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China Releases Human Rights Activist By Tim Peters When South Korean activist Chun Ki Won got into a taxi near China's border with Mongolia on a cold evening last December, he thought he could relax, his work done. The 12 North Korean refugees he was spiriting out of China, including a pregnant woman, seemed safely on their way to South Korea. The night did not end as planned. Chun was arrested, probably turned in by his taxi driver for the bounty offered by China to citizens who denounce North Korean refugees and the missionaries and aid workers who assist them in their escape.
The return of evangelist Chun Ki Won after only 8 months of imprisonment in a Chinese prison in Inner Mongolia was a wonderful answer to prayer, one that required us putting feet to our prayers! In May, a couple of us had been called to Washington to testify to the U.S. Senate about the plight of North Korean refugees, at which time we highlighted the case of 200 foreign missionaries detained in China for aiding North Korean refugees, Chun Ki Won included. In June, Congress passed -- by a phenomenal margin (406-0) -- a very strongly worded resolution regarding North Korean refugees in China, and activists being detained there. By late August, Chun was released.
I worked with Chun in China, and was all too aware of how the Chinese government took care of those held in detention. As I expected, Chun was given the equivalent of one piece of coarse wheat bread per day, deprived of sleep and forced to clean all the prison toilets. The fate of the North Korean refugees --who now number 13 with the baby's birth-remain uncertain though we suspect that some are still in detention in China, while some may have been sent back to North Korea. This unfortunate but all too familiar story adds, as one journalist puts it, " to the growing sense of tragedy and confusion that surrounds the many desperate attempts by North Koreans to escape their failing country, which is fraught with food shortages and controlled by a paranoid regime. "It is a dramatic refugee crisis but on a scale that cannot be determined for certain because it is taking place mainly out of public view. … A veil of secrecy and mystery surrounds the overall situation because the North Korean refugees are fleeing from one closed, authoritarian state into another. Neither [China nor North Korea] wants to manage the crisis in public, and so there are no definitive status reports and no help forthcoming from such organizations as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. … The best estimate puts the number of North Koreans in China at 50,000 to 100,000, a figure that includes people going back and forth across the border in search of food and money." (Click here for full Chicago Tribune story.) Thank God the story is beginning to get out. ABC Nightline recently featured an award-winning documentary on the plight of North Korea's food refugees, with viewer response unprecedented in Nightline's 20-year history. [For more on the subject, read "Escape from hunger, fear in N. Korea" and "Who Was Yoo Chul Min?--And Why Does it Matter?"] Tim Peters is the Project Manager of Helping
Hands, in Seoul, Korea |
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