From the WSJ Opinion Archives
THE REAL WORLD
The Unwanted Refugees
Won't anyone but Mongolia help the North Koreans?
The Rev. Chun Ki Won, just released from a Chinese prison, was sitting in a hotel room in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China, when I reached him by phone Monday. Back in December Mr. Chun tried to help a dozen North Korean refugees, including a pregnant woman, escape across China and slip into the country of Mongolia. They were all caught. The fate of the North Koreans he tried to save is not yet clear. Barring a massive foreign campaign to rescue them, the odds are high that China will ship them all back to North Korea, where--as numerous defectors have attested--they can expect a brutal stint in a prison camp if not execution.
Mr. Chun, who is South Korean, received better treatment. After more than seven months in prison, he was convicted of aiding these Northern refugees, and ordered to leave China. When we spoke, the 46-year-old Mr. Chun was awaiting the court papers for his imminent deportation. His overriding concern was for the estimated 200,000 to 300,000 North Koreans who in recent years have fled famine and repression in their own country, only to risk in China the kind of punishment he had just sampled.
"What I want to tell the world is that they are persecuted in China, they are on the run," Mr. Chun told me. And though the bread-and-water rations in the Chinese prison were meager, he said, "it will be even worse when they are sent back to North Korea." What's needed, he urged, is world pressure on China at least to allow North Korean refugees safe passage to some place of sanctuary. China's authorities may appear intractable, he said, but "they are very sensitive to outside pressure. So keep talking to the Chinese government."
I should add that we managed this conversation by way of a conference call, set up via the South Korean capital of Seoul, whence a colleague of Mr. Chun's, the Rev. Douglas Shin, joined us as an interpreter. These two Christian missionaries know each other well. For them, our three-way talk was one of the simpler steps in their long quest to save North Korean refugees, in part by talking to anyone who will listen, in part by risking their necks. Both Mr. Chun and Mr. Shin, who is an American citizen, are part of an underground railroad that in recent years has been operating inside China, seeking any way to spirit the refugees out.
For North Koreans fleeing the gulag rule of Pyongyang's Kim Jong Il, such private underground networks are the only help the world offers. "There's an utter absence of any institutional assistance," says another American missionary, Tim Peters, who runs his own "Ton-A-Month" food relief organization out of Seoul. For almost all these refugees, the only remotely viable escape route runs north, across the long border with China. North Korean naval patrols prevent any exodus by sea (though this past week one man did slip through in a small boat). To the south lies the lethal demilitarized zone. And foreign travel is so tightly controlled, and people are so poor, that only the most elite would ever have the chance to defect while shopping in Switzerland.
So instead, people brave the hazardous crossing into China. To reach real safety, they must somehow make the odyssey to a receptive third country--which nearby Russia is not. In recent months a few dozen of these refugees have achieved global publicity and asylum by storming embassies and consulates inside China. But for most, the heavily guarded approach to any potential diplomatic haven is just too dangerous to navigate. Beijing sends them back when they get caught, and offers bounties for the capture of anyone--like Mr. Chun--caught helping them.
In this sense, North Korean refugees are even worse off than Vietnamese boat people, Cambodians escaping the Khmer Rouge, the defectors who scaled the Berlin Wall or even refugees fleeing China itself, today--all of whom have had at least some hope of an initial haven to aim for. Nowhere in the world right now is there any officially designated, preliminary site for receiving the rising flood of North Korean refugees--unless one counts the generally unreachable offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which seems at best unenthusiastic about providing any large-scale help.
Beijing's regime, though signatory to the United Nation's 1951 convention mandating protection of refugees, insists the North Koreans are "economic migrants" and gives priority to a bilateral treaty with Pyongyang promising they will be forced back. Chinese authorities forbid the UNHCR, which maintains a small office in Beijing with an international staff of five, to visit the northeastern border areas, where most of the North Korean refugees can be found.
But neither has the UNHCR raised any loud fuss world-wide over China's gross violation of its 1951 treaty obligations. Instead, last December, right around the time Mr. Chun was leading the doomed quest of those dozen, desperate freedom-seekers to reach the Mongolian border, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Ruud Lubbers was telling a conference in Geneva that no one these days is questioning the "validity" of the 1951 convention protecting refugees.
And despite the UNHCR's slogan of "protecting the world's vulnerable people," Mr. Lubbers did not deign to attend a major conference on North Korean human rights and refugees, held in Tokyo this past February. All the organizers received, when they invited the head of what is supposed to be the world's leading official agency tasked with safeguarding refugees, was a note, sent on the high commissioner's behalf by a UNHCR staffer, wishing them success and urging "inter alia" that they "promote the anti-discrimination agenda contained in the Declaration and Programme of Action adopted at the World Conference against Racism held in Durban in September of last year."
Of course, the UNHCR is a creature of the U.N.'s member nations, and Mr. Lubbers's approach pretty much reflects that. There is no lack of official interest world-wide in North Korea per se. It's just that the aid and attention from foreign governments goes almost solely to the Stalinist regime of Kim Jong Il. The U.N. ships him food; the U.S. sends him fuel. As you read this, in fact, some 150 dignitaries from the U.S., South Korea, Japan and the European Union have just made the trip to Kumho, North Korea, to celebrate the pouring of concrete for the first of two nuclear reactors the free world is donating at a cost of some $4.6 billion to Mr. Kim, in a convoluted attempt to appease his murderous nuclear ambitions.
For North Koreans on the lam from Mr. Kim's kingdom, there are no official receptions, let alone festivities. South Korea--seen universally as the prime haven-- in theory regards them as citizens, but in practice tries to ward off any large influx by keeping the door almost closed. The difficulty of finding preliminary asylum in some third country provides a buffer almost as effective as the DMZ.
In the first half of this year, South Korea gave asylum to about 600 North Korean refugees. That's double last year's rate,but compared with the quarter million or so risking their lives to hide out unprotected in China, it's small kimchi. As for America, the number of North Koreans taken as refugees is so miniscule that a spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, looking through the data for recent years, told me at best it's lumped in as a trivial portion of the tiny category known as "other." He added that though he isn't sure, he suspects, "there may not be any."
The bottom line, and the shame of South Korea, America, Russia and most of all China, is that for lack of any substantial push by the world's great nations in promoting organized help for the Korean refugees, the role as world leader in responding to this crisis has defaulted to, of all places, Mongolia. Not that impoverished Mongolia, itself recovering from decades of communist rule, provides any systematic welcome. But at least the Mongolian authorities have been quietly tolerant enough that their country has become, for now, the best hope and destination for North Koreans seeking some safe perch.
Among the private relief networks, there has been much talk lately about the possibility of setting up some sort of officially credentialed center to help refugees who reach Mongolia. But nothing has materialized so far. A UNHCR spokeswoman in Geneva says there is no truth to reports that the UNHCR has opened an office in the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator. She confirms that the UNHCR and Mongolia have signed a letter of intent to go ahead at some point, but right now the project is still in a "transitional phase," while Mongolian politicians spar over this fraught issue.
Absent solid support from such major powers as the U.S. or the EU, there's every reason why the prospect of opening the gates and contravening China's contempt for civilized conduct should leave Mongolians queasy. Right now, the only truly active advocates of these refugees are folks such as a German doctor, Norbert Vollertsen, who after gaining extraordinary access to North Korea about two years ago has dedicated himself to publicizing and ending the abominations he witnessed. Backing him up are crusaders such as 27-year-old law student Edward Kim, a Korean-American who since last year, with only a volunteer staff and a laptop, has been running a Web site, ChosunJournal.com that has become a mother lode of information on North Korea. Or, to name just one more of many, there's Suzanne Scholte, president of the Virginia-based Defense Forum Foundation. In the event a safe haven is set up in some third country, Ms. Scholte has amassed a batch of letters from relief agencies, such as the Paris-based Médecins Sans Frontières, offering to help.
But given the role here of thuggish regimes, private help goes only so far. It's a small start that Congress has recently taken an interest, with both houses hearing horrific testimony from North Korean defectors and calling on China to honor its treaty obligations to refugees. Much more is needed from the democracies of the world. Until that happens, the global response to a true holocaust of our own time comes down to such scenes as Mr. Chun, on the phone in his hotel room, hoping that word of his months in a Chinese jail might at least nudge the world a little closer to understanding the ugly depths of this crisis.
Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Wednesdays here and in The Wall Street Journal Europe.
