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Category: Human Trafficking

September 21, 2009

The Comfort Women of Our Time: North Korean Women Are Turning to Prostitution to Survive

It shouldn’t be forgotten that Laura Ling and Euna Lee went to China to tell the story of what it means to be a North Korean woman today. What it means, increasingly, is having no future, and often, having no means to keep body and soul united but sacrificing the latter to preserve whatever remains of the former. If the historically weighty term “comfort woman” means a woman coerced into prostitution by the actions of an oppressive government, the women...

Categories Human Trafficking/Inside NK
August 20, 2009

The Blood of Children on Their Hands (Updated)

[Update: Someone I trust tells me that Laura Ling and Euna Lee are anguished by the blog posts and news stories going around about this aspect of their story. Obviously, we’d love to hear Ling and Lee’s side of it, but according to my friend, they’re under a great deal of pressure from Current TV (among others) not to talk. Expect Ling and Lee to say more in the next few days about the precautions they took to prevent incriminating...

Categories China & Korea/Human Trafficking/Media Criticism/Refugees
August 13, 2009

The Winding Road to Redemption

It may be the ultimate case of paving someone else’s road to hell with good intentions. You may have heard it reported that on a lark, Laura Ling and Euna Lee crossed into North Korea and were captured while carrying video showing the faces of refugees and rescuers, whom Chinese police duly rounded up to send back to a firing squad or worse in North Korea.  Intentional?  Of course not.  Reckless?  Yes, perhaps fatally; yet it’s damage that can’t be...

Categories Human Trafficking/Ling/Lee Incident/Refugees
July 6, 2009

State Dep’t: NK Trades in Slave Labor

What the State Department is saying about North Korea’s use of forced labor is at least as strident as anything we heard during George W. Bush’s second term.  I suspect we’re seeing a combination of two things here — first, the State Department has internal politics of its own, and the bureaus that deal with labor and refugee issues tend to subscribe less to the diplomacy of connivance than the East Asia Bureau.  Second, with North Korea’s recent behavior pushing...

Categories Human Trafficking
May 8, 2009

China’s “missing women phenomenon” fueling bride trafficking of North Korean refugees

I’ve been reading a few of the articles to come out of North Korea Freedom Week which was April 26-May 2 in Washington, D.C. and among them was particular story focusing on the bride trafficking industry in China. Not surprisingly, China’s history of favoring baby boys over girls, coupled with its one child policy, has resulted in a severe shortage of women for a generation of bachelors. This shortage is referred to as “the missing women phenomenon” by the World...

Categories Human Trafficking
February 4, 2009

North Korean Johns in Need of More Effective Consumer Protection

As a worker at a state enterprise, at Chongjin city, North Hamkyung Province, he came to Pyungsung City on a business trip. As a beautiful woman approached him and said the motel had a warm cozy room as well as a “high-class waiting room” (rooms where prostitutes wait for travelers who want sexual intercourse), he went to a one-story house in Yangji-dong. [Open Radio for N. Korea] What could possibly go wrong with a story that begins like that? For...

Categories Human Trafficking/Korean Society
November 22, 2008

The Power of Truth

Freedom rises over Korea, into the air over the most oppressed and darkened place on earth. The video clips that follow are from the BBC, Al Jazzeera, the Voice of America, and New Tang Dynasty Television. The people who are launching these balloons are, in large part, North Koreans who could not live — or stand living — in their homeland, and who can find no other means to connect with those they left behind. Others are South Koreans whose...

Categories Abductions/Activism/Defectors/Deprogramming/Human Rights/Human Trafficking
March 13, 2008

“On the Border”

Today, on Capitol Hill, I had a chance to see an excerpt of that Chosun Ilbo documentary on human trafficking in North Korea. As my friend had said, it does indeed depict drug smuggling. One smuggler is actually interviewed on night vision, just as he emerges from the freezing Tumen River with a load of drugs he is smuggling into China. His source? His brother, a soldier, who is pilfering from a state pharmaceutical factory in Nampo. I wasn’t able...

Categories Drugs & N Korea/Human Trafficking/Media Criticism
March 5, 2008

Chosun Ilbo Produces Four-Part Documentary on N. Korean Refugees

[Update: OK, that TBS network that’s showing this series turns out not to be this one, but a Japanese network. I’ll let you know about U.S. broadcast times when I hear more.] Yesterday, I wrote about a disturbing economic trend in North Korea that I hadn’t known previously — the regime’s practice of lending food at usurious interest rates. The original report from Good Friends doesn’t specifically say what the penalty for non-payment is, but it must be starvation or...

Categories Drugs & N Korea/Human Trafficking/Refugees
February 4, 2008

Kaesong Workers Recoup Stolen Wages on the Black Market

With all the questions about how much pay  Kaesong workers actually collect, we’ve always  suspected that their earnings  must be  far  more than most of their North Korean neighbors.  For one thing, the workers are hand-picked loyalists; the regime  must want to keep them relatively content.   Yet no one really believed that the workers received the “official” wage of around $60 a month, after “voluntary” deductions and the bite of the inflated official exchange rate. I figured it was just...

Categories Human Trafficking/NK Economics
July 21, 2007

‘Pyongyang Soju’ Importer Arrested

A Korean American businessman has been arrested by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation on charges of hiding his activities as a spy for the South Korean government, AP reported Thursday. According to court documents obtained by the wire agency, Park Il-woo, also known as Steve Park, was a legal resident in the U.S. for the past 20 years and conducted business with North Korea. Park provided information he obtained from his frequent trips to North Korea to the South...

Categories Human Trafficking/NK Economics/U.S. Law
June 12, 2007

Win the Battle, Lose the War: How South Korea’s Brilliant Negotiation Skills May Have Killed the FTA

[Update:   The USTR will reportedly call for renegotiation of the entire deal, in part to make the draft FTA compliant with U.S. labor standards.  More at the bottom of this post.] Absolutely stomach-turning.  After all of the Bush Administration’s brave rhetoric about  “forced labor” and  “material support” for  “atrocities,” it ended up signing a free-trade  agreement that could very well have allowed slave-made, axis-of-evil  Kaesong imports into the United States.  Then, because there was no denying the staggering hypocrisy...

Categories Anju Links/Human Rights/Human Trafficking/NK Economics/U.S. Politics
May 7, 2007

Soju for You = Hennessey for You-Know-Who

[Update:   I’ve made indirect contact with a North Korean defector familiar with how Pyongyang Soju is made.  Based on that information, the product is not manufactured in a forced labor camp.  I  hope to  have more specific information about the materials and labor practices later.]   The Chicago Tribune and the  Hankook Ilbo are both reporting that North Korea is about to export of shipment of soju to the United States. US-North Korean trade is rare as Washington imposes...

Categories Google Earth/Human Rights/Human Trafficking/NK Economics/U.S. Law/Uncategorized
May 2, 2007

Anju Links for 2 May 2007: North Korea Denies Abducting Any S. Koreans, May Day in Kaesong, and North Koreans’ Growing Meth Problem

*   It has now been 18 days since North Korea violated all of  the denuclearization commitments to which it agreed last February.   I blame  Bill Richardson, who obviously must have said something tactless and belligerent while being led around the deck of the U.S.S. Pueblo.   It’s time for us to get serious about diplomacy and  offer some carrots.   How many of our soldiers’ lives is Catalina Island really worth?   How many times must the canonballs fly, Bill? *  ...

Categories Anju Links/Diplomacy/Drugs & N Korea/Geopolitics/Human Trafficking/Inside NK/Six-Party Talks
April 25, 2007

Anju Links for 25 April 2007: The Children of Arirang, Questions About Treasury’s WMD Sanctions, and More Blackmail Boasts from Pyongyang

* Arirang, Child Exploitation Tourism: Haven’t you ever wondered about how such young children are taught such precise choreography, and why those robotic smiles are frozen on their little faces? The reality of Arirang is different however, according to vivid testimony of the parents whose children participate in the performance. Their children’s eyes are tense after robust mechanical drilling by their director. The training period for the Arirang is over 6 months. Particularly delicate dancing or movement may require training...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights/Human Trafficking/WMD
April 24, 2007

Kaesong, Kim Jong Il, and Killing the Goose

Update: South Korea may be reconsidering the expansion plans after all.The Kaesong Slave Labor Park may want to reconsider its expansion plans in light of the Daily NK’s new breakdown casting doubt on just how successful the existing venture really is. Of 23 businesses that were supposed to have started operations at Kaesong since 2005, 4 have abandoned their space reservations; 1 or 2 more are considering abandoning their reservations; 4 have placed their space reservations on hold; 6 or...

Categories Appeasement/Human Trafficking
April 24, 2007

Anju Links for 24 April 2007: China and South Korea Claim Their Largesse Has Limits, Another Fresh-Faced Septuagenarian Rises in Pyongyang, and Why the Defunding Debate Should Focus on the U.N., Not Our Troops

*   North Korea is now eleven days past the April 13th deadline by which  it agreed to shut down and seal the Yongbyon reactor, make a meaningful showing at another session of six-party talks,  begin discussions about the full extent of its nuclear programs, and invite U.N. inspectors back in.  As of today, it has failed to fulfill any of those conditions.  I  just  wanted to point that out in case Chris Hill is reading or Kim Jong  Bill...

Categories "United" Nations/Appeasement/China/China & Korea/Human Rights/Human Trafficking/Kremlinology/NK Economics
April 3, 2007

FTA Hits Opposition in U.S. Congress

The Economist’s blog reports, After a long drawn out, and highly fraught, negotiation that pushed right up against the deadline, America and South Korea have inked a new trade deal. It is the largest America has signed since NAFTA. However, tensions between the Bush administration and resurgent protectionists in America’s new Democratic Congress make it highly uncertain that the pact will be ratified. I don’t yet know if the opposition will be enough to defeat the deal, but some key...

Categories Human Trafficking/Korean Politics/NK Economics/U.S. Politics