By Norbert Vollertsen, Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2003

Seoul, South Korea—A human tragedy of hellish dimensions continues in North Korea. For nearly a decade, an unknown number of North Koreans, possibly as many as 300,000, have defected to China. These brave men, women and children risk their lives to flee the mass starvation and brutal oppression brought upon them by Kim Jong Il’s Stalinist regime. Sadly, Beijing’s official policy has been, and remains, to arrest the refugees and forcibly return them to North Korea, where they face imprisonment, torture and in some cases execution.

Until recently, these refugees’ stories and China’s practice of refoulement, or forced return, went largely untold. Mercifully, this is beginning to change. Now, action by human-rights campaigners from around the world --including my own small efforts-- helps some of these refugees to seek asylum, and to publicize their brutal treatment at the hands of Chinese and North Korean officials.

President Bush is right to call the regime in Pyongyang “evil.” I know, because I have seen the evil with my own eyes. From July 1999 to December 2000, I traveled with the German medical aid group, Cap Anamur, and gained access to some of the country’s most secretive regions. What I witnessed could best be described as unbelievable deprivation. As I wrote for this newspaper in April 2001, “In the hospitals one see kids too small for their age, with hollow eyes and skin stretched tight across their faces. They wear blue-and-white striped pajamas, like the children in Hitler’s Auschwitz.”

While western critics denounced President Bush’s decision to include North Korea in the Axis of Evil, the long-suffering people of North Korea cheered it. I know: refugees have told me. They know how Ronald Reagan’s description of the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire” was an early and important step toward its collapse. Moreover, the Axis of Evil remark proved prescient after North Korea’s confession that it had a large, covert nuclear-weapons program. More and more high-ranking defectors have told us that Kim Jong II’s government is in a desperate situation, much closer to collapse than the outside world knows. This, they say, is why he needs the fear of nuclear annihilation to win concessions from the West, prop up his regime, and subjugate his own people.

One must remember that the famine in North Korea is not a natural disaster, but a man-made one. The North Korean dictator uses food as a weapon against his own people, keeping them weak and dependent on the state. From 1994 to 1998 (the most recent reliable data the outside world has), at least two million North Koreans perished from starvation and related diseases. Nearly 50% of all North Korean children are malnourished to the point that it threatens their physical and mental health.

I worked in North Korea for 18 months until I was deported in late 2000, for publicly denouncing the regime for its human-rights abuses and failure to distribute the massive amounts of food aid to the people who needed it most. After leaving, I knew the only way I could help the people of North Korea was to tell the world what I had witnessed and work to free the 23 million people who remain prisoners in their own country.

In 2001, I interviewed several hundred North Korean defectors in Seoul, as well as near the Chinese-North Korean border, plus in several other locations where they were hiding. Many of them had spent years in concentration camps and spoke of mass executions, torture, rape, murder, baby killing and other crimes against humanity. Most were imprisoned for “anti-state criminal acts.”

During my interviews, I met with many human-rights activists who had devoted their lives to helping the North Korean refugees. Hiroshi Kato, a Japanese journalist and organizer of Life Funds for North Korean Refugees, based in Tokyo; San Hun Kim, a South Korean former UN official and human rights volunteer; Chun Ki Won, a South Korean Christian missionary; and many others. We realized from our experience in the field in China that the North Korean defectors had risked their lives fleeing starvation and oppression.

In China, most of the refugees live in utterly primitive circumstances. They have little food, no medicine, and lack proper shelter. Many live in the woods, sleep in makeshift huts, and cook in holes in the ground. Those in urban areas are sold like slaves to Chinese businessman, and the young women are forced into prostitution.

My fellow activists and I have appealed to Beijing numerous times, asking them to change their policy toward the refugees; but to this day we have yet to receive a response. In late 2001, we agreed that helping North Korean defectors enter a foreign embassy in Beijing would be an effective way to bring the issue to international attention. Encouraged by other international and South Korean aid workers, who were consulted in the weeks that followed, we arranged a plan of action and made several trips to China to go over the logistics.

Kim Hee Tae, a South Korean humanitarian aid worker operating in China, joined us on condition that the operation be carried out on humanitarian grounds. We agreed, and thus 25 North Korean defectors were interviewed and selected from a great many defectors, all anxious to leave China at any risk. On March 15, 2002, we launched our first operation, sending all 25 defectors into the Spanish Embassy in Beijing. Several similar operations followed.

Our plan was to conduct as many operations as possible, to keep the issue in the news, and ratchet up international pressure on Beijing. Then, a plan to send a group of refugees into the Peruvian Embassy last September was aborted when the Chinese authorities arrested the chosen refugees and the activist Kim Hee Tae in late August. Things then went from bad to worse. In early November, Mr. Kato was detained by the Chinese police, very severely interrogated, even tortured, and finally released because of increasing international pressure, mainly from the Japanese media. Because the police confiscated his notebook, our whole network suffered a huge setback.

Another strategy of ours was to create a flood of North Korean “boat people.” We made extensive plans for vessels to carry refugees across the Yellow sea from China to South Korea. Once again many activists and even a freelance photographer for the New York Times got arrested. Beijing treats the North Korean refugees—and increasingly those who help them as well—like criminals. China continues to prop up Kim Jong II’s evil regime even as thousands sneak over the border to escape it.

Even worse, the South Korean government has largely turned a blind eye to the plight of their “brothers” to the north, and in many cases has actually hindered their escape. Our plans to cross the Yellow Sea were foiled in part by South Korean authorities who used surveillance, interception and minders to disrupt our plans. Read this again, for I wish to stress the shame of it: South Korean authorities worked actively to foil our attempts to bring North Korean refugees to freedom. But under South Korean law, North Korean refugees cannot be turned away. It is time for Seoul to live up to this promise.

And it’s not just the officials. South Korean students spend their time and energy denouncing the presence of U.S. troops, instead of denouncing the evils of Kim Jong II. What many foreigners fail to understand is that the student movement in Seoul is heavily influenced by North Korean propaganda, and quite possibly given logistical and financial support through spies from the North.

This is similar to the espionage and propaganda that was so pervasive in Europe during the cold War. As a German who witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, I understand the destabilizing impact an exodus of refugees can have on totalitarian regimes. Despite arrests and beatings, my friends and I will continue our efforts to create a stead flow of refugees through Western embassies in China, by boat across the Yellow Sea, and at the North Korean-Russian border.

As a German, I also know about Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy towards Nazi Germany, how badly it failed, and how disastrous were its consequences. The only way to truly help the North Korean people and to end Pyongyang’s nuclear blackmail is to hasten the collapse of Kim Jong II’s murderous regime. As President Bush said of Iraq in his State of the Union address, so too should it be said of North Korea: the real enemy of the North Korean people is not surrounding them but ruling them.

Dr. Vollertsen, a physician from Germany, worked in hospitals in North Korea from July 1999 to December 2000. He is currently based in South Korea, from where he organizes rescue and asylum efforts for escaping North Koreans.

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