Who Would Let This Child Die?

The Chosun Ilbo’s Korean edition is reporting on the heartbreaking and maddening story of Kim Seong-Ryong, a 7 year-old* boy who finds himself caught between the gears of four governments that don’t care if he lives or dies. The story began as a rare exception to the terrible fate most North Korean women suffer in China. Most find themselves raped and enslaved, or end up like this woman did.

(I’ll note here that most of their South Korean sisters know this is going on, yet few seem to care as much about it as they do about the events of six decades ago.)

Some background on the North Korean refugees in China here:

In 1998, at the height of the Great Famine, Seong-Ryong’s mother crossed over, defied the odds, and met a Chinese-Korean man who married her. Because their son was born in China to a Chinese-Korean father and a North Korean refugee mother, he was born stateless. The Chinese government — in direct violation of the U.N. Refugee Convention it signed — refuses to give refuge to North Korean refugees and sends them back to near-certain death in North Korea. That means Seong-Ryong couldn’t be registered as a Chinese citizen. Still, his father found the money to pay a bribe and register him.

And they lived happily ever after.

Until one day in November of 2003, when the Chinese police came to Seong-Ryong’s house, and dragged his mother away right in front of him. He would never see her again. Seong-Ryong’s father returned home to find his wife gone. He pleaded with the Chinese police. His pleas did not persuade them. Bribes would have, but Seong-Ryong’s father couldn’t raise the ransom they demanded. Seong-Ryong’s mother was sent back to North Korea. A year later, they learned that she had been publicly executed.

Seong-Ryong’s bereaved father then left his son and went to South Korea in search of work, for reasons that aren’t otherwise clear.

Somehow, Seong-Ryong made his way to Laos, and then to Thailand, where the police caught him. And here is the situation in which he now finds himself. The Thai government, which had once treated North Korean refugees with a degree of compassion, now sends them back to China, and without divine or governmental intervention, they’ll send Seong-Ryong back, too. The likely reasons for this include pressure from those paragons of compassion in Beijing, and economic ties with North Korea that the North Koreans suddenly cultivated when large numbers of North Korean refugees started to appear in Thailand. Once the Chinese government gets its clutches on this child, it could well decide to send him to North Korea, despite the fact that he wasn’t born there and hasn’t ever lived there.

But surely, you say, not even the North Koreans would kill an innocent child? Would they?

And the South Korean government? You’re going to love this. The South Korean consulate is taking the position that Seong-Ryong can qualify for Korean citizenship, but only if he submits documentation proving that his dead mother was North Korean. You can read the whole story here, and if you can make it work, there’s video, too.

Lee Myung Bak is about to have another opportunity to do something right. For the sake of this little boy’s life, let’s hope he takes it.

* The original story lists Seong-Ryong’s age as eight, but Koreans calculate age from the approximate time of conception, meaning that one’s Korean age is generally one year older than one’s Western age.