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 information from falling into the hands of the North Koreans, and much more about the very harsh treatment they endured from the North Koreans themselves. They may dispute some of what Durihana is saying to the Chosun Ilbo and other media. I got no additional information about how they crossed the border. I look forward to hearing their side of it, but every day they don’t speak up for 25 hunted children is another day those children are vulnerable to the Chinese police sending them to their deaths.

Al Gore, if you’re reading this, it’s time to speak out against Manbearpig before he kills again.]

I’m now being flooded with e-mails with links to this story, and I’m simply horrified. A fascist dictatorship with a seat in the U.N. Security Council rounds up innocent women and children, probably to ship them to Kim Jong Il’s slaughterhouses, and three inexplicably stupid and reckless Americans unwittingly helped them do it:

Lee said Laura Ling, Euna Lee and a man named Mitch Koss met him at a hotel in Yanji, in China’s Jilin Province, on March 14. They said they wanted to gather information about North Korean women who were working in adult videos at the North Korean-Chinese border area and on other North Korean women who were sold into the Chinese countryside.

They also wanted to know about children born to North Korean women and Chinese men. At the time, Lee was protecting some 21 children who had been abandoned by their Chinese families after their mothers were taken back to the North at five orphanages.

“I allowed them to collect information about the children on condition that they would not film their faces,” he said.

The three visited an orphanage the following day. Euna Lee, who speaks fluent Korean, asked children to send video messages to their mothers who had been deported to the North, and to bow to their mothers in front of the camera. But Lee said he stopped them from filming the scene.

The next day, the journalists filmed North Korean women at the border. They crossed the border and were arrested by North Korean soldiers on March 17. Ling and Lee were taken to North Korea, but Koss made it back and was arrested by Chinese border guards and handed over the video footage he was carrying. [Chosun Ilbo]

But it was information the Chinese gestapo found on Mitch Koss that caused the most heart-wrenching part of this:

On the early morning of Mar. 19, Chinese police raided Lee’s house and confiscated his computer, camera and various documents. “The documents contained the personal information of 25 North Korean orphans in addition to the children staying at the orphanages, and the phone numbers and addresses of human rights activists and their future plans,” he said. “I was interrogated intensively by three Korean-Chinese police officers until March 26. It was during interrogation that I found out that Chinese police had confiscated the video.”

Lee was deported to South Korea on April 8 after paying a fine of 20,000 yuan (approximately W4 million). “The five orphanages were forced to close down one by one,” he said. “I found Chinese relatives for 17 of the 21 orphans and a safe shelter for the remaining four, who have no relatives there.”

Koss declined to comment, and it was not possible to contact Euna Lee.

So if I’m reading this correctly, Pastor Lee was allowed to place 21 kids with shelters or Chinese families — families that appear not to want them, and for the time being — and another 25 kids are being hunted down for deportation to North Korea, or for all we know, already have been. Make what assumptions you will about their fate — I assume that China’s brutality is proportional to its ability to commit any given atrocity outside the presence of witnesses.

Other refugees, denied the assistance of a network to help them escape North Korea, will now be limited to the option of dying in place. There won’t be a Bill Clinton visit for them, and I doubt Bill Richardson raised the subject while he was whoring for the cameras.

I took a call from the Wall Street Journal today, asking for my views on this. What can I say that I haven’t already? It’s distressing beyond belief that this happened. I hope that Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee will use some of the media interest they’ve attracted to bring attention to the horrors they were used to help perpetrate. I suppose there is no undoing what is done, but there is atonement in what Ling and Lee could still do to save others.

They’d better start soon. A lifetime may not be enough to repay a karmic debt this ghastly. But that’s still more than can be said for the thugs who run China.