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Category: Refugees

September 30, 2014

This guy rode a bicycle from North Korea to Mongolia while evading the Chinese police.

“One time I was sent back to North Korea through a broker so I couldn’t trust anybody any longer. So when I came out to China again I got a map and a compass and a bicycle, I just went”, he explained. “I prepared a little mini tent, a change of clothes, a little of the money I earned,” park said, describing the items he took with him from the North. “I didn’t know how long it was going to...

Categories Refugees
September 29, 2014

Would it be slander if I called Rep. Sim Jae-kwon a fascist masquerading as a liberal?

A South Korean opposition lawmaker filed a resolution Thursday calling for the implementation of past inter-Korean agreements to stop slander between the two sides. The resolution, submitted by Rep. Sim Jae-kwon of the main opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy (NPAD), calls on the two Koreas to recognize that mutual recognition and respect are the basis for trust-building. It also urges the two sides to honor such agreements as the joint statement of July 1972, which bans cross-border slander. [Yonhap]...

Categories Activism/Censorship/Refugees
September 23, 2014

4th Annual North Korean Human Rights International Film Festival

NKnet is hosting its 4th annual North Korean Human Rights International Film Festival this coming Friday and Saturday, September 26-27, in Gwanghwamun, Seoul. This year there are 14 films from Korea, the US, and Saudi Arabia, and two of the films received financial support from the festival: November 9th 100 min. – Korea – documentary – no English subtitles Directed by: Kim Gyu-Min (the director of Winter Butterfly, which played at the first NHIFF in 2011) Category: Reunification of the...

Categories Books & Films/Defectors/Human Rights/Refugees
September 23, 2014

North Korean Gulag survivors call on Switzerland to freeze Kim Jong Un’s slush funds (Alternate title: Cursed are the Cheesemakers).

Switzerland has always been there for North Korea. When North Koreans were starving to death in heaps, Switzerland was there to receive Kim Jong Il’s personal shopper and sell him millions of dollars’ worth of its finest timepieces. When North Korea needed creative new ways to make money – literally! – Switzerland sold it the very same intaglio presses and optically variable ink our Bureau of Engraving and Printing uses to make money. When Kim Jong Un needed a place...

Categories Activism/Anju Links/Europe/Money Laundering/Refugees/Sanctions
September 23, 2014

Park Sang Hak is a very brave man.

Park and the Fighters for a Free North Korea, most of whom are North Korean refugees, ignored a letter from Pyongyang to the office of South Korea’s President that, according to Yonhap, “alluded to retaliation” against their next leaflet balloon launch: Defying the warning, 10 activists from Fighters for Free North Korea launched 10 big balloons carrying 200,000 anti-North Korea leaflets into the sky in Paju, north of Seoul. The waterproof leaflets contain messages denouncing the three-generation power transfer in...

Categories Activism/Propaganda/Refugees/Subversion/Terrorism (NK)
September 16, 2014

North Korea doesn’t want defectors from South Korea or the U.S. anymore.

There was a time when North Korea would have welcomed a defector from the United States and, long after any intelligence value had been squeezed out of him, put him in propaganda films for a generation. Today, if you try to defect to North Korea, they’ll sentence you to hard labor until Jimmy Carter comes to make them a different kind of propaganda film. More surprising, however, is that North Korea doesn’t want South Korean defectors, either. There was a time...

Categories Defectors
September 11, 2014

Fifty a day, every Tuesday. Men. Women. Children.

“These days, China trucks about 50 North Korean defectors from its immigration detention center in Tumen to North Korea’s Namyang city just across the border every Tuesday,” an activist said, citing an unidentified Chinese official familiar with the matter. He did not elaborate on the official’s identity for fear of possible reprisal against her by the Chinese government. [Yonhap] Update: The title of this post was edited after publication, adding the words “every Tuesday.”

Categories China & Korea/Human Rights/Refugees
August 29, 2014

Top N. Korean money man defects to “third country”

A senior North Korean banking official who managed money for leader Kim Jong Un has defected in Russia and was seeking asylum in a third country, a South Korean newspaper reported on Friday, citing an unidentified source. Yun Tae Hyong, a senior representative of North Korea’s Korea Daesong Bank, disappeared last week in Nakhodka, in the Russian Far East, with $5 million, the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper reported. [Reuters, Ju-Min Park and James Pearson] Daesong Bank is sanctioned by both the...

Categories Defectors/Kremlinology/Money Laundering/Sanctions
August 28, 2014

I love watching North Korean refugees emerging as a cultural force …

to inform the world about life, such as it was, in their homeland. The South China Morning Post covers a North Korean human rights film festival in Hong Kong, and The Washington Post’s new Seoul correspondent, Anna Fifield, covers a young North Korean rapper who doesn’t quite share my taste in music, but does share my outlook about food distribution north of the no-smile line.

Categories Books & Films/Korean Society/Refugees
August 15, 2014

11 down, 31 to go: Mixed news on China and N. Korean refugees

I NEVER THOUGHT I’D SAY THIS, but God bless Park Geun Hye, because China would never have allowed those ten young North Korean adults and one child to go to South Korea after their capture by the police near the Laotian border if she hadn’t pushed the issue with her new pal, Xi Jinping. No, China’s leaders have not grown a soul, but they aren’t completely impervious to Park’s sensitivities, and after all, they can’t fight everyone in Asia at...

Categories Refugees
July 30, 2014

China shuts down exhibition by North Korean satirist

IF THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT WONDERS why its own people find its modern cultural output stultifying, then maybe it shouldn’t stultify quite so much: A North Korean defector known for his satirical paintings on North Korean society was forbidden from holding a rare exhibition in Beijing on Sunday, with Chinese police officials removing his artwork shortly before the exhibition began. The painter from North Korea with the pseudonym Sun Mu, who fled the North in 1998 and resettled in South Korea in...

Categories China/Refugees/Subversion
July 29, 2014

S. Korea: We’re trying to save those N. Korean refugees in Chinese custody

The ROK Foreign Ministry has made a public statement about the case of the 29 refugees arrested by China, whose case I first noted here last week. The statement is a good sign, because it means that Park Geun-Hye’s government is linking China’s treatment of North Korean refugees to the quality of South Korea’s relations with China: The Foreign Ministry on Wednesday pledged to make all diplomatic efforts to prevent 29 North Korean defectors being deported from China back to their repressive home...

Categories Refugees
July 23, 2014

29 N. Koreans arrested in China at risk of repatriation and execution

Via the Chosun Ilbo: Twenty-nine North Korean defectors and five of their South Korean helpers were arrested in China on July 15-17. They were nabbed in Qingdao, Shandong Province, and Kunming, Yunnan Province, on an established escape route to Southeast Asia, and face deportation, possible torture and execution in North Korea. Kwon Na-hyun of an activist group for defectors on Tuesday said 20 defectors were arrested in Qingdao and nine others in Kunming. One of the helpers who were arrested is...

Categories Refugees
July 8, 2014

Refugees’ lives may depend on interpretations of Sino-Korean consular agreement

Human rights advocates have long contended that China’s repatriation of North Korean refugees violates international law, including obligations China undertook voluntarily in the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1969 Protocol. A U.N. Commission of Inquiry recently added its weight to that contention and strongly criticized China’s disregard of that Convention. [Suzanne Scholte and Rep. Park Sun-young protest outside the Chinese Embassy in Seoul, 2012] Some rights advocates have hoped that the COI’s report would force China to alter its refugee-deportation policy,...

Categories China & Korea/Refugees