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The Blood of Children on Their Hands (Updated)

[Update: Someone I trust tells me that Laura Ling and Euna Lee are anguished by the blog posts and news stories going around about this aspect of their story. Obviously, we’d love to hear Ling and Lee’s side of it, but according to my friend, they’re under a great deal of pressure from Current TV (among others) not to talk. Expect Ling and Lee to say more in the next few days about the precautions they took to prevent incriminating information from falling into the hands of the North Koreans, and much more about the very harsh treatment they endured from the North Koreans themselves. They may dispute some of what Durihana is saying to the Chosun Ilbo and other media. I got no additional information about how they crossed the border. I look forward to hearing their side of it, but every day they don’t speak up for 25 hunted children is another day those children are vulnerable to the Chinese police sending them to their deaths.

Al Gore, if you’re reading this, it’s time to speak out against Manbearpig before he kills again.]

I’m now being flooded with e-mails with links to this story, and I’m simply horrified. A fascist dictatorship with a seat in the U.N. Security Council rounds up innocent women and children, probably to ship them to Kim Jong Il’s slaughterhouses, and three inexplicably stupid and reckless Americans unwittingly helped them do it:

Lee said Laura Ling, Euna Lee and a man named Mitch Koss met him at a hotel in Yanji, in China’s Jilin Province, on March 14. They said they wanted to gather information about North Korean women who were working in adult videos at the North Korean-Chinese border area and on other North Korean women who were sold into the Chinese countryside.

They also wanted to know about children born to North Korean women and Chinese men. At the time, Lee was protecting some 21 children who had been abandoned by their Chinese families after their mothers were taken back to the North at five orphanages.

“I allowed them to collect information about the children on condition that they would not film their faces,” he said.

The three visited an orphanage the following day. Euna Lee, who speaks fluent Korean, asked children to send video messages to their mothers who had been deported to the North, and to bow to their mothers in front of the camera. But Lee said he stopped them from filming the scene.

The next day, the journalists filmed North Korean women at the border. They crossed the border and were arrested by North Korean soldiers on March 17. Ling and Lee were taken to North Korea, but Koss made it back and was arrested by Chinese border guards and handed over the video footage he was carrying. [Chosun Ilbo]

But it was information the Chinese gestapo found on Mitch Koss that caused the most heart-wrenching part of this:

On the early morning of Mar. 19, Chinese police raided Lee’s house and confiscated his computer, camera and various documents. “The documents contained the personal information of 25 North Korean orphans in addition to the children staying at the orphanages, and the phone numbers and addresses of human rights activists and their future plans,” he said. “I was interrogated intensively by three Korean-Chinese police officers until March 26. It was during interrogation that I found out that Chinese police had confiscated the video.”

Lee was deported to South Korea on April 8 after paying a fine of 20,000 yuan (approximately W4 million). “The five orphanages were forced to close down one by one,” he said. “I found Chinese relatives for 17 of the 21 orphans and a safe shelter for the remaining four, who have no relatives there.”

Koss declined to comment, and it was not possible to contact Euna Lee.

So if I’m reading this correctly, Pastor Lee was allowed to place 21 kids with shelters or Chinese families — families that appear not to want them, and for the time being — and another 25 kids are being hunted down for deportation to North Korea, or for all we know, already have been. Make what assumptions you will about their fate — I assume that China’s brutality is proportional to its ability to commit any given atrocity outside the presence of witnesses.

Other refugees, denied the assistance of a network to help them escape North Korea, will now be limited to the option of dying in place. There won’t be a Bill Clinton visit for them, and I doubt Bill Richardson raised the subject while he was whoring for the cameras.

I took a call from the Wall Street Journal today, asking for my views on this. What can I say that I haven’t already? It’s distressing beyond belief that this happened. I hope that Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee will use some of the media interest they’ve attracted to bring attention to the horrors they were used to help perpetrate. I suppose there is no undoing what is done, but there is atonement in what Ling and Lee could still do to save others.

They’d better start soon. A lifetime may not be enough to repay a karmic debt this ghastly. But that’s still more than can be said for the thugs who run China.

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31 Responses

  1. Just when I had turned my attention to other matters regarding the two Korean states, what with the aborted rocket launch, the passing of ex-president Kim Dae-Jung, this comes out. But Joshua, people like you should not be surprised. You and I and others expected all along that any and all video footage captured by either the Chinese police or the North Korean border patrol would be used to round up and to deport defectors back to the DPRK.

    I’m not surprised Lee and Ling remain silent. They’ve never denied anything and upon their return, Lisa Ling admitted they did enter the DPRK illegally – as KCNA stated video footage of the women said they had done.

    I’m fuming again.

  3. This might explain the silence of Mitch Koss more than Laura and Euna.

    Ling and Lee were taken to North Korea, but Koss made it back and was arrested by Chinese border guards and handed over the video footage he was carrying.

    I had previously assumed that the video footage was in North Korea’s possession, since KCNA said there were 6 videotapes and a video camera included among the evidence presented at the trial in Pyongyang. I thought Mitch Koss had let go of (or dropped) the Current TV video camera during his struggle to get away from North Korean border sentries at the Tumen River.

    Excuse me, Joshua, may I ask if the Wall Street Journal is now doing an article on this angle of the story? I wonder if they are trying to get more information from the WSJ South Korea bureau correspondents as well. I would love to see WSJ do their own interview with Lee Chan-woo, since he’s the only eyewitness who seems to be willing to talk about what really happened as well as the unfortunate consequences.

  4. Lisa Ling said before the Sacramento rally. “Right now we need the help of our government. … At the end of the day Laura and Euna are journalists and they were doing their job. And they made a mistake on March 17, for which they are paying.”

    It is now confirmed that other innocents are also paying. Current needs to man up and start telling the story now. The heck with the exclusives, the CYA, the let’s all get our stories straight, or whatever reason they are not talking. (The reporters ARE back safe now) The only truth we have comes from the North Koreans and now this article. The time for the truth, warts and all, has long passed.

  5. “A fascist dictatorship with a seat in the U.N. Security Council rounds up innocent women and children, probably to ship them to Kim Jong Il’s slaughterhouses”

    “the thugs who run China”

    I guess if China instead went around assassinating people and bombing peasant goat herders with Predator drones, and tried to come up with false pretexts to invade other countries then you wouldn’t have a problem with China.

    You really drink the Kool-Aid of the Freedumb Agenda don’t you?

  6. Calvin, yeah because China is just peace loving, open society with freedom for all workers just like DPRK. Not like that facist dictatorship US of A. Thanks for making such a compelling argument for abortion.

  7. Calvin–Tibet?

    And this is dreadful news–I’m amazed that Koss, who’s in his 50s, could sprint so fast with a camera (I’m sure he wasn’t hauling a big Beta rig).

    I still wonder why the Current execs. haven’t said anything. David Neumann’s silence is troubling.

  9. Newly confirmed U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman Jr., who has declared human rights one of the target areas of his upcoming service, now has a supremely complicated issue to deal with. One that reminds us that the Chinese are as equally culpable in the North Korean refugee crisis as their neighbors.

    The most urgent matter right now is to find out what has-is happening to those 25 other orphans. Let us all hope they have not yet been deported…

  10. We need a president who will stand up at the DMZ and shout down Kim Jong Il and the North Korean regime, and demand that he free his people immediately. He can say things like, “Stop murdering innocent women and children in cold blood!”

    Then he can fly to Taiwan and eviscerate the Chinese government and tell them to go to hell and that Taiwan is the legitimate government of mainland China and will be considered as such until the Chinese take North Korea to task—for real.

    Then he needs to install nuclear missiles in South Korea and Japan, pointing West and North, over the objections of France, Russia, China, the UN, and North Korea. And finally, he needs to move all of the US military assets to the borders of North Korea and make jokes about the invasion starting 10 minutes ago live on radio.

    We’ve done this before, in the ’80’s. The result: The end of the Cold War, the liberation of countless millions, and an end to unimaginable suffering of the poor.

    Euna Lee and Lisa Ling are idiots who can’t understand evil even when they are abused by it. We need to create a world where such can live out their lives without suffering the consequences of their own ignorance.

  11. Danny:

    I never said that the US was a fascist dictatorship.

    Dan Ó C:

    What’s that? [Deleted by OFK; commenter banned.]

    I’m a reactionary. You guys are a bunch of Right-Liberals who think that you’re “conservative” because you’re “pro-military.” In other words you’ve all fully assimilated the Freedumb Agenda.

  15. Americans are funny, spending billions of dollars trying to destabalize China’s western region, while its own western region is destablized by massive mexican migration.

  17. Laura and Euna were new to the area and to working with the defectors, so that explains their foolish and ignorant behavior. However, the Durihana Mission workers are very experienced, so they should have been more precautious in dealing with the Current TV crew. The orphans and the orphanages should not have been videotaped.

    In the past, there was a case of some South Korean journalists who interviewed defectors in their hideouts, not realizing they were being watched by Chinese cops, and the defectors were captured.

    I hope these incidents serve as a warning to aid workers and journalists to be more careful about protecting the defectors. Perhaps videos and revealing photos should not be allowed.

  18. It’s a valid point. No doubt, Durihana would answer that it needs publicity to raise money to maintain those orphanages, but I’d agree that after this, some reconsideration of the risks is warranted.

  19. From the New York Times –

    In South Korea, Freed U.S. Journalists Come Under Harsh Criticism

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/world/asia/22journalists.html?ref=world

    There’s a direct quote from Mitch Koss:
    ‘The cameraman, Mr. Koss, declined to answer specific questions about the trip until Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee had spoken first. Still, he said, he was amazed by “how many untrue stories have been published in the last five months” and how “when there is silence, fantasy answers to fill in empty spaces.” ‘

    He has a valid point about silence and fantasy, but then why is he silent? Why must he wait for Laura and Euna? I hope they’ll be ready to speak soon. I’ve always believed in their good intentions, and I think we need to remember that this was Euna’s first assignment.

  20. Koreans were also critical of their own missionary-hostages in Afghanistan, and I’m not surprised that they’re speaking out against this.

    OPSEC — does anybody else remember the commercials on AFKN?

  21. So Laura Ling and Euna Lee are anguished by the blog posts and news stories going around about this aspect of their story? 活该！ If the amount of anguish could be quantified, then how much did Pastor Lee Chan-woo have in comparison? Did Laura and Euna really assume this eyewitness in South Korea was going to stay quiet after their release? Laura has had 2 weeks to pen that editorial Lisa said she would write.
    Are we now to believe that there is a dispute between Current TV’s crew and Durihana?
    I don’t see what Durihana has to hide or lie about, but at least they are telling the story that needs to be told with details of the unfortunate consequences of Current TV’s border caper.

    Pressure from Current TV not to talk? Yet isn’t Laura talking with publishers about a book deal? Do some clever reporters in Los Angeles have to disguise themsleves as book publishers in order to hear her story first?

    Mitch Koss finally ends his silence by saying “when there is silence, fantasy answers fill in empty spaces.” Hey Mitch! What a profound observation! How am I supposed to fill in Current TV’s empty spaces? Would you prefer I do some quiet meditation and yoga exercises?

  23. I agree with you Sonagi.

    I am an ethnic Korean, so all of you who are not Koreans, please forgive me for this angry statement… but the ignorant way so many non-Koreans here in the US have reacted, rejoicing and treating them as veritable heroines, has infuriated me. I have no issues with these people rejoicing at the family reunions, for from a humanitarian perspective, I too was gladdened at the sight of Euna Lee and Laura Ling embrancing their husbands and in Lee’s case, her lovely 4-year-old daughter.

    However, these people are also grossly unaware of what’s happening in northeastern China, and are not moved even when confronted with the facts presented in this NY Times article, let alone with the declarations made in the article we’ve already read (the one from The Chosun Ilbo). If only these people all read Joshua Stanton’s blog as we do…

  25. His latest in the NYT is a first step in redeeming himself as a journalist after years of self-promoting atrocity-mongering of Nogunri and kid-glove treatment of the Mad Cow protests.

  27. It makes me so sad that Laura Ling is shopping around for a book deal with her new found fame. Money, fame and probably a better job than Current TV while those poor North Korean orphans will probably starve to death this winter…

  28. From the Los Angeles Times:

    North Korean defectors network fears crackdown

    http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-korea-underground23-2009aug23,0,2753762.story

    It could be bad:
    ‘”Their arrest reverberated through the aid network,” said Tim Peters, a missionary in Seoul …’

    But don’t worry:
    ‘Lisa Ling … said her sister would never knowingly identify people she had interviewed.
    “I think they were careful not to get anything like that on tape or in their notebook,” she said …’

  29. IN the US, reporters know better than to ever film/tape kids w/o consent of their parents or guardians–even news doesn’t do this.

    I’m sure Euna Lee and Laura Ling thought this would be cute (but did they think the mothers of those children would be watching Current TV?), but it’s an amateur move.

    I still maintain that Current TV’s execs need to speak up–I don’t need to hear from Euna Lee, and I don’t want to hear from Laura Ling. I wonder if Koss was forced by Current to talk to the NYT or if he decided to break ranks and speak up.

    Lisa Ling says whatever is expedient. I don’t think much of her as a journalist, and while her loyalty to her sister is admirable, I think she’ll do or say whatever gets her more airtime. I know that’s harsh, but I think anyone who’s still clinging to the notion that Current TV journalists were reporting an important story and got caught by the evil-doers is willfully naive.

  30. There will never be any other video to explain themselves better than the husband in the California sunshine presser smiling as he informs the details are for the book. Sick.