From the WSJ Opinion Archives
THE REAL WORLD
Two Refugee Stories
A Turkish hero vs. U.N. goats.
Today, I have two stories to tell. The second concerns refugees from North Korea. But first let's pause to honor a brave man who almost 60 years ago answered the call not of practicality but of principle, to save the lives of some 200 human beings on the island of Rhodes, today part of Greece but then under Nazi occupation.
The year was 1944, and Selahattin Ulkumen, then 30, was the Turkish consul general in Rhodes. In July the Nazis began rounding up all Jews on the island for deportation to Auschwitz. Ulkumen could have simply stood by and watched. He was not Jewish. He was Muslim, with a promising diplomatic career and a pregnant young wife. But Ulkumen did not choose to stand by. He went to the detention center, where the Jews had been ordered to await deportation to their deaths. And though Ulkumen could not save them all, he saved all he could. He confronted the German general in charge, told him that some of these Jews were Turkish citizens, and demanded they be released.
In facing down the Nazis, Ulkumen took the risk of stretching to the limit whatever rules he could and fabricating his own definition of Turkish citizenship to include non-Turkish spouses. One of the people he saved, Bernard Turiel, now a 68-year-old lawyer in New Jersey, recalls with gratitude how Ulkumen "took it on himself to confront the German authorities"--parlaying the Turkish citizenship of Mr. Turiel's mother into salvation for the entire family, including Bernard, his younger brother and their non-Turkish father.
In response to Ulkumen's demand, the Nazis released 42 Jewish families, totaling some 200 souls, who had been slated for the death camp. The Nazis told Ulkumen it was his responsibility to get them off the island. Again, Ulkumen took it upon himself to bend the rules, finding any way he could to issue the necessary documents. All 42 families got out, including, in January 1945, Mr. Turiel's. They departed Rhodes in the cramped hull of a fishing boat, bound through rough winter seas for Turkey. Mr. Turiel, who was only 10 at the time, remembers vividly the courage of the young Turkish consul who saved their lives.
From Turkey, in 1946, the Turiels emigrated to America. Today, Bernard Turiel's brother, Elliot, teaches at the University of California at Berkeley, specializing in matters of morality and culture. Between them, the two brothers have two daughters, a son, three grandchildren and--Mr. Turiel tells me joyfully--another on the way. The Turiels trace this bounty back to the moment in 1944, when Selahattin Ulkumen weighed the constraints of prudence and bureaucracy and chose instead to defend the value of human life.
Had Ulkumen done otherwise, the 200 people he saved would have gone the way of the nearly 1,700 Jews deported from Rhodes to Auschwitz, of whom only 1 in 10 survived. Ulkumen himself paid a high price for his courage. The Germans took their reprisal with a bombing raid on the Turkish Consulate, wounding Ulkumen's wife, who died of those injuries after giving birth to their son.
Earlier this month Ulkumen died in Istanbul. He was 90. His son, Mehmet Ulkumen, now the United Nations chief of protocol in Geneva, told my by phone this week that when his father talked about the events of 1944, he would say: "I listened to my conscience. Any decent human being would have done what I have done."
Which brings me to the North Korean refugees, who are today fleeing a holocaust in their own country. The totalitarian regime of Kim Jong Il, with its absolute state control, selective rationing and deadly labor camps, has in recent years presided over the deaths by starvation, exposure and other causes of some two million North Koreans. To save their own lives, many North Koreans have fled to the only place they can reach--China. But Beijing refuses to recognize as refugees any of the 100,000 to 300,000 North Koreans estimated to be hiding in China. Not one. Instead, Chinese officials call them criminals and economic migrants. Chinese security agents hunt them down, send them back to likely punishment or even death, and jail private individuals who try to help any North Korean.
On the part of private individuals, especially a small network of South Koreans and Korean-Americans, there has been astounding generosity and courage in trying at great risk to help these refugees. Among the heroes are such figures as the Rev. Chun Ki Won, a South Korean jailed in China for more than seven months last year for trying to smuggle a group of North Koreans to safety in Mongolia. There is South Korean Choi Yong-hun, now in a Chinese prison, making his final appeal of a five-year sentence for trying to help a small group of North Koreans escape China last January aboard two fishing boats. Jailed for the same "crime" are Park Yong-ho, a Chinese citizen of Korean origin, sentenced to three years, and South Korean photojournalist Seok Jae-Hyun, sentenced to two years. Waging a campaign world-wide to save the North Korean refugees and end the holocaust is the now-famous German physician, Norbert Vollertsen.
But among the U.N. officials specifically assigned, paid and protected to serve as frontline defenders of the rights of the North Korean refugees, there are no heroes. For years, the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has deferred to China's abuse of the U.N.'s own refugee convention. Last Friday, the head of the UNHCR's Beijing office, Colin Mitchell, celebrated World Refugee Day by giving an interview to China's official People's Daily, in which he praised China for a 20-year partnership with the UNHCR, saying: "China has set a good example for many countries in this respect." Mr. Mitchell did not respond to my requests that he explain this comment.
But Mr. Mitchell's budget, which according to a spokesman in the UNHCR's Geneva headquarters would cover all dealings with the North Korean refugees, speaks volumes. Of the UNHCR's total annual $881 million budget, $3.37 million goes to the Beijing office, of which 70% is spent in Hong Kong, another 27% on salaries for international and local staff in Beijing, and the remaining $100,000 or so on Macau and Mongolia. There is nothing for the North Koreans. They do not even turn up in the UNHCR refugee statistics.
The failings of the UNHCR are only the beginning of the problem. The very few North Koreans who do find some way to escape China are shunted in almost all cases to South Korea. There, under the so-called sunshine policy of groveling appeasement toward Pyongyang, the South Korean authorities have for some time gone to great lengths to discourage these refugees from publicly saying anything too damning about the North or about the refugee predicament in China.
Last week, for example, coincident with World Refugee Day, North Korea's top-ranking defector, Hwang Jang-yop, was scheduled at long last to visit the U.S., where he was to testify before a congressional committee and meet the next day with the press under auspices of Suzanne Scholte's Defense Forum Foundation. Ms. Scholte and others have been trying to for six years to bring Mr. Hwang to Washington and provide a world stage for his insights into the depravities of North Korea's regime. But yet again, Seoul's authorities stymied the plan, blocking Mr. Hwang's trip, essentially on grounds that after six years the paperwork was still not in order.
Nor has the Bush administration bestirred itself to pressure either the UNHCR, Seoul or China toward doing right by the North Korean refugees. Despite America's role as leader of the free world, and haven for the tempest-tossed, the number of North Koreans granted asylum here over the past 10 or 15 years is so miniscule that the Immigration and Naturalization Service has no distinct category for it, and experts disagree mainly on whether the grand total comes to roughly two, or more like a dozen.
The good news is that in some corners of officialdom, there is forward motion. Reps. Chris Cox and Ed Royce have for years championed a course of greater integrity in U.S. policy toward both North Korea's regime and its refugees, and other congressmen have been taking notice. With the help of refugee advocates like Ms. Scholte, a record of North Korean testimony is starting to accumulate that makes the truth at least hard to deny. Today Sen. Sam Brownback plans to introduce a bill that would help bypass the bureaucratic bogs of the UNHCR and South Korea, and allow North Korean refugees to apply directly for asylum in the U.S.
Even the U.N. has made a small nod to decency, though not enough. Last week, while visiting Seoul, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Ruud Lubbers, offered up to the press the observation that with regard to North Korean refugees, China's authorities have been "falling short of their obligations." So, however, has Mr. Lubbers. The UNHCR has a 1995 treaty with China that allows it to invoke binding arbitration in the event of a dispute over refugee policy. But the UNHCR hasn't even tried. A spokesman tells me there would be no point, because China might not comply.
By that logic, Selahattin Ulkumen would never have confronted the Nazis. For the UNHCR (and the officials in Seoul and Washington who should be pressing the U.N.), facing down China over the North Koreans hardly requires superhuman degrees of heroism. Unlike the brave private individuals now doing prison time in China, none of the UNHCR officials need put their lives or their freedom on the line. Should any one of the U.N.'s more visible bureaucrats find the courage simply to stand up, tell the true story and demand, publicly and without reservation, that China's rulers honor their signed commitment to the value of human life, the most these staffers would be risking is their jobs. It is way past time to wonder if we should have people running the UNHCR who consider their own sinecures more important than the lives of the refugees they are supposed to be helping.
Ms. Rosett is a columnist for OpinionJournal.com and The Wall Street Journal Europe. Her column appears alternate Wednesdays.
