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“Escape from North Korea – Defection is daunting. So is starting a new, free life.”
National Geographic, February 2009
Photograph by Chien-Chi Chang
The National Geographic published a very informative article accompanied by high-quality photographs which describes what it’s like to be a North Korean refugee today.
A frigid November day pressed against the windows of a shabby apartment building in the Chinese city of Yanji, ten miles from the North Korean border. Three stories up, footsteps stopped outside a door. At the sound, two young women hurried to a back room and shrank against a wall. Then came a knock. The women, defectors from North Korea, bowed their heads, expecting the worst. If the Chinese police found them without identity cards, they would be deported in handcuffs and chains. Back in North Korea, they would be sentenced to years of hard labor in a prison camp…
read more…
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A Glimpse of Horror
Radio Free Asia, 12/01/08
Common life rituals which are taken for granted, such as getting married, having a child, or even just getting vaccinated against disease, have to be worked for by prisoners. “To be allowed to get married, people break their backs working and volunteer to perform the most dangerous of tasks.” So why haven’t more prisoners like Shin Dong Hyuk taken the plight for escape? He explains briefly with the following quote, but read more of Shin Dong Hyuk’s memoir here at Radio Free Asia.
“The reason why prisoners don’t resist or rebel goes beyond fear of the armed guards watching over the camp. All prisoners have been brainwashed to believe that they are in the camp for a good reason, that they have done wrong and deserve to be there, and the thought of escape hardly crosses their mind. Most prisoners, including me, believed that they were supposed to be in the camp. My escape wasn’t an act of rebellion against the prison camp system; I was just tired of having to work so much, and I simply wanted to get away”.
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How much longer will we ignore the misery that is North Korea?
Globe and Mail, 09/11/08
On a recent trip to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, aid worker James Lim saw a group of children cleaning the streets. Nothing unusual about that in a country that routinely exploits people of all ages. But when they got nearer, he noticed that three of the male cleaners had facial hair.
These were not children at all. They were adults stunted by malnutrition. Their heads came only as high as his chest. One of them said he was 30 years old. Another cleaner, a woman who said she was 19, was about the size of an average second-grader. Some appeared to be mentally, as well as physically, delayed.
Mr. Lim, a Korean-Canadian Christian who is a veteran of aid work in dirt-poor Afghanistan, says he has never experienced anything quite like the misery of North Korea, which he has visited seven times over two years. Fellow aid workers have seen bodies floating in the rivers – victims, it’s thought, of a renewed food shortage. Whole mountainsides are said to have been turned into mass graves. The average North Korean seven-year-old is estimated to be nine kilograms lighter and 20 centimetres shorter than her southern sister.
What the 23 million North Koreans are living through is almost unimaginable. The totalitarian dynasty headed by Kim Jong-il has turned their country into a vast prison camp where conditions are close to medieval. The United Nations says the food crisis is the worst since the 1990s, when a famine killed as many as two million North Koreans. People are once again seen foraging for edible roots, grasses and other “wild foods.” Those who flee across the border into China, as hundreds of thousands have done, are forcibly repatriated to North Korea to face beating, imprisonment and even execution. Human-rights groups say that women who become pregnant during such absences are often subjected to forced abortions. read more..
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China: Educate Children of North Korean Women
Policies marginalize children, force family breakups
Human Rights Watch, 04/13/2008
Many children of North Korean women living in China are denied legal identity and access to education, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today. To comply with international standards and its own laws, China should ensure all children can go to school, without preconditions such as requiring them to show household registration papers. China should also stop arresting and summarily repatriating North Korean women who have had children with Chinese men.
“China has nothing to gain by having a growing number of uneducated children,” said Elaine Pearson, Asia deputy director at Human Rights Watch. “To uphold the rights of these children, China does not need to implement new laws, or amend existing ones. It has only to abide by its own laws and the international treaties it has ratified.”
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How China Breaks Up Refugees’ Homes
The International Herald Tribune, 04/09/08
“She went to the police station,” the 6-year-old girl said in a barely audible voice. When asked if she knew what happened to her mother, she hung her head and stared at the floor. At the end of the interview, during which she said very little, I realized she was holding onto the hem of my jacket. I wondered if I reminded her of her mother.
The girl’s Chinese father, a tanned, middle-aged farmer, explained how the child’s North Korean mother was arrested by the police and sent back to North Korea in 2005. They had not heard from her since. The only good thing that came out of this tragedy was that the father could finally register the girl on his hukou, or household registration, meaning that she can attend school. In China, despite laws saying all children are entitled to nine years of elementary education, in reality, this only happens if a child can produce a hukou document.
“Where I live, if you want to obtain hukou for a child with a North Korean mother, you must obtain a police document verifying the mother’s arrest and repatriation,” said the girl’s father. As a matter of policy, the local government is breaking up families and leaving children motherless. Once repatriated, the women are likely never to see their children again.
China continues to arrest and repatriate North Korean women, although they could face mistreatment, imprisonment, torture and even execution because, under North Korea’s penal code, leaving the country without state permission can be considered an act of treason.
This strong risk of persecution upon return means that, under international law, many North Koreans in China are considered to be refugees. As a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, the Chinese government has an obligation not to repatriate them, an obligation that Beijing ignores. read more…
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Olympic Torch’s Passage in Seoul Spotlights China Rights Crisis
Human Rights Watch, 04/24/08
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak should use the occasion of the Olympic torch’s passage in Seoul on April 27 to urge Beijing to stop arresting and repatriating North Korean refugees in China, Human Rights Watch said today. The torch relay, which up to now has been dogged by protests over China’s human rights abuses at home and in Tibet, will also pass through the North Korean capital Pyongyang on April 28, one place where protests are not expected.
China is likely to welcome the torch’s protest-free leg in North Korea, where basic freedoms have been restricted for so long and on such a scale, that there is no known record in the past 50 years of any major public demonstration calling for political freedoms or human rights.
“President Lee’s commitment to speak out for North Koreans who suffer human rights abuses should not be limited to those inside North Korea,” said Elaine Pearson, Asia deputy director at Human Rights Watch. “He should speak out for all North Koreans suffering human rights abuses, including those living in China.” read more..
