Claudia Rosett on North Korean Loggers in Russia
The defection of those two loggers at the South Korean consulate in Vladivostok inspires further thought from Claudia Rosett:
I’ve seen those North Korean lumberjacks–or at least their predecessors. In 1994 I was working as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Moscow when a story turned up in the Russian press, saying that North Korea was running lumber camps in remote areas of Russia.
In Moscow, Russian officials confirmed to me that they had two big logging operations manned and policed by North Koreans. Both were in the Russian Far East, in areas once part of Stalin’s old gulag. One was based in a place called Tynda. The other was headquartered in a town called Chegdomyn, straddling a rail spur that ran a few hundred miles north from the major city of Khabarovsk, one of the main stops on the Trans-Siberian railroad.
These camps were the legacy of a 1967 Brezhnev-era deal between the Soviet Union and the North Korean regime of Kim Il Sung. The Soviets supplied the equipment and the forests, in rough terrain where during the long winters the temperature dives far below zero. North Korea supplied–and supervised–the lumberjacks. The two governments sold the lumber abroad and divvied up the profits.
In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. Surrounded by a freer Russia, these logging sites carried on as de facto slave labor camps, totalitarian outposts of North Korea. For the Russian foreign ministry at the time, this was a human-rights embarrassment. One Russian official told me there was “harsh treatment” in the camps, including “torture, beatings” and even “controversial” deaths. But the Russian Ministry of Agriculture, which was raking in money from the lumber sales, saw it as an excellent deal worth continuing. One of their spokesmen explained that Russians would not be willing to log such hostile turf for the pittance the North Koreans were paid.
Having heard this tale, I recruited the help of a young intern and interpreter in our bureau.
Latest word is that the loggers will actually demand to be sent to the United States. Under Article 2 and 3 of the South Korean Constitution, however, the men are South Korean citizens, and pursuant to long-standing principles of international and immigration law, an applicant for asylum must generally apply for asylum at the first country of refuge where asylum is sought. The natural place of refuge is the place where these men are already citizens, and let’s face it, Chung Dong Young isn’t the President of the Republic of Korea. It’s reasonable to assume that these men can live safely in South Korea.
Still, isn’t it interesting that after a lifetime of indoctrination that Americans are big-nosed, baby-bayoneting rapists, these men would still prefer to live in the United States, notwithstanding all of the linguistic and cultural barriers living here would mean for them?