Eight More North Korean Refugees Enter Same School in Beijing

The shouting over the last forced repatriations hasn’t yet ended, but still they come, risking their lives to escape hell on earth:

Eight North Koreans entered a South Korean school in China in a bid to seek asylum in South Korea, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said.

The entry came Tuesday, a day after South Korea protested China’s repatriation of seven North Korean asylum seekers who entered an international school in the northeastern Chinese city of Yentai in August.

The North Koreans got into the South Korean international school on Tuesday in the coastal city of Qingdao, south of Beijing, at 10:00 am (0100 GMT), Yonhap said, quoting an unnamed source who helped them enter the school.

I have several reactions to this:

“The eight North Korean escapees heard the news of the Chinese repatriation via a satellite television at a safe house yesterday, but we let them go ahead with the entry because they strongly wanted to go to South Korea whatever risks they should take,” the source told Yonhap.

Easy for me to say from my office chair, but that seems like a very big risk to take under the circumstances, including the fact that the school is not a diplomatic post, and given that “North Korean defectors face imprisonment, forced labour and even execution if they are forced to return to their communist homeland.”

Tell me again that these people are too obedient, too cowed, or too afraid to fight. If I were in their shoes, I’d vastly prefer to risk death in battle than death tied to a post. Wouldn’t it be better–indeed, more humane–to arm these people than to subject them to this kind of slow agony?

Do we still believe in Thomas Jefferson’s words, when he said “[t]hat when a government becomes destructive of these ends, that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it?”

Update: Backlash alert!

If a country persecutes people who risk their lives crossing the border to escape starvation and oppression, it declares itself an enemy of human rights and humanitarianism. A UN Human Rights Commission report issued in March says countries holding North Korean defectors “must protect refugees and suspend decisions reached by [China and North Korea] that endanger their lives.” It was a mere scrap of paper to Beijing.

Our government blames China, saying it asked Beijing a dozen times over the last month to hand over North Korean defectors. But it could have made the matter public and turned it into a human rights issue: then the outcome could have been different. It is also reasonable to expect Seoul to formally announce its standing interest in North Korean defectors. Yet neither Unification Minister Chung Dong-young, who visited China as a special presidential envoy in December, nor ruling Uri Party chairman Moon Hee-sang, who visited the country last month, raised the issue with their Chinese hosts.

Developments make it glaringly obvious that resolving the issue through one-on-one “quiet diplomacy” does not work. It is high time the government sought a way of putting pressure on China through international opinion by turning the North Korean refugee issue into a question of international human rights.

I read the news of a U.S. punitive sanctions bill aimed at China’s treatment of North Korean refugees differently. I first saw a draft of this bill several months ago, and kept it quiet at my source’s request. At best, the announcement is timed to coincide with the refugee situation in Beijing today, but the idea itself is not new. This is a Michael Horowitz concept that’s been under discussion since I heard Rep. Ed Royce allude to it at a congressional forum a year ago. Royce suggested that it was the offspring of an unlikely tryst between pro-labor Democrats and human rights Republicans.

Under the draft bill, the U.S would freeze imports from China at the 2003 level and reduce them if Beijing continues to violate international treaties on refugees, impede access by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and fails to stop trafficking of North Korean women. The bill, dubbed the Scoop Jackson National Security and Freedom Act 2005, is modeled after the Jackson-Vanik bill that imposed trade sanctions on the Soviet Union in 1975, in what lawmakers believe enabled the mass migration of Russian Jews to Israel and the U.S.

Pro-business lawmakers will point out that this would have disastrous effects for the global economy, and that it’s not (or wasn’t) focused on the specific entities that are doing business with North Korea. For those reasons, the OFK view is that this is unlikely to get voted out of committee. That doesn’t make it a pointless exercise, however. Hopefully, it will give the Chinese a good scare, although I can’t really say what we can scare them into doing. I think we’ve underestimated Beijing’s desire for North Korea to distract us, and to amplify the problems that terrorists can cause us.