Archive for Refugees
Posted by Dan Bielefeld on August 14, 2010 at 3:58 pm · Filed under Human Rights, Refugees, Defectors, Books & Films
On August 19-22 Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights in Seoul is partnering with this year’s host HanVoice in Toronto for their 10th International Conference on North Korean Human Rights and Refugees. This will be the first time the conference has been held in North America; to date the ICNKHRR has been in Seoul (3x), Tokyo, Prague, Warsaw, Bergen (Norway), London, and Melbourne.
The main session this year is Saturday, August 21st, from 9 - 6. Events open to the public also include an art exhibition and concert Thursday, and movie screenings of Kimjongilia (followed by a Q&A session with the director) and The Red Chapel Friday evening.
All events are free, though for the main conference Saturday they’re asking that people register in advance since they’re providing free lunch and a translation device.
Here is the schedule on Saturday:
@ The Isabel Bader Theatre (U of T)
08:30 Registration
09:30 Opening Session
Opening Remarks
Benjamin H. Yoon, Founder & Chairman, Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights
Welcoming Speeches
- Randall Baran-Chong, Chair – 10th International Conference on North Korean Human Rights and Refugees , HanVoice, Canada
- Carl Gershman President, National Endowment for Democracy, USA
Congratulatory Remarks
- Michaelle Jean (Written), Governor General of Canada
- Hon. Jason Kenny (Written), Minister of Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism, Canada
- Dalton McGuinty (Written), Premier of Ontario, Canada
- Heidi Hautala, Chairperson of Sub-committee on Human Rights to the EU Parliament
(to be confirmed)
Keynote Speech
Hon. Lawrence Cannon, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Canada (To be confirmed)
Special Remarks
Barry Devolin, Member of Parliament, Canada
10:30 Session 1: Human Rights in North Korea between Obstacles & Opportunity
Pervasive State of Fear in the Country
Man-ho Heo, Professor, Kyungpook National University, ROK
Changing Perception of North Korean Population
Katy Kongdan Oh Hassig, Researcher, Institute for Defense Analysis, US
Testimony of NK defector
Young Cheol Kim, Former Officer at Ministry of people’s Safety in the DPRK, Escaped and Entered South Korea in February of 2008
Q & A
12:30 Lunch
13:30 Session 2: Experience of North Korean Refugees in Transit & Asylum Countries
Moderator: Dr. Sun-Young Park, MP, Liberty Forward Party, ROK
Legal Grounds for Protection of North Korean refugees
Roberta Cohen, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Brookings Institution, US
Human Trafficking: Human Rights Situation of North Korean Refugee Women in China
Won-Woong Lee, Professor, Social Welfare Studies, Kwandong University, ROK
Children from Nowhere: Stateless Children in China
Kay Seok, Human Rights Watch
Testimony of NK Refugee
Mi-Ran Kim, Hair Dresser in the DPRK, Escaped from the country on 3rd of April, 2007 and entered South Korea in March of 2008
Resettlement Process & Experiences of countries accepting North Korean refugees: issues with resettlement and integration in final destination
- South Korea: Yoon-Sook Park, Professor at World Cyber University, ROK- Canada: Younglee Ha, Executive Director, Korean Canadian Womens’ Association
- Canada: Young-Lee Ha, Executive Director, Korean Canadian Women’s Association, Canada
- US: Hannah Song, President, Liberty in North Korea (LiNK)
- Japan: Kate Nielsen, Director of International Relations, Life Funds for North Korean Refugees, Japan
Q & A
16:00 Break
16:15 Session 3: Strategies for the Improvement of Human Rights in North Korea and Protection of Refugees
Moderator: Hon. Barry Devolin, Member of Parliament, Canada
Maintaining the Momentum and Commitment of the International Society
- Pam Shime, Researcher, Global Advocacy & Leadership Institute- Joanna Hosaniak, Head of International Campaign & Cooperation, Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, ROK
- Jack Kim, Executive Director, HanVoice
- Kate Nielsen, Director of International Relations, Life Funds for North Korean Refugees, Japan
- N.C. Heikin, Director of Documentary Film, “Kinjongilia(2009)”, US
Q & A
Closing Cermonies
The Isabel Bader Theatre is located at 93 Charles St. West (Closest TTC Station – Museum):
If anyone is planning on driving to the conference from the Milwaukee/Chicago area, please drop me a line. If I can go, I’d certainly help with gas and driving duties.
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Second, this must be a pretty busy season in the Citizens’ Alliance events department — tomorrow (Sunday) in Seoul is their annual Beautiful Dream Concert to raise money for young North Koreans who’ve resettled in the South. It will be at 4pm at Korea University. Sounds like a good way to observe Liberation Day, August 15th:
CONCERT INVITATION
There are youth defectors all around you that traveled a long and perilous road to reach a place where their dreams could flourish. Yet, many experience difficulties in adjusting to life here due to differences in culture, disparities in education levels, lack of understanding by fellow professors and students, and other problems regarding their families and their lives. The need for our concern and our help is exigent to insure that their budding hopes and dreams are not rooted out by the cold indifference of society. As a result, we are holding the Beautiful Dream Concert 2010 to raise contributions to aid youth refugees. We would be deeply grateful if you would join us in our effort to protect the bright future of youth defectors.
August 15th 2010 (Sun) 4:00 pm
Korea University Inchon Memorial Hall
Hosted by: GSIS of Korean University, Ewha Institute of Unification Studies
Organized by: Beautiful Mind Charity, Citizen’s Alliance for North Korean Human Rights
PROGRAM
Beautiful Harmony Orchestra – Silk Road Foundation
Poem by Dong-Ju Yoon on Orchestral Music and Sopranos -Jin-Won Lee
Cavatina- S. Myers
Arirang rhapsody -Ji-Soo Lee
Piano Trio – Pianist Joo Young Kim =, Violinist Ji-Hoon Park , Cellist Il-Hwan Bai
Hungarian Dances No.1 - J. Brahms
Otono Porteno from Four Season in Buenos Aires - A. Piazzolla
Visually Impaired Clarinetist Sang Jae Lee
Theme from Schindler’s list - J. Williams
It ain’t necessarily so from Opera - G. Gershwin
[Kyeong-min Kim Introduction Slideshow]
Cerebral Palsy Pianist Kyeong-min Kim
Piano Sonata no.14 op.27-2 c# min. 1st mov. - L. V. Beethoven
Yearning - Kyeong-min Kim
Baritone Kyoo-Seok Lee
Largo al factotum della citta from Opera - G. A. Rossini
Soprano Mihyun Kho
Il bacio> - Arditi
Soprano Mihyun Kho & Baritone Kyoo-Seok Lee
All I ask of you from Musical - A. L. Weber
Nowon Voll Ensemble
Radetzky March - Johann Strauss Sr.
Nowon Voll Ensemble & North-South Korean Youth Choir Dream Plus
Magic Castle - Kwang-Jin Kim
To the Country of Hope - Jae-Myoung Hyun
# There will be an event during the concert to donate funds aiding youth defectors.
# The donations falls under public interest contributions under Corporate Tax law and will
be eligible for tax-free benefits at the end of the year.
# There will be pizza served starting at 6 pm* thanks to the generous donations of Papa John’s Korea.
(First 400 guests)
[*NOTE: It appears the pizza party has been changed to 3pm if I’m reading this update right. -DB]
Invitation Tickets: Free.
Performance and Ticketing inquiries ㅣ
Yeon Jung Hong 02-723-1672, 2671 nkhr@naver.com
Posted by Joshua Stanton on August 13, 2010 at 10:46 am · Filed under Refugees, Korean War, North-South
An octogenarian South Korean POW has been sent to a North Korean prison camp after he was caught attempting to escape the country and return to his homeland more than 55 years after being captured during the Korean War. [Open News]
According to the report, the “peace forest” that will be Jung’s final destination is the infamous Yodok, or Camp 15.
Follow me in a slightly cynical thought. If we’re going to start using the I.C.C. as a means to hold officials accountable for their unlawful human rights abuses, this would seem to be a clear violation of three documents the Chinese government has signed — the Korean War Armistice Agreement, the 1951 Refugee Convention, and its 1968 Protocol. Here’s hoping that someone will file an I.C.C. indictment against the Chinese officials responsible for abetting this old soldier’s torture and almost certain murder. Nothing bad could come of this. On the one hand, it could generate richly deserved bad press and condemnation for China. On the other, it might convince China to take a more active role in limiting the jurisdiction of the I.C.C.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on July 28, 2010 at 6:35 am · Filed under China, China & Korea, Refugees, Korean War
When someone escapes from North Korea and makes contact with South Koreans, and when China then repatriates that person to North Korea, the North Korean authorities typically execute that person, or send him to die in a prison camp. China has known this for years. That’s why the Chinese government is an accessory to murder when it does things like this:
China has repatriated an 81-year-old former South Korean prisoner of war who had fled North Korea decades after being captured, a newspaper report and an activist said Tuesday. Dong-A Ilbo quoted an unidentified government official as saying the man surnamed Jung was sent back despite intensive diplomatic efforts by Seoul to bring him to the South. [….]
“The government made tremendous diplomatic efforts but he was eventually sent back to the North,” the source was quoted as saying. South Korea had contacted Chinese diplomatic authorities more than 50 times since Jung’s arrest, the daily said. Choi Sung-Yong, an activist who campaigns for the return of South Korean abductees, said Jung was forcibly returned to the North in September last year, about a month after being arrested in China where he was hiding. He said Jung was arrested eight days after he fled the North with the help of South Korean activists. [AFP]
In the end, all of our differences with China over Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Korea, and everything else come down to its contempt for the rights of individual human beings. If China recognized that the condition of humanity carries with it certain basic rights and liberties, it would be a threat to no one, it would have peacefully reunified with Taiwan decades ago, it wouldn’t be plagued with ethnic and labor unrest today, and wary Asian nations wouldn’t be looking for alternative structures to check its thuggish conduct, its hegemonic predations, and most recently, its aggression through its North Korean proxy. That is why Pacific nations need a military alliance, patterned after NATO during the Cold War, to contain China for next 20 years until demographics, economics, religion, and politics catch up with its anachronistic statism. There already is a new Cold War in Asia — it’s just that some would rather not admit it. But I suspect that historians will record that it was presaged by the ugly nationalism of the 2008 Olympics, and “officially” began with the Cheonan Incident.
The Chinese reaction to such an expansive argument will certainly be that I am making too much of one man’s life, which is just my point. Societies and nations are composed of individuals who want the state to serve them, and not the other way around. Gradually, those who can see the significance of an individual’s life are learning to loathe China’s oligarchy, one small injustice at a time. Because this includes growing numbers of the Chinese people, this will be the downfall of the fascist experiment that has functionally replaced the failed Maoist one. In the case of China, that downfall is likely to be more episodic than cataclysmic, but a system can only brutalize so many people before their rage eventually consumes it.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on July 20, 2010 at 5:50 am · Filed under Media Criticism, Inside NK, Refugees, Useful Idiocy
Sue Lloyd-Roberts continues her look at North Korea by interviewing refugees in Seoul and asking them about the images her minders allowed her to film. At 13:00, Lloyd-Roberts interviews Young Howard, a/k/a Ha Tae Kyung, the founder of Open Radio. She even sits in as he interviews a source by telephone. She seems to presume (incorrectly) that Ha is North Korean, but in fact, he’s a South Korean and a former leftist political prisoner. It’s both unsurprising and striking how clearly North Koreans see things in their homeland, in contrast to most South Koreans.
Lloyd-Roberts’s effort to pierce the regime’s facade this way is the mirror image of the controversy between Amnesty International, which tried to do the same, and the W.H.O., which expects us to join it in believing that the regime showed it the true picture of medical care in North Korea. But then, you don’t get the backing of the Chinese government for a high-profile U.N. job by speaking the truths hidden behind the disinformation put out by repressive regimes, and Chan’s background suggests that her acquired talent for willful blindness has been career-enhancing for her.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on July 10, 2010 at 9:06 am · Filed under Kim Jong Il, Refugees, NK Military, Kremlinology, Reconstruction, Deprogramming, Anju Links, Propaganda, Aijalon Gomes
If there was ever any cognizable justice in holding Gomes in a prison cell for peacefully presenting a petition to North Korean border guards, it ended months ago.
North Korea says an American man being held for illegally crossing its border has tried to kill himself. A statement issued by the regime’s official Korean Central News Agency says Aijalon Mahli Gomes’ suicide attempt was “driven by his strong guilty conscience,” plus disappointment and despair that the U.S. government “has not taken any measure for his freedom.”
This is a transparent demand for ransom, and our government has legal tools for responding to terrorist tactics like this (sadly, it lacks the spine and the sac to use them). Gomes hasn’t been allowed to speak to his mom since April. And while I won’t criticize Robert Park for his still-unretracted confession until I’ve done a little time in a North Korean prison, I’ve noticed that Gomes hasn’t given his captors any such thing.
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Speaking of hostages, the Daily NK reports that more than ten North Korean refugees have been living in the Japanese Embassy in Beijing for the last two years, held hostage to Chinese demands that Japan could not legally accede to without violating the same Refugee Convention that China itself flagrantly violates:
Several North Korean defectors who are under the protection of Japanese consular offices in China have not been able to leave China. The Chinese government has been asking Japan to sign an agreement to no longer accept North Korean defectors in exchange for letting them leave the country. [Wall Street Journal, via the Asahi Shimbun]
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In most countries, the civil service is known for its generous health benefits for family members. That may be true in North Korea, too, but benefits like that must surely be outweighed by risks like these:
North Korea’s Ministry of State Security last month sent 34 relatives of former economic official Pak Nam Gi and others to a prison camp on the outskirts of the northern city of Hoeryong, Seoul-based Good Friends said on its website. [….]
On June 14, the relatives of Pak and other officials were collected and forcibly loaded into a wagon before being sent to the prison camp, the organization reported, citing an unidentified official at the North’s security ministry. The authorities transported the relatives in the middle of night in part to keep it a secret from the rest of the world to avoid international criticism, the official was quoted as saying.
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Grimly, Kang Chol Hwan looks forward to a less horrible future for Korea.
Kang Cheol-Hwan, North Korean defector and activist, thinks Kim Jong Il’s brutal North Korean regime will collapse within three years, five years at the most. But the prospect doesn’t make him giddy. On the contrary, the imminent fall of the one of the world’s most repressive states just means more work. However much he wants North and South Korea to be reunified, he knows that how it happens is as important as reunification itself.
“If it’s done wrong, it will fail,” Kang told me last week when he was in town to attend a conference on the fate of the North Korean regime. As founding director of the North Korea Strategy Center, a nonprofit in Seoul, Kang works to prepare North Korean defectors for leadership roles after reunification. But in many ways, he works just as hard to prepare South Koreans — and even Korean Americans — for the inevitability of a unified Korea. And its discontents.
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The Chosun Ilbo wonders if Kim Jong Il’s stroke has had more of an effect than some of us had thought:
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has ordered the demolition and rebuilding of a theater that was in perfect condition, adding to suspicions that his judgment is becoming severely impaired as a result of a stroke in 2008. Citing North Korean sources, Radio Free Asia reported on Monday that a national theater in Pyongyang was demolished in May and is being reconstructed. People there “seem to wonder why a building that was just renovated in 2003 is being rebuilt.”
The theater was torn down on May 9 just after Kim watched a play there, making his first public appearance since his visit to China early that month. Kim had apparently watched another performance of the same play there on April 27 and after his second visit had enough and ordered it rebuilt.
“It’s strange enough to watch the same play twice in less than two weeks, but it’s even more absurd to order the reconstruction of a building that was renovated just seven years ago,” said a South Korean intelligence official. “It appears that the aftereffects of Kim Jong-il’s stroke are more serious than we thought.”
It just pains me to think of all the yachts, centrifuges, Mayback sedans, and razor wire the children of North Korea have been denied because of the wasteful spending of its politicians on make-work patronage projects.
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Open News talks about the impact of foreign broadcasting on North Korean soldiers.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on July 9, 2010 at 9:45 am · Filed under NK Economics, Human Trafficking, Sunshine, North-South
A bus accident, apparently caused in part by bad weather, has killed 10 North Korean workers and injured 40 others at the Kaesong Industrial Complex, which, by the way, subsidizes Kim Jong Il to the tune of $50 million per month.
Give a thought to the poor families of the dead … and the wounded as well. I’m not sure how much of that substantial sum goes into providing suitable medical care for the North Korean people, but my best information about health care in North Korea falls short of the expectations U.N. apparatchik Margaret Chan raised last May Day.
Meanwhile, we all eagerly await angry calls by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions for an investigation into the safety of the North Korean workers.
The complex itself continues to persist as an artificial, subsidized entity despite a growing consensus that it’s a failure as a business model.
[T]he managers’ biggest difficulty has been a decline in orders from South Korean buyers, who they said had stopped buying from Kaesong factories for fear the complex might suddenly be closed down for political reasons. They also said they were worried that the North would close the complex if the South resumed its political broadcasts.
“We are being used as bargaining chips in a political game,” said Jimmy Bae, director of strategic planning at Cuckoo Electronics, a South Korean electronics company that has a $10 million factory in the complex. [N.Y. Times]
Posted by Joshua Stanton on June 14, 2010 at 2:37 pm · Filed under Famine & Food Aid, Refugees
Report: North Korea cuts state rations, forced to lift market restrictions after China fails to deliver on aid. Assuming this report is accurate, my guess is that those who suffer most from this will be the enlisted ranks in less-favored military units and lower-ranking state workers. Most people are already cut out of the ration system and dependent on the markets, and the regime always seems to find enough food for the Inner Party, the officers, the internal security services, and the special forces.
Meanwhile, conditions in the North sound atrocious, though it’s always hard to say if they’re unusually atrocious:
Chinese villagers along the northern border told the Herald of North Koreans plundering their livestock, tools and any other objects not nailed down. They told of women crossing the river to trade backpacks full of soy bean paste for luxuries like nail clippers, shoes and rice. Wilson Im survived his adolescent years in South Pyongan by scavenging aluminium pots, pans and cutlery, of which his bauxite-rich neighbourhood had relative plenty. He would pack them in his school bag, and stow away on south-bound trains to trade for rice on the flatter and more fertile fields closer to Pyongyang.
Lately the regime has been battling to reimpose its tight-fisted control by restricting street markets and launching a campaign against imported Chinese goods. It has slowed the refugee traffic to a trickle by increasing patrols.
Refugee activists in China told the Herald they had grown reluctant to help arrivals because they could no longer tell a genuine refugee from a North Korean secret agent who had starved themselves to infiltrate their networks. [Sydney Morning Herald]
Posted by Joshua Stanton on May 17, 2010 at 6:31 am · Filed under WTF?, Refugees, Africa, Interviews
It’s not just elephants that Zimbabwe is capturing and shipping to North Korea:
Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe has ordered that two of every animal species in the Hwange National Park be sent to North Korea as a gift to that country’s leader, Kim Jong Il. [Johannesburg Times]
Conservationists say the President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, will send a modern-day ark, containing pairs of giraffes, zebras, baby elephants and other wild animals taken from a national park, to a zoo in North Korea. [The Guardian, via Sydney Morning Herald]
An official is now insisting that octogenarian “President” Robert Mugabe has nothing to do with it, while sort-of confirming that the “gifts” are being rounded up:
However Vitalis Chadenga, the Director General for National Parks told the weekly Zimbabwe Standard newspaper that Mugabe was not involved in the controversial export. “I can tell you that the president or even the minister is not involved in this, there is nothing like a presidential decree here at parks. But I can confirm that we received an application from the Democratic Republic of North Korea and we are still processing the application,” he said on Friday.
Chadenga insisted exports of wild animals to any country were governed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) regulations. “Of the animals which were requested only two elephants are endangered, the others like giraffes, zebras, warthogs are not endangered according to Cites,” he said. Chadenga said experts had been sent to the communist country to assess the new home for the animals and a report was being compiled. [Nehanda Radio]
It’s striking how much international outcry Zimbabwe is receiving over rounding up animals and sending them to death or a life of misery in North Korea. Contrast that to the apathy of most of the global news media when China does the same thing to men, women, and children every day.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on May 17, 2010 at 5:55 am · Filed under Refugees
Open News reports that North Korea’s latest crackdown on border-crossing has made it difficult to get out of the country for any price:
Around the mid-1990s when North Korean defectors first emerged, the fee for crossing the river was 300-500 Yuan, about 50,000-80,000 Korean Won. The fee for crossing the river continued to rise as more and more North Koreans were escaping. In early 2009, the fee was 5,000-6,000 Yuan (800,000-1 million won), which is a 10-fold increase compared to the mid-1990s. This fee also increased to 10,00 Yuan, which is around 1,660,000 Won after the second nuclear testing and the launch of a rocket on May 5, 2009.
The fee for crossing the river is rising again with the internal control in North Korea rising. With stricter control, some North Koreans have a difficult time finding border guards who are willing to help them even with lots of money.
A North Korean defector, Mr. S (30 years old) stated that even though the average fee for crossing the river is 3-4 million Won, it is at times difficult to find guards to help them for even 10 million Won. He also stated that there was an order to shoot whoever crosses the Tumen River. Guards make a lot of money with helping 3-4 groups who cross rivers, and since some have been working for 10 years, there are guards who have made enough and do not have any incentive to help defectors anymore.
I wish I knew if this was the result of temporary measures timed with Kim Jong Il’s visit or a real shift of the regime’s assets designed to close the border. If the latter, and if I’m correct in guessing that a substantial percentage of the food in the markets is smuggled in, it could have a serious effect on the country’s food supply.
And of course, you can’t get to the border at all without a travel pass. Yet people find ways to get them:
Obtaining a travel document takes a week, and entry into Pyongyang and other special areas is impossible without relatives or friends. For instance, entry into the Rajin-Sunbong area is managed by the National Security Agency, and the procedure is extremely strict.
Restrictions on issuing permits as well as tough security are used in order to exercise control. Every province has a #10 security point (Note 1), which is managed by the military section designated for security. Pyongyang #10 security office is restricted by the highest level of the security section. Security around Rajin-Sunbong area is tight - barbed wire with 3,300 V.
However, citizens have been moving around despite all those restrictions with the help of bribes. Foreign cigarettes or food can be given to safety agents on trains. Some women offer their bodies to get on trains.
Those who manage to get out of North Korea and through China will also face closer scrutiny inside South Korea, to make sure they’re not North Korean spies on, say, assassination missions.
Posted by Dan Bielefeld on April 25, 2010 at 11:18 am · Filed under Human Rights, Refugees
North Korea Freedom Week 2010 is underway! At 3 p.m. Sunday the ribbon-cutting ceremony was held for an exhibit on North Korean Human Rights Exhibit that will run all week in two large rooms on the first floor of the Seoul Press Center.
The first room primarily focuses on Gang Gil-su and his extended family, who lived in hiding in China for about three years from 1999-2001 after escaping North Korea. On display are dozens of crayon drawings depicting their recollections of life in North Korea, as well as their diaries, letters, and thousands upon thousands of origami cranes they folded to pass the time.
The following drawing by Jang Han-gil was entitled 먹을게 없어 나무껍질 벗기는 어머니” (There was nothing to eat so (a) mother is peeling bark off a tree.).
The pile on the ground and the display case behind it contain thousands of origami cranes. The sign said 500,000! While i wonder if that could possibly be accurate, there sure was a great number of them. Also, they wrote a brief note on the back of each sheet of paper before folding it.
The second room had artwork by another artist, some multimedia, and on one wall hung airline tickets, calling cards, train tickets, etc., used by — if I understand correctly — activists and refugees they were helping.
Keep reading after the break for pictures of the opening.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Joshua Stanton on April 21, 2010 at 7:42 am · Filed under Terrorism (NK), Defectors
Two North Korean agents sent to South Korea to assassinate Hwang Jang-yop, the highest-ranking official ever to defect from Pyongyang, have been arrested, intelligence and law enforcement authorities announced yesterday.
According to the National Intelligence Service and prosecutors, Kim Yong-ho, 36, and Dong Myong-gwan, 36, have been arrested. Both men were majors of the North Korean Army’s reconnaissance bureau, the authorities said.
The two agents were ordered in November by the bureau’s chief, Colonel General Kim Yong-chol, to assassinate Hwang, the former secretary of North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party. [Joongang Ilbo]
According to the Chosun Ilbo, which has more on the Reconnaissance Bureau, the spies had orders to “cut Hwang’s head off.” The AP, quoting an anonymous prosecutor, reports that the instruction was to “slit the betrayer’s throat.”
As North Korean spies have often done in recent years, Kim and Dong posed as defectors; in this case, they came to South Korea via Thailand. This time, however, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service smelled a rat, and the two men confessed under questioning. The hunt is now on for the spies’ contacts in South Korea.
AFP puts the new revelation into the context of North Korea’s recent threats against Hwang.
You can find the legal definition of “international terrorism” at this section of the U.S. Criminal Code. The procedure for listing a government as a state sponsor of terrorism can be found here.
The assassins were trained in the Peoples’ Republic of China, which has long tolerated the presence of North Korean spies on its soil. Frankly, that may be the most sensational part of this entire story; after all, North Korea has assassinated people on South Korean soil before. I can’t foresee much support in Washington for the idea of listing China as a state sponsor of terrorism, but I certainly hope — this being an election year and all — that some members of Congress will hold hearings and ask the Congressional Research Service to investigate the question of what the Chinese government knew about the training and the plot. At a minimum, China’s support for the North Korean intelligence services is a crime against humanity, and China ought to pay a much higher price for it.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on April 19, 2010 at 9:19 pm · Filed under Refugees, The Fifth Column
While most of my allotted blogging time has been consumed by following the Cheonan Incident, several other k-blogs covered the story of one “Kim,” a South Korean, who volunteered in 1999 to work for North Korean intelligence, hunt down and rat out defectors hiding in China, and send them blissfully off to death, or a fate worse than. He also agreed to spy on activists helping the refugees, and on the South Korean military. “Kim” has since been arrested by the South Korean authorities in Seoul:
Mr Kim, 55, was recruited by North Korea during an illegal visit to China in the late 1990s, Yonhap quoted prosecutors in Seoul as saying. He received espionage training in Pyongyang in 2000 before being sent to China as an agent to hunt defectors, they said. But he left China after an accomplice was jailed there. He was arrested as he arrived back in South Korea. Officials said the case was being investigated to see whether Mr Kim had any further accomplices engaged in spying.
Seoul prosecution spokesman Oh Se-in told AP news agency Mr Kim had denied the charges. Mr Oh said Mr Kim had violated South Korea’s National Security Law, which prohibits nationals from engaging in activities which could benefit Pyongyang or having unauthorised contact with North Koreans.
This AP report contains more interesting details about “Kim:”
The 55-year-old man, who was arrested last week and who denies the charges, is accused of taking up the spy job after meeting a female North Korean agent in 1999 in China’s eastern Shandong province, where he was believed to be engaged in drug trafficking, the official said on condition of anonymity because an investigation was ongoing.
The man, surnamed Kim, allegedly traveled to Pyongyang in 2000 for 15 days of spy training and received US$10,000 (S$13,904) and 2 kilograms of narcotics from the North, the official said.
The suspect was sent back to China and started abducting South Korean activists who were helping North Koreans defect from their impoverished, authoritarian homeland. The kidnapped Koreans were sent to the North in cooperation with the female agent, the official said.
The man also kidnapped North Korean defectors hiding in China and forced them back to the North. He also tried to gather information on South Korean intelligence officers operating in Chinese towns near North Korea, the official said.
“Kim” is only the latest of several North Korean spies known to have worked on Chinese soil, some of them more openly than others. The Ilshimhue spy ring, which penetrated to unknown depths into South Korea’s former leftist goverment, met its North Korean handlers in a safe house at 3089 Dongxuhuayuan, 18 Shuangqiaodong-lu, Zahoyang-qu, on the outskirts of Beijing.
It stands to reason that North Korea isn’t repatriating all those refugees across Chinese territory by itself; China must be complicit in permitting the North Korean spies to operate on its soil. Certainly North Korean spies couldn’t have abducted Rev. Kim Dong Shik, who was confined to a wheelchair, and transported him across the Chinese-North Korean border without the Chinese authorities knowing. Certainly the reference to “Kim” “abducting South Korean activists” suggests that he could be a third suspect in Rev. Kim’s abduction, an issue that even captured the sadly ephemeral interest of President Obama.
The abduction of Rev. Kim is now the object of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit in a U.S. federal district court. Thus far, one North Korean agent has been convicted in a South Korean court of taking part in Rev. Kim’s abduction, and another was being questioned on suspicion of involvement before this story broke. (The latter suspect, apparently a North Korean native who went rogue and defected, does not appear to be the same person as “Kim.”)
These three are not the only North Korean agents who’ve worked in China, only to turn up in South Korea later. There is also Ma Young Ae, who became the object of controversy among other defectors, who questioned her truthfulness when she applied for asylum in the United States in 2006, claiming persecution by South Korea’s then-leftist government. Ma, an admitted “former counterintelligence agent” for North Korea, has told the New York Times that “she did undercover work in China before she defected in 1999.” That’s a year too early to know about Rev. Kim’s abduction, but not too late to describe the North Korean agents’ modus operandi, or to have met “Kim,” the spy.
Ma continues to be a controversial figure today. This blog post identifies Ma as one at least two accusers who claim that the Rev. Chun Ki-Won attempted to coerce sexual favors from her (more here, at TMH). Frankly, given all of the baggage with Ms. Ma’s reputation and her admitted links to North Korean intelligence, I can only say that someone is lying. Rev. Chun may be a hero who has, for obvious reasons, become the target of a regime-orchestrated smear campaign. He may be a scoundrel using his position to gain fame and sexual satisfaction, but if he is, he’s certainly chosen a strenuous and dangerous way to get what’s easily available in any South Korean city for a modest and negotiable fee, and virtually no risk of arrest or prosecution. Rev. Chun could also be both of those things — a hero and a scoundrel. Chun does have a reputation as showboat, but no one but Rev. Chun and his accusers knows the truth about the other accusations. Chun is also a survivor who has outlasted plenty of other activists who got caught. This implies a personality attracted to risk, but it also implies one that doesn’t make stupid mistakes, either. Knowing the good that Rev. Chun has demonstrably done for many other people, I’m inclined to ask for more credible evidence than Ma Young-Ae can offer before I deny him the benefit of the doubt. I profess no knowledge about the credibility of the other accusers, but as a defense attorney, I’ve seen multiple accusations against a single subject dissolve under cross-examination.
Finally, there is the case of Won Jong-Hwa, who was arrested in 2008 after sexually seducing and collecting information from male South Korean officers:
Won Jong Hwa, 35, is suspected of collecting information, including photographs and locations of key military installations and weapons systems, partly by offering sexual favors to military officers. One of her lovers, identified as a 26-year-old army captain, was detained for offering classified information to Won even after he found out she was a North Korean spy.
After obtaining information in South Korea, Won handed it over to North Korean agents in China. She frequently traveled to China and delivered to North Korean intelligence agents there the name cards of more than 100 South Korean officers, whose e-mail accounts are said to have been hacked into from China.
Won was first dispatched to China, where she was commissioned to kidnap North Korean refuge-seekers in China for repatriation, and South Korean businessmen to the North.
In a bid to reach Seoul, Won married a South Korean worker in China, disguising herself as a Korean resident in China. She divorced her husband immediately after entering the South in October 2001, and falsely reported to Seoul’s authorities that she was a defector from the North, according to investigators.
I blogged about Won’s case at the time of her arrest and conviction, and when a lieutenant who became one of her lovers was sentenced. Won was recruited by the North Korean regime at a time when she was facing a potentially harsh punishment for stealing zinc. In 1999, she also got her start working in China spying on refugees until she was reassigned to South Korea. At that point, she claimed to have had a change of heart and defected to the South.
Via Andrei Lankov, North Korea has a very long history of spying on and abducting its enemies. One of the lessons from the case of “Kim” and others like it is that North Korea’s ideology continues to appeal to a hard core of sympathizers in South Korea. Another is that not all who claim to be defectors are what they represent themselves to be. It’s not a reason to stop accepting defectors, but it is a reason to vet them carefully and remain open to following the evidence in some convoluted directions.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on April 1, 2010 at 8:28 am · Filed under Defectors, Propaganda, Subversion
I was too busy to see Hwang Jang Yop speak in D.C. the other day, but a few news services picked up his remarks:
North Korea’s highest-ranking defector said “ideological warfare,” not military action, would help topple the regime of Kim Jong Il.
“We don’t need to resort to force,” Hwang Jang-yop told a small audience Wednesday at the Center for Strategic International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. “We need to use ideology and markets and diplomacy. We need to take a lesson from the cold war.” [….]
“Simply trying to make Kim Jong Il die would not be the solution,” he said. “The solution is ideological warfare. We need to focus on the people of North Korea and alert them to the human rights abuses that are taking place.” [CNN]
I agree with Hwang’s message about ideological subversion and believe that most North Koreans are ready to be subverted. I’m not sure, however, that I’d want Hwang, who still professes belief in the “misunderstood” juche ideology, to be the messenger or the author of the message. I’m deeply ambivalent about Hwang. North Korea’s Inner Party is the sort of place where you don’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Like Rudolf Hess before him, his defection doesn’t exactly absolve him of his responsibility for helping to create a tyrannical system, and like Hess, he hasn’t necessarily rejected the ideology on which the system is built. Still, his defection has value for what it tells us about that system and its weaknesses, and for what it has done to discredit the system.
Hwang also called for excluding North Korea from the six-party talks, which sounds silly to me because (a) North Korea is doing just fine excluding itself; (b) eventually, the regime is going to fracture and we’ll want a mechanism in place to talk to Kim Jong Il’s replacement, and eventually manage the peaceful reunification of Korea, and (c) I get that the talks’ value is exclusively cosmetic, so why ruin that by excluding North Korea?
Oh, and Hwang just doesn’t understand why China doesn’t help us pressure North Korea to be nice to everybody. Really?
Posted by Joshua Stanton on March 30, 2010 at 6:10 am · Filed under Refugees, Reconstruction, Regime Change
Alternative elite members who can apply the knowledge they learned in South Korea well in the North Korean reality could be doctors, technicians, CEOs and scholars of a post-Kim age. Re-education could cultivate specialists in the new North Korea. Despite the very low economic level, North Korea provides a fairly good basic education. Therefore, when carrying out the rehabilitation of North Korea, re-education based on the knowledge they already have is more reasonable than educating North Korean specialists such as technicians and doctors all over again from the start. An alternative elite which received a university education in South Korea and has experience of working in a modern environment with modern technologies is one which can accomplish the most in re-education.
Read the rest here.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on March 23, 2010 at 9:45 pm · Filed under NK Economics, Refugees, Resistance
The Times of London sent correspondent Jane Macartney to China’s border with North Korea and found that the refugees there are reporting a rapidly deteriorating food situation, deepening discontent with the regime, and more willingness than ever to express that discontent openly. The editors of the Times are shocked enough by the report to write these cogent words in an editorial:
Of all the atrocities of modern history, famine is the least commemorated. It is an agonising mass death sentence imposed, invariably, by a non-democratic regime. With the possible exception of Mao’s China during the Great Leap Forward, no tyranny has acted with greater ruthlessness in perpetuating its people’s sufferings than North Korea. The Times reported this weekend that famine is an imminent prospect in the isolated prison-state. Hunger killed millions of North Koreans in the 1990s, and threatens to do so again. [Times Online]
In the coming days, expect to see more good reporting of this kind finding the same trends. Macartney’s reporting is must-reading, and I’ll give you some extended excerpts so that they’ll be here in the archives for the long haul:
The Times met four women in a safe house in China this week who fled recently across the frontier. They described despair in North Korea at the growing prospect of starvation in the Stalinist state. The youngest, only 16, crossed the frozen river last month. The other three, in their 50s, left last year and were tight-lipped about how they got out because they must go back to help the families they left behind.
While snow falls outside, Choi Kum Ok squats on the floor of an anonymous apartment not far from the border. Her eyes fill with tears as she talks of the son she had to leave behind. “I came over to earn money for his medical care. I need to get him food or he will starve.” Read the rest of this entry »
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