Old KGB Habits Die Hard: Russians Arrest North Korean Logger

In the war between Kim Jong Il’s regime and the people of North Korea, Russia has taken the regime’s side:

The North Korean’s note, scrawled in pen, was simple: “I want to go to South Korea. Why? To find freedom. Freedom of religion, freedom of life.” The ex-logger, on the run from North Korean authorities, handed the note over to a South Korean missionary in the Russian city of Vladivostok last week in hopes it would lead to political asylum.

Just before he was to meet Thursday with the International Organization for Migrants, a team of men grabbed him, slapped handcuffs on him and drove off, rights activists in Moscow said Friday. He was spirited away to the eastern port city of Nakhokda, where he is sure to be handed back over to North Korean officials and repatriated to his communist homeland, activists said in Seoul.

Police in Vladivostok refused to comment. A senior South Korean diplomat in Vladivostok said he had no information. Officials from the U.S. consulate in Vladivostok could not be reached for comment.

The 51-year-old would be the third North Korean logger in Russia in a week to make a bid for asylum. On March 9, two other North Koreans who had fled their jobs as loggers managed to get into the South Korean consulate in Vladivostok. [AP, via the Washington Examiner]

It isn’t reported whether the men who pulled the would-be refugee into the Black Maria were classically trained post-Soviet thugs or North Koreans working with tacit Russian approval, but this man’s prolonged captivity and repatriation won’t be possible without the cooperation of the Russian authorities. In this Journeyman Pictures documentary on the North Korean logging camps in Russia, the human rights advocate Sergei Kovalyov alleges that there is a secret protocol between the Russian and North Korean security services to enforce North Korean discipline among the workers:

Protocol or not, like China, Russia is responsible for the criminal acts it aids, abets, and permits on its own territory. Sadly, I suspect that this is the sort of conduct that comes naturally to officials of Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship. Putin’s destruction of Russian democracy ranks alongside China’s descent into nationalism and fascism as one of the saddest developments of the last decade.