Can Seoul Blame China
for Repatriating N.Koreans?
By Kang Chol-hwan at
North Korea Strategy Center , June 15, 2012
It has been more than
15 years since the flood of defections of North Koreans began after the death
of nation founder Kim Il-sung. For the last 10 years, activist and reporters
have been risking their own lives to cover the harrowing escapes of North
Korean defectors, rescuing women who were being sold off into sexual slavery
and letting the world know about China's repatriation of North Korean
defectors.
I am grateful that the
South Korean government and many people in the country and the international
community have spoken out against the repatriations. But I am afraid it is too
late. And while the Chinese government is getting a lot of criticism, are we
really in any position to blame China?
During the great
famine of the late 1990s, hundreds of thousands of North Korean defectors swarmed across the
border to Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in Jilin Province. At the time,
the airport and markets in Yanji, the prefectural capital, were overflowing
with North Koreans begging for food and money. Beijing was alarmed by
the surge in the number of defectors and contacted the Kim Dae-jung
administration to see whether Seoul was willing to take them in. But it
failed to get a definite response from Seoul, so it repatriated them. As it
bolstered its rule using aid money from South Korea, the first thing the North
Korean regime did was to bring back people who had crossed the border into
China.
When Hwang Jang-yop,
a former secretary of the Workers Party, defected to South Korea in 1997, China
allowed him to come to the South despite threats and urgent pleas by
North Korea to send him back to Pyongyang. In fact, it has let most South Korean
abduction victims and prisoners of war return to the South if they were
captured in China after escaping. This demonstrates that it would once have
been willing to let all of them go if South Koreans had paid enough attention
to them.
The South Korean
Embassy and consulates in China should have been at the forefront of protecting
North Korean defectors. But during the left-leaning administrations of
presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, South Korean diplomats did nothing
even as North Korean defectors were dragged away by Chinese police right
in front of the embassy in Beijing.
Today the trafficking
of North Korean women is as serious a problem as the repatriation of defectors.
North Korean women who cross the Duman and Apnok rivers into China have no
choice but to seek the help of people smugglers. If a woman pays between 1,000
and 2,000 yuan to a broker, she can avoid being captured and sold off as a
prostitute and find her way to South Korea.
Human rights groups
and other activists helping North Korean defectors have turned to women's
rights groups in South Korea for aid, but none of them have been willing
to raise funds to prevent the trafficking of North Korean women. The Unification Ministry sets aside
huge sums of money to aid the North Korean regime but considers it virtually
impossible to use that money to help North Korean defectors.
If the South Korean
government and the public had paid more attention to the plight of North Korean
defectors and supported human rights groups, the forced repatriation of so many
defectors by the Chinese government could have been prevented. It is easy to
denounce the Chinese government now, but we must not forget the indifference we
have shown. The chorus of criticism aimed at Beijing will be effective only if
South Korea does all it can to help the defectors.
China Halts
Repatriation of N.Korean Defectors
June 15, 2012
The Chinese government
has halted the repatriation of North Korean defectors, apparently in response
to South Korean requests and because it is angry that the North went ahead with
its rocket launch.
The Yomiuri Shimbun on
Wednesday cited an official from China's Liaoning Province as saying China,
which had been repatriating up to 30 North Korean defectors a day since the
death of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in December, recently stopped doing
so.
China drew
condemnation from international human rights groups by claiming the defectors
were not political refugees but merely economic migrants searching for work.
