Escape from North Korea (31 page)

ALMOST SAFE

S
omewhere in the Gobi Desert stands a cross in the sand. It marks the grave of Yoo Chul-min, a ten-year-old North Korean boy who died while walking across the Chinese border to Mongolia.

Chul-min was traveling with five other North Korean escapees when the group lost its bearings for more than a day somewhere near the Mongolian frontier. The terrain is harsh there, and the temperature drops precipitously at night. A healthy boy his age might have survived. But years of malnutrition in North Korea had weakened Chul-min, and he died of exhaustion and exposure. His companions carried his body across the border when they finally oriented themselves. The Mongolians buried the child. His father, Yoo Sang-jun, a Christian, flew to Ulan Bator from Seoul to pray at his son's grave. Chul-min's story is a reminder that not every North Korean who makes a bid for freedom is successful.

For North Koreans trying to escape, the route across China is a life-and-death game of hide-and-seek. There are two ways to win: They can gain entrance to a consular facility in China, which is technically foreign ground; or they can cross the Chinese border and touch the soil of a third country. After that, it is a waiting game. They must wait for South Korea to agree to take them, and they must wait for China or the third country to grant them permission to depart. The process can take weeks, months, or even, in a few cases, years.

It is unusual today to hear about North Koreans who are turned away at the door of a South Korean consular facility in China or elsewhere. But that was not always the case. During the presidencies of Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, from 1998 to 2008, rescue workers complained bitterly about what they saw as the South Korean government's abandonment of the North Koreans despite its constitutional obligation to accept them. South Korean consular facilities in China or third countries sometimes turned away North Koreans who appeared on their doorsteps. A partial explanation for South Korea's shameful actions, though no excuse, was that it was unprepared for the flood of refugees escaping from China.

The core problem, however, was the underlying political situation. The North Korean runaways put the South Korean government in an embarrassing position vis-à-vis the Sunshine Policy then in place of building bridges to the North. If North Korea was such a reasonable place, why did so many of its citizens want to get out? It was an awkward question for a South Korean government that was seeking reconciliation with the North, one that it preferred not to address. Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun usually refrained from publicly raising the issue of the North Korean fugitives for fear of antagonizing Kim Jong Il's regime. If circumstances forced South Korea to help North Koreans on the run, it would. Otherwise, the refugees were a low priority.

The experience of one high-ranking defector illustrates this attitude. In the early 2000s, this man turned up at the South Korean Embassy in the city where he'd been posted and announced that he wanted to defect. The defector was what intelligence agencies call a walk-in. The receptionist told him to go away. It was left to the astonished would-be defector to remind her that the constitution of her country required the embassy to accept any North Korean who requested asylum. The would-be defector insisted on speaking to a higher-ranking diplomat. That diplomat agreed to accept him. The next day the North Korean was on a plane to Seoul.
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In this case, the defector was highly educated, well informed, and in possession of information that would be valuable to the South Korean government. Any ordinary refugee is much more vulnerable. If a South Korean consular official told him to go away, he might not know enough to stand his ground. When put in such a position, many would do as they were told and leave. An untold number did just that.

In 2001, a group of humanitarian workers, angered by the Chinese government's treatment of the refugees and Seoul's reluctance to help, launched a public-awareness campaign. Their objective was to put a global spotlight on the plight of the North Korean escapees and shame Beijing and Seoul into treating them better.

They began by organizing small groups of refugees committed to taking high-profile actions in China. Under their direction, the refugees stormed past guards and into embassies, where they demanded political asylum. Over the next three years, North Koreans would jump over walls, knock down Chinese guards, and push past gates at embassies, consular facilities, and United Nations offices. Many of these dramatic scenes were captured on camera by foreign journalists, whom the organizers had tipped off in advance.

The protests were conceived of and organized by an international group of rescuers: Tim Peters, the Seoul-based American
missionary; Kim Sang-hun, a lay Christian worker from South Korea; Hiroshi Kato, founder of a Japanese nonprofit group, Life Funds for North Korea; and Norbert Vollertsen, a German physician who had worked in North Korea. The four men sketched out their operations in a series of meetings over coffee at a McDonalds restaurant in Seoul. The German, Dr. Vollertsen, was the public face of the movement and its unofficial spokesman.
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With his tall, imposing physique and flowing blond hair, Vollertsen was a charismatic personality who believed that the refugees were the key to regime change in Pyongyang. The publicity campaign he and his colleagues devised had three objectives: gain global publicity for the plight of the North Koreans, force China to protect them, and shame South Korea into accepting them. Vollertsen and his friends aimed to trigger a larger outflow of North Korean refugees that would in turn destabilize the Kim family regime. As Vollertsen said at the time: “We hope to achieve something similar to what happened in 1989 when East Germans sought asylum in Hungary, which forced it to open its borders in a step that led to the collapse of East Germany.”
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Vollertsen is another example of a humanitarian worker who underwent a road-to-Damascus conversion while working on the ground in North Korea. He spent one and a half years in that country as a representative of a German medical charity. The experience taught him that working with the Kim family regime was hopeless. He reached the conclusion that it was impossible to help North Koreans inside North Korea. He came to believe that the only way to alleviate the suffering of the North Korean people was to help some of them escape.

The doctor's conversion took place on the road, not to Damascus, but to Haeju, a city seventy miles south of Pyongyang. Vollertsen was traveling in a car with a German colleague, their North Korean minder, and a driver, when they saw a uniformed soldier lying along the side of the road. The Germans insisted that the driver
stop the car. The soldier was dead. When Vollertsen examined the body, he observed that the man had suffered from malnutrition. The doctor also saw signs of torture. Police arrived, and an altercation ensued when Vollertsen tried to take photographs of the corpse. The incident prompted him to deliver a statement on human rights to the North Korean government. He was expelled from the country.

The first protest organized by Vollertsen and his colleagues took place in Beijing in June 2001. Seven members of a North Korean family entered the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, requested asylum, and refused to leave. The incident had its desired effect: The world press covered the story aggressively; South Korea said it would accept the refugees; and three days later, China allowed them to depart. The family flew to Seoul via Singapore and Manila. In Seoul, the government of President Kim Dae-jung called a meeting of the national security council to discuss the impact of the asylum bid on intra-Korean relations. Vollertsen announced that there would be more rushes on foreign facilities in Beijing.

The next incident occurred in March 2002, when twenty-five North Koreans stormed through an open gate into the Spanish Embassy in Beijing. The North Koreans stood on the lawn outside the residence of the ambassador, raised their arms in a sign of victory, and passed out pamphlets in English and Korean expressing their desire to seek asylum in South Korea. The Chinese government allowed them to depart the next day for Seoul via Manila.

The rush was on. In the next few months, North Koreans forced their way into the German, American, Canadian, and South Korean Embassies in Beijing and into consulates in the northeast city of Shenyang, near the North Korean border. Invasions of more embassies followed, along with incursions into several foreign-run schools in Beijing.

Many of these incidents made international headlines, but none pulled more at the heartstrings than the story of an adorable
two-year-old girl with pigtails. Her name was Kim Han-mee. In May 2002, Han-mee and her parents, grandmother, and uncle pushed past the Chinese guards and entered the compound of the Japanese Consulate in Shenyang. The guards went in after the family and manhandled them back into Chinese territory. Photographs showed Chinese security officers dragging Han-mee's mother out of the compound while Han-mee stood sobbing on the Japanese side of the entrance gate. The images aired worldwide and ignited a diplomatic spat between Beijing and Tokyo, which charged that Chinese soldiers had violated their consular ground by rushing in after the North Koreans. After spending two weeks in a Chinese jail, the family was released and sent to Seoul via the Philippines. President George W. Bush later invited Han-mee to the White House.

At first, China allowed North Koreans who invaded consular facilities to leave the country within days or weeks. In 2002, as the rushes on embassies proliferated, the Chinese Foreign Ministry began to take a tougher line. It announced that the North Koreans did not meet the legal definition of refugees. Embassies had no right under international law to grant them asylum, it proclaimed, and it demanded that the embassies hand over the refugees in their care. China's interpretation of international law in this regard was rightly seen as preposterous, and diplomats ignored its demands. Beijing then tried to bully the embassies into withdrawing their protection of North Koreans: We will let the current group of refugees go, it offered, so long as you promise not to give asylum to any more North Koreans. That tactic didn't fly either.

Eventually Beijing began to punish embassies for accepting North Koreans by delaying exit permits. Diplomatic facilities are unprepared to host refugees for any lengthy period of time. Having North Koreans to feed, house, and entertain for months on end was expensive and hugely inconvenient for the embassy staff, who were forced to share their space and help take care of them. As Tim Peters put it: “Caring for North Koreans takes an amount of sacrifice
and forbearance. It affects the diplomats personally. It is way outside their comfort zone.” In 2003, South Korea shut its embassy in Beijing for ten days, saying it was overwhelmed with refugees and could not accommodate more.

All in all, between seven and eight hundred North Korean refugees reached safety in the early 2000s through the tactic of invading diplomatic facilities in China. In the end, Beijing put a stop to the practice through the crude but effective technique of making the consular facilities inaccessible. It erected roadblocks on streets that were home to embassies, installed spikes and barbed wire on top of the walls surrounding diplomatic compounds, and dramatically increased the number of guards at the front gates. Embassy visitors now had to pass through two sets of Chinese security barriers, as well as the virtual no-man's land in between. A North Korean who attempted entry was almost certainly doomed to failure.

At the same time that some North Korean refugees were seeking asylum at embassies in China, others were fleeing to third countries.

Mongolia was a popular route on the new underground railroad in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Its principal advantage was its location next to the northeast region of China, where most of the North Korean refugees arrive. Escapes were routed through Heilongjiang Province and the Chinese autonomous region of Inner Mongolia, which shares a border with Mongolia. As the death of the child Yoo Chul-min in the Gobi Desert shows, the desert terrain along the Chinese-Mongolian frontier is treacherous, and crossing the border can be extremely perilous.

The government of Mongolia, which maintains good relations with both Koreas, has a history of treating the North Koreans humanely. Border patrols on horseback would pick up refugees crossing from China and arrange for them to be transported to the
capital of Ulan Bator. From there the North Koreans would be issued exit permits expeditiously and allowed to travel to South Korea. As a Mongolian analyst put it in 2006, Ulan Bator was “trying to handle this issue in a careful and delicate manner.”
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There were reports, denied by the Mongolian government, that Mongolia might establish a refugee camp at a former Soviet military barracks to care for the North Koreans until they could be transferred to South Korea.