Home  >  Refugees

Category: Refugees

October 4, 2009

Till Death Do Us Part

North Korea has given us its official reaction to the defection of 11 of its proles in a creaky open wooden boat across at least a hundred miles of freezing cold ocean: it’s demanding that they be sent back (link in Korean; hat tip to Mrs. Stanton). Is it possible that any South Korean government official could be stupid, amoral, corrupt, or naive (your choice) enough to do that to human beings — including children — under such circumstances? Yes,...

Categories Refugees
October 1, 2009

Eleven North Koreans Vote Against Kim Jong Il

… by climbing into a boat on North Korea’s east coast and sailing to the South. Two of them are children. South Korean authorities are questioning them now. (Link is in Korean.) Hat tip to Mrs. Stanton. Update: Here’s the boat they went south in: Jesus wept. So they obviously came from just north of the DMZ, then? This post is dedicated to every idiot who ever took a guided tour of Pyongyang and came back talking about how “normal”...

Categories Refugees
September 24, 2009

Demonstrations Around the World Today Against PRC’s Repatriation of NK Refugees

A little before 1 p.m. today across the street from the Chinese embassy in Seoul 40+ people gathered to remind the Chinese government of a commitment it made 27 years ago today.  On September 24, 1982, the PRC signed the 1951 U.N. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol, the major international agreements which lay out how signatory governments say they will handle refugees. Today’s demonstration in Seoul was one of approximately a dozen scheduled for...

Categories Activism/China/Human Rights/Refugees
September 21, 2009

The Comfort Women of Our Time: North Korean Women Are Turning to Prostitution to Survive

It shouldn’t be forgotten that Laura Ling and Euna Lee went to China to tell the story of what it means to be a North Korean woman today. What it means, increasingly, is having no future, and often, having no means to keep body and soul united but sacrificing the latter to preserve whatever remains of the former. If the historically weighty term “comfort woman” means a woman coerced into prostitution by the actions of an oppressive government, the women...

Categories Human Trafficking/Inside NK
September 11, 2009

Alleged Chinese Police Report Supports Allegations of 2003 Massacre of North Koreans

Writing in the Wall Street Journal in October 2006, Melanie Kirkpatrick first raised shocking claims about North Korean border guards’ massacre of a large group of people trying to flee from North Korea to China across the Yalu River. Her report was based on documents purporting to come from official Chinese documents, including a local police report from Badaogou Precinct, near Baishan City: “At 7 a.m. on Oct. 3, 2003,” Case Report No. 055 begins, “a report was received from...

Categories China & Korea/Refugees
September 6, 2009

Americans Do Not Admire China, and This Is Why

I was immediately suspicious yesterday when I heard that some ChiCom mouthpiece rag had claimed that the Chinese flag would fly on the South Lawn of the White House later this month. Here is China Daily’s report: The national flag of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will be hoisted at the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on September 20, media reported Sunday. Chinese associations in the United States [read: Commie puppet fifth column] had applied to...

Categories China/China & Korea/Refugees/Uncategorized
August 20, 2009

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...

Categories China & Korea/Human Trafficking/Media Criticism/Refugees
August 13, 2009

The Winding Road to Redemption

It may be the ultimate case of paving someone else’s road to hell with good intentions. You may have heard it reported that on a lark, Laura Ling and Euna Lee crossed into North Korea and were captured while carrying video showing the faces of refugees and rescuers, whom Chinese police duly rounded up to send back to a firing squad or worse in North Korea.  Intentional?  Of course not.  Reckless?  Yes, perhaps fatally; yet it’s damage that can’t be...

Categories Human Trafficking/Ling/Lee Incident/Refugees
August 10, 2009

Rumors Persist That Laura Ling and Euna Lee Were Lured; China Uses Video to Launch Pogrom Against Refugees

It wouldn’t make crossing the border any less dumb, but it would make North Korea much more culpable: “There is a strong suspicion that he [the guide] was heavily involved and it was a trap,” said an experienced activist who has led dozens of refugees to safety. There has been no word of Kim. Such suspicions are bolstered by a first-hand account given to The Sunday Times by an American missionary who was warned by Chinese police a month earlier...

Categories Media Criticism/Refugees
August 3, 2009

The Damning of Kim Dae-Jung and Roh Moo-hyun

Video presentations from May’s Oslo Freedom Forum are now online with North Korea represented by Park San-Hak, a North Korean defector who currently works as a democracy activist. It takes a while for Park’s presentation to gain momentum, but it’s well worth watching in its entirety if you can get through the introduction because his talk eventually heats up. About midway through his presentation, Park embarks on a crusade of stinging criticism directed toward former South Korea presidents Kim Dae-jung...

Categories Activism/Defectors/Human Rights/North-South/Sunshine
July 21, 2009

An Inside Look at Hanawon

It is rare to be granted a look inside Hanawon, the first stop for North Korean defectors arriving in the South, but this summer the center opened its doors to international media in recognition of its 10 year anniversary, allowing journalists (and readers/viewers) a rare glimpse into the facility. As a result of the media invite, the L.A. Times ran a story about the rehabilitation center earlier this month and just recently VOA released a video story about Hanawon and...

Categories Defectors/Refugees
July 8, 2009

High-Level Defector Describes Regime’s Illicit Income

I’d previously mentioned that I recently had the opportunity to meet Kim Kwang Jin, a high-level North Korean defector with detailed knowledge of North Korea’s illicit financing and money laundering.  Now, Kim adds much to our understanding of how North Korea pays for all those Mercedes-Benzes and missiles.  Having guessed that most of the cash came from flipping houses and the inventing some of the novel kitchen applicances I’d seen Billy Mays selling on my TV, this was a cruel...

Categories Deprogramming/Money Laundering/NK Military/North Korea/Refugees/Regime Change/Religion/Uncategorized
July 6, 2009

State Dep’t: NK Trades in Slave Labor

What the State Department is saying about North Korea’s use of forced labor is at least as strident as anything we heard during George W. Bush’s second term.  I suspect we’re seeing a combination of two things here — first, the State Department has internal politics of its own, and the bureaus that deal with labor and refugee issues tend to subscribe less to the diplomacy of connivance than the East Asia Bureau.  Second, with North Korea’s recent behavior pushing...

Categories Human Trafficking
June 23, 2009

Someone Will Face a Firing Squad for This

Some of Hwang Jang Yop‘s family members have escaped from North Korea: Three relatives of Hwang Jang-yop, a former North Korean Workers’ Party secretary who defected to South Korea over a decade ago, fled the North last month and are now in a third country en route to the South, sources said Tuesday. The defectors are members of Hwang’s extended family, one of the sources who is also a North Korean defector and frequently communicates with defectors abroad, said on...

Categories Defectors
June 16, 2009

Some Good Reads

Both appear in the Wall Street Journal, and both are too good to just graf and go.  Read them both in their entirety. Nicholas Eberstadt:  A New Plan for Pyongyang Paul Wolfowitz:  Resettle the North Korean Refugees Plus this from Melanie Kirkpatrick:  “I pray Ms. Lee and Ms. Ling will come home soon. But if the Americans’ ordeal raises international awareness of the horrors of North Korea’s gulag, it will not have been in vain.”

Categories Diplomacy/Human Rights/Refugees/Uncategorized/Washington Views/WMD
June 9, 2009

North Korea’s Nuclear Tests and Camp 16

I had previously speculated that the proximity of Camp 16 to North Korea’s main nuclear test site was probably more than mere coincidence (you can see Google Earth images of both at this link; click the images).  The Chosun Ilbo has now published the first indirect evidence — really, a gathering of rumors — to support my speculation, despite the regime’s extraordinary secrecy: How were even the locals kept in the dark? The terrain around Mt. Mantap in Kilju, North...

Categories Human Rights/Refugees/The Camps/WMD