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On the death or freedom trail with Kim's starving fugitives By Michael Sheridan, The Sunday Times, December 3, 2006 He came out of the darkening snow flurries to our rendezvous near a pagoda set in a frozen ornamental pond, a man who was both saviour and fugitive. Nam Hong-chul, as he called himself, had slipped in to the far northeast Chinese city of Yanji to rescue 11 refugees from North Korea. Now he had to make a plan. Nam had the classic North Korean looks, aged about 35, with dark wavy hair and high cheekbones. Armed with money, documents, warm clothes and maps, he was trying to save others who, like him, had risked everything to escape starvation and violence under the regime of Kim Jong-il. “Four of them are living with the pigs,” said Nam, as we made our way to a dingy hotel room to talk. “One of them is going insane. And they are not the worst off. There are others surviving in burrows dug in the ground. “They have crawled through the fields, then waded across the river or walked over the ice when it freezes,” Nam added. “They are desperate.” Nam is a courier on the “underground railroad” that helps a lucky few North Koreans to sanctuary in Thailand or Mongolia, where they can seek asylum in South Korea. He muffles his face and hides in the back of a car. Every Chinese checkpoint is a challenge. North Korean agents are out to kill him. Chinese-Korean gangsters hate him for rescuing women doomed to sexual slavery. Nam made his own escape after his wife and younger son perished in a famine in 1998, only to lose his beloved first son, not yet in his teens, who died on the journey. A simple man, he found that the Christian faith consoled him in his sorrow. It fired him with zeal to help others in memory of his own boy, who tried to reach freedom but never made it. “Helping other people makes it easier to deal with my grief for my son,” he explained. “I try to get the orphans out first. You will understand why.” His group has established a secret orphanage, where they give food, shelter and a rudimentary education to a group of lost children. Thousands of North Koreans are hiding on farms and in towns all over China’s three Manchurian provinces of Jilin, Liaoning and Heilongjiang, which are divided from North Korea by the Tumen and Yalu rivers. The men labour on the land in exchange for food or a little cash, but risk betrayal. Even taxi drivers have been known to turn in refugees for a £20 bounty. The danger is multiplied for women, who are routinely kidnapped, raped and sold into sexual slavery, for China’s one-child policy has sown a dire shortage of girls up in these lonely wastes. “I interview them,” said Nam, “I judge them. I must decide who will be strong enough mentally and physically to make it. And I also have to pick ones who will be able to adapt to life in South Korea, which isn’t easy.” They are groomed, coached in rudimentary Chinese, and in some cases given new identities as South Korean “tourists”. Then Nam must shepherd them, with their new documents and clothes, past policemen at a railway station or bus terminal. Nam has never before risked meeting a foreign reporter while on a mission. It had taken months of negotiation to arrange this moment. First came a vetting by two anonymous Korean Christian activists. We met in a bustling terminal at Bangkok airport. Weeks of silence followed. Then the trip was on again, off again. At last came the call to Yanji, a place out on the extremes of China in every sense. “The police are run by the ‘black societies’ and everything can be bought, even a death,” confided a former policeman in the city. North Korean agents operate with impunity, says the ex-policeman, funding their work by drug dealing. They have kidnapped and assassinated opponents. Nam was also dodging a highly sophisticated surveillance operation by the Chinese security services. They want to break the Manchurian connection — that crucial link between the nightmare world of North Korea and the neon lights of Seoul, where people can eat their fill and a myriad church spires pierce the skyline. If the refugees can make it out of Manchuria, there is a well-trodden path by rail, bus and even on foot across China to reach its distant borders. If they fail, a terrible fate awaits them. Once caught by the Chinese, they are deported straight into the hands of the North Korean secret police. Beatings and abuse are the minimum punishments; over the next few days I was to hear accounts of far worse — the murder of newborn babies, summary executions and prolonged deaths by torture. To verify the stories of deportation, we drove to the border city of Tumen, where the Chinese army has built a prison on a hill to house their North Korean captives. At the frontier bridge over the river, three shopkeepers said they often witnessed vanloads of prisoners being taken back. One saw more than 20 people, mostly women, escorted across on Friday, November 24. They are unloaded outside two grey office buildings visible on the far side. A giant colour portrait of Kim Il-sung, Stalin’s ally, who founded North Korea, greets the victims on their return. Often, North Korean guards skewer the prisoners with wire through their hands or under their collarbones to be yoked like cattle, according to Chinese soldiers who have seen the practice. “We’ve got Koreans hiding in our village,” confided a gruff farmer in his sixties, who stood looking at the view. “Of course we don’t report them! “They are just poor people,” he went on. “If we report them they are sent back to serious punishment. How could we do that? It would betray our own consciences.” Private Chinese consciences apart, the prison vans are still rolling. North Korea has been condemned as one of the world’s worst violators of human rights. Yet China denies its obligations under the 1951 refugee convention, calling the fugitives “illegal immigrants”. It refuses to allow the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees any access to these border areas. But it is possible to get at the truth by following the escapers to freedom. The South Korean airliner could make the journey from Yanji to Seoul in 60 minutes but instead it flies a great loop around North Korean airspace to land after three hours in the air. No refugee could hope to pass the Soviet-style security checks to get on the flight; on the divided Korean peninsula it seems that history has stood still since the end of the war here in 1953. Even in Seoul, I was to find, the survivors of Kim Jong-il’s utopia cannot escape his clammy grasp. Take the 70-year-old grandmother who sat opposite me in a cellar cafe near the British embassy. She asked to be called Park Kyong-ja. She had eight children and some of her family were still in North Korea. But she had escaped, twice. “We were caught the first time and sent back from China,” she said. “I was stripped naked. They made me squat in case I was hiding anything in my body. I was beaten, of course. Then I was kept for a year in a prison in the Naman district of Chongjin city, North Hamgyong province. “My cellmate was pregnant. I am a simple person but she was an educated lady of 35, on the staff of the United Enterprise Company, from the Songpyong district of Kimchaek city. She had been sent back from China, like me. “About 3am, she gave birth to a girl. Well, the guard came along and shouted at her that she knew she must kill the baby. He said he’d beat her if she didn’t. “The baby lay crying. It was still attached to her by the umbilical cord. She tried to will herself to harm it but her hands were shaking so much she could not. The guard came back and screamed at her, ‘Why haven’t you killed it?’ “Well, we sat there for almost three hours like that. Then at six, the guard came back again and told her, look, either you kill the baby or we will, and then we’ll beat you up and you’ll never get out of here. “So, while I watched, the mother leant down and bit through the umbilical cord. Deliberately, she did not tie the cord connected to the baby. A lot of blood flowed out. The infant died almost immediately.” There was a silence around the table, where five of us sat. Nobody quite trusted themselves to speak. The grandmother’s homespun features crinkled up. “What I’ve told you is what I saw with my own eyes,” she said. Her story was consistent with medical literature. Park said many other pregnant prisoners lost their babies because guards kicked and beat them around the abdomen. She gave a precise description of the prison and said she could identify its deputy director, a lieutenant-colonel of police aged about 60, who exercised day-to-day authority. Her explanation was the same as in other such accounts. The regime is obsessed by racial purity, and so it exterminates children feared to be of Chinese blood. Death comes in many guises for the returnees, as an elegant woman of 50 from Pyongyang, who asked to be named as Kim Hae-soon, explained. She escaped to Seoul in 2003. “My brother led a group of 16 escapers who were caught on the border with Mongolia and sent back in 2004,” she said. “After torture they singled him out as a political offender. The others were sent to camps but he was kept for interrogation.” The family had influence. Last summer Kim found out that a senior North Korean official they knew was visiting China. She flew to Beijing on her South Korean passport, met the man and handed over $10,000 (£5,050) with a plea for help. “The only result was that a few weeks later I got a curt message notifying me that my brother died in custody on April 28 this year and warning me not to inquire any further.” Her sister-in-law and two nieces fled after hearing the news. They have just made it across the Tumen River. Rescuers are now trying to find them somewhere in northeast China. Their hope is a quiet American missionary called Tim Peters. He is the man who runs what Christians call the “Seoul Train” and it was his emissary I had met in Yanji. Peters founded Helping Hands Korea, a charity that started out by sending food aid to the north and has graduated to a full-time escape organisation. His web of Korean helpers extends across Asia. It is a rare week when one of them is not flying off with bundles of cash and documents. Peters lobbies diplomats, uses charm and moral pressure on bureaucrats and has testified with fine biblical indignation to the US Congress. “It’s unconscionable to sit here and do nothing,” he said. “What does the Bible teach us if not that?” Peters, 56, is married to a South Korean and has five children and two grandchildren of his own, a happy life that makes the reports of infanticide all the harder for him to comprehend. “This is one of the few populations in the world that has been hermetically sealed from the Gospel” is all he can say. To grasp the courage of those who dare to act, we went to meet Phillip Buck, a frail Korean-American pastor of 68, who helped to smuggle more than 1,000 people out of China. His luck ran out on May 6, 2005, when he was caught by six Chinese plainclothes men as he left a rendezvous with clergy from America at a restaurant in Yanji. “They had three notebooks full of stuff on me, they’d traced all the cellphone numbers, they told me they’d been after me for five years,” he said. “I guess somebody had talked.” He survived 457 days in a cell with murderers and drug dealers, enduring repeated interrogations until 4am, eating cornmeal and washing in cold water. Only Buck’s American passport and 13 visits by diplomats from the US consulate in Shenyang saved him. Eventually the Chinese abandoned a shambolic attempt to prosecute him for “people smuggling” and he was put on a plane to Los Angeles on August 21 this year. Back in China, Nam ran similar risks to meet me because he fears it is all about to get much worse. The world imposed sanctions after North Korea tested a nuclear weapon on October 9. International food supplies to the regime have already been cut back. In the suffering northern provinces, the spectre of famine once again haunts the land. Recent clandestine videos show Kim Jon-il’s firing squads shooting people found guilty of organising escapes. As we looked down at the broad Tumen river, it was so cold that great sheets of ice were stilling its torrents. Soon it will freeze solid. And then thousands more will dare to trudge across in the dark.
• North Korea is the world’s only hereditary communist dictatorship
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