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January 6, 2009

Conscience in Unlikely Places

The Myanmar junta released 19 North Korean defectors into Thailand on Wednesday following their arrest in December, a diplomat said Thursday. The 19 North Koreans, including 15 women and a 7-year-old boy, were arrested at the Myanmar-Thai border town of Tarchilek on Dec. 2 while trying to cross into Thailand en route to South Korea, the same source said. [Kyodo News] It’s hard to understand why that regime, with its bizarre reliance on numerology, does anything. I suspect this doesn’t...

Categories Refugees/Southeast Asia
December 14, 2008

North Korea Imposes Harsher Penalties for Unauthorized Border Crossing

Although I recall hearing someone say recently that human rights would be an important part of the State Department’s negotiations with North Korea, I have yet to see any recent evidence that State’s masters of cerebellingus have applied their techniques to the task of lifting North Korea to a shallower level of hell. Somone had better tell Glyn Davies that a few more adjectives will have to be sacrificed for the cause: North Korea has imposed stiffer punishments on those...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Human Rights/Refugees
December 14, 2008

Chosun Ilbo Re-Runs Accounts of “On the Border” Refugees

If you haven’t seen “On the Border,” the Chosun Ilbo has re-posted the accounts of the refugees featured in the documentary: – Young-Hwa, a 19 year-old girl crossing China and Laos with her family. – Kim Soon-Ok, the young mother of a handicapped child, forced to leave him behind in China to earn money for his medical treatment and passage to South Korea. – Mun Yun-Hee, a 26 year-old woman who allowed herself to be sold to escape starvation in...

Categories Refugees
December 7, 2008

Well, that’s just dumb

Activists have decided to suspend those propaganda balloon launches that were actually starting to have a tangible impact on the North Korean military right as they’re doing their winter training exercises. The balloon launches seem to have been pure P.R. brilliance. Instead of moderating their tactics, the activists ought to keep pressing on with more brazen ones. Imagine the effect a shower of these leaflets would have on Kim Jong Il’s birthday parade in February.

Categories Activism/Defectors/Deprogramming
December 5, 2008

Book Review: Escaping North Korea, by Mike Kim

[By Guest Blogger, Dan Bielefeld] A couple months ago I saw something about a new book by a Korean American who had lived in China for four years helping North Koreans.  This really caught my attention — I’ve heard of such people but I don’t know a lot about them since most of their work is done in secret.  To pique my interest a bit further, he’s from the same part of the country I am (he’s from Chicago, I’m...

Categories Activism/Books & Films/China/Refugees
November 24, 2008

Calling Jay Lefkowitz

According to some fragmentary reports passed along by Human Rights Frontiers, Son Jung Nam — or rather, what’s left of Son Jung Nam after more than a year of torture in a dungeon in Pyongyang — is about to be stood up against a firing squad … if he still lives, that is. (No link on the latest report, which come to me via e-mail). I previously posted on Son’s case here. In China, a group of 11 refugees between...

Categories Appeasement/Human Rights/Refugees
November 23, 2008

Some Human Rights Updates

The Korea Times reports that a joint committee of the U.S. Congress has recommended that the government establish a special task force aimed at persuading the Chinese to stop repatriating North Korean refugees. On the less hopeful side, we still don’t have a clear idea of how much priority the executive branch is going to give this issue, and to phrase this gently, I don’t expect Hillary Clinton’s policies to be unduly influenced by sentimental considerations. The commission recommends appropriating...

Categories China & Korea/Refugees/U.S. Politics
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
October 25, 2008

Mystery Solved? Senior N.K. Diplomat Reportedly Defects

We may now know why North Korean diplomats were told to stand by for an important announcement on Monday: The United States declined Thursday to confirm or deny a report that a senior North Korean diplomat has defected and seeks shelter in the United States. “We have no information on that,” said Melanie Higgins, spokesperson for the State Department’s East Asian Affairs Bureau. Reports said that the defection of a senior North Korean diplomat led the Pyongyang regime to order...

Categories Defectors/Regime Change
August 31, 2008

Under Lee Myung Bak, Refugee Policy Moves in a More Humane Direction … Mostly

The number of North Korean refugees arriving in South Korea has risen by a whopping 42 percent from the number arriving this time last year: The ministry estimated the number of North Korean defectors coming to the South in the first six months of this year to be 1,744, up 41.7 percent from 1,230 during the same period last year. The figure represented a growth of 101 percent from 869 in the corresponding period in 2006. A ministry official said...

Categories Anju Links/Refugees
August 27, 2008

Unusual Suspects (2) (Updated)

In South Korea, where North  Korean agents still infiltrate into the South  to kidnap and occasionally even kill people,  commie conspiracy theories aren’t  always just for John Birchers.  The prosecution has just announced the arrest of a 35 year-old female North Korean “defector,” Won Jeong-Hwa,  for spying for the North Korean regime.  Before coming to the South in 2001, Won served jail time for theft and feared possible execution for committing another crime — stealing tons of zink, which is...

Categories Censorship/Defectors/Refugees/The Fifth Column
August 5, 2008

N. Korean Defectors Escape Severe Malnutrition Only to Acquire “Chronic” Case of Munchies

Just when I think I’ve seen everything …. Two North Korean defectors living in Britain were jailed after they were caught working at a secret cannabis farm, a U.S. broadcaster reported Saturday. Radio Free Asia (RFA), monitored in Seoul, said a Liverpool court sentenced this week the North Korean men — who lived in the country under refugee status — to jail terms, after they were arrested in March during a police raid of a cannabis farm in Southport, a...

Categories Drugs & N Korea/Refugees/WTF?
June 30, 2008

Times of London: N. Korean Snipers Shooting Refugees

You read it here first, but now it’s getting some big media coverage: North Korean guards, newly armed with Russian Dragunov sniper rifles, have shot dead refugees attempting to ford the river that divides their hungry homeland from China, according to human rights campaigners. On the Chinese shore alone, two bodies, marked by several bullet holes, were found by a local activist, said Tim Peters, an American pastor who runs a Christian group supporting the fugitives. The shootings indicate a...

Categories China/China & Korea/Human Rights/Refugees
June 27, 2008

The Year of the Boat People?

With the worst of this year’s North Korean famine concentrated in southern coastal areas, flight across the Tumen River to China is no longer the easiest way to flee North Korea. This famine map, courtesy of Good Friends, is instructive (click for full size): In the past, North Koreans have fled to South Korea by sea in onesies and twosies. The first attempt at mass defection by sea ended with disastrous results — the South Koreans sent them back to...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Refugees
June 20, 2008

Why Should We Believe Chris Hill?

Chris Hill is the man in whom Congress will have to invest its trust if it decides to throw away America’s leverage and let the State Department de-list North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism this summer.  The terms of Hill’s deal with Kim Jong Il are  so  hopelessly vague  and endlessly flexible  that the viability of this whole process rests on two  thin  and brittle reeds: Kim Jong Il’s good faith and  Chris Hill’s veracity.   Enough said?  If not,...

Categories Abductions/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Refugees/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
June 3, 2008

The Washington Times Reviews “Crossing”

Avoiding the melodrama of many South Korean films, “Crossing” is relentless in its detailed, docudrama approach. A cross-border trader and his family are seized by secret police in a midnight raid. Ragged orphans beg in destitute markets. Camp guards kick a pregnant woman in China in the stomach. Kim Tae-kyun, the film’s director, said he did not retain Mr. Yoo, a high-profile defector, as a consultant for fear of creating a political incident while filming in China. Last year, Mr....

Categories Appeasement/Korean Society/Refugees