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Category: Refugees

November 22, 2013

U.N. Commission should find China responsible for crimes against humanity, too.

China is denying reports that it arrested 15 North Korean refugees near Kunming. According to the Chosun Ilbo, the refugees have been moved to areas near the North Korean border. Some may have been repatriated already, along with other refugees rounded up near Shenyang. If so, their fate inside North Korea is grim. As the Chinese government already knows, and has for years. I don’t know what, exactly, I should read from the fact that North Korea is loudly calling for China...
Categories China/Refugees
October 16, 2013

AP’s new Bureau Chief should tell us: Are these kids dead or alive?*

Last night, a reader forwarded me AP’s announcement that it had replaced Jean Lee as Bureau Chief in both Seoul and Pyongyang. The new Bureau Chief in Pyongyang will be Eric Talmadge, whose name is absent from the vast OFK archives, and whose reputation is thus a blank slate. The AP has also caught up with the spirit of ’45 by appointing a separate Bureau Chief for Seoul, Foster Klug. Klug’s name is one of the best known in Korea...
Categories AP Watch/Refugees
September 16, 2013

ROK Army shoots, kills man attempting to swim to N. Korea

I’ll withhold my criticism until I know a few more facts, but I can’t immediately understand why South Korean troops had to shoot and kill a South Korean man who was swimming the Imjin toward North Korea. This would not be the first South-to-North defection, but I don’t know why one the loss of one more nut or fugitive would be a great loss to the South. If the South doesn’t address the appropriateness of the use of force, it will weaken calls...
Categories Defectors/North-South/ROK Military
January 19, 2013

For refugees, “bittersweet” still beats “hell on earth”

I loved this Reuters video of a graduation ceremony for North Korean refugees in Seoul. LiNK also shares another happy story, about “Danny,” who resettled right here in America, and New Focus International writes about the difficulty many North Koreans have adjusting to the concept of credit in South Korea. I would concede that for the ten-year period following my own graduation from high school and a background of fairly severe poverty (by American standards), I, too had difficulty adjusting...
Categories Refugees
January 14, 2013

North Korea Glasnost Watch: Kim Jong Un’s Border Crackdown Is Working

The most superficial things you’ve probably heard about Kim Jong Un are the closely related ideas that he is, or must be, a latent reformer because he (a) appreciates aspects of Western culture, (b) has a fashionable wife, and (c) had a Swiss education. As examples, I’ll cite this report by Jean Lee, this and this from Joohee Cho of ABC, and this exercise in straw-grasping by John DeLury. The problem with this theory is that it isn’t supported by any evidence that the...
Categories Border Control/Famine & Food Aid/Refugees
November 7, 2012

Escape from North Korea: An Incremental Review

Nov. 7, 2012.  Early in Melanie Kirkpatrick’s Escape from North Korea, you start to find powerful phrases that stay with you — phrases that make you stop reading and chew on them, to extract the full significance of some aspect of life in another reality.  I couldn’t help quoting two of them.  The first is illuminating: So accustomed are North Koreans to the lack of light that when I asked a North Korean who had settled in an American city...
Categories Books & Films/Defectors/Human Trafficking/Refugees/Useful Idiocy
October 9, 2012

Conference on North Korean political prison camps and refugees, this Friday in Los Angeles

This Friday, the Museum of Tolerance, in cooperation with the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Liberty in North Korea and the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, will host a conference on human rights in North Korea. According to the agenda flyer, which you can see at this link, “The event will conclude with a book signing by Melanie Kirkpatrick (author of Escape from North Korea, The Untold Story of Asia’s Underground Railroad), Blaine Harden (author of Escape from Camp 14),...
Categories Anju Links/Refugees/The Camps
July 23, 2012

North Korea Increases Public Executions and Collective Punish…. Hey, Look! It’s Snoopy!

Writing in The Washington Post, Chico Harlan reports that as North Koreans try to flee its most recent avoidable food crisis, the repressive partnership of North Korea and China has been grimly effective in keeping North Koreans from escaping from their prison of a country: Last year, 2,706 North Koreans came to the South. During the first half of this year, there have been only 751 — a 42 percent decline compared with the same period a year earlier. The...
Categories AP Watch/Kim Jong Un/Refugees
July 14, 2012

North Korean Refugee Adoption Act

A reader writes in to ask for your support on a piece of pending legislation and asks for your support at the petition link below.  This legislation is similar to efforts that Sam Brownback had been pushing for years, so please give it a read. I know your blog is very active about matters related to North Korea, so I’m seeking your support for a cause I’m very passionate about, the passage of the North Korean Refugee Adoption Act (H.R....
Categories Refugees
July 2, 2012

No Pyongyang Spring

You may not believe that Kim Jong Un learned to drive at age three, but he has managed to perform one miracle — making North Koreans long for the libertine halcyon era of Kim Jong Il: The ‘Dear Leader’ Kim Jong Il’s sudden death in December of last year brought a tighter grip across the border.  Going even further, Kim Jong Un ordered a “guilt by association” system, which is a collective execution system which aims to terminate the entire...
Categories Human Rights/Inside NK/Refugees
June 27, 2012

Flower Indeed: Lim Su-Kyung and the Bigotry of the Korean Left

For several days, I’ve hoped to find time to write about the new hit TV show in South Korea, “Now on My Way to Meet You,” featuring (and humanizing!) photogenic North Korean women: Each woman also entertains, some by singing and dancing. Others perform comedy skits, including several who mimic North Korea’s iconic, stern-faced female TV newsreader. But the ending turns sad as the women send video messages to family members back in the North. Everyone in the studio sobs...
Categories Korean Politics/Korean Society/Refugees
June 4, 2012

China Targets North Korean Refugees and the Activists Who Help Them

So those reports that China would stop repatriating North Korean refugees were probably disinformation after all. Instead, China is launching yet another pogrom against North Korean refugees, which coincides with a wider sweep against foreigners that got its impetus (or pretext) from one drunken Brit. China is also targeting foreigners who are helping North Korean refugees: “I heard that police and security staff are in every nook of the streets. All defectors must take shelter and cannot come out of...
Categories China & Korea/Human Trafficking/Refugees
March 20, 2012

Demonstrations Today at the White House & Chinese Embassy

It’s probably too late to save 31 North Korean men, women, and children whom China is believed to have repatriated to North Korea this month, in flagrant violation of the U.N. Refugee Convention and its 1968 Protocol, both of which China signed. China committed this crime against humanity with malice aforethought and with characteristic arrogance, and despite a modest but rising protest movement in South Korea against the repatriations. We can only speculate as to the fate of these 31...
Categories Activism/Human Rights/Refugees
March 14, 2012

Fisticuffs now officially more likely to save innocent life than appealing to the U.N.

Sure, we can complain that the United Nations has become a farce, but hey, we all elected for ’em, right? So you’ve heard that there are lives to be saved, and international conventions that would save them, if only some effective international body was capable of enforcing those conventions. Enter a group of members of the South Korean National Assembly, who flew to Geneva to make an appeal to the U.N. Human Rights Council to save about 30 North Korean...
Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights/Refugees
February 24, 2012

China abets the murder of nine North Korean refugees

South Korean legislators on Friday condemned China’s repatriation of fugitives from North Korea after Beijing reportedly sent nine back despite pleas from Seoul. A resolution passed by the committee on foreign affairs and unification urges China to follow international rules in handling North Koreans who flee their impoverished homeland, and seeks outside help to halt the returns. [AFP] Seoul says it might (gasp) raise this with the U.N. Human Rights Council — without mentioning China by name. But despite all...
Categories AP Watch/China/Human Rights/Refugees
February 21, 2012

Entertainers Join Effort to “Save My Friend,” South Korean Lawmaker Launches Hunger Strike

Across the street from the Chinese Embassy in Seoul today was a busy place.  At 2 p.m. South Korean National Assemblywoman Park Sun Young of the Liberty Forward Party launched a hunger strike (I took the photo above around 5:40 p.m.). In a statement on Tuesday, Park said she plans to launch an “indefinite” hunger strike in front of the Chinese embassy in Seoul to protest the forced repatriation of North Korean defectors by China. “At this very moment, China...
Categories Activism/China/Human Rights/Refugees