KNRC to Give $100,000
in Flood Aid
Daily NK. 8/20/12 By
Park Seong Guk
It was revealed today
that the Korea National Red Cross (KNRC) has agreed to give $100,000 in
aid to North Korea through the International Federation of the Red Cross
(IFRC).
"The IFRC
recently requested the participation of the KNRC in North Korean disaster prevention
and flood relief," an official with the KNRC explained this morning. The
aid for the purchase of relief supplies is being given, the official added,
“from the humanitarian and brotherly perspective to those North Korean citizens
who are suffering due to the recent flooding.”
The aid, which comes
from existing funds appropriated for assistance to North Korea, "is
separate from the 300,000 Swiss Francs the IFRC has allocated to support the
North Korean flooding,” the official also clarified.
The IFRC revealed the
extent of the funding it has earmarked to aid North Korea in a report released
on the 1st, saying, “We have earmarked 300,000 Swiss Francs (approx. $308,000)
from the Disaster Relief Emergency Fund to allow the North Korean Red Cross Society
to assist 2,500 households, around 10,000 civilians, who have suffered flood
damage.”
The South Korean funds
will be used to purchase tents, sanitation and cooking equipment for those left
homeless by the recent floods.
North Korean state
media reports indicate the deaths of a total of 560 people alongside the loss
of more than 8000 homes and flooding of a further 43,700 in the recent heavy
rains and attendant flooding.
N.Korean Workers Go
AWOL in China
The Chosun Ilbo.
8/20/12
Several North Korean
workers who were sent to China earlier this year have disappeared. The workers
were sent to China as part of efforts to step up economic cooperation between
the two countries.
An informed source in
China said "five or six" North Koreans who were working in factories
and restaurants in Jilin, Tumen and Hunchun along the border with North Korea
have disappeared. Chinese security forces are believed to be looking for them.
Meanwhile, two or
three North Korean students who were studying in Eastern Europe recently
defected to South Korea. "The number of North Korean defectors has
almost halved due to crackdowns by Chinese authorities," a
government source here said. "But it looks like there are many
defections among North Koreans either working or studying abroad.”
China's Jilin Province
signed an agreement with North Korea in January of this year allowing 20,000
North Koreans to work in Tumen and Hunchun. Some 200 North Korean women were
granted work visas in May as industrial trainees in Tumen. Since then, more North
Koreans have been allowed to work in Jilin, Liaoning and Dandong along the
border between the two countries.
But North Korea and
China are apparently having a tough time managing the workers. A source said North Korea insists on state-run supervision similar to
the joint-Korean Kaesong Industrial Complex to prevent the workers from
escaping, but China wants to let companies manage and control workers based on global standards.
North Korean personnel
manage the 50,000 workers employed by South Korean companies at Kaesong, giving
them regular ideological training sessions and controlling their movements.
"The problem of defections will grow worse if the work programs are
expanded," the source said.
Some 40,000 North
Koreans are believed to be working in China. The North has sent another 30,000
people to 40 different countries to earn foreign currency. They apparently send
back around US$100 million per year.
Could North Korea Be
the Next Rare Earth Powerhouse?
Rare Earth Investing
News. 8/20/12
While China’s
dominance of the rare earth element (REE) market is nothing new, news that the
mining giant and North Korea have signed a deal aimed at broadening the trade
of both countries surprised investors.
The news, released
last week, has sparked speculation that China is likely seeking possible
investment opportunities aimed at the notoriously secretive state’s mining
potential, specifically that of rare earths.
According to a
statement released by Chinese Vice Commerce Minister Chen Jian, the government
is willing to “support big Chinese companies who are willing to invest in North
Korea to broaden the economic and trade cooperation with North Korea, to push
the two sides to upgrade two-way trade and investment structures and study the
feasibility of cooperation on big projects.”
The statement does not
underline what the actual investment might be; however, speculators argue that
it is likely to be aimed at North Korea’s mineral sector, which some estimate
is worth more than $6 trillion — including a large number of rare earth metals.
China does not currently adhere to the US and United Nations sanctions that
restrict North Korea’s trade.
Potential remains
unknown
While the actual
potential of North Korea’s REE reserves is still unknown, the recent deal is
not the first time a foreign country has shown interest its supplies. Last
month, investors learned that in 2011 South Korea’s state-owned commodities
developer held talks in North Korea about a possible North-South project aimed
at developing REE deposits. The talks took place as part of a second round of
discussions about a graphite development project in the North that Korea
Resources (KOSDAQ:033430) invested in a decade ago.
Last year, North
Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency confirmed that Pyongyang was
paying increasing attention to the global race to secure REEs, later announcing
that local exploration companies had uncovered deposits amounting to
approximately 20 million tons. However, while many have brushed off these
reports as nothing more than propaganda from a government-controlled
mouthpiece, there have been signs that the country is attempting to build upon
the sector, such as the construction of a rare earth processing plant in
Hamhung in 1990.
According to South
Korea’s National Statistical Office, the potential value for key mineral
deposits in North Korea is currently set at $6.09 trillion (in the base year of
2008), while its exports of rare metals to China stood at $16 million (1.27
billion yen) in 2009. Despite these numbers, the true potential of North
Korea’s reserves remains relatively unknown as the country has not yet begun
full exploration or undertaken feasibility studies.
Political
ramifications
The agreement could
have hard-hitting political repercussions.
In an interview with
World Politics Review, Daniel Sneider, associate director for research at the
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University said
that by embracing an open market, North Korea will effectively be confirming
that its system has failed. When questioned on how economic ties with North
Korea might benefit China, he outlined mineral resources ranging from REEs
to coal as being integral to the Asian giant’s future economic and social progression.
“The Chinese have a
huge appetite for that, and they are trying to get it cheap, because they know
North Korea is pretty desperate,” he said. “China is the source of consumer
goods as well as food and energy for North Korea, so that is basically the
nature of the economic exchange between the two.”
China’s motives
While China could be
seen as noble for wanting to advance the traditionally secretive nation via
trade, the overture could also be viewed as merely making another attempt to
gain more of a monopoly over a market that it already has a tight reign over.
China has come under
increased criticism of late, with its trade partners claiming that
it is setting out to create the ultimate monopoly by driving up export costs
and restricting supplies in the hope that manufacturers will be forced to
relocate facilities to China. Last month the World Trade Organization confirmed
that it will investigate China’s export and tariff policies following
complaints from the US, European Union and Japan that the restrictions break
global commerce rules.
Effect on the market
News of the agreement
has not yet had any profound effect on the market. While a partnership like
this has the potential for longer-term repercussions in relation to market
supply, the fact of the matter remains that North Korea is unable to actively
influence the market as it has not yet undertaken the proper groundwork in
relation to exploration and evaluation.
While speculation
might create short-term price volatility, the majority of REE investors will be
more focused on companies that are nearer to bringing mines into production as
opposed to those that have yet to prove their worth.
North Korea: Human
Traffickers and the Chinese Market for Brides
The Daily Beast.
8/20/12
‘Escape from North
Korea: The Untold Story of Asia's Underground Railroad’ by Melanie Kirkpatrick.
376 p. Encounter Books. $15.71
Steven Kim, an
American businessman from Long Island, New York, may be the world’s leading
expert on the market for North Korean brides. He acquired this expertise
accidentally. He likes to say it was God’s plan.
A decade or so ago he
was living in China, overseeing the manufacture of chairs he sold to retail
clients in the United States, when he heard about a secret church that catered
to the South Korean businessmen who worked in the Shenzhen industrial zone, not
far from his apartment. It wasn’t registered with the Chinese government, as
required by law, so it operated underground, billing itself as a cultural
association. There was no sign on the door and no cross on the roof. The 100 or
so congregants had learned about the church as Kim had, by word of mouth.
Kim, a practicing
Christian, became a regular attendee. One Sunday he noticed two shabbily
dressed men seated in a corner of the room. After worship, he went up to them,
said hello, and learned to his astonishment that they were from North Korea.
They had escaped across the Tumen River to northeast China and traveled 2,000
miles south to Guangdong province, a journey that took two months. They hoped
to find a way to slip across the border into Hong Kong. “They came to church
asking for help,” he says. “But the church would only feed them, give them a
few dollars, and let them go.”
Kim was outraged. “I
asked the pastor, ‘Why do you let them go?’” “Because we’re afraid,” the pastor
replied. “If we’re caught helping North Koreans, the church will be shut down.”
Kim took the two men home.
That was the start.
Kim began to assist North Korean refugees clandestinely. He provided safe
houses, food, clothing, and money; eventually he organized secret passage
across China to third countries. Before long, he gained a reputation along the
new underground railroad as someone North Koreans could count on for
assistance. Many of them turned out to be women fleeing from the Chinese men
who had purchased them as brides.
Today he runs 318 Partners,
a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to rescuing trafficked women in China. It’s
named after Article 318 of the Chinese criminal code, the law under which Kim
was arrested in September 2003 as he led nine North Koreans in a prayer meeting
at his apartment. Convicted of helping illegal migrants, he spent four years in
a Chinese prison. His home office now, on a quiet street on suburban Long
Island, is a luxurious contrast to the Chinese prison cell he shared with a
dozen felons. On the morning of my visit, his cellphone rings repeatedly with
calls from South Korea, China, and Southeast Asia regarding a rescue operation
in the works. It is not until lunchtime, when most of Asia is asleep, that his
phone finally goes quiet.
A missionary on the
lookout for North Korean refugees in Yanbian. (Chien-Chi Chang / Magnum)
Kim clearly has his
hands full. The only practical escape route for fugitives from North Korea is
through China, and human-rights groups say roughly 80 percent of those
thousands of refugees are women and girls who have become “commodities for
purchase,” in Kim’s words. The most popular marketplaces are in the three
Chinese provinces closest to the North Korean border—Liaoning, Jilin, and
Heilongjiang—but North Korean brides are sold to men throughout China. Many of
the buyers are farmers. Some have physical or mental disabilities that make
them unsuitable as husbands in the eyes of Chinese women. In almost every case,
the men are buying the one thing they want most in life: a wife.
But why import brides
from North Korea? The answer is China’s family-planning laws. Ever since the
one-child policy went into effect in 1979, Beijing has enforced it through
fines, imprisonment, forced abortion, sterilization, and even, human-rights
groups charge, infanticide. The policy has had its intended effect of slowing
the rate of expansion of China’s population. But there has been an unwelcome
side effect: an unnaturally high male-to-female ratio.
Women may hold up half
the sky, in Mao Zedong’s famous phrase, but they are treated as second-class
citizens in much of modern China. Many couples still favor sons, both to carry
on the family name and support them in their old age. In rural areas the birth
of a son heralds the arrival of an extra farmhand as soon as the boy is old
enough to hold a hoe. Not so long ago in China, an unwanted baby girl might be
drowned in a bucket at birth or left unattended to die. These days abortion is
the preferred method, and ultrasound tests let couples find out the baby’s sex
early in the pregnancy for about $12, well within the means of most couples.
There are laws against using ultrasound this way, but they’re widely ignored.
“Sex-selection abortion accounts for almost all the excess males,” says the
British medical journal BMJ.
The result is an epic
surplus of bachelors. The Chinese have a euphemism for permanently unmarried
men: guang gun—“bare branches” on the family tree. The unmarried men are often
desperate—for companionship, for sex, for household help. In rural areas the bride
shortage is exacerbated by young Chinese women’s preference for urban life and
modern-minded husbands. Young women are fleeing the farm in droves, attracted
by well-paying factory jobs and more comfortable urban lifestyles. In the three
provinces closest to North Korea, the ratio of young men to young women is a
staggering 14 to 1, according to an estimate from the Committee for Human
Rights in North Korea.
Bang Mi-sun (at left)
at a demonstration outside the Chinese Embassy in Washington. (Nikki Kahn / The
Washington Post-Getty Images)
The situation was all
but made for flesh traffickers. As Kim explains, a chain of “suppliers,”
“wholesale providers,” and “retail sellers” has developed. Stage one, as he
calls it, takes place inside North Korea, where the suppliers lure women from
their homes with promises of a lucrative trip to China. These recruiters—either
North Korean nationals or Korean-Chinese, and usually male—typically hang out
around urban train stations in the border regions and chat up attractive young
women who pass by. Their marks are often rural women who have come to the city
to sell crops grown on an illegal private plot or scavenged from the forest.
They make a tempting promise: you can come home after a few months with more
money than you could make in a year here. For an impoverished young woman with
no job prospects, it can be an irresistible offer.
Other recruiters
travel from village to village, keeping an eye out for potential brides. They
spot a pretty young woman and follow her home. Kim explains what happens next.
“When they see a widow with a beautiful daughter, they say: ‘Why do you leave
your daughter like that? If you send her to China, then she can get money and
have an education. Why don’t you send her?’ They keep talking and gain trust,
and then—‘OK,’ the mother says, ‘I trust you. Take her.’ Then he takes the girl
into China and sells her. This is one of the tricks.” Kim shudders. “Horrible.”
Stories abound of
girls who have gone to China and never returned. But many women are young
enough, inexperienced enough, or desperate enough to believe “it won’t happen
to me.” One former bride I interviewed—she called herself Naomi—described how
she was befriended by a traveling salesman from China who offered to guide her
to where relatives of her father lived on the other side of the border. She
left home in the middle of the night. “I didn’t want my parents to know I was
leaving,” Naomi told me. She knew she was taking a risk and didn’t want them to
dissuade her. “I thought I would go for a few days and come back.” Only when
she was delivered to a Chinese farmer did she realize that the salesman’s
“wares” were human, and female.
If trickery fails,
recruiters have been known to resort to kidnapping. Hannah, another former
bride, was a teacher in Pyongyang until she accompanied the mother of one of
her pupils to the border region, hoping to make a little extra money. The
friend was planning to purchase fashionable Chinese-made clothing from a
Chinese salesman for resale in the capital.‘Escape from North Korea: The Untold
Story of Asia's Underground Railroad’ by Melanie Kirkpatrick. 376 p. Encounter
Books. $15.71
After they concluded
the deal, the Chinese salesman invited the two women to dinner. The food was
drugged. The two women woke up in a dark room, hands and feet bound, groggy
from the narcotic. As Hannah struggled to come to, she heard her friend cry
out: “Teacher, I think we’ve been sold!” They were inside China, destined for
forced marriages. They never saw each other again. “I never knew such things
happened,” Hannah told me.
The supplier’s job
ends when he delivers the woman to the Chinese side of the Tumen or Yalu River.
His fee, Steve Kim says, runs between $80 and $300 per woman, depending upon
the quality of the “product” and the difficulty of the crossing. Out of that
sum, the supplier is expected to cover any bribes he must pay to North Korean
border guards for information about safe crossing points or an agreement that
they’ll look the other way at a prearranged time.
Stage two begins
there, where wholesaler providers are waiting to receive the women. The
wholesaler’s job is to escort the women past Chinese ID checks to a safer place
farther from the border. That is typically somewhere in the Yanbian area of
Jilin province. The area’s full name is Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture,
and it is home to a large number of ethnic Koreans, making it a good place for
North Koreans to hide in plain sight—or in the case of the North Korean brides,
to be hidden. Some of the women are sold directly to Korean-Chinese men who
live in the region. From the woman’s point of view, this is usually the better
option. Life with a Korean-Chinese man, in a community where the Korean
language is spoken, is preferable to life with a Han Chinese man who speaks
only Mandarin and whose culture and food will be unfamiliar.
Other brides move on
to stage three and are resold to retailers for between $500 and $800 each. The
retailers in turn sell the women to their clients, usually Han Chinese in other
parts of the country, for between $1,200 and $1,500 per woman, depending upon
her age and appearance.
At some point the
woman realizes what is happening to her. She then has two choices: go through
with the marriage or try to escape. This is not really a choice. The woman is
on her own in a strange country. She knows no one. She doesn’t speak the
language. As she quickly finds out, in escaping to China from North Korea, she
has exchanged one form of bondage for another. Most accept the inevitable and
agree to be sold. They reason, not illogically, that life with a Chinese
husband, even an abusive one, is preferable to arrest, repatriation, and
automatic imprisonment in a North Korean labor camp for illegally leaving the
country. Nevertheless, the couple’s living arrangement will have no standing
under Chinese law. Because the woman has no official identity papers, the marriage
cannot be legally registered.
Such pseudomarriages
may be voluntary—at least in the sense that the woman has the theoretical
option of turning down a man’s offer. But it is wrong to consider it a true
choice. It is “a means of survival or livelihood,” says Lee Keum-soon, a senior
researcher with the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul. Lee has
interviewed hundreds of North Korean women who have settled in the South. In
many cases, she says, a voluntary marriage is indistinguishable from a forced
marriage. The woman’s few alternatives may include prostitution or online
stripping. A woman who cannot speak Chinese would not be able to work in a
restaurant or a store. The North Korean woman “would quickly realize that there
was no alternative but to establish a live-in relationship with a Chinese man
to avoid a police roundup,” Lee observes. “She would have to choose to live-in
as a relatively safe means of staying in China.”
The rule of law—to the
extent that it prevails in China and to the extent that a North Korean with no
exposure to such a concept is capable of understanding it—doesn’t apply to
North Korean refugees. If a woman has relatives in China, they often urge her,
not without reason, to strike a bargain with a Chinese man who will feed and
house her in exchange for her labor and sexual favors. If she contacts the
police or other Chinese officials, she can expect worse treatment. If the
police abide by the law, they will arrest her and send her back to North Korea.
If they are corrupt, they will sell her to another bride broker.
North Korean brides
are “thrice victimized,” says Ambassador Mark Lagon, former director of the
U.S. State Department’s human-trafficking office. “They have fled starvation
and human-rights abuses in North Korea,” he notes. “They are subject to abuse
as undocumented migrants in China. And if they are sent back to North Korea,
they face severe punishment, even execution in some cases.”
How bad can it get?
Ask Bang Mi-sun. She crossed the Tumen River, motivated, she later said, by one
thought: “I might find refuge in China.” Her husband had died of starvation in
North Korea. Her elder daughter had disappeared, and her two younger children
needed her help. She hoped to find work in China. Instead, she found Chinese
police waiting for her, ready to send her back to North Korea unless she agreed
to be sold. Speaking at a press conference in Washington, D.C., she described
what happened next: “My first buyer sold me to another buyer, and then that
buyer sold me in turn to another buyer, each buyer for additional profit.“
“I was being sold like
a beast,” she said. “I remember these Chinese brokers would call us, those who
were being sold, pigs. Well, I was the best pig they had. I was sold at top
price.” Her first husband told her he had paid 7,000 yuan for her—then the
equivalent of about $850. “He told me he would kill me if I did not listen to
him.” But she soon got a reprieve of sorts: she was abducted and sold her to
another man. “I found out that there are brokers who would take the people who
had been sold and take them away and sell them again to a third party. I never
knew that this buying and selling of people existed,” she said. “I was sold
again and again.” Eventually she was arrested and deported to North Korea,
where she was beaten and sent to a labor reeducation camp.
She finally escaped
again to China and made her way to South Korea. At the Washington press
conference, she stood on a chair, lifted up her skirt, and displayed the deep
furrows in her thighs, scars where she’d been tortured. She asked, “Why do
North Korean women have to be treated like pigs and sold like pigs and suffer
these things?”
Many North Korean
brides have asked themselves the same thing, and some have made it to freedom.
Kim relies on them to tell the friends they left behind in China. After brides
escape, “they tell us there are 10, 15 more women like them in their village,”
he says. “And then they call them.”
He lifts his hand to
his ear, playing the part of a rescued North Korean woman calling from Seoul to
a friend in China. “‘Yeah, I’m here. It’s so-o-o good. Why don’t you come?’”
The bride who has escaped then gives Kim’s phone number or that of a colleague
in Seoul to her friends. “If they want, they contact us,” he says. “That’s how
it happens.” The next step is a phone interview with Kim. Does the woman fully
understand the risks of escape? Is she willing to take the chance that she
could be arrested and repatriated? If she has children with her Chinese
husband, is she prepared to leave them behind?
Some women decide not
to leave. “Many women have adjusted to their new lives even though they were
trafficked,” he says. They have enough to eat. Their living conditions are far
better than anything they experienced in North Korea. Their neighbors help
shield them from arrest when security officials come snooping. “The husband is
happy, and they’re not complaining,” Kim says. “They’re taking it as destiny.
They tell me, ‘Don’t bother our family.’ They are living peacefully.”
If a woman asks for
help and Kim agrees, he goes to work quickly. He figures out how much the
rescue will cost and begins to organize his network on the new underground
railroad. If the woman is still living with her Chinese husband, the first step
will be to arrange for her to get to a secure location from which she can begin
her journey.
Then he sends out a
plea for money to his email list of supporters. Typical is an appeal from a
January 2010 newsletter: “We have received another call for help from three
trafficked North Korean women in China,” the newsletter states. “They are all
from the same hometown in North Korea. According to the older woman named Choi,
they have escaped from the captors [and are] hiding in a northern city of Jilin
province. We ask your support in prayers and financially.”
The basement price of
one of 318 Partners’ rescues is $1,300. Most cost much more—$3,000 or above.
Money is so tight that Kim sometimes asks the rescued women to pledge to pay
back $1,000 of the costs once they get to Seoul and receive financial help from
the South Korean government. There is a rough symmetry in that figure. After
all, $1,000 is roughly what a Chinese man will pay for a North Korean bride.
