced by Chinese culture, so it is not surprising that our sense of values tended to follow the collectivist values of China in the past. Only as we entered the modern era did our values change as Western social values began to be known here and take root. As a result, we turned to a more critical view of our Chinese-influenced traditions.
China is in the middle of a huge modernization program, and it is heading towards an uncertain future. Korea, which is historically connected to China, only hopes that the mainland would head in the same direction that Korea is headed. The reason that the Chinese government complained about the North Korean defectors to the Korean government, and the reason for the crackdown on civic groups assisting the defectors, may be that it needs to make a gesture to prevent complaints from Pyongyang. I hope that the explanation for China's recent behaviour is as simple as that.
China could also be anxious about the alarming increase in North Korean defectors, which is approaching the scale seen in East Germany in 1989. That could be a scenario that could eventually lead to the end of communism in North Korea as happened in East Germany. If that is indeed a concern, China should realize that it would be more threatening for the communist rulers of North Korea if North Koreans who escaped their country, risking their own lives to evade communist rule, are sent back there.
Finally, China must also think about the image it portrays to the global community and to Korea in particular. China is teetering on the edge of being seen as a country that would quickly trample on human rights if it is in its national interest. China must realize that for the "country in the center of the world" to take its place as a leading nation in the 21st century, its value system must be one that will be recognized by the rest of the global society. Just as the yellow sand phenomenon has stopped, I hope the bad news about North Korean defectors' problems will end as well.
Reporter Kim Boram, March 25, 2002. Following last Monday’s mass defection by North Koreans in China, Beijing is intensifying its crackdown on illegal North Korean refugees while local aid workers here, maintain their vigil to safeguard these individuals. Back in 1996, North Korean defector Lee Aeran and nine members of her family including her son escaped into China before making their way into South Korea. Now a graduate student at a leading women’s university, Lee is working to secure a better future for her family. “I am extremely thankful for being able to realize my own personal identity and what rights and freedoms I have as an individual.”
Last Monday, the Beijing government has launched a crackdown on North Korean refugees, tens of thousands of whom are believed to be hiding along the north-eastern provinces of China. The issue of North Korean refugees is a sensitive one between Seoul and Beijing, as China views them as economic migrants rather than as asylum seekers. “The Chinese government in this respect needs to be a bit modernized. They have to put more emphasis on human rights instead of consideration on alliance politics with North Korea.”
Since 1996, the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, a NGO here in Seoul, has helped North Korean refugees in third countries working to improve the human rights situation in the communist North. NKHR organized the 3rd International Conference on the issue in Tokyo last month where participants affirmed that North Korea were entitled to their rights. “We have been sending reports to the U.N. High Commissioner of Refugees on how North Korea are fleeing their country to preserve their right to life and the suffering they have to endure when they are forcefully repatriated.” Activists say while the most recent mass defection cast a global spotlight on the issue, it has also intensified Beijing’s efforts to crackdown on potential defectors warning many more will be caught and forced back to the North.
Joongang Ilbo, March 25, 2002. After 25 North Koreans succeeded in their attempt to flee to South Korea by invading the Spanish Embassy in Beijing, all foreign embassies there have gone on alert, anticipating more such asylum attempts from the large numbers of North Koreans hiding in China. Some embassies, quick to sense that mass defections might take place, have already come up with manuals on how to deal with the kind of situation that developed at the Spanish Embassy. In those manuals are found negotiating tactics and important phone numbers, such as those for their own government offices concerned with such issues as well as those of the Chinese government, the Beijing Office of the UN High Commission for Refugees and the Korean Embassy in Beijing.
North Korean defectors are a hot potato for any government that might have to deal with them, and the best way not to burn your hands with a hot potato is to get rid of it quickly. The Chinese government expelled the North Koreans to the Philippines within 27 hours of their rush through the Spanish Embassy gates. The Philippines government, which did not want them in the country, at first wanted to redirect them to Seoul as soon as they arrived in Manila. One or two hot potatoes can be handled - or tossed to others. But when they appear en masse the problem is different.
Thirteen years ago in Germany, that's just what happened. In July 1989, East Germans who had gone on vacation to another "workers' paradise," Hungary, went to West Germany's embassy there and demanded to be sent to West Germany. The wave of East Germans continued, and finally the West German and Hungarian governments had to sit down and devise a solution to the outpouring of refugees. On August 25, West Germany's Chancellor Kohl and Foreign Minister Genscher met secretly with their Hungarian counterparts in Bonn. After four hours of negotiations, Hungary decided to allow the East Germans to go to West Germany while West Germany agreed to give Hungary a loan amounting to several hundred million U.S. dollars. The month after that secret meeting, Hungary opened up its border with West Germany, allowing all East Germans in their country to cross to the Federal Republic. East Germany's government went berserk, but was impotent, as Hungary simply ignored the protests and said its action was a humanitarian gesture. The exodus of East Germans continued, and in September 1989 alone, 25,000 East Germans found their way to freedom. Two months later, the Berlin Wall fell and the next year Germany was united.
A German doctor, Norbert Vollertsen, took part in the planning of escape of the 25 North Koreans. He tells a story of his childhood: He constantly heard his father saying how he regretted the fact that he had fought for the Nazis, not knowing the atrocities they had committed against Jews. His father always said that he would never had joined the Nazi army had he known what they were doing.
Dr. Vollertsen said that he was shocked by the reality that he saw during his 15-month stay as a doctor in North Korea, the last Stalinist regime on earth. After he was banished from North Korea, he used his time and money to let other people know about the cold realities of the country. The reason that he is doing so, he says, is because he does not want to hear from his own children that he just stood by and did nothing, knowing fully well the miserable conditions people have to endure in North Korea. Dr. Vollertsen has more plans to help suffering North Koreans; he said that he plans to bring even more people to freedom. He said that the collapse of North Korea, just like East Germany's collapse in 1989, would be his dream come true. Of course, China is no Hungary, and the Korean peninsula is far different than East and West Germany.
Press reports from China say that the Chinese and North Korean governments are cracking down on groups that support North Korean refugees. A tiny hole in a dike will sooner or later destroy the whole structure; water flows from higher ground to lower. This is a law of nature, and nobody can change it. Maybe Dr. Vollertsen's dream might become more than just a dream.
Reuters reported that just days after 25 DPRK escapees reached the Seoul, the ROK reported on Thursday the arrival of 24 more defectors from the DPRK. The ROK's National Intelligence Service (NIS) said that most of the 24 DPRK citizens had fled their country in February 1997 and made their way to the ROK through third countries. It gave no details on their escape routes or arrival times. It said the latest arrivals had taken the number of DPRK asylum seekers to have reached the ROK this year to 162. Last year, a record 583 DPRK citizens defected to the ROK. ("SOUTH KOREA CONFIRMS ARRIVAL OF 24 MORE N.KOREANS," Seoul, 03/21/02)
Thomas F. McCarthy
The following article was contributed by Thomas F. McCarthy. McCarthy has traveled frequently to the DPRK as an agricultural development consultant and has worked in Washington, most recently in cooperation with the Atlantic Council's 'Korea in Transition Program.' McCarthy argues that NGOs have no right to risk the consequences of Chinese or DPRK decisions to prevent people from receiving continued aid because of misdirected efforts to turn their plight into an international political issue. Instead, these groups could be more effective by supporting World Bank and IMF efforts at development assistance programs. This article was written shortly after the February 2002
International Conference on North Korean Human Rights and Refugees."
March 21, 2002. February's "International Conference on North Korean Human Rights and Refugees" concluded with a demand that China not only grant legal refugee status to North Koreans in its border areas but that it also allow foreign NGOs and religious groups to help these people resettle in third countries. One conference speaker, Norbert Vollertsen, the German doctor who left North Korea a year ago, stated that pressure on China to open official refugee camps along its border would assist in forcing change in the DPRK. Dr. Vollersten reportedly said, "We would try to create a flood, spreading information about the camps through the underground railroad across North Korea"
The Tokyo conference raised awareness of something that was already well underway. An array of NGO and missionary groups in Europe, Canada, and the United States are joining with South Korean groups to "internationalize" migration issues on the China - North Korea border. They are pressing -- in the U.S. Congress and elsewhere -- for China to grant formal refugee status to North Korean migrants and to begin internationally-managed programs to help them move to third countries.
It might be useful for the conference supporters -- and their various allies -- to reflect for at least a moment on the almost certain consequences of their actions: China is no more likely to tolerate this sort of international intervention than would the United States in, for example, Texas. At a minimum, China can simply tighten its borders with North Korea and refuse entry to would be migrants or temporary workers, thereby solving everybody's "refugee" problems. At worse, it could also decide to ask the foreign NGOs and church groups that it has allowed to work in Yanbian to end their humanitarian and missionary work and leave the country.
The clear losers would be the North Koreans living in border areas.
Most of the NGO and church groups seeking to assist these people are unquestionably well intentioned. A few aim also at disrupting North Korea's efforts to open relations with European Union and other countries. Both groups share a common misunderstanding of what China has in fact been doing to help in North Korea. Some readily verifiable facts about China and North Korean "refugee" issues are summarized below.
China is clearly the most important single source of humanitarian and development assistance to the DPRK. It provides at least as much food aid and other help as any "donor" nation or humanitarian agency. Agricultural research centers in China are major sources of technical assistance to their North Korean counterparts. When asked, China also furnishes advisory support for DPRK efforts to modernize its economy.
China permits the World Food Program, the UNDP, and foreign NGOs to use Beijing as logistical and "R&R" "support bases" for their programs in the DPRK, and as a platform for publicity and press events, including a major May 1999 conference on NGO humanitarian assistance in North Korea.
China allows NGOs and church groups to freely use its domestic as well as international banking, communications, and transport facilities to purchase and deliver food as well as agricultural supplies and other assistance goods to North Korea. NGOs regularly receive full support from Chinese railway authorities to move supplies from Dandong to Sinuiju.
Most importantly, China has allowed -- and often actually facilitated -- the various humanitarian activities of foreign NGO and missionary groups in territory bordering North Korea. It has complemented this de facto support for their assistance efforts with extremely tolerant policies toward the North Koreans who enter Yanbian and other areas in search of food and temporary or permanent employment.
Some NGO and church groups have a peculiar arrogance about Chinese behavior toward North Koreans. China is no less concerned than they are about human suffering. It has demonstrated that concern in many practical ways - including permitting an NGO presence that few countries would tolerate. But China must also
manage other dimensions of its border problems. In particular, it cannot let the availability of humanitarian assistance become a magnet for uncontrolled migration that would weaken its sovereignty or destabilize its relations with its neighbor. China simply is not going to give up control of its borders. What country would?
If NGOs and churches want to reduce human suffering in North Korea, they should support efforts to accelerate development and change by admitting the country to the World Bank and the IMF and by improving the quality of ongoing assistance programs. In the meantime, they should continue to discretely provide humanitarian help to families in the border areas. There is no indication that China is unwilling to allow this. But NGOs should not risk the consequences -- to North Korean migrants and not to them -- of Chinese or North Korean decisions to prevent people from receiving continued help because of misdirected efforts to turn their plight into an international political issue.
Less than fully thought out humanitarian initiatives -- with their attendant publicity -- are unlikely to calm the waters at the exact moment when the Bush Administration is asking China to assist in opening a dialogue between the DPRK and the U.S.
Agence France-Presse reported that the PRC and the DPRK have launched a massive hunt for DPRK citizens hiding in the PRC following last week's defection by 25 DPRK citizens, an evangelist group said. "Many truckloads of arrested North Korean escapees are being taken away every day ... some of them commit suicide by jumping over the bridge into the Yalu River," the ROK's Yerang Mission said. "One hundred and fifty North Korean agents were dispatched and they, together with Chinese agents, are searching one house after another to ferret out North Korean refugees," it said. The hunt for DPRK citizens is concentrated on northeastern provinces in the PRC, including Jilin, Heilongjiang and Liaoning, where tens of thousands of DPRK citizens are hiding. ("CHINA, NKOREA HUNT FOR NORTH KOREAN REFUGEES: EVANGELISTS," 03/20/02)
LA Times , March 19, 2002. Activists who aided N. Korean defectors aim to replicate events leading to fall of Berlin Wall. The 25 North Korean defectors who stormed into the Spanish Embassy in Beijing last week in a bid for freedom arrived safely in South Korea on Monday, and political activists, emboldened by the success, promised more dramatic operations in China and elsewhere in behalf of defectors.
The activists who staged the Beijing operation said they are trying to replicate the historic events of 1989 that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. "We will create a flood of refugees to embassies, and it will lead to the collapse of North Korea," said Norbert Vollertsen, a 44-year-old German physician, who spent 18 months as an aid worker in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, and who now agitates against the Communist regime. "This is the way it happened in 1989, in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. First there were a few dozen defectors, then hundreds and then thousands." The storming of the Spanish Embassy on Thursday was a deliberate restaging of an incident in September 1989 in the Czech capital, Prague, when more than 1,100 East German defectors scaled the fence of the West German Embassy, attaining asylum and demanding safe passage to the West.
An estimated 100,000 to 400,000 North Koreans are living clandestinely in China, having escaped their famine-ridden homeland. But China, honoring a repatriation treaty with North Korea, routinely hunts them down and sends them back to North Korea, where they face imprisonment and sometimes torture or execution. In addition, the South Korean Embassy in Beijing is restricted by China from directly helping defectors.
After a journey from China that took them through Manila to the South Korean capital, the North Korean defectors stepped off a plane Monday at Seoul's Inchon airport for a brief but emotional welcoming ceremony. They waved, accepted flowers and expressed thanks to their South Korean hosts. They had no luggage but clutched duty-free airport shopping bags with gifts from their airline. "I want to live as a free man in a free country," declared Lee Song, 43, a factory worker, as his pigtailed 7-year-old daughter hid from the cameras behind her mother's legs. Kim Hyang, a 16-year-old orphan, said she will study in South Korea so she can help needy North Korean children when she is an adult.
The defectors, 14 adults and 11 children, were whisked off for medical treatment and questioning by South Korean intelligence officials before being sent to Hanawon, an acclimation center for North Korean refugees 30 miles south of Seoul. At the same time, the South Korean government announced a $5-million expansion of Hanawon. And South Korean Unification Minister Jeong Se Hyun, the government's point man on North Korean relations, issued a strong statement of support for defectors, saying, "It is the basic policy of the government to accept and accommodate all North Korean defectors from a humanitarian viewpoint."
South Korea views the increasing number of defectors with some trepidation. Last year, 583 North Koreans came to the South, nearly double the number in 2000. With the latest arrivals Monday, the figure so far this year has reached 141--53 in the last week alone. Defectors now get about $28,000 each to resettle, but those funds will be badly stretched if there turns out to be an exodus. The defections also could jeopardize efforts by South Korean President Kim Dae Jung to salvage his "sunshine policy" of engagement with the North.
Efforts to Topple Regime
Refugee advocates, Christian missionaries and conservative political activists have been working quietly with the defectors in China for years, but they have decided that the time is now ripe to burst upon the international stage with more daring acts. Their goal is not merely to help defectors but to trigger a series of events that they believe could topple the North Korean government, the last bastion of undiluted communism. "I hope more escapes will be possible as we saw when East Germans flocked into West Germany as the wall fell," said Kenkichi Nakahira, head of the Tokyo-based Life Funds for North Korean Refugees, one of the groups involved in the planning.
Indeed, the activists had originally intended to use the German Embassy in a deliberate effort to evoke memories of Prague and of similar embassy sit-ins in the Hungarian capital, Budapest. But they switched to the Spanish Embassy at the last minute because of its less stringent security. Last week's incident was more a carefully planned covert operation than a spontaneous occurrence. The group of about 30 activists--Japanese, Koreans, Americans and Europeans, most of whom did not want to be identified--spent months preparing for it. They cased embassies and surreptitiously photographed the diplomatic missions' security precautions. They carefully selected and rehearsed the defectors.
The six families and three individuals were picked for their intelligence and their resolve. Most had already been arrested once before by Chinese police and sent back to North Korea, so they were willing this time to risk their lives. They carried poison with them and threatened to use it if they were captured. "They were the bravest, the ones who suffered some very bad experiences in North Korea," said Vollertsen, the German doctor. "Most of them had been living now in China one or two years, so they were well-fed and knew their way around. We couldn't do this if we picked up fresh refugees from the North Korean border."
At 9:30 a.m. Thursday, the defectors arrived in front of the Spanish Embassy in a rented bus, wearing red baseball caps reading "Beijing" to make it look as if they were on a package tour. Conveniently, the metal gates to the embassy compound were wide open, as was the front door. As a CNN crew that had been tipped off rolled its cameras, the defectors rushed past the single Chinese policeman outside and dashed into the embassy.
"It was surprisingly easy. The doors were open, and they were the doors to freedom," said Moon Kook Hwan, a South Korean businessman who was watching from behind a tree. Moon and several others had also been involved in an incident last summer in which a family of seven North Koreans barged into the Beijing branch of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, demanding safe passage to South Korea. The family is now living near Seoul.
'Right to Their Freedom'
Moon said he was encouraged that in this operation, the South Korean and Chinese governments, with the help of the U.N. refugee agency and the Philippines, were able to patch together a face-saving deal so quickly to evacuate the refugees and bring them to Seoul. "This makes me very optimistic. I think the time has come that China, South Korea and North Korea are realizing that these defectors have the right to their freedom and the right to seek food," Moon said. A high-ranking Chinese official was quoted Monday by South Korea's Yonhap news agency as saying that last week's incident should not be viewed as "a precedent for the future." There were also reports that Chinese police in provinces near the North Korean border had launched a search for North Koreans at churches, restaurants, construction sites and rooming houses where they might be living or working illegally.
China is in a difficult position, juggling its obligations to its increasingly isolated North Korean ally and its desire to burnish its record on human rights. The activists are betting that the latter prevails. As of late Monday, there had been no comment from Pyongyang regarding the latest defection drama. Vollertsen's greatest hope is that news of the successful operation will filter back to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, or at least to some of the elite there who have access to foreign television.
Activists Seek U.S. Aid
The activists are also seeking support among U.S. conservatives for refugee camps in Mongolia and elsewhere in Asia to help North Korean defectors. They hope that President Bush's characterization of North Korea as part of an "axis of evil" can be parlayed into U.S. support for their plans. Among North Korea watchers here, there are conflicting opinions about whether the recent increase in defectors could be the harbinger of something bigger to come. "The conventional wisdom is that the North Korean regime is not going to collapse for quite a while. I'm not sure," said Kim Kyung Won, a former South Korean ambassador to the United States. "North Korea is a failed state. Changes in China are going to have a corrosive impact on North Korea."
Moon Chung In, a professor at Yonsei University in Seoul, believes that China will prevent any increase in defections from North Korea from developing along the lines of what happened in Eastern Europe. "There is a very strong bond between Beijing and Pyongyang. I don't think China wants the internal collapse of North Korea. . . . They want to keep the status quo," Moon said. "South Koreans, for the most part, also don't want the collapse of North Korea. They learned from the experience of German unification the enormous costs that could be incurred. Except for some ultraconservatives, the majority of Koreans want incremental changes, not what we call the 'Big Bang.'"
Washington Post, March 19, 2002. The scene of 25 North Koreans who landed in Seoul yesterday, describing their desperate thirst for freedom to hundreds of reporters, seemed a major victory for human rights groups trying to encourage defections from the Stalinist country. But the quick transfer of the 17 adults and 8 children to a closed camp in Seoul denied their supporters the goal of forcing China and South Korea to open their doors to more North Koreans.
"I am deeply disappointed," said Kim Sang-Chul, secretary general of the Commission to Help North Korean Refugees, a Seoul-based human rights group. The defectors had rushed into the Spanish Embassy in Beijing last week seeking sanctuary after leaving North Korea. But by swiftly ushering them out of the country to Manila, China sidestepped their request for formal refugee status. "What we really wanted was this to be a showcase example of refugee acknowledgement witnessed by the world," Kim said.
Kim and others are frustrated at the secretive approach of Seoul, and to a lesser extent China, in dealing with the growing flow of refugees who escape from hunger-wracked North Korea. Both countries have quietly ignored an underground escape route for North Koreans, but have been loath to offer any public help to those who are fleeing the starvation and oppression of North Korea.
Tens of thousands of North Koreans have crossed the long and porous border into China, but they remain there by hiding or by bribing Chinese guards who periodically carry out crackdowns to forcibly return the Koreans home. Relatively few get to South Korea. Most of those who make it say they got little or no assistance from the South Korean government. And once in South Korea, the government tries hard to keep their arrival from being publicized to avoid antagonizing North Korea and upsetting Seoul's "Sunshine policy" of engaging the north.
The South Korean government declined to discuss the issue on the record today. An official in South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, insisting on anonymity, said China privately upbraided Seoul for "not handling the matter quietly." When the 25 defectors arrived on a flight from Manila yesterday afternoon, the government sought to whisk them away from the waiting reporters. Officials eventually relented to allow a few limited questions, then took the families to a camp, where they will be in seclusion for two months, ostensibly to teach them how to fit into the South Korean society.
China's position, too, has brought it in for international criticism. China is a signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention but has been condemned by human rights activists for refusing to grant refugee status to North Korean defectors hiding mostly in its northern border town. Instead, China has acceded to requests from its communist ally to repatriate defectors to what human rights group say is often severe punishment or death.
China today said its handling of the defectors does not signal the opening of an escape route for fleeing North Koreans. "I would like to point out that such a way of dealing with the situation does not constitute a precedent for resolving similar situations in the future," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue told a news conference, according to Reuters.
Analysts here agree the incident puts the quiet policies of China and South Korea in the spotlight. "There's no way these governments could avoid the problem anymore. China will soon have to make a decision and South Korea must come up with a sound policy to deal with the rising number of hungry North Koreans in China," said Lee Tai Hwan, senior research fellow at Sejong Research Institute.
Reuters reported that the PRC said its decision to let a group of DPRK asylum seekers leave for Seoul will not set a precedent. "I would like to point out that such a way of dealing with the situation does not constitute a precedent for resolving similar situations in the future," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhang Qiyue told a news conference. Zhang warned potential organizers against similar attempts. "We warn those individuals and organizations who make use of illegal entrants to stir up trouble and deliberately challenge Chinese laws. The Chinese government would by no means allow or ignore their illegal activities," she said. "We hope they will not judge the situation erroneously and make trouble in China," she said. ("CHINA SAYS N.KOREAN REFUGEE SOLUTION NO PRECEDENT," Beijing, 03/19/02)
The Associated Press reported that 25 DPRK asylum seekers arrived in Seoul on Monday, four days after they forced their way into the Spanish Embassy in the PRC demanding that they be allowed to travel to the ROK. The group, 14 adults and 11 children, landed at Incheon International Airport outside Seoul aboard a Korean Air plane that took them from Manila, the Philippines. "We're glad to be finally in South Korea, which is better off than the northern side," Choi Byung Sup said, speaking on behalf of the whole group. "We want to live freely here, abiding by South Korean law and do whatever we want to do." It was the largest DPRK defection ever to the ROK. (Paul Shin, "ASYLUM SEEKERS ARRIVE IN SEOUL," Seoul, 03/18/02)
Reuters reported that twenty-five DPRK asylum seekers -- six families and two orphaned girls -- left the Spanish embassy compound in Beijing on Friday bound for Manila, a little more than 24 hours after they sought refuge. They will likely leave Manila for the ROK the following day in the largest DPRK mass defection since the Korean War. "We have diplomatic ties with North Korea and we would like to maintain good relations with both North and South Korea so if ever they will come here it will only be for transit and will not be entering Philippine territory," Foreign Affairs Secretary Teofisto Guingona told reporters. Guingona added that he had no communications with the DPRK government about this issue. The ROK has said it would accept the 25 once it verified that they wanted to come to the ROK. (Rosemarie Francisco, "N.KOREANS TO HEAD FOR S.KOREA AFTER MANILA STOPOVER," Manila, 03/15/02) and Agence France-Presse ("NORTH KOREANS EN ROUTE TO MANILA AS CHINA EMBASSY STAND-OFF ENDS," 03/15/02)
La représentation espagnole prise d'assaut par des réfugiés nord-coréens.
Par Pierre HASKI, Le vendredi 15 mars 2002
Le groupe de 25 hom mes, femmes et enfants, portant des casquettes de base-ball estampillées «Beijing» comme tout bon touriste, avance négligemment sur le trottoir de l'ambassade d'Espagne, hier matin à Pékin. Arrivés devant la grille grande ouverte, deux hommes se mettent à courir vers l'entrée, attirant vers eux l'unique policier chinois de faction qu'ils maîtrisent pendant que tout le reste de la petite troupe pénètre en territoire diplomatique. Une brève échauffourée et les deux hommes se séparent du policier hébété et pénètrent à leur tour dans le bâtiment. Non sans faire le «V» de la victoire avant de disparaître à l'intérieur de l'ambassade, où les diplomates espagnols se demandent ce qui leur tombe dessus...
Crise. La scène a duré moins d'une minute, le temps qu'il a fallu à ces 25 réfugiés nord-coréens en quête d'asile politique pour ouvrir une crise dont la Chine et l'Espagne se seraient bien passées. En quelques minutes, le périmètre de la chancellerie espagnole est bouclé, des dizaines de policiers encerclent le bâtiment et la circulation est interrompue dans cette rue passante du quartier diplomatique de Sanlitun. La première réaction chinoise, dans l'après-midi, est sèche: «Ce ne sont pas des réfugiés, et notre position sur ce point est permanente et claire», déclare la porte-parole du ministère des Affaires étrangères. Elle précise toutefois que Pékin négocie le sort des occupants de l'ambassade d'Espagne avec «les parties concernées», c'est-à-dire, l'Espagne elle-même, le Haut-Commissariat de l'ONU pour les réfugiés (HCR), et, sans doute, les deux Corées.
Une première affaire similaire s'était produite en juin dernier, lorsqu'une famille s'était réfugiée au bureau du HCR dans la capitale chinoise. Elle avait discrètement été autorisée à gagner Séoul, via Singapour et Manille, pour sauver la face de la Corée du Nord comme celle de la Chine. Dans une déclaration écrite adressée à la communauté internationale, diffusée par les organisations humanitaires qui les soutiennent, les occupants de l'ambassade revendiquent ce statut de réfugiés, mais se plaignent de l'attitude chinoise qui renvoie vers Pyongyang tous ses citoyens ayant fait défection. «Si nous sommes de nouveau rapatriés en Corée du Nord par les autorités chinoises, nous savons que nos vies seront en grand danger. Notre liberté nous sera niée en raison de nos précédentes défections et de cette tentative de nous rendre en Corée du Sud. [...] Nous avons atteint un tel niveau de désespoir, et nous vivons dans une telle hantise des persécutions et de la peur, que nous avons pris la décision de risquer notre vie pour la liberté plutôt que d'attendre passivement notre sort.
Certains d'entre nous portent du poison pour se suicider si les autorités chinoises décidaient de nous renvoyer en Corée du Nord. Le seul pouvoir qui nous reste est celui de faire appel à vous, à genoux et en larmes.» Allié inconfortable. Le geste spectaculaire de ces familles, dont certaines vivaient depuis des années en se cachant en Chine et ont déjà été renvoyées au moins une fois chez elles (lire ci-contre), vient relancer le débat sur l'attitude chinoise face aux dizaines de milliers de réfugiés nord-coréens présents sur son territoire. Pékin, toujours allié, même inconfortable, du régime stalinien de Pyongyang, renvoie chaque année des milliers de réfugiés chez son voisin, au mépris des conventions internationales qu'elle a signées. Prenant les devants, la porte-parole chinoise a souligné hier qu'il n'y avait «pas de problème de réfugiés» entre la Chine et la Corée du Nord. «Nous traitons ces gens amicalement et sur une base humanitaire. Toute accusation contre l'approche chinoise est totalement irraisonnable.»
Côté occidental, on est sans réponse face à cette question, sinon pour chercher à éviter la multiplication de ce type d'incidents. «Il ne faudrait pas que s'ouvre une route frontière chinoise-Sanlitun (le quartier des ambassades à Pékin, ndlr)-Séoul», commente un diplomate européen. Les activistes étrangers qui soutiennent les réfugiés se félicitent au contraire d'avoir posé une nouvelle fois le débat, et les plus audacieux se prennent à rêver d'un mouvement de masse de réfugiés dans les ambassades, à l'image de celui des étudiants est-allemands qui avait provoqué la chute du mur de Berlin en 1989. La Corée du Nord pays de l'«axe du mal» selon George W. Bush n'en est pas là. Mais Pyongyang, comme Pékin, ne peut ignorer la menace
Koelner-Stadt-Anzeiger, March 14, 2002. Peking - Die Flüchtlinge kamen als Touristen verkleidet. Mit bunten Mützen auf den Kopf stiegen die Nordkoreaner am Donnerstag Morgen vor der spanischen Botschaft in Peking aus einem Bus. Ein Mann hielt den chinesischen Wachmann fest, dann rannte die 25 Erwachsenen und Kinder durch das offene Tor auf das Gelände, um sich in der Botschaft zu verschanzten. Drei Jahre waren manche von ihnen auf der Flucht. Jetzt waren sie zum ersten Mal in Sicherheit.
Für die Nordkoreaner, darunter sechs Familien und ein zehnjähriges Mädchen, war die Flucht in die Botschaft der letzte Ausweg. „Wir sind an einem Punkt der Verzweiflung (...), dass wir unser Leben für unsere Freiheit riskieren“, erklärten sie in einem Flugblatt. Wegen der Not und der Unterdrückung hatten sie ihr Heimat verlassen und sind heimlich über die Grenze nach China geflüchtet. Sie wollten lieber sterben, als zurück nach Nordkorea zu gehen. „Einige von uns tragen Gift bei sich, um Selbstmord zu begehen“, heißt es in einer Erklärung. Sie verlangen, dass die chinesische Regierung sie ausreisen lässt, und sie in Südkorea ein neues Leben beginnen können. Sollten sie zurück nach Nordkorea geschickt werden, rechnen sie mit der Todesstrafe.
Ursprünglich sei die deutsche Botschaft das Ziel gewesen, erklärte der deutsche Arzt Norbert Vollertsen, der zusammen mit Menschenrechtsgruppen die Flucht der Nordkoreaner organisierte. „Die deutsche Botschaft war zu stark bewacht“, sagte Vollertsen dem „Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger”. Der ehemalige Cap Anamur-Mitarbeiter war Ende 2000 aus Nordkorea ausgewiesen worden. Er bestätigte, dass die Flüchtlinge Gift bei sich tragen - nach seinen Angaben eine Mischung aus Opium und Rattengift, die auch nordkoreanische Soldaten mit sich führen. Vollertsen hatte die Flüchtlinge am Mittwoch untersucht. Einige, die in Nordkorea in Gefangenschaft waren, hätten “Spuren von Schlägen„ und anderen Misshandlungen am Körper, berichtet Vollertsen.
Zehntausende Nordkoreaner leben versteckt im chinesischen Grenzgebiet, schätzten Hilfsorganisationen. Viele von ihnen schlagen sich als Bettler durch. Nordkoreanische Frauen hoffen darauf, mit einem chinesischen Bauern verheiratet zu werden. Da Peking die Flüchtlinge offiziell nicht anerkennt, leben die Nordkoreaner in ständiger Angst, entdeckt zu werden. Chinas Sicherheitspolizei hat in den vergangenen Jahr die Kontrolle in dem Grenzgebiet Yanbian verschärft. Tausende Nordkoreaner wurden zurück über die Grenze geschickt.
Dort werden sie häufig gefoltert und in Lagern festgehalten, berichtet Amnesty International. Die Flucht der Nordkoreaner ist für Peking brisant. China unterhält enge Beziehungen zu dem Regime in Pjöngjang, das die Rückführung der Flüchtlinge fordert. Anderseits steht Peking unter dem Druck der internationalen Öffentlichkeit, die eine zwangsweise Rückführung von Nordkoreanern nicht duldet. Im Januar 2000 schickte Peking trotz internationaler Proteste eine siebenköpfige Familie zurück nach Nordkorea. Im Juni vergangenen Jahres hatten sich ebenfalls sieben Nordkoreaner in der UN-Vertretung in Peking verschanzt. China ließ sie nach einigen Tagen stillschweigend ausreisen.
Peking wird in den nächsten Tagen über das Schicksal der Familien entscheiden. China stehe bereits in den Verhandlungen mit den beteiligten Ländern, erklärte eine Sprecherin des Pekinger Außenministeriums. Südkorea forderte Spanien und China auf, den Wunsch der Flüchtlinge zu respektieren und “humanitäre Gesichtspunkt„ zu berücksichtigen. Vollertsen ist optimistisch, dass Peking die Nordkoreaner ausreisen lässt. Ihm schweben bereits größere Aktionen wie einst in Ostberlin vor. “Das nächste Mal könnte man auch 150 Leute nach Peking bringen„.
B центре Сеула произошло серьезное столкновение между полицией и бывшими южнокорейскими разведчиками, недовольными отказом правительства выплатить им премии за секретные задания, которые они выполняли в Северной Корее. Около 500 пожилых шпионов (большинству - за 60), одетых в черную форму, вооруженных металлическими прутьями, сражались с тысячей полицейских около 20 минут, но эти 20 минут превратились в настоящий бой.
Участники демонстрации подожгли баллоны со сжиженным природным газом, но пожарным удалось быстро затушить их, не позволив им взорваться. Полиция преградила бывшим шпионам дорогу к правительственным зданиям. Разведчики на пенсии требовали от правительства, чтобы оно выполнило то, что, как они утверждают, обещало за секретные миссии в Северной Корее, которые ветераны осуществляли после окончания корейской войны в 1953 году и вплоть до начала 70-х. В то время Южная Корея засылала на территорию северного соседа тысячи диверсантов.
Многим уже заплатили, говорит правительство. По официальным данным, 300 из них погибли, 203 - были ранены, 130 арестованы и 4849 числятся пропавшими без вести. В 70-е, когда США начали осуществлять сбор разведданных с помощью спутников, количество диверсантов стало сокращаться. Вашингтон и Сеул, как союзники, обменивались полученной информацией.
Престарелые диверсанты ожидали от правительства признания их заслуг, а также денежных выплат, новых домов и других привилегий. По закону, однако, компенсации не положены тем, кто вернулся с задания в Северной Корее целым и невредимым. Кроме того, правительство настаивает на том, что многие получили деньги сразу по окончании миссий.
Как передает агентство Ассошиэйтед пресс, на голове многих демонстрантов были красно-сине-желтые повязки со словами "Посланы в Северную Корею с разведзаданием". Один из них, 65-летний Ли Донь-ан, сказал корреспонденту агентства: "При прошлых правительствах мы не имели возможности высказаться публично. Но мы больше не можем молчать о нашем прошлом". Источник: Би-би-си, BBC,
15.03.2002
(in Russian)
By Joe McDonald,
Associated Press
Thursday, March 14, 2002; 3:09 PM
BEIJING –– Two dozen North Korean asylum-seekers handed China a dilemma Thursday: anger its ally North Korea or risk alienating the world. The North Koreans – men, women and children as young as 10 – rushed past Chinese government guards and into Spain's embassy, appealing to be allowed to go to South Korea. They threatened suicide if sent home, saying they would be persecuted and possibly killed by the hard-line communist dictatorship.
The asylum bid pushed China toward an unwelcome choice between Pyongyang, with which it has a treaty obliging it to return fleeing North Koreans, and a growing international role that has brought membership in the World Trade Organization and a winning 2008 Olympic bid. While the North Koreans waited Thursday night in an embassy ringed by Chinese police, Beijing said it was evaluating the situation but that the asylum-seekers would be dealt with according to law – both international and Chinese. "I think their entry into the Spanish Embassy can only be regarded as an illegal entry," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said.
A Spanish Foreign Ministry spokesman said officials from both nations were working on a solution that would have the asylum seekers leave China and pass through a second country to South Korea. "That's what we're working on, and prospects look good." "We are confident there will be a solution soon, and one satisfactory and good for the asylum seekers," the spokesman said in Madrid, speaking on condition of anonymity.
South Korea appealed to China and Spain to respect "humanitarian principles" and the will of the asylum-seekers. "The issue should not be resolved against their will," Choo Kyu-ho, head of the South Korean Foreign Ministry's Asia-Pacific affairs bureau, said in Seoul.
Beijing's ties with North Korea are sentimental as well as practical. They date to an alliance against U.S.-led forces in the 1950-53 Korean War, an event that still resonates with the influential Chinese military. President Jiang Zemin visited Pyongyang last September and assured North Korean leaders of the "long-term and steady development" of good relations. Beijing will try to honor that relationship in the latest crisis, but "certainly will abide by relevant international norms," said Zhao Gancheng, a Korea specialist at the Shanghai International Research Institute.
The Chinese government has been criticized for refusing to grant refugee status to North Koreans fleeing repression and famine. Many have been sent back, while others live in hiding near China's northeastern border with North Korea. Last June, China relented when seven members of a North Korean family sought refuge in a U.N. office in Beijing. After a four-day wait, they were allowed to leave for South Korea via Singapore and the Philippines.
Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor who once lived in North Korea and helped to organize the asylum bid, said China's decision last June was motivated by the glare of publicity.
Vollertsen predicted that China would let the latest group of North Koreans leave as well. "China will refuse to create a diplomatic disaster," Vollertsen told reporters outside the Spanish Embassy on a tree-lined street of diplomatic compounds in northeastern Beijing. Vollertsen said the asylum bid Thursday was part of a planned campaign of such actions, with a growing number of North Koreans taking part each time.
On Thursday morning, two North Korean asylum-seekers approached the Spanish Embassy first, occupying the guards while others streamed in through the open gate. The men then shook off the guards and rushed in themselves. Some thrust fists into the air in jubilation when they reached the embassy building. Life Funds for North Korean Refugees, a Tokyo-based organization that assisted the group, described the members as six families and three individuals.
The organization also distributed statements by some members of the group. Some said they were carrying rat poison to kill themselves if they were sent home. One man, who used a pseudonym, said hunger forced him and his wife to flee to China in 1996 but that they were caught and sent home. He described being beaten and kicked in detention in North Korea before the couple escaped again last year. "North Korea is a gigantic prison," the man wrote. © 2002 The Associated Press
The Asahi Shimbun, March 13, 2002. After nearly 20 years, the government must act, the parents say. The parents of a young woman lured to North Korea and held since 1983 said court testimony Tuesday gave them hope that they may see their daughter again. Akihiro and Kayoko Arimoto talked to reporters after a Tokyo District Court session in which Megumi Yao described how she conned Keiko Arimoto into visiting the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea). Akihiro Arimoto, 73, said the statements by Yao provided evidence that his daughter was in North Korea and he called on the Japanese government to step up negotiations to free her and other Japanese believed abducted by Pyongyang. Kayoko Arimoto, 76, said she only wanted to see her daughter again and that every day had been difficult, thinking about what had happened to Keiko.
Earlier, the Arimotos expressed frustration at the Japanese government for not doing anything to confirm the whereabouts of their daughter. After last hearing from Keiko in 1983, the Arimotos first learned she was in North Korea in 1988 from relatives of a man who disappeared in Spain. A letter to the man's family in Hokkaido, sent from Poland, said Keiko was living in North Korea. For years, the Arimotos waged a fruitless battle with the Foreign Ministry to find out what had happened to their daughter.
With officials unable to offer much help, they joined other families whose relatives are believed to have been abducted by North Korea to pressure the government into action. While the Foreign Ministry eventually began listening to the Arimotos' concerns, officials offered little hope, saying there was nothing they could do as Japan did not have diplomatic ties with North Korea, Akihiro Arimoto said.
Meanwhile, sources said Yao recently told investigators she had been agonizing over her part in the Arimoto case. ``I want to confess and try to explain everything done by the group associated with the hijacking of the Yodo airliner,'' Yao told investigators, sources said.
According to those close to the case, after Yao graduated from high school in Hyogo Prefecture, she visited North Korea in February 1977. Yao had developed an interest in the country's juche (self-reliance) ideology through contact with the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Cho- chong- ryun). Of the nine hijackers who ended up in North Korea, eight married Japanese women. Yao lived with the rest of the Yodo group in a suburb of Pyongyang known as the ``Japan Revolutionary Village'' and underwent intensive ideological training. She said the group soon decided to bring more Japanese to North Korea to further their revolutionary goals.
The Asahi Shimbun, March 12, 2002. Keiko Arimoto was apparently spirited to North Korea while visiting Denmark. Police on Monday added the name of Keiko Arimoto to the list of 10 Japanese believed to have been abducted and spirited to North Korea two decades or so ago. Arimoto disappeared while studying in London and was last heard of in a letter from Copenhagen in October 1983. Her situation is to be recounted today in testimony in the Tokyo District Court trial of Emiko Akagi, 46, accused of violating the passport law. Arimoto's name emerged in a statement by the former wife of a former Red Army Faction member who helped commandeer a Japan Air Lines jet to Pyongyang in 1970.
The Metropolitan Police Department has assembled a task force to investigate the circumstances, which represent the first direct testimony from someone involved in the abduction of Japanese. The informant, a 46-year-old woman now living in Japan, told police in December that her group snatched Arimoto from Copenhagen in 1983 and took her to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea). The source for the revelation was married to a member of the so-called Yodo hijacking group and often traveled to Europe during the first half of the 1980s. Until now, the government had said it believed 10 Japanese were abducted by North Korean agents. Arimoto left her birthplace, Kobe, to study in London in 1982 and was 23 when she vanished. One of two Japanese men, who disappeared while visiting Spain, wrote to his family in 1988 to say that the men and Keiko were living in Pyongyang. Keiko's family has demanded that the government add her name to the list of missing Japanese.
The others, both men and women, disappeared from isolated areas and shoreline during the latter half of the 1970s and the 1980s. The areas ranged from Niigata to Kagoshima prefectures. Tokyo's efforts to locate missing nationals has proved a stumbling block in talks with Pyongyang on establishing full diplomatic relations.
LA Times, March 12, 2002. Lim Kyung Hee and Chi Jung Nam, Seoul Bureau
As the number of North Korean defectors in the South grows, so does awareness of their plight. Their hunger assuaged, many still struggle to assimilate.
BUCHEON, South Korea--Kim Kang Chul steered past the clutter of fast-food restaurants that make up the bustling streetscape of this Seoul suburb. There are KFC restaurants and Dunkin' Donuts, and towering above them billboards advertising mobile telephones and yet more fast food. Kim hasn't stopped marveling at the incongruity of it all: that he, having fled a small North Korean town where you're counted rich for eating rice instead of corn, should be living amid this 21st century capitalist bounty, driving his own car, albeit a snub-nosed subcompact Hyundai purchased with installment payments.
"I can't believe I'm driving myself around. There are no private cars in North Korea," said Kim, deftly braking at a red light, yet another novelty. There isn't enough electricity in the North to power traffic signals. One of a new breed of North Korean defectors, the 42-year-old Kim settled in Bucheon a year and a half ago and brought his children south last summer. Now they are working hard to assimilate, trying to lose their telltale Northern accents and recover from what can only be diagnosed as an epic case of culture shock. Until recently, only a handful of North Koreans managed to escape to the South. Most were border guards or members of the elite who had unique opportunities to defect. That has changed as North Koreans find new routes out, usually slipping first across the border into China and then making their way to South Korea through third countries.
A record 583 defectors came south last year, nearly double the number who arrived in 2000, according to South Korean statistics. So far this year, at least 88 have arrived--including a soldier who braved the land mines of the demilitarized zone last month near where President Bush just hours later urged that North Koreans be given their freedom. Few observers are forecasting a mass exodus, but the numbers are expected to climb as more North Koreans flee the chronic food shortages and extraordinary isolation that make life so difficult at home.
The trend puts the South Korean government in a delicate position. Any perception that it is encouraging defectors would pique the North, which classifies them as traitors, and further undermine South Korean President Kim Dae Jung's efforts to maintain a dialogue with his nation's Communist neighbor. Too many new arrivals also could breed resentment among his people, who already fear that impoverished North Korea will one day become an economic burden for them. At the same time, the government is well aware that a successful resettlement effort would be a dress rehearsal for the possible reunification of the Koreas after more than half a century of estrangement.
"If this relatively small group of North Korean defectors fails to adjust, our prospects for reunification are gloomy," said Yoon In Jin, a sociologist with Korea University who has written extensively about the subject. "If they succeed in making a new life here, we have hope of integrating. For that reason, we have to make every effort to help them so we can learn from their trials and their errors."
Extensive research is underway in South Korean academia about resettling the defectors. The government Unification Ministry has studied models ranging from Israel's airlift and resettlement of Yemeni Jews in the 1940s and '50s to German reunification in 1990. It is generally assumed that integrating North and South Korea would be even more difficult than Germany's costly effort. While West Germans were about four times richer than East Germans just before reunification, the income disparity between South and North Koreans is 16 to 1. South Koreans throw away 4 million tons of food each year, more than North Korea, which has about half the population, produces in food staples annually, according to a report last week by the South Korean government. "They lived under a totalitarian system. They are very ignorant about the outside world. They don't know how to open a bank account, how to drive, how to use a mobile telephone," said Jo Sang Ho, an official with the Assn. of Supporters for Defecting North Korean Residents, a government-supported foundation.
In a survey published by the association in December, defectors complained of difficulties finding jobs, combating prejudice and adapting to the radically different life in the South. "They are like newborns. They have to forget everything they learned in North Korea and start fresh,"' said Lee Jung Kuk, who defected in 1995. Now a successful businessman in Seoul, he volunteers to work with newcomers.
Jeon Woo Taek, a psychiatrist at Yonsei University who works with defectors, said psychological problems handicap their adjustment to new lives. They often suffer guilt over family members left behind and live under assumed names in fear that the North Korean government might punish their relatives. "I think their main obstacle to life in South Korea is that they are suspicious and paranoid," said Jeon. "It makes it hard for them to get close to South Koreans or to each other."
Defectors receive government payments of roughly $28,000 to get started. The amount used to be higher but was reduced because of the growing number of new arrivals. For about two months, they are housed in Hanawon, a resettlement center about 30 miles south of Seoul, which serves a dual purpose: It is both a training facility and a detention center while the defectors are investigated by intelligence services, which try to determine if they are spies. Hanawon was opened in 1998, a year when there were only 71 defectors. The increasing numbers are forcing the government to expand the center.
Kim Kang Chul, who, like most defectors, changed his name when he arrived, is a relative success story amid the new crop. He is one of the few who can operate a car, having been a driver during his military service in the North. He managed to bring his son, daughter and mother south. Still, the family's travails illustrate how difficult the adjustment is. They live in a government-subsidized, 13th-floor apartment crammed with an impressive collection of donated appliances--computer, television, VCR, stereo, rice cooker, water purifier--but so tiny that there isn't enough room for a chair in the space that remains. With a thick accent and slightly mismatched clothing, Kim seems just enough out of step to be spotted as a Northerner. He looks older than his 42 years, probably the result of poor nutrition and the stress of years on the run.
In 1997, Kim escaped from his home in North Hamgyong province by swimming across the narrow Tumen River into China. He worked as a laborer on Chinese farms, hoping to raise enough money to smuggle out his family. But his wife died three months after his defection, succumbing to a combination of malnutrition and tuberculosis. "She sacrificed herself for the children," he said. "She was living on one meal a day so she could give them all the food, and she just wasted away."
Kim made it to South Korea two years ago and paid a smuggler to bring out his mother and children last year. His son, now 15, and daughter, 12, look younger than their ages; the poor Northern diet has left them smaller than their South Korean peers. They also have been held back a year in school because so much of their early education was devoted to studying the works of North Korean founder Kim Il Sung and his son, current leader Kim Jong Il. "Emotionally, it has been a great shock for the children. They grew up believing that Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il were heroes. Now they believe they are tyrants," their father said. There is much about South Korea that the children like--mostly their computer and the abundant food--but they complain of loneliness. "If it weren't that we were always hungry, I would rather be in the North. The people are more human," said the boy. He identified himself by a nickname, Tae Hwan, because he wants his Northern roots kept from classmates. "They are too shallow and frivolous. They wouldn't understand."
Kim has found the adjustment difficult as well. He has tried various businesses, including a matchmaking service. A writer by profession, he also has tried selling essays and articles about his experiences in the North, only to find that South Koreans aren't all that interested. "People here are indifferent mostly," he said. "I think they have lost interest, or maybe they have become a little apprehensive that there will be so many defectors that they become a burden on the economy."
There are now close to 2,000 North Korean defectors living in South Korea. Although a handful have had striking success writing books or starting businesses, the vast majority struggle to reinvent themselves. About 28% are unemployed, living entirely on government assistance. At a conference on North Korean human rights last month in Tokyo, Hong Seong Phil, a professor at Ewha Woman's University in Seoul and an expert on North Korea, predicted that about 1,000 defectors will come south this year. "Nothing can deter them from coming out in search of food and human rights, and it is up to us to help them," Hong said.
It is almost impossible for North Koreans to escape directly to the South. Until the 22-year-old soldier appeared near the Dorasan train station last month, no defector had made it across the demilitarized zone since September 1999. Escaping to China is easier, especially in winter when the Tumen River is frozen over. It is estimated that between 100,000 and 200,000 North Koreans have fled to China. But they live there illegally in fear of being sent home, where they would face harsh treatment in labor camps or even execution. China has a treaty with North Korea requiring that defectors be deported if caught.
Only a few of those in China make it to South Korea, as the latter's embassy in Beijing will not issue them visas for fear of endangering its diplomatic relations with the Chinese government. Defectors must go to a third country--often Mongolia--where the South Korean Embassy screens them, grants visas and gives them plane tickets. All this is done in great secrecy to avoid angering the North Korean government. "It used to be that every defector coming out was very special and unique, people who had great bravery or luck, money or connections, because it was so difficult to get out of North Korea," said Jeon, the psychiatrist. "But now you are seeing ordinary people, families with children." Jeon said the food situation has improved somewhat since the height of the crisis, in 1997, but that the famine weakened social controls, making it easier for North Koreans to leave home. "The society is crumbling. The old virtues of taking care of your elderly relatives are disappearing because there is not enough food," agreed defector Kim Pyong Il, a 38-year-old doctor who lives in Seoul. "People leave their children, their families." Kim Chul Young, a 29-year-old actor who defected last year after his 18-month-old son died during the famine, agreed. "People are desperate," he said. "They feel they will die anyway if they stay, so why not take the chance?"
The Mainichi Shinbun reported that a Japanese woman who went missing in Europe in the early 1980s has been taken to the DPRK, the wife of a former Red Army Faction member has admitted, police said on Monday. The 46-year-old wife of the unnamed leftist -- one of the hijackers of a Japan Airlines jet from Tokyo to Fukuoka who defected to the DPRK in 1970 -- confessed to police recently that she took part in an operation to abduct Arimoto from Denmark to the DPRK. "I took Keiko Arimoto out of Copenhagen and handed her over to North Korean agents in 1983," the woman was quoted by police officials as saying. "I was a member of a group that took her to North Korea." Arimoto's 73-year-old father, Akihiro, said he is hoping that the confession would persuade the Foreign Ministry to do more to rescue people kidnapped to the DPRK. ("MISSING JAPANESE WOMAN SAID KIDNAPPED TO N.KOREA," 03/11/02) and the Yomiuri Shinbun ("GOVERNMENT EXPECTS ELUCIDATION OF KIDNAP," 03/12/02).
Pyongyang, March 6 (KCNA) -- A spokesman for the DPRK Foreign Ministry answered a question put by KCNA today accusing the united states of pulling up the DPRK again over the "human rights issue." He said:
The U.S. State Department released an "annual report on human rights for the year 2001" on March 4 in which it let loose stereotyped vituperation against the DPRK, talking about "dictatorship," "lawlessness" and "absence of political and civil rights." It is a well-known fact that the U.S. is a land with the world's poorest human rights record. The U.S. finds itself in such a pitiful position that it lost membership of the U.N. human rights organization. Such being the hard fact, the U.S. is making much fuss over the human rights situation in other countries, styling itself a "judge". This is the height of folly.
Through this smear campaign over the "human rights issue" the U.S. seeks to hurt man-centered socialism in the DPRK where the leader, the party and the masses form a harmonious whole. But this is as ridiculous as trying to sweep the sea with a broom. All human rights are guaranteed by law in the DPRK and its people fully enjoy true political freedom and rights as genuine masters of the state and society. The U.S. desperate moves to destroy the DPRK's political system will only harden the Korean people's will to defend to the last the most advantageous socialist system of their own style. The U.S. should clearly know that its reckless efforts to unilaterally apply its "human rights standards" to other countries will only invite international criticism, scoff and isolation.
International Herald Tribune, March 03, 2002. One man's 14-year odyssey finally ended Friday as the South Korean government recognized him as a North Korean defector and granted him asylum. Kim Yong-hwa, 48, fled the North in June 1988, crossing into China and living among ethnic Koreans there. After making his way from northern to southern China over a number of years, Mr. Kim went to Vietnam in hope of finding a way to the South. After failing in several attempts there, he returned to China and succeeded in stowing away on a ship to the South in June 1995. He sought asylum, but his request was denied by the South Korean government. Mr. Kim had no proof that he was a North Korean; his only form of identification was a forged registration card issued by China's Liaoning province.
Mr. Kim filed 22 petitions and appeals of the decision, but was still denied asylum. A South Korean government source said Chinese officials had repeatedly confirmed that Mr. Kim was a Chinese citizen.
Facing deportation to China, Mr. Kim fled in April 1998 to Japan where he was imprisoned for nearly three years. Mr. Kim filed a petition with a Japanese court demanding that he be returned to South Korea. After months of deliberation the court opted to send him to the South in February 2001 rather than forcibly deporting him to China. After a frustrating year in the South, Mr. Kim finally got his wish. "The Chinese government recently notified us through diplomatic channels that Mr. Kim was a North Korean, not a Chinese citizen," a Seoul official said Friday. "We will work to support Mr. Kim's settlement in the South."
28 February 2002
International instruments and fact-finding mission by Human Rights Without Frontiers
Project Manager: Nadia Milanova
Editor-in-chief: Willy Fautré
The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is signatory to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, whereby "States Parties shall ensure to women appropriate services in connection with pregnancy, confinement and the post-natal period...." (Article 12.2). Furthermore, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, whereby
Article 2
1. States Parties shall respect and ensure the rights set forth in the present Convention to each child within their jurisdiction without discrimination of any kind, irrespective of the child's or his or her parent's or legal guardian's race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national, ethnic or social origin, property, disability, birth or other status.
2. States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that the child is protected against all forms of discrimination or punishment on the basis of the status, activities, expressed opinions, or beliefs of the child's parents, legal guardians, or family members.
Article 3
1. In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.
2. States Parties undertake to ensure the child such protection and care as is necessary for his or her well-being, taking into account the rights and duties of his or her parents, legal guardians, or other individuals legally responsible for him or her, and, to this end, shall take all appropriate legislative and administrative measures.
3. States Parties shall ensure that the institutions, services and facilities responsible for the care or protection of children shall conform with the standards established by competent authorities, particularly in the areas of safety, health, in the number and suitability of their staff, as well as competent supervision.
Testimonies collected during the Human Rights Without Frontiers fact-finding mission
Human Rights Without Frontiers has interviewed a number of North Korean refugees in South Korea and in China and has collected documented cases of recent baby killings that were committed in the following detention places: North Pyongan Provincial Police Detention Camp in Shinuiju, North Hamkyong Provincial Police Detention Camp in Chongjin, Musan District Labor Camp and Onsong District Labor Camp.
Case 1
Date and place of interview : 14 February 2002, in Seoul (South Korea)
Arrival in South Korea: July 2001
Interviewer: Willy Fautré, Human Rights Without Frontiers
Witness: Mr Kim Yong-chol, born in 1969. He was a student at the mechanic department of a local college in Wonsan. He defected to China in February 1998. He was arrested in Yentai in January 2000 together with ten other defectors. He left the country again in 2001.
Place and date of the baby killing: North Pyongan Provincial Police Detention Camp in Shinuiju, spring 2000
Testimony:
In the camp, pregnant women were forced to abort. If a baby was born alive, it was killed. During my detention here, three young women were detected to be pregnant and were sent to the police hospital outside the camp for abortion.
Case 2
Date and place of interview : 13 February 2002, in Iksan (South Korea)
Arrival in South Korea: December 2000
Interviewer: Willy Fautré, Human Rights Without Frontiers
Witness: Kang Seong Nam, born on 20 November 1973. He was a former border guard. He had been arrested because he had closed an eye while a whole family with a handicapped child was crossing the border. When arrested in China, they had confessed under torture that he had let them go through. He was detained at the state security labour camp in Kumkwang district (Kangwon Province) during the last seven months of 1998. He defected to China in March 1999. He married a defector in China in November 1999. They were both arrested on 21 April 2001 and deported to North Korea. On 15 September 2000, he defected again with his wife to China.
Place and date of the baby killing: North Hamkyong Provincial Police Detention Camp in Chongjin, early in May 2000
Testimony:
One morning, very early, six strong prisoners were called out. I was one of them. We were given shovels and led to the foot of a mountain nearby. We found freshly dug-up earth here and there. When we arrived at the site where we were to work, we saw a number of dogs running away and some pieces of torn clothes lying around. I first suspected that foxes had done that but we soon discovered dead bodies buried at a very low depth. I could count up to 43 fresh burial sites but there were more. There were several corpses in each pit. Obviously, the prisoners who had been ordered to bury the corpses were so weak that they had not been able to dig up deeply enough and the army's dogs had sniffed, dug holes, bitten clothes away and eaten parts of the corpses. I saw plastic sheets scattered around which were used to kill infants. I repeatedly heard prisoners whispering that just born infants are killed by covering their faces with wet plastic sheets. At that time, I did not know what happened to the dead infants. Now, I realized that they had been buried here. We covered the holes and tried to make the earth so hard that dogs could not unearth them any more. I was mobilized for the same work a month later.
Other prisoners told me they had done the same job at other times. I heard of several deaths of babies born from women prisoners in the camp.
Case 3
Date and place of interview : 13 February 2002, in Seoul (South Korea)
Arrival in South Korea: December 2000
Interviewer: Willy Fautré, Human Rights Without Frontiers
Witness: Kim Kyong-ok, born in December 1976. She was graduated from a three-year Economy College in Chongjin in March 1997. She was appointed district products inspection clerk until August 1998.. She defected to China in December 1998. She got married with the previous witness in November 1999. They were both arrested on 21 April 2001 and deported to North Korea. On 15 September 2000, she defected again with her husband to China.
Place and date of the baby killing: North Hamkyong Provincial Police Detention Camp, in May 2000
Testimony:
On the day of my arrival at the detention camp, there were seven pregnant girls, mostly between 21 and 23 years old. The cells were full of fleas, lice, bed bugs and all kinds of insects. During the next few days, they delivered their babies in the cell. A senior woman had to wrap up three babies and their cords in plastic sheets and to leave them outside upside down to die. She was so shocked by what she had done that she became seriously ill and was sent home to die there. Another woman was selected to do the dirty job but refused to do so. However, three other babies died the same way. The seventh baby survived three more days. He was finally suffocated to death.
Case 4
Date and place of interview : 13 February 2002, in Seoul
Arrival in South Korea: 2001
Interviewer: Willy Fautré, Human Rights Without Frontiers
Witness: Ham Kyu-chol, born in March 1972. He was graduated from a high school in September 1991. He was drafted in the North Korean people's army in the same month and was discharged in 1995. His father, who was a dentist, had come from Japan to North Korea in the late sixties. He died from malnourishment in 1998. Ham's wife defected to China on 6 February 1998. Ham joined her in China on 22 October 1998.
Place and date of the baby killing: North Pyongan Provincial Police Detention Camp in Shinuiju, in August 2000
Testimony:
While I was there, it was commonly known that pregnant women were taken to a hospital outside the camp for forced abortion and that babies born alive were killed there. One day when we came back from our work outside the camp, prisoners told us that a police doctor had inspected the female prisoners in the morning and had found out that two of them were pregnant: one in her 4th month of pregnancy and another in her six month. I knew one of them. Her name was Kim Son-hi from the Sambong district of Musan City of North Hamkyong Province. Both women were ordered to run around the camp yard with a heavily loaded stretcher. The first woman had miscarriage and collapsed. Then, two prisoners were ordered to kick the swollen belly of Kim Son-hi. She miscarried about one or two hours later.
Case 5
Date and place of interview : 23 June 2001, in China
Arrival in South Korea: October 2001
Interviewer: Correspondent of Human Rights Without Frontiers in China
Witness: Lee Hong-wa, born in June 1969 in the province of North Pyongan. Her parents divorced when she was only a baby. Her father, who was a police officer, disappeared as a political prisoner shortly after the divorce. Lee Hong-wa stayed with her mother. She graduated from school in 1996. She helped her mother with the household but was told that she could have a better life in China and she decided to leave the country in October 1997. She was sold for 10,000 yuan (Chinese currency: about 1,200 USD) to a Chinese farmer. She was arrested by the Chinese police on 14 March 2000 and sent back to North Korea a few weeks later.
Place and date of the baby killing: Onsong District Labor Camp, in mid-April 2000
Testimony:
At the camp, newcomers were subject to bodily search as was done at the State Security Agency. Everyone was stripped. The police guards were looking for concealed money. We were given all kinds of hard work. There was a 19-year old pregnant woman prisoner in the camp. She screamed with pain and said that she was in her eighth or ninth month of pregnancy. Her complaints were ignored at first and she was forced to line up with the other women for the day's work. She kept groaning and cried out for help. It was obvious that she was laboring and, finally, she was exempted from work. When we returned to our barracks in the afternoon, she was still sick. Next morning around eight o'clock, she gave birth to a baby with the help of an elderly woman prisoner from the Onsong district. The camp guard immediately ordered us to kill the just born infant. The eldest woman had to cover the infant with a blanket as instructed and to kill him.
Case 6
Date and place of interview : 5 February 2001, in Yanbian, North China
Arrival in South Korea: 2001
Interviewer: Correspondent of Human Rights Without Frontiers in China
Witness: Park Sun-hi, a woman in her fifties from Sambong area, Onsong district in North Hamkyong Province of North Korea. She defected to China in August 1999 and lived in Soyong district until the Chinese police arrested her in April 2000. She was imprisoned at Yanji police station for five days before being handed over to the State Security Agency in Musan district in North Korea in early May 2000.
Place and date of the baby killing: North Hamkyong Provincial Police Detention Camp of Chongjin, in May 2000
Testimony:
At the provincial detention camp everyone was stripped naked, inspected and interrogated again. Once again the focal points were money, contacts with South Korean 'intelligence services' or missionaries. They asked female prisoners if they were married and pregnant. When the questioning was over I was sent to a large room which looked like a warehouse. There were three rooms for women and three for men. One of them was used for delivery and abortion. Some women in our group were pregnant.
When a baby was born, it was abandoned to die on the floor or suffocated with a wet plastic sheet put on its face. Seven or eight babies were delivered and killed in a month at the camp. Their bodies were thrown away. Security officers kicked bellies of pregnant women whose gestation was less than five months. " As the pregnant women were screaming out of pain, the officers ordered them to run around the campground to induce quick abortion. A woman from Hamhung city lost a four-month-old fetus and had to go back to work immediately. When a baby was really delivered, the mother would have three days rest to recover but she was only fed with grains of corn. On the fourth day she had to get out to work. How miserable it was. No women in the camp were provided with menstrual pads. There was no toilet paper in the rest room. First we used a patch from their underwear to clean. When nothing was available we used our own hands. We eat meal with the same hands. No wonder diseases would spread quickly.
A woman was screaming as she went into labor. Officers were laughing at her, saying that she had had a good time with a 'Chinese bastard'. They threatened her to take her out for running if she didn't stop screaming. Because of malnutrition and weakened physical condition she did have not enough energy to "push" at the critical moment. So, a woman pressed down her belly while others were holding her arms and legs. When the baby was delivered after suffering a terrible ordeal, it was left on the floor to die. The mother wept and wailed to get her baby in her arms. Her eyes were swollen with grief but the guards hurled all sorts of invectives at her.
A woman lost her mind in this dire process. It was just too much to witness so many baby killings. During the month that I spent in detention here, two adults, one four-year-old child and seven newborn babies were killed.
Case 7
Date and place of interview : 2 May 2000, in China
Interviewer: Local correspondents of Human Rights Without Frontiers
Witness: Park Young-nan, an ordinary housewife from Pohang district, city of Chongjin, North Hamkyomg Province. She is in her forties and has children. She was a former factory worker in Chongji. She defected to China on 2 February 1999 with her husband and her two children. On 2 April 2000, she was arrested by the Chinese police at her hiding place and immediately sent back to North Korea. In early May 2000, she managed to escape from the police escort on her way to her home district and she defected again to China. A few weeks after the interview, her hiding place was raided by the Chinese but she managed to slip through the net.
Place and date of the baby killing: Hweryong SSA Detention Camp, April 2000
Testimony:
Case in point, there were two pregnant women, twenty something women locked up with us in our cell, and the guards were a lot meaner to them than they were to us in terms of physical abuse. For instance, the guards would constantly stab their bellies with ends of their clubs and say things like, `I see you got chink kids in there. Better drop'em before they come out, bitches'. Then again, what the guards said were not idle threats, as they would actually try things to end their pregnancies, like dragging them out and pouring cold water on them all of a sudden. The soon-to-be-mothers knew full well what the guards were trying to do, and maternal instinct would have it that they do all they can to protect their unborn children. Other women helped out by taking their clothes off to keep the expecting mothers a little bit warmer whenever they were wet, but wet, flimsy clothing plus cold weather basically meant they had to shudder for days at a time. If people trying to run away than to sit tight and starve to death was considered high treason that is one thing, but it was quite another to punish and torture innocent - and unborn - children. But considering that the system rounded up anyone even remotely related to people who were `accused' of something, tormenting even unborn children would not be considered going too far.
Anyhow, both of the women were expecting in April, and one of them went into labor on April 15th, and had a relatively smooth delivery thanks to the help of older women in the cell. People took pockets off their clothes and even bits of their underwear to piece together a blanket for the child, and taking their clothes off to give them extra cover. People breathed a sigh of relief and were glad both the mother and child were doing well, and congratulated them both in silence, in the corner of a cold and dark room.
The young mother then began to weep as she looked at her still-wet and newborn child, holding it tight against her breast. She was probably lamenting that she had to give birth at the kind of place and through the kind of horrendous treatment, and was not in the mood to celebrate the fact that she had brought a new life into this world. And sadly enough, she would not have the chance, because the guards rushed into our cell the moment they heard that she had given birth. He took the child from the mother's arms, put it on the floor, and threw us a piece of wet vinyl. The guard threatened us as he slammed the door shut, saying that we would get a taste of his merciless club if we were unwilling to do away with the baby. Needless to say, we were to suffocate the child with the wet vinyl, just like five other children before this one, according to a woman who had been in prison the longest. And that was how the baby's short and unhappy life came to an end, before it even had the chance to suckle from its mother's breast. The mother was dumbfounded and dazed at first, then cried and wailed until she finally passed out, and it didn't seem like she would wake up any time soon.
The guard seemed unfazed by all that was going on, and instead glared at us to dump the dead child into the sheep stable. The oldest woman of our group very reluctantly got up to take the child's body to where the guard told her, and she was frightened out of her mind when she saw another body, of a middle-aged man, inside the stable as well. The man had died from typhoid fever that was going around, and died a horrible death without receiving so much as a pill for his illness, much less decent treatment. I later found out that four men died from the disease during the month I was there.
But just when we thought it was over, the other woman who was expecting gave birth to a child, and again with help from older women of our group. Since it was going to be her first childbirth, the young woman was in great pain, but got through the process with some toughness and lots of assistance. Yet knowing that this child would probably suffer the same fate as the last, there was nothing that people could do except sigh and hold their breath while waiting for whatever was going to happen next. And lo and behold, a guard from the young woman's home county arrived and ordered her out. It must have been difficult for her to part with her baby, and she hesitated and tried to hold her child. The guard screamed at her to go out quickly, and when she kept hesitating, the guards took her by the arm and dragged her away. The sound of her wailing rang through the corridor as she was taken away screaming without her baby.
I believe that a mother's love for her child is the most precious feeling there is. There is nothing more heartbreaking and tragic for a mother than being separated from her child without even a chance to show that love, and to have her child killed before it gets to see the light of day. It does not matter if its mother had been accused of a heinous offense, no child should be made to bear the consequences of whatever its mother did, and the word `heartbreaking' could not even begin to describe how the mother would feel.
Yet the sadistic guards actually had the gall to come back to our cell after the prison transports were gone, and yelling at us to kill what he called a `chink brat', which made everyone retreat into the corner and tremble in fear. In the end, the old woman who carried the other infant out to the stable turned her head away from the baby, placed her hand around its throat, and choked the infant to death.
The poor, innocent baby was only a few hours old when they met their terrible fate, but for what? What did they do that was so terrible that they have to forsake life after just a few hours after coming into this world? I am simply exasperated and shudder at the fact that human rights and dignity could be so ruthlessly trampled on by murderous maniacs who have no more respect for human life than a damned bug's. I am most positive and certain that such barbaric and inhumane actions perpetrated by these sadistic butchers is an act of criminal affront to human civilization, and that they will be made accountable.
Recommendations
Human Rights Without Frontiers recommends to:
a.. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, entrusted with the monitoring of the implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, to send an investigation commission to North Pyongan Provincial Police Detention Camp, Provincial Detention Camp in Chongjin, Musan Labor Camp, Provincial Detention camp of Shinuij and Onsong District Labor Camp. Its objective would be to check the allegations of maltreatment of pregnant women recorded during the aforementioned interviews taken by Human Rights Without Frontiers.
b.. The United Nations Committeee on the Rights of the Child, entrusted with the monitoring of the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to send an investigation commission to North Pyongan Provincial Police Detention Camp, Provincial Detention Camp in Chongjin, Musan Labor Camp, Provincial Detention camp of Shinuij and Onsong District Labor Camp. Its objective would be to check the allegations of baby killings recorded during the aforementioned interviews taken by Human Rights Without Frontiers.
Human Rights Without Frontiers
International Secretariat
Av. Winston Churchill 11/33 - 1180 Brussels-Belgium
Phone: 32 2 3456145 - Fax: 32 2 3437491
Email: [email protected] - Website: http://www.hrwf.net
BBC Monitoring Service, February 26, 2002. Seoul, 26 February: North Korea, aware of the increasing interest of the West in its human rights issue, has shown "a significant change" in the human rights situation, including eased punishment of the defectors sent back to the country, according to the National Intelligence Service (NIS) Tuesday [26 February]. In a report on major recent developments in North Korea presented to the National Assembly Intelligence Committee, the NIS said North Korea now gives penal servitude to grain thieves, instead of executing them in public, and sets free defectors who crossed the border into China simply to get food when they are repatriated.
It also has increased participation in international human rights programmes; forwarding the second report in 17 years to the International Human Rights Convention B in March 2000, joining the International Convention Against Discrimination Against Women in March 2001, participation in an international seminar for ending discrimination against women held in the Philippines early February and plans to participate in a human rights education programme in Sweden next month and a similar programme in England also next month.
On the diplomatic front, North Korea focuses on increased relations with China and Russia and endeavours to introduce funds and technology from the European Union, while restraining provocation of the United States, the NIS said. The number of economic and trade missions sent overseas increased from 50 in 2000 to 100 last year and the number of North Koreans who took part in trade, information and communication training programmes overseas also rose to 530 from 370 in the two-year period.
Koreaherald, February 23, 2002. A total of 74 North Koreans have defected to the South so far this year, including 20 whose arrival the National Intelligence Service (NIS) announced yesterday. The agency said the defectors - mostly manual laborers, farmers and unemployed people - came to the South through a third country after fleeing the North between 1997 and June last year. Two have relatives here.
Joongang Ilbo, February 18, 2002. The number of North Koreans defecting to the South has steadily risen over the past three years, the Ministry of Unification reported recently. The ministry said 71 defectors came to South Korea in 1998, 148 in 1999, 312 in 2000 and 583 in 2001. Most of the defectors - about 70 percent - are men. The government said 197 of the total 1,990 North Koreans who have sought shelter in the North have passed away and 35 had left for third countries, leaving 1,758 still residing in the South. Defectors to the South generally settled in the Seoul metropolitan area, with Seoul having 746 (42.4 percent) and Gyeonggi province, which surrounds the capital, has 271 (15.4 percent). "China estimates that it has less than 10,000 North Korean defectors, but the UN High Commissioner for Refugees says there are about 30,000 in China," many of them hoping to come to South Korea to live, a ministry official said. Some non-governmental organizations estimate the number of North Koreans in China to be as high as 300,000.
Joongang Ilbo, February 2002. The government announced Friday that it would increase the monitoring of North Korean defectors travelling overseas. It was discovered that North Korean defectors were leaving the country without government knowledge, and in some cases had gone missing or had re-entered North Korea. The government said it would focus on the estimated 1,700 defectors living in Seoul, especially those who have not completed the government protection period, which is five years. The government estimated that 25 defectors are currently travelling overseas. The government decided to restrict North Koreans from traveling to foreign countries to ensure their safety and to avoid the possibility that they might commit illegal actions that could create diplomatic problems with other countries, especially North Korea and China.
The government restrictions came after Yoo Tae-joon, who recently succeeded in his second attempt at crossing the North Korean border, was found to have given a false statement about his escape. Mr. Yoo, who defected to South Korea in 1998, re-entered the North in 2000 in order to return with his wife. Mr. Yoo told reporters in Seoul Saturday that he broke out of a solitary confinement facility operated by the North Korean intelligence service. After a thorough interrogation, the government discovered that Kim Jong-il, National Defense Commission chairman of North Korea, had personally pardoned Mr. Yoo in May last year. Mr. Yoo later worked at a food factory from which he walked away during his lunch break on Nov. 10. He crossed the Chinese boarder on Nov. 30. Mr. Yoo told South Korean reporters that he had been able to see his wife only from a distance while he was in North Korea. Government interrogaters later learned that he had lived with her for 25 days. The police and the National Intelligence Service conducted a joint investigation of Mr. Yoo for possible violations of inter-Korean exchange and cooperation laws and laws on national security.
AP Network News, February 15, 2002. Amid mounting criticism over the government's 'incomplete' management of North Korean defectors here, seven North Korean defectors have gone missing, been kidnapped abroad or re-entered North Korea in the past two years, a local daily reported Friday. The government has yet to determine their whereabouts, the JoongAng Ilbo said.
Chosun Daily, february 15, 2002. Yu Tae-jun’s story is dramatic almost to the point of disbelief. Having escaped from North Korea once already, Yu actually went back to that harsh place to get his wife, and was arrested immediately. All that, and he has managed his way back to the South again. It is all so dramatic; his return to the North, his escape from prison, escape from the North, and return to the South. One becomes curious about many aspects of his adventure, but you still want to congratulate him.
In the meantime, we cannot help but feel something of a bitter aftertaste in the way the current government has been so disinterested and passive towards the plight of people in similar situations, at a time when Yu was enduring profound trials while making his way back and forth over the walls of national division. When government authorities confirmed that he had gone back to North Korea, it cut off the funds it had been providing him for settlement here, took back his apartment, and cancelled his Resident Registration status. Instead of demanding that North Korea provide him safe passage, it hurried to erase the fact that he was ever a citizen of the Republic of Korea.
Human rights groups in Korea and other countries called for his safe return, but the government maintained its silence. Nowhere in the entire narrative of events does one see any sign whatsoever of an effort by the government to get involved on his behalf. The government’s top strategy in North Korea policy seems to be to bend over backwards to keep from offending the regime there. Surely everyone knows that asking the government to care about those who escape from the North, or to take interest in the human rights situation there is like reading scripture to a cow. But its failure to work on behalf of one of its own citizens is something that should be recorded in history; to be a lesson for the future.
You can see in the case of Yu Tae-jun that the North Korean regime is indeed sensitive to some degree to the way people on the outside take it to task about the human rights situation there. When the Korean press and various human rights groups took up Yu’s cause, the North broadcast two press conferences with him, and his treatment improved. For it to be able to claim that he had gone back to the North voluntarily and do so on video, it had to at least allow him some normality, at least in outward appearances.
The Northern regime gave Yu the text he was made to read, containing wholesale criticism of the South’s government and society, and of course deserves to be criticized for doing so, but we should note that among other things it proves how the press conferences we’ve seen featuring people kidnapped and taken to the North were probably not done voluntarily. One aspect about Yu’s situation that is difficult to understand is how some in our society are raising doubts about his account of how he escaped with his life intact. It is time to rethink policy that seeks to approach the human rights situation there “quietly.” Calls for improvements in the North’s treatment of human rights need to be more like a “great outcry.”
Chosun Daily, February 13, 2002. A North Korean defector who went back to the North to get his wife has succeeded in re-escaping and returning to the South on February 9 after being detained for a year and eight months. Yoo Tae-joon aged 34, is the first North Korean defector settled in the South to re-enter the North, get arrested and re-escape. Yoo came to the South with his son in December 1998 and settled in Daegu, but returned to the North in June 2000 via China in order to get his wife. Instead the North Korean authorities arrested him. While behind bars in Pyongyang, he had a news conference twice with North Korean press and succeeded in escaping from the jail when monitoring was loose on November 10, 2001. On November 30, he managed to across the Amnok River.
Yoo was the arrested by the Chinese authorities and was investigated for 70 days. As the investigation showed he had South Korean registration, he escaped forced repatriation to the North and entered into the South Saturday. The Chosun Ilbo's erroneous report of Yoo's death in Pyongyang on March 7 of last year prompted two news conferences with human rights organizations, in and out of the country strongly demanding the North Korean government to confirm if Yoo was alive or dead. While in jail, Yoo said he was suddenly moved into ruling Workers Party Youth Hostel for communicating with the South last May, where he practiced a ready-made speech for 25 days before the news conference, and recorded it on May 30, 2001. A second news conference came in August of last year held in the People's Culture Palace.
New York Times, February 11, 2002. By JAMES BROOKE TOKYO, Feb. 10
As the Chinese police try to block an underground railroad that funnels North Koreans to northern China, human rights advocates appealed today to President Bush to press Chinese leaders for relief when he visits Asia next week. Escaping famine and a totalitarian government, about 200,000 North Koreans, about 1 percent of the population, have fled to northern China in recent years. There they live clandestine lives, fearing discovery, deportation and disappearance into North Korea's prison camps.
Refugee advocates, gathered here for a conference on human rights in North Korea, say they were heartened when President Bush included North Korea as part of an "axis of evil" with Iran and Iraq. They hope Mr. Bush, who is scheduled to arrive here Sunday at the start of a trip to Japan, South Korea and China, will urge concrete measures to help the refugees. Among the steps the advocates are promoting are these: Orderly transit camps should be set up with international financing in China and Mongolia. Residence status should be offered to North Korean refugees, starting in countries with large ethnic Korean populations, like the United States, China, Russia, Japan and Brazil.
"Twenty years ago, the world was confronted with a similar problem with the mass exodus of boat people from Vietnam," Marcus Noland, a Korea specialist for the Institute for International Economists, said in a keynote speech at the meeting, the Third International Conference on North Korean Human Rights and Refugees. "The international community underwrote the establishment of temporary resettlement camps in surrounding Asian nations with the promise that these would be way stations to permanent resettlement." With South Korea a multiparty democracy and China and Russia increasingly open societies, North Korea now sticks out in the region as a Stalinist throwback. At the same time, North Korea has taken steps to open up to the world, increasing air links, seeking foreign investment and establishing diplomatic relations over the last two years with Australia, Brazil, Canada and most of the European Union.
Rights groups now feel they have some leverage with a government that depends heavily on food and oil donations from the United States, Japan and South Korea. Last fall, a bipartisan group of prominent Americans formed the privately financed Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.While rights promoters disagreed here over tactics, many agreed that the opening of protected refugee camps in China and Mongolia could destabilize North Korea. "We would try to create a flood, spreading information about the camps through the underground railroad across North Korea," said Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor who was expelled from North Korea a year ago for trying to show American reporters the underside of the nation.
But China, Russia and South Korea fear that a collapse of the North Korean government would unleash a mass exodus from the North. Last month, military officials from the three countries gathered in Seoul for a week of simulated computer scenarios based on a hypothetical flood of 100,000 refugees into the South.
About 200,000 North Koreans are confined in a prison camp system where conditions are so harsh that an estimated 400,000 have died over the last 30 years, said Jack Rendler, a human rights advocate from Minneapolis, who is vice chairman of the new American committee. Mr. Rendler said North Korea's government had stratified society into 51 different loyalty classifications, with foreign food and medical aid going to the most loyal. "The people who are dying are considered less loyal to the regime," said Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, a pro- democracy group financed by the United States government.
On a recent visit to Japan -a major food donor to North Korea - Catherine Bertini, the executive director of the United Nations World Food Program, said her agency had improved monitoring of food deliveries. Over the last five years, she said, the World Food Program had won access to about 80 percent of North Korea's 211 counties. "Today we feed literally one-third of the population of North Korea," Ms. Bertini, an American, said. "Tens of thousands of children are alive today, and will be alive because of this rice."
AP Network News, February 10, 2002. The United Nations should spearhead relief efforts for North Korean refugees in China and Russia, delegates said Sunday on the final day of an international conference on human rights in North Korea. Defectors who flee oppression and famine in North Korea often face new problems once they sneak across the border into neighboring countries. Denied legal status as immigrants or refugees, many struggle to make a living and fear being sent home, where they are often put in prison or sometimes executed as traitors.
Led by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the international community should pressure China and Russia to allow independent relief groups into border regions to help the refugees, activists said at the closing session of the two-day International Conference on North Korean Human Rights and Refugees. "Along the border with China, tens of thousands of North Korean refugees live in hunger and in fear of forced return," said Jack Rendler, vice chairman of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. "News from increasing numbers of refugees is consistently horrible."
Up to 150,000 North Korean migrants live in China, according to activist estimates. If China were to classify them as refugees, they would be one step closer to receiving U.N.-supplied food and shelter. Instead, a treaty between allies China and North Korea requires Beijing to deport them. The resolution adopted at the Tokyo meeting called on China to halt the practice. Beijing maintains that North Koreans in its territory are not refugees under the U.N. definition because they crossed the border for economic motives, not political reasons.
South Korean activists, however, believe the refugees should be classified as political refugees because they would be subject to political persecution if they were deported to the North. Speaking at the Tokyo conference, defector Lee Young Kuk said he was sent to the North's harshest political prisoner camp, Yodok, after his first defection attempt failed. He described scenes of political prisoners being skinned or buried alive. In the past, the UNHCR has accused China of violating international refugee laws by deporting North Koreans. The Tokyo conference, which drew dozens of activists from eight countries, came ahead of a regional visit by President Bush, who is expected to discuss North Korean relations with leaders of Japan and South Korea.
AP Network News, February 9, 2002. Ten North Koreans arrived in South Korea via a third country after fleeing their famine-stricken homeland, the National Intelligence Service (NIS) said Saturday. With the latest defections, the number of North Koreans, who have officially entered the South so far this year, swelled to 54.
BBC Monitoring Service - February 8, 2002. Defectors from North Korea have said that food aid to the country was being stored for military use and urged donors to put up strict conditions to ensure that the food reaches the masses. Officials in Seoul have denied the claims. The following is the text of report in English by South Korean news agency Yonhap Tokyo, 8 February: North Korean defectors, including North Korean leader Kim Jong-il's former bodyguard, claimed Friday [8 February] that North Korea diverts international food aid to military use, instead of distributing it to the people.
Ri Yong-guk, Kim's former bodyguard, Lee Jae-kun, South Korean fisherman kidnapped to the North, and Jong Chun-hwa, a woman, spoke about North Korea in a press conference held in the Foreign Correspondents Club here. Ri said the aid coming from the international community does not go to the people and that the food that should be distributed to the people is piled up in warehouses for use as reserve food in war. North Korea's GULAGs are much worse than Afghanistan's and they must therefore be done away with, he claimed. Saying he served as Kim Jong-il's bodyguard for 10 years, Ri described Kim as having no quality of a leader, because he is short-tempered and does not listen to others.
Lee claimed that when World Food Programme inspectors arrive, North Korean officials deceive them into believing food is distributed to the people. To prevent such deception, the international community must put up strict conditions before delivering food to the North, he added. Jong said many North Korean women crossing the border into China end up in prostitution. Some are raped by ethnic Korean men and others are sold to Chinese men, she added. Claiming that the North Korean women suffer from a subhuman life, she said if they were accorded only a half of the treatment the South Korean women are now, they would be very happy. A two-day international conference on North Korean human rights and refugees will open here in Tokyo at weekend.
In Seoul, meanwhile, South Korean officials denied the defectors' claim that North Korea diverts international food aid to military use. The claim that the medicine, corn and rice South Korea has delivered to the North are diverted to military use, instead of being distributed to the hungry people, is a story of those who do not know North Korean society, an official said. "In the light of the information we've got, the claim is unfounded, he added. The World Food Programme and other international organizations are reportedly striving for an extension of the North's food distribution network for the old and infirm and pregnant women to areas other than Pyongyang, he said. It is wrong to deny the recognized activity of international organizations, he added.
Source: Yonhap news agency, Seoul, in English 1100 GMT 8 Feb. 02.
Chosun Daily, February 8, 2002. North Korea has fed soldiers and ruling party officials with food aid from overseas, it was alleged Friday by Lee Jae-geun, a former fisherman kidnapped by the North and Lee Yeong-guk, a defector and escapee from a political offenders camp. They said the North gave the food to children in front of international aid organization officials and then take it back after the officials leave the country. It then stores it in regional party warehouses for party officials use, Lee Jae-geun added at a news conference in the Tokyo branch of the Foreign Correspondents Club, hosted by Japanese Foreign Correspondents Association. "If one gives 100g of food, it feeds Kim Jong-il by 100g," he said.
Lee Yeong-guk said while he was working for Workers' Party, he witnessed officials taking foods, adding the North gave war stockpiles to civilians until 1994 due to the food shortage, but stored up to 80% of food aid from the international community since 1995. The news conference on Friday was staged on the eve of the Third Round of International Talks on North Korean Human Rights and Refugees, co-hosted by the Citizens' Alliance for North Korean Human Rights from Korea and its Japanese counterpart in Tokyo's YMCA. Participants in the conference include 60 to 70 members of the Aurora Foundation, CNN, Tokyo TV and journalists.
AP Network News, February 5, 2002. A North Korean defector, who came to South Korea in 1997, was arrested by Chinese authorities while trying to get his daughter and granddaughter on a flight to South Korea from Harbin Airport in China, it was learned Tuesday. Kim Jae-won aged 64, a former doctor, has been held in custody for ten days, along with his daughter aged 36 and granddaughter aged 8. Chinese authorities will reportedly hand them over to North Korea. Kim flew to China in September of last year in an effort to get his daughter and her child, who have hidden in China since 1999 when they escaped from the North into South Korea.
He was arrested at Harbin airport in Heilongjiang Province, because his daughter and granddaughter were carrying forged passports; Kim's passport is South Korean, but his offspring had passports from North Korea. An official said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade had contacted the Chinese authorities, but has yet to be notified of the results of an investigation into the three. China has recently exerted strong controls on North Korean defectors and chances are high that they will be handed over to the North, unless the South Korean government acts aggressively. A graduate from a medical college in China, Kim served as a physician in the North before escaping to South Korea, where he worked for an educational institute resettling defectors as a government employee.
Chosun Ilbo, January 31, 2002. The World Food Program administers one of its largest humanitarian assistance programs in the world in North Korea. About 25% of the entire North Korean population benefited from the program's relief aid last year, according to the WFP. Operating from five branch offices it has established in the North, including one in Chongjin, North Hamgyong Province, a fruit of its "no access, no food" principle, WFP officials distribute food to North Koreans directly. Twelve counties were added to the list of its accessible areas last year, a feat rated as a major achievement in WFP activities. Of the North's total of 211 cities (or special city districts) and counties, 168 are now accessible to the WFP, according to figures tabulated at the end of last year.
Among the 43 areas Pyongyang denies WFP of access for security reasons almost all are the focus of world attention as they involve nuclear, missile and human rights issues. The Yungbyun area in North Pyongan Province, home to a nuclear power plant and a nuclear research station, which have been inspected by international agencies from time to time, and Taegwan County encompassing Kumchang-ri, suspected of holding underground nuclear facilities through the satellite photographs made public in 1999, are off-limits. The adjacent Chonma and Changsong Counties, which are also inaccessible, are known to have many military facilities. The previous off limits Sakju County, North Pyongan Province, housing chemical weapons plants, became the latest addition to the accessible areas and its residents began receiving relief aid on November 20 last year.
Also off-limit are Musudan-ri, Hwadae County, North Hamgyong Province, from which a Daepodong missile was fired in 1998, and Kim Hyong-jik County, Yanggang Province, in which a large-scale missile base was learned to have been completed in the 1990s. So are nearly all parts of Jagang Province where the North's principal munitions plants are gathered. Kim Jung-suk County (formerly Sinpa county) of Jagang Province is excluded from WFP access not for military reasons, but for the prestige of the system in view of its unique significance in the country's "revolutionary history." Ri In-bok, a North Korean defector in the South who had worked in that county as an agriculturist for six years, commented, "Though it is a poor farming area, the people there are proud of living in a county of historical significance."
Also inaccessible are nearly all concentration camp sites, targeted by international human rights organizations. Among them are a concentration camp in Yodok, South Hamgyong province, the situation of which have been revealed over a decade by former inmates who defected to the South - Kang Chol-hwan, An Hyok, Ri Yong-guk, and Ms. Kim Bok-hui (alias). Part of the Dukjang coal mining area of Bukchang County, South Pyongan Province, is also off-limits as it is adjacent to Kyaechon County, home of Kyaechon Concentration Camp. Yi Sun-ok and Kim Yong, both former inmates who have fled to the South, have disclosed the plight of the latter camp.
Hochon, Jangjin, Daehung and Bujon in South Pyongan Province, Yonsa in North Hamgyong, and Baekam in Yanggang are all mountainous areas, notorious for the banishment of political prisoners. Isolated from cities, as they are, their residents enjoy a relatively high self-sufficiency in food thanks to slash-and-burn farming and lucrative specialty products such as mushrooms. Rumors abound in Myongchon County, North Hamgyong Province, that the county is inaccessible to WFP food relief, because its chief party secretary reported to Kim Jong Il during the latter's guidance tour, "We have no food shortage," according to a native Jong Hyon-chol, who fled to the South in 2000.
Also inaccessible is the capital's Unjong District, dubbed the "Taedok Valley of North Korea," housing the Academy of Sciences and the College of Science, where a number of munitions plants operate. So is the capital's Chung (central) District, the hub of the North's bureaucracy incorporating the Workers' Party headquarters. In addition, the WFP is denied access to areas adjacent to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) on the east and west coasts, and the Kumho area of South Hamgyong Province, where a light water reactor is being constructed by KEDO. Access to three counties in South Pyongan Province and the entire Jagang Province was interrupted for about two weeks late in November, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), though the reasons for this are still unknown.
Kim Yong was earning foreign currency as a cadre at the National Defence Department when he learned that his father had been executed on espionage charges. He was then sent to the No. 14 detention centre and when he arrived there he saw "people who looked like living skeletons" and he realized that no one ever left there alive. Kim Yong is the first person known to have escaped from Pyongnam Kaechun, the No. 14 detention centre, and to have made his way to South Korea...
Agence France-Presse reported that ten DPRK refugees have defected to the ROK. The latest defection put the total number of DPRK citizens to have sought asylum in the ROK at 31 for this year. The ROK received 312 North Korean defectors in 2000 and 583 in 2001. ("TEN NORTH KOREAN REFUGEES ALLOWED TO SETTLE IN SOUT H KOREA," 01/27/02)
Korea Herald, January 18, 2002. Twelve North Korean defectors have arrived in Seoul via a third country, the National Intelligence Service (NIS) said yesterday. The defectors, mostly workers and students, came from the North's Hamgyeong provinces, an NIS official said. The group brought to 21 the total number of defectors who have come to Seoul so far this year, the official said. In 1999, 148 North Korean defectors arrived here, compared with 312 in 2000 and 583 last year.
International Herald Tribune, January 26, 2002. A North Korean defector described for a U.S. religious freedom commission Thursday what she called Pyeongyang's suppression of religious freedom and human rights. At a hearing before United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, Lee Soon-ok, who served seven years in a North Korean detention camp for political offenders and defected to the South in 1997, described the situation in the concentration camp where she was sent. Ms. Lee said some pregnant prisoners were forced to undergo late-term abortions by injections of a saline solution into their wombs. Ms. Lee also gave tearful testimony of public execution by firing squads. "The world should put pressure on the North to change," she said.
Human rights advocates and North Korea-watchers also attended the hearing, held at a U.S. House of Representatives office building to press for international action to force changes in the North's human rights regime. The commission is an autonomous U.S. federal government agency. The hearing was the first examination of North Korea social issues since the beginning of the Bush administration. Participants urged President Bush to make the issue a priority during his visit to Korea, China and Japan in March. Jack Rendler, vice chair of the U.S. Committee on Human Rights in North Korea, estimated that some 400,000 prisoners have died in DPRK prison camps since 1972. ( Joongang Ilbo Kim Jin, "ABUSES, AID ARE STUDIED," Washington, 01/25/02)
Pyongyang, January 18 (KCNA) -- The South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo has become more desperate in its anti-north false propaganda since the outset of the year. This is evidenced by a false report recently carried by the paper that "unborn and new born babies are being killed at concentration camps in the north." In spreading this lie it quoted information allegedly available from the "human rights council without borders," an international organization on human rights. The story floated by Chosun Ilbo was a whopping lie. There can be no "concentration camp in the DPRK as it is a man-centered society where man is valued most.
There is, therefore, no need to refer to the desperate anti-north diatribe made by the paper. What Chosun Ilbo said is nothing but a plot deliberately hatched by it to hurl mud at the north. The dastardly smear campaign launched by the paper against the north from the outset of the year is aimed to play the role of a shock brigade serving the U.S. in its "human rights" campaign in a bid to foster distrust among fellow countrymen, fan up confrontation between the north and the south and thus bar the implementation of the June 15 joint declaration. But this is no more than an anachronistic daydream.
Korea Herald , January 18, 2002. The Defense Ministry said yesterday that 457 former South Korean soldiers are being held in North Korea after being captured by communist forces during the Korean War (1950-53). "We have secured a list of 457 South Korean prisoners of war (POWs) believed to be alive in the North," a ministry spokesman said. The number is an increase from 385, which the ministry tallied in July last year. A total of 23 South Korean POWs have returned home after fleeing the North since 1994, including six last year, the official said.
An interagency task force met Wednesday to review the government measures on POWs, including the legal status of POWs remaining in the North. The South's POWs in the North are considered deceased, and their families are granted government assistance. The official said their legal status will not be changed until they are confirmed alive upon their return to South Korean territory. "The government will continue efforts to trace the POWs in the North and have all of them repatriated, and assist returned POWs in the South in accordance with law," the official said. The task force first convened in January in 1999 and held the sixth meeting this week. In 2000, Seoul repatriated more than 60 former North Korean spies and soldiers following the inter-Korean summit in June. But the North returned none of the South Korean POWs or others believed to have been abducted.
Korea Herald, January 17, 2002. Twenty-four relatives of 12 South Korean fishermen who were allegedly abducted by North Korea in 1987 on the fishing boat Tongjin-ho, filed suit yesterday with the Seoul District Court seeking compensation from the South Korean government. They said it is unjust that the location of the kidnapped fishermen has yet to be confirmed, while the government has so far returned 63 communist prisoners to the North.
Joongang Ilbo reported that three DPRK citizens were repatriated through the truce village of Panmunjeom on Tuesday. Park Do-yeol and two other fishermen were found adrift Wednesday by the Russian commercial vessel Sormovsky off the DPRK east coast. A ROK Red Cross official said that the repatriation was voluntary and was handled through the North and South Korean Red Cross organizations. The men were released after the ROK determined their intentions and gave them a medical check-up. ("RESCUED FISHERMEN RETURN TO THE NORTH," Seoul, 01/16/02)
Joongang Ilbo reported that the US State Department will encourage the ROK to allow Hwang Jang-yop, the highest-ranking DPRK official to defect to the ROK, to testify before Congress. The US House of Representatives' International Relations Committee has been trying to arrange for Hwang to appear before the congressional committee. The ROK government has opposed his travel. However, the US State Department responded that it was a matter between the ROK and the US Congress. The ROK government reconfirmed on Wednesday that the trip of Hwang Jang-yop to the US is "not desirable." An official ROK spokesperson stated, "Hwang's trip is a matter to be entirely decided by our government which means he'll leave only if the government believes it would be a benefit to us." (Kim Jin, "U.S. DIPLOMATS WILL WEIGH IN ON HWANG TRIP," Washington, 01/16/02) (Kim Hee-sung, "GOVERNMENT SAYS HWANG'S U.S. TRIP NOT DESIRABLE," Seoul, 01/16/02)
International Herald Tribune, January 10, 2002. The Commission on International Religious Freedom, a body of the U.S. Congress, announced Wednesday it would hold a special hearing on North Korea's persecution of religious groups on Jan. 24. "The Commission on International Religious Freedom will hold its first hearing this year to remind the world of religious persecution in the North and come up with countermeasures," a spokesman for the commission said. The hearing is expected to include Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor who worked in the North and was expelled for his criticism of the regime, Chuck Downs, a former adviser to the Republican Party and North Korean defectors. The U.S. State Department in its report on international religious freedom last October included North Korea on a list of oppressors of religious freedoms and a nation that requires special concern. The commission is comprised of nine members appointed by the president and the leadership in Congress and submits an annual report on world religious freedoms.
A North Korean defector living in South Korea argued Wednesday at a special workshop in Seoul that North Korea has intensified its crackdown on Christians since late 1999. "At the time North Korean leader Kim Jong-il said it's either him or Christianity that has to go," said the defector, who not to be named. "I once saw a couple who studied the Bible during a visit to China," he said. "The husband got 18 years [in a labor camp] and the wife 15 years, but those sentences don't mean much," he added. "It was obvious they would either spend the rest of their lives in prison - or be killed." "I understand there are rumors in South Korea about North Koreans hiding underground churches but I don't buy that at all," he continued. "There's just no way those helpless people could pull it off on a large scale" under the noses of the authorities. Other defectors at the workshop largely agreed with his assertions.
Chosun Ilbo, January 10, 2002. "Socialism Must Be Safeguarded Even If Life Is Harsh" Round-Table Talk of North Korean Defectors Who Served in People's Army Editor's Note: Most young North Korean men in their late teens and early 20s serve in the military. Even without taking into account Pyongyang's "military-priority politics," they do constitute the pillar underpinning the regime today, and the central force that will lead North Korean society tomorrow. Under what circumstances do North Korean servicemen lead their barracks life, and what sorts of perceptions do they harbor about the reality of the North and South Korea? In an effort to seek answers to such questions and others, we've hosted a round-table talk of three North Korean defectors in the South who had served in the military.
Participants:
Kim Sung-min, 40: Officer at 620th Training Center, People's Army (capitan)
Byon Sang-ho, 40: NCO at 118th Brigade, 624th Unit (master sergeant)
Jang Chol-bong, 29: NCO at Civil Defense Battalion, 5th Corps (staff sergeant)
- Young North Koreans entering the military upon graduation from senior high school undergo a two to three month basic training at training centers run by corps or divisions before being assigned to individual units. Unlike their South Korean counterparts, who are given military serial numbers upon admission to recruit training centers, North Korean soldiers formally become military servicemen only after making pledges after completing basic training.
- They get interested in obtaining party membership in five to six years after enlistment. If one aspires to become a junior party official such as a guidance officer on discharge, it's essential to become a party member. Many servicemen became party members in the past, but it's no longer easy to get party membership since the quorum has been slashed.
- To become a party member, one has to win the favor of the unit's personnel officer or political guidance officer. Many methods are mobilized to achieve this end. One is to save a portion of one's own food rations for a period, and another is offer the officer pieces of cloth used for wrapping feet in the place of socks. Still another, used by children of privileged ranking officials, is to bribe the officer by helping him resolve his family problems or providing goods needed for the marriage of his children.
- Once admission to the party is granted, some servicemen, especially those coming from farming villages, coal and other mines, make desperate efforts to enter officers' school or college in order not to resume the life of their parents upon discharge. To successfully enter officers' school or college is harder than to gain party membership. Successful candidates are limited to two or three per company.
- In the military compounds, few know what's going on outside, because nobody tells them about the reality, especially something unfavorable. But we felt something serious was amiss when military units in or around 1994 received an order to secure side dishes on their own.
- Starving troops plundered farm produce indiscriminately for a while, harming the population seriously. To mend deteriorated military relations with the public, the authorities launched a massive drive to restore harmony between them.
- Servicemen are ignorant of the situation in South Korea and elsewhere, because the authorities control information so tightly and imbue them with the idea of socialism's superiority through ideological education. The People's Army is perhaps the most alienated group in the North.
- Looking at the South from the demilitarized zone (DMZ), we saw streams of motor vehicles in the daytime and electric lights in the night, shining as bright as daytime, scenes telling us the South's economic power is not as poor as we were told. If you look backward at the North, it's just pitch-dark without any sign of light.
- Despite the economic woes, a perception prevails in the military that socialism must be safeguarded. It's an outcome of controls on information about the outside world and ceaseless ideological education.
- Servicemen think unification must be achieved by all means. Once unification is realized, they think, they can live well. Some soldiers cherish a delusion that if the nation is unified, "We can eat rice produced in the expansive Cholla Province rice fields and meat soup."
- To achieve unification, the US troops must be pulled out of the South, they think, and so long as they remain stationed a war is inevitable. Whoever wins in a war, many servicemen favor a war. Such a sentiment arises from their dire living surroundings and exhaustion from barracks life.
- Enlisted men perceive that once a war breaks out, the North will turn out victorious, because they have long been so brainwashed. The authorities also brag, "We possess nuclear and chemical weapons as well. With them alone, we can win." But many senior North Korean officers think otherwise.
Chosun Ilbo, January 4, 2002. The cross-border smuggling landscape between North Korea and China is changing. Thanks to relatively stable prices in North Korea, cross-border smuggling has slowed with large-scale smuggling all but gone. Instead the "heydays of housewives" in smuggling are emerging, in which North Korean ladies illegally sell cheap and shoddy goods to Chinese across the border. In contrast to smuggling of scale, connived with border guards, that leaves little profits after bribes, smuggling on a small-scale involving housewives result in relatively handsome profits, because no bribes are needed, according to some North Korea watchers in the South.
These North Korean women carry contraband disguised as laundry to the Yalu or Tumen River and sell them to Chinese. Mostly the Chinese wade the river to the North or they exchange goods in the waist-deep midstream. Upon confirming the goods delivered, the buyer throws money to the seller, tucked in a vinyl-paper bag along with a piece of stone. The border guards rarely detect such "throwing" smuggling. Even if it is, troops, it is said, find it troublesome to crack down on the housewives, who challenge them to "Kill me."
Specialized smugglers are recently changing the item of their business from goods to people. They play the role of middlemen by smuggling North Koreans out to China to have them meet with their South Korean relatives. More risky than contraband smuggling as it is, it is more lucrative. But this business requires securing tight ties with State Security Agency and People's Security Ministry officials as well as border guards. Soldiers accumulate bribes from smugglers, usually using the latter's homes as their hideouts. Smugglers look after the troops' laundry, meals and even liquor parties. They live like family members, forming a close relationship.
The bribing of border guards generally costs 1% of sales in the case of goods and US$50-US$100 per person in the case of people. North Korean brokers are linked with their counterparts in China. Smuggling a person out of North Korea to China and returning him or her to the North usually calls for a brokerage fee of between US$2,000 and US$3,000. Since it's so risky to take people out of the North surreptitiously, it is not easy to locate brokers in North Korea. Pyongyang authorities are also tightening up border crackdowns.
Kim Jong Il has tried hard, but in vain, to uproot cross-border smuggling since the early 1990s, even resorting to executing scores in Shinuiju and Hyesanjin in recent years. The viability of smugglers lies in their tightly-knit relationship with troops, offering their lives as security. It's an unwritten law for smugglers, caught while crossing the river by unconnected troops, not to divulge conniving soldiers even in the face of harsh torture. Persevering in hardship by themselves ensures the subsequent development of deepened relationship with particular troops.