The Hidden People of North Korea (42 page)

In recent years, the United Nations has become more vocal in expressing its concern about human rights abuses in North Korea. In September 1981 the DPRK joined Covenant A, the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, and Covenant B, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. After submitting its first periodic report to the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1984, the DPRK delayed submitting its next report until 2000. In 2003, the commission adopted its first resolution citing the DPRK for human rights violations on a broad range of issues. A second resolution, passed in 2004, requested the appointment of a special rapporteur to monitor the DPRK’s human rights situation, and beginning in 2005 this individual began making a series of reports, citing shortcomings in the following areas: “The right to food and the right to life; the right to security of the person, humane treatment, non-discrimination and access to justice; the right to freedom of movement and protection of persons linked with displacement; the right to the highest attainable standard of health and the right to education; the right to self-determination/political participation, access to information, freedom of expression/belief/opinion, association and religion; and the rights of specific persons/groups, including women and children.”
⁴³

A third commission resolution on North Korea passed in April 2005 recommended that the issue be taken up by the General Assembly, which adopted its first resolution concerning North Korean human rights (as part of a package of resolutions also concerning the Congo, Iran, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) in December 2005. The draft resolution was supported by eighty-eight countries and opposed by twenty-one, with sixty abstentions (including the ROK) and twenty-two absentees. Virtually all the world’s developed countries supported the resolution, whereas most of the countries that opposed the resolution had their own serious human rights problems, including Belarus, China, Cuba, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. Most African countries either abstained or were absent. Since 2005, the United Nations has continued to pass resolutions disapproving North Korea’s human rights policies. In 2006, the ROK voted in favor of the annual resolution, perhaps in part because its former foreign minister had just been elected as the incoming UN secretary-general and in part because North Korea had recently staged its first nuclear test. South Korea abstained in 2007, but under the new Lee Myung-bak administration, it not only voted for the resolution in 2008 but cosponsored it. The North Korean government has vigorously rejected all these UN resolutions, claiming that they are initiated by the United States “and its followers.” However, given the critical attention the North Korean media have shown these resolutions, the Kim regime is apparently concerned about the bad publicity the country is receiving in the international arena.

Every March, the U.S. State Department issues its annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, and every year it singles out North Korea as one of the countries with an especially poor human rights record. Adding to the pressure put on North Korea by international organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Refugees International, various American groups, such as the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and Freedom House, have lobbied for a stronger U.S. government response to human rights abuses. In 2004 the U.S. Congress passed the North Korean Human Rights Act, which was signed by the president. The act focused on three major issues: promoting human rights in the DPRK, establishing a framework to assist North Koreans inside and outside their country, and establishing a framework for protecting North Korean refugees. The act also called for the appointment of a special envoy on human rights in North Korea and authorized (but did not appropriate) $24 million to be used each year between 2005 and 2008 to support the act’s agenda. Unfortunately, the implementation of the act became caught up in political and bureaucratic squabbles, and it appears that none of the authorized money was ever appropriated. By 2007, the Bush administration was pushing harder for a negotiated solution to the North Korean nuclear issue, which required North Korea’s cooperation in the Six-Party Talks, and the U.S. government’s North Korean human rights campaign faltered.

Little Progress, Little Hope

No significant improvement in human rights can be expected under a dictatorial regime such as North Korea’s. Extralegal social-control mechanisms are a part of North Korea’s totalitarian society, fitting in with all the other parts, such as leadership style, ideology, economic practices, and military dominance. Nor can one expect that other governments will vigorously press North Korea on this issue. China is governed by a communist party that sympathizes with the North Korean Workers’ Party’s desire to hold on to power. In recent years, South Korea has extended economic and moral support to the Kim regime and, in any case, has no desire to welcome millions of North Koreans. Japan’s poor relations with both Koreas force it to keep its distance. The countries of the European Union are far away. The United States is preoccupied with fighting terrorism and ending the Kim regime’s nuclear weapons program. And the United Nations cannot take decisive action because most of its members agree with the Kim regime’s argument that the first principle of international relations is sovereignty. It is therefore up to the North Korean people to help themselves, if only by employing the “weapons of the weak” outlined at the end of chapter 6.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Defectors

The escape of hundreds of thousands of North Koreans to China and the arrival of over fifteen thousand of them in South Korea (by 2009) is an indictment of the Kim regime’s policies as well as a test for the South Korean government. Their disappearance from North Korean society and the information they take out with them are also threats to the Kim regime.

In
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
, economist Albert O. Hirschman observes that when people are discontented with a situation that cannot easily be changed, their options are to voice a complaint or leave.
¹
Wise leaders prefer that discontented followers exercise their voice so that matters can perhaps be adjusted, although hearing bad news is never pleasant, and it is true that complaints can multiply among the discontented and cause their own organizational problems. Dictators rarely countenance complaints, and so far as we know, Kim Jong-il has never considered emulating Chairman Mao, who in a momentary lapse of political judgment proclaimed, “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.” The hundred-flowers policy was reversed within a few weeks, and Mao is better known for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s that attempted to impose his thought on a half-billion Chinese. In any case, Kim Jong-il has neither the economic nor political resources to satisfy his people, so letting them complain might not be such a good idea after all. Better to be the leader of a sick society than not a leader at all.

Discontented North Koreans try to leave—either physically or psychologically. Earlier chapters have described how North Koreans psychologically escape socialism by ignoring the Kim regime’s political and economic teachings. Tens of thousands of others have taken the more extreme step of fleeing the country, a course of action that is dangerous, but not as dangerous as voicing complaints.

Only a few thousand of the twenty-three million North Korean people have ever been allowed to legally emigrate or travel to another country. To protect the image that the country is a worker’s paradise, the regime has made it a treasonous offense to leave without permission. Only diplomats, contract workers, and foreign-currency-earning business agents are issued passports. Obtaining a permit to travel across the border into China is somewhat easier than getting a passport but still involves months of waiting and the payment of fees that are beyond the resources of most North Koreans.
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The only other alternative is to leave the country illegally.

Escape by sea is dangerous and rarely attempted. Trying to cross the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) into South Korea is suicidal. The least dangerous means of escape is to sneak into China or Russia, which merely involves eluding or bribing North Korean border guards and crossing the Yalu River (forming the western half of the border with China) or the Tumen River (forming the eastern half of the border with China and the short border with Russia). Thousands of North Koreans do this every year, but most border crossers spend only a few days or weeks in China trading goods before bribing the border guards again and returning home. Some choose to stay in China indefinitely, either living an underground existence as unregistered aliens among the two million Koreans who are legal residents of the Chinese border provinces or working their way on to a third country. Estimates of the number of North Koreans living illegally in China range between thirty and one hundred thousand, although during the 1990s famine, the number may have been as high as three hundred thousand.

The most common term in English for a person who does not return to his or her country is
defector
, which first came into use after World War II to distinguish Soviet soldiers who took up residence in the West from the millions of refugees who did so. In this sense,
defector
, which the dictionary defines as one who leaves his or her country for political reasons, is not an appropriate term for the majority of North Korea border crossers because they are fleeing primarily for economic reasons—although by the very act of fleeing they are committing a political crime in the eyes of their government.

Until about 1997, South Koreans usually referred to defectors as
gwisun
, meaning “someone who has surrendered after seeing the light.” Beginning in the mid-1990s,
talbukja
, meaning “a person who has left the North,” became popular.
Tal
does not imply any motivation or value judgment for leaving; it simply expresses a change in one’s location. More recently, the term favored by the government of the Republic of Korea (ROK) is
saetomin
(“new settler”). Some defectors prefer to be called by other expressions, such as
jokugul ttonan saram
(“person who left the motherland”),
kohyangul dengjin saram
(“person who deserted his hometown”),
silhyangmin
(“person who lost his hometown”), or
monjo ttonan saram
(“person who departed earlier”). In English, defectors are also referred to as escapees, refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, deserters, border crossers, and displaced persons. The majority of those leaving North Korea would prefer to return to their homeland if economic and political conditions improved, so in this sense they are only sojourners in a foreign land. In the absence of a completely satisfactory term to describe them, these people are referred to in this book as “defectors” or “former North Koreans.”

Defectors are a valuable source of information about what is happening in North Korean society, although their testimony must be used judiciously. Because defectors are usually paid for giving interviews, they may be tempted to exaggerate their experiences in North Korea to make their testimony more marketable. More worrisome, their memories of life in North Korea may become confused with information they have obtained since coming to the South. However, when numerous defectors tell similar stories with different details, their testimony becomes quite credible.

Who Defects?

In the years immediately following the liberation of Korea from the Japanese, many Koreans moved between the northern and southern parts of the country. Between 1946 and the beginning of the Korean War, an estimated 580,000 people came down from the North, and another 400,000 to 650,000 came south during the Korean War.
³
After the war, the border between the two Koreas was tightly shut, and not until recent years has an appreciable number of North Koreans tried to defect—by way of China, not through the DMZ. Only 219 North Koreans arrived in South Korea from 1953 to 1959, and 212 came in the 1960s—probably fewer than the number of pro-communist South Koreans who fled to the North. During the entire decade of the 1970s, when economic conditions in North Korea were about the same as in South Korea, fifty-nine defectors arrived in the South. In the 1980s, when North Korea began to show signs of strain but the Great Leader Kim Il-sung was still at the helm, defectors numbered only sixty-three, although the trickle of South Koreans defecting to the North virtually stopped.

In the 1990s, as economic conditions deteriorated in the North and word of South Korea’s wealth started reaching the people, defections increased to 533, the number rapidly rising at the end of that decade and into the 2000s: 71 in 1998, 148 in 1999, 312 in 2000, 583 in 2001, and 1,139 in 2002. If hunger was the primary reason for leaving, the number of defections should have declined after the end of the 1995–1998 famine, but according to defectors, by 1998 people were losing hope that the North Korean economy would ever prosper. After 2002, the number of defections continued to increase, although not exponentially. Some 1,281 people defected in 2003, 1,894 in 2004, 1,387 in 2005, 2,019 in 2006, 2,544 in 2007, and 2,809 in 2008.