NORTH KOREA

Ten North Koreans are returned by China

China cracks down on North Korean refugees

China called likely to oust 78 North Koreans

Human Rights Without Frontiers urge the UNHCR to invoke the arbitration procedure under Article XVI on Settlement of Disputes of the 1995 Agreement between China and the UNHCR, if the Chinese authorities deny access to the refugees and continue with their forced repatriation

22 January 2003

Ten North Koreans are returned by China

JoongAngIlbo (22.01.2003)/ HRWF Int. (22.01.2003) - Website: www.hrwf.net - Email: info@hrwf.net - Ten of the 58 North Korean refugees arrested during an attempted escape by boat from China were returned to North Korea, the Rescue the North Korean People! Urgent Action Network reported yesterday.

"The Chinese government has begun to take drastic measures to crack down on the refugee issue by rewarding anyone reporting refugees, leading to their arrest, and punishing anyone who assists their escape," two refugee support groups, the Korean Durihana Missionary and Doctors Without Borders, said at a press conference in Tokyo yesterday.

The groups also announced that the Chinese and the North Korean government have joined hands on a 100-day mission. They said that more than 3,200 North Koreans have been repatriated and another 1,300 are waiting in prison to be sent back.

China cracks down on North Korean refugees

By John Pomfret

Washington Post Foreign Service (22.01.2003)/HRWF Int. (22.01.2003) - Website: www.hrwf.net - Email: info@hrwf.net - Cracking down on North Korean refugees, Chinese authorities have forcibly returned thousands of destitute people to their isolated homeland and forced those who remain to risk their lives scratching out a meager existence in wintry mountains to escape Chinese police raids, according to witnesses and refugees.

The crackdown was on display over the weekend in the checkpoints and patrols here on China's border with North Korea, and in eastern Shandong province, where 58 refugees seeking food and freedom were caught trying to board fishing boats headed for South Korea and Japan.

China's roundups in the border region constitute a piece of the puzzle surrounding North Korea, a sign of Beijing's goal of keeping the North Korean government in power as a way to preserve stability and prevent large-scale refugee flows.

The government in Pyongyang, the capital, recently threatened to resume its nuclear weapons program, sparking an international debate on how to deal with the threat. But China's desire to avoid a massive exodus of refugees from North Korea has had the effect of heading off any option that could destabilize the country.

China, the country with the closest ties to North Korea, has yet to fully exercise its influence, Western diplomats complained. But China has been assiduous in carrying out its crackdown on North Korean illegal immigrants, fulfilling a treaty with Pyongyang.

China argues that North Koreans in China are "economic migrants" and thus have no legal basis to remain here. It rejects the argument that the North Koreans are escaping a repressive government whose economic policies have caused millions to die. However, the underlying reason Beijing does not welcome them, Chinese analysts say, is that it believes the fall of communism in Eastern Europe was precipitated when Hungary allowed tens of thousands of East German refugees to pass through on their way to the West in 1989.

"If we gave them refugee status, millions would pour over our doorstep," said a Chinese scholar who advises the North Korean and Chinese governments. "That would cause a humanitarian crisis here and a collapse of the North. We can't afford either."

China's actions have triggered criticism from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, humanitarian agencies and human rights groups, which argue that returning refugees are met with execution, prison, torture and detention in labor camps. The U.N. agency today called on China to give it access to the 58 "boat people" and not return them to North Korea. In Tokyo, international aid groups added their voice to appeals not to send the refugees back.

"The systematic and organized dragnet taking place in China leaves North Korean refugees no other alternative than a desperate flight to a third country, at the risk of their very lives," the international medical charity Doctors Without Borders said in a statement Monday.

Chinese sources in the Yanbian border region 650 miles northeast of Beijing said Chinese border security units have forcibly repatriated thousands of refugees since the crackdown began after 25 North Korean asylum seekers ran into the Spanish Embassy in Beijing last March. In all, 130 North Koreans have broken into various embassies and most have been allowed to leave China.

The sources estimate that fewer than 100,000 and perhaps as few as 20,000 North Koreans remain illegally in northern China, down from a high of 200,000.

North Koreans in the region live an existence out of the 19th century. A trek over the weekend to the snow-covered mountains hard against the North Korean border wound eight miles up frozen streams and down empty valleys to one isolated community of refugees. Han Zhe, 40, a mechanic from the east coast of North Korea, said the police came Thursday to the squalid mountain cabin where he has lived for a few months, burst in and arrested his wife and daughter.

"They couldn't run away," Han said. "I was the only one who could escape. I couldn't help them. I just heard them screaming and could do nothing. We are all defenseless."

Han found shelter in another one-room shack, at the bottom of another steep valley, eight miles outside of Liangshui, near the border town of Tumen. There he shared the slim pickings of a life on the run with the Kim family of four and another refugee whose hovel was also raided by Chinese border guards. The only reminders of the 21st century in their smoky, 4-by-15-foot abode were a clock, a calendar, a radio and some flimsy plastic bags that have been used so often the brand names are no longer legible.

Kim Cheng Ri, the 44-year-old head of the Kim family, caught a wild pig last week in a trap he had laid months before, so his family and friends ate well for a night and smoked the leftovers. Most of the time, however, the Kims survive on pickled ferns, collected over the summer, and handouts from a few trusted villagers in the hamlet below.

Kim has already been forced to make decisions painful for a father. His 19-year-old daughter is less than four feet tall, about the same as his 12-year-old son. "He's a boy," Kim said, explaining his decision to allow the boy to eat more and deny his daughter the nourishment she needs to grow.

Kim, who drove a truck for the North Korean army for 10 years, was once the beneficiary of a system that favored military men. But then he was demobilized. When famine struck North Korea in 1996, as a result of disastrous economic policies and the evaporation of Russian aid a few years earlier, Kim saw his brother starve to death, similar to an estimated million other North Koreans. Kim decided then to take his family to China.

The first years were good. Chinese Koreans opened their arms, their wallets and their kitchens to the refugees. Churches established soup kitchens. The streets of Yanji were filled with refugees and Kim's children went to a Chinese school.

By 2000, following constant protests from Pyongyang, China began cracking down. The churches were forced to close their soup kitchens. South Korean pastors and aid workers were expelled. Arrests of North Koreans began. South Korean activists also adopted a more aggressive policy, encouraging refugees to break into embassies in Beijing, angering China and arguably bringing on the current crackdown.

"We decided to move here. Now our biggest danger is the weather," Kim said, taking off a boot and showing two frostbitten and apparently infected toes. "The second-biggest danger is the police."

Kim was mourning the fate of his eldest daughter, a 22-year-old who was arrested last week. She was married to a Chinese man but someone in their village reported her, he said.

Lee Xiangyu, a willowy 19-year-old from Pyongyang, now lives in Yanji, where she has an e-mail address but no place to sleep. She wears a knockoff DKNY down vest and oversize sneakers. She spends her days surfing the Web at Internet cafes and her nights at dance halls -- surfing the crowd and looking for a warm bed.

"Girls make it in China if we are beautiful," Lee said, tossing back a mane of black hair. "There's a market for us."

Desperate for a way out, the refugees are frequent victims of scams. Over the weekend, one appears to have unfolded from Yanbian in the north to Yantai on the coast of Shandong province, 800 miles away.

On Jan. 13, two South Korean activists took $12,500 to Yantai and, through a Chinese intermediary, purchased two fishing boats, according to Douglas Shin, a Korean American evangelical pastor who runs Exodus 21, a group that encourages North Koreans to flee China. The plan was to send one boat to Chuja island, off the southern tip of South Korea, and the other one to Sasebo in Japan, the site of a U.S. military base, Shin said.

However, Chinese police seemed to have gotten wind of the plan. Last week, they arrested 10 refugees in Jilin province, near Yanji. And on Friday and Saturday, 48 others were seized as they prepared to board the boats in Yantai, Shin said.

China called likely to oust 78 North Koreans

By James Brooke

New York Times (21.01.2003)/HRWF Int. (22.01.2003) - Website: www.hrwf.net - Email: info@hrwf.net Human rights campaigners warned today that China planned to send home the 78 North Korean refugees captured last weekend when the police foiled their exodus from China.

The attempt last weekend to bring boatloads of the refugees to South Korea and Japan was financed and supported by 21 aid groups from South Korea, France, Japan and the United States. In a news conference here today, five nongovernmental groups demanded the release of the 78 North Koreans and 3 South Koreans, including a news photographer.

Alarmed by Chinese television reports that the refugees would be sent back shortly, Doctors Without Borders charged that over the last month China has forcibly returned 3,200 North Korean refugees and detained 1,300 more in camps.

"Eighty percent of the support networks have collapsed," Marine Buissonnire, the group's Korea spokeswoman, said at the news conference. "All the Chinese and foreign aid workers have been arrested and some are still in prison."

Norbert Vollertsen, a German campaigner against North Korean human rights abuses, who has been involved in several attempts to find refuge for North Koreans, said: "This was only the first step. You can be sure we will try again."

Today, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman would not confirm a Chinese report that the refugees would be deported this week. But the spokeswoman, Zhang Qiyue, did castigate foreign aid groups for helping the North Koreans, whom China views as economic migrants.

"I want to point out that recently some international organizations or citizens used the North Korean illegal immigrants to steadily create trouble," she said. "These organizations' actions violate China's laws and harm social stability. These actions are illegal in China, and any country should fight against them."

China fears that a trickle of refugees could become a flood, leading to the destabilization of North Korea.

The Rev. Douglas E. Shin, a Los Angeles-based pastor, accused China of "double standards," contrasting its speed in deporting refugees to North Korea to its reluctance to impose economic penalties on North Korea over the resumption of its nuclear weapons program.

Cooperation between the North Korean and Chinese police is so tight, Mr. Shin charged, that Kim Jong Nam, the oldest son of North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, is "in Beijing, taking care of this refugee roundup."

Chun Ki Won, a South Korean Christian missionary, warned, "These refugees will end up in political prison camps when they get back."

"Up until now there has been some occasional leniency on those forcibly sent back to North Korea," continued Mr. Chun, who spent 220 days in Chinese jails for helping refugees. "But currently, there is no trial, no legal procedure when they are sent to the political prison camps."

Tim Peters, an American Christian aid worker from Seoul, said punishment of returned refugees in North Korea could be as severe as execution. Four refugees whom he had cared for until they were sent back last May were shot by firing squads for carrying Bibles, he said.

"The North Korean refugee in China is hunted like an animal he is under a bounty," continued Mr. Peters, who runs a nongovernmental organization, Helping Hands Korea. "The bounty for turning in North Korean refugees has recently been raised three or four times from what it was last summer, to 3,000 yuan" or $362. The reward for turning in an aid worker helping North Korean refugees is 10 times higher, he said. The boat evacuation plan derailed last weekend, Mr. Shin said, because "it turned out to be a setup."

The human rights workers urged the United Nations High Commission on Refugees to intervene to prevent the forced repatriation of the 78 arrested last weekend.