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May 31, 2000
Beijing Steps Up Effort to Expel Illegal North Korean Immigrants
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Related Article
• North Korea Appears to Be Emerging From Years of Severe Famine (Aug. 20, 1999)
ANJI, China -- As the police truck bumped past frosty pine trees toward the North Korean border in January, Mr. Yoon and the six other prisoners locked in back knew they had only an hour to act.
Like hundreds of thousands of hungry North Koreans who have sneaked into China illegally, Mr. Yoon and his wife first came to find food, escaping a deadly famine in their homeland. But now, two years later, Chinese police officers had burst into their tiny rented room here, 20 miles from the border, arrested the couple and were sending them back separately -- to certain persecution.
Mr. Yoon, 29, still vividly recalls a terror-filled ride, as he sat alternately crying and clawing at the cable lock that sealed the truck's back gate. Just miles from the border, it snapped.
"Five of us ran away, but a woman and her 15-year-old couldn't run fast enough," said Mr. Yoon, a baby-faced former professional athlete who is now a fugitive in China again. "We pulled and pulled. We were totally desperate. If I'm sent home I'll be sentenced to life in prison -- or death. I will do anything not to go back."
The Chinese police in recent months have sharply increased their efforts to expel North Koreans living undercover in China, creating a climate of fear along the border and fueling a potentially explosive international refugee crisis.
Against that backdrop, migrants are extremely nervous about interviews, refusing to divulge full names and hometowns, or to have pictures taken, for fear of helping the Chinese or North Korean authorities to locate and them and send them back, or persecute relatives still at home.
The number of "food migrants" sent back has at least doubled this year, to as many as 2,000 a month, aid groups on the border say. The problem, the office of the United Nations high commissioner for refugees says, is that a number of the people whom the Chinese call "food migrants" probably meet the criteria for protected political refugee status, which would make their return illegal under international law.
But the Chinese government is not allowing United Nations workers to travel to the border to make that determination, even though China has signed related treaties.
While most North Korean refugees are driven to China by hunger, their government often regards them as traitors once they flee. Many face not just renewed hunger, but also persecution if they are returned.
It is unclear exactly why China is now making greater efforts to enforce its longstanding policy that the Koreans are economic migrants who must go home. But experts point out that the Chinese are hoping for a visit this year from North Korea's reclusive Communist leader, Kim Jong Il, and are also fearful that their own resources will be overwhelmed by the growing stream of gaunt North Korean arrivals.
And so the government has recently stepped up raids on the hundreds of tiny shelters and factories where the illegal migrants live and work, generally run by local churches, South Korean aid groups or Chinese of Korean descent.
In the past, the local authorities generally turned a blind eye to the 100,000 to 200,000 North Koreans estimated to be staying illegally in this border region, where the language of small talk is Korean and the favored dish is spicy kimchi because many of the citizens are ethnic Koreans. North Koreans were generally deported only if they became too visible or committed crimes.
The United Nations refugee agency has quietly expressed concern to the Chinese about its poor access. Most Western nations, though disturbed, have remained mum. All worry that criticism would prompt the Chinese to seal the border altogether, closing what remains an important safety valve for a five-year famine that experts say has caused as many as two million deaths.
"If these people were from Cuba, or Vietnamese boat people, they would absolutely be considered political refugees," said a Western scholar who studies Korea. "But this is very delicate."
It is unclear exactly how many North Koreans have recently been handed over to North Korean border guards on the bridges that span the narrow Tumen River. Relief workers with contacts at the local public security bureau say the number was about 7,200 in 1999 -- about 10 percent of new arrivals -- and is likely to be at least twice as high this year.
While refugees say first-time offenders who are sent back to North Korea are sometimes released after questioning, repeat offenders are punished harshly. Mr. Yoon said his older brother had been imprisoned after being forced back to North Korea and later died in jail.
In April, 80 prisoners on the verge of repatriation at a Chinese border jail took two guards hostage, demanding not to be sent back, North Koreans and aid workers here said. It was a predictably futile move: Chinese soldiers easily regained control, sending back 60 right away.
But Mr. Yoon's wife, Ms. Lee, who was jailed at one of the five Chinese border prisons here earlier this year, understands. "It was freezing, there were not enough mattresses and meals were just a bit of rice or porridge," recalled Ms. Lee, a lively former singer. "But what was on our minds, all the time, was that we needed to escape."
North Hamgyong Province, across the border from China, is a mountainous mining region of North Korea, poorly suited to farming. So when the state grain distribution system there stopped providing regular food deliveries in 1996, after years of weather disasters and mismanagement, people had little to fall back on.
Ms. Kim, 40, a former interpreter and Communist Party member from the province, who is now being hidden by a church group in China, made her first trip across the border in June 1998, because she "couldn't stand the hunger anymore." She has since been sent back to North Korea twice, with increasingly severe punishments each time.
In a former life, she remembers, there was an apartment stocked with food, a good job, a television and two happy children. Now, with hollow cheeks and perpetually downcast eyes, she and her husband survive on handouts, spending their days hiding in a low, dark room with other North Koreans. She had never met a Westerner before, and in the back room of a cheap Korean restaurant, she talked nervously.
Almost two years ago, she recounted, she and her husband left their children with relatives and simply waded across the Tumen River into China when the North Korean guards changed. The Chinese do not aggressively police the long border, although migrants say patrols have recently increased. The couple were sent back just two months later, by police officers investigating a murder, but were treated benignly in North Korea.
The police questioned them but in the end sent them home, saying, "We understand that you don't have anything to eat, so go home and don't do it again," Ms. Kim recalled. But having long since sold their possessions to buy food, they said, they had no way to eat. Soon they waded back.
Like many North Koreans who subsist in China, they rarely ventured out and were ultracautious, moving from safe house to safe job and back again. But when Ms. Kim's sister fell ill in a distant Chinese city, they went to help her and were quickly detained. This time, Ms. Kim said, her forced return to Korea was marked by beatings and, finally, jail.
The North Korean police immediately took her to a security office for a violent interrogation, she said. Officers punched her, demanding to know why she had left and where she had lived. North Korean agents work extensively in the Chinese border region, trying to identify Koreans who have strayed and the Chinese who help them, aid groups say.
The process was repeated at a second security office, where the delicate woman said she was tied to a grate by her hair. Then, exhausted, she was sent to a prison, where the inmates slept on the floor without sheets, and where there were no showers. Although the prisoners worked long days in the field, she said, rations were meager and families were expected to bring in food. Many had none to give.
Conditions got so bad that the wardens started releasing prisoners, including Ms. Kim. "They were worried someone would die and didn't want to be held responsible," she said.
But her brief elation turned to terror when a policeman, a childhood friend, told her that she would be rearrested. She said goodbye to her two children, now 11 and 15, and fled -- this time in need of political protection. "I miss them terribly, but if I go back now I'll be executed," she said.
Mr. Yoon, the former athlete, is terrified by the current crackdown because he has similar fears. When he sneaked across the border the last time, in 1998, he was already running from Korean police officers who had come to arrest him for two previous trips to China.
In 1996, when the food shortages started, "we stole coal from a railroad yard by our home -- which we sold or traded for food -- and in the summer we stole from state farms," Mr. Yoon said. But in 1997 he had to make the two brief trips in search of additional food.
When he fled this last time, sympathetic Chinese helped him and his wife find work on a farm in Heilongjiang Province, 100 miles from Yanji. There, the urban couple planted rice, for a total of $70 a year, before the farmer kicked them out, saying the police might raid his property.
They then moved to Yanji, a small industrial city, where Mr. Yoon found work in a candle factory and Ms. Lee knitted for a living. Last Dec. 12, the police beat down the door of the tiny apartment where they lived quietly with two other migrants and took the terrified couple to the station.
There, interrogators accused them of one crime: being North Koreans in China illegally.
"They beat us over and over, asking, 'You are North Koreans, aren't you?' " Mr. Yoon recalled. Using the broken Mandarin he had picked up during almost two years in China, he hotly denied the accusation. But despite hours of wailing and pleading, they were ultimately separated and slated for deportation.
Miraculously, both managed to elude return, he by jumping from the truck, and she when a policeman plucked her from a vanful of prisoners about to be handed over into North Korea. She suspects that a man who had previously given her shelter bribed the police.
Since that experience, the couple said, they have become even more careful.
"The situation is getting worse in this area," said Mr. Yoon, noting that the candle factory where he had long worked was afraid to employ him any longer.
Yet there is little he can do, a man who cannot go back to his home -- or his 6-year-old daughter -- and cannot move forward either. Asked about the future, the small, clean-cut man dressed in donated clothes laughed, a mixture of sadness and cynicism.
"Generally speaking for North Koreans like me, there are no plans," he said. "I live day by day. Each night I just think, 'Good, I survived today.' "
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