THE KOREAS

Refugees in Purgatory

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's power reaches beyond his police state to Seoul, where President Kim Dae Jung's government appeases Pyongyang by failing to stand up for refugees from the North. Protests against this policy are growing. This is the story of one such voice

By John Larkin/SEOUL

Issue cover-dated September 06, 2001

BOOKS WERE Yu Tae Jun's passion in North Korea. His inquiring mind needed nourishment that the numbing party tracts foisted on him by cadres couldn't provide. He had views of his own, which he cultivated with a reading list that included Tolstoy and Shakespeare. Yu's dream was to be a writer in South Korea. But for one possibly fatal decision, which has exposed Seoul's ambivalent attitude toward North Korea's abuses of human rights, he might have seen it come true.

Yu made his move in 1998, crossing into China with his young son and younger brother. There he joined his mother, who had already defected, to become yet another of the many thousands of North Koreans living in fear of forced repatriation by Chinese authorities. After being turned away by South Korea's embassy in Beijing, the family split into two groups. Yu and his brother won their freedom by stowing away on a South Korean freighter to the port of Pusan. His mother made it to Seoul with Yu's son early last year. It seemed his dream of a new life was becoming reality.

But there was one missing element--his wife, who had refused to leave North Korea. So Yu decided to return to the dangerous border area to meet her. His mother, Ahn Jeong Suk, was in a training programme for new defectors and could only try to dissuade her son in a desperate phone call. "Of course I thought it was a stupid idea," she recalls in an interview with the Review. "But I got the feeling he really missed his wife."

In March this year, Ahn's worst fears were confirmed. Word reached Seoul that Yu had been caught at the border and taken to North Korea, where he was tortured and publicly executed. He was 32 years old. Ahn was angry as well as distraught. She claims the South Korean intelligence service knew of his capture late last year and could even have stopped the execution by making a public appeal to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR.

Then came a bizarre twist, that has intensified criticism of Seoul's reluctance to draw attention to North Korea's human rights violations--a failure that critics say is a tactic to preserve President Kim Dae Jung's policy of engaging Pyongyang to end more than half a century of bitter division. On June 12, North Korean state radio broadcast a press conference by someone it claimed was Yu.

The man said he was tricked into defecting, hated living in South Korea and was happy to be back in the North with his wife. He even accused his mother and younger brother of leading "decadent lives." The South Korean government said the voice was Yu's. Unification Minister Lim Dong Won told the National Assembly that the voice was believed to be authentic.

But Ahn is adamant it was not her son's. The broadcast, she claims, got crucial details of Yu's defection wrong. Moreover, the voice had an accent from the east coast city of Hamhung, where the family lived for several years. "The voice was totally different. Tae Jun spoke with a Pyongyang accent," says Ahn, adding his way of speaking had made him the butt of jokes in Hamhung. "The press conference was a total invention."

Yu is a cause cél�bre for South Korean human rights activists who accuse the Seoul government of soft-pedalling outrage over the suffering of North Korean refugees hiding in China's northeast.

Truth be told, Seoul is in a hard position. With its much-vaunted policy of engaging North Korea under huge strain, an official outburst against Pyongyang's disgraceful treatment of its nationals could blow away the gains the policy has made for inter-Korean relations, which include last year's summit between the leaders of the two Koreas. It could also endanger the future of the whole process.

A MOTHER'S LONELY MISSION
For Ahn, the choice is simpler. Sitting in a café in a trendy Seoul suburb, she looks like a typical Korean grandmother. Wearing a simple grey dress, the 58-year-old fusses over Yu's five-year-old son Yoon Ho. Only their darker skin, and the police shadow following them, sets them apart from South Koreans. Ahn was a journalist for a time in the North and quite well-to-do. The harsh realities of Northeast Asian geopolitics are not beyond her, but she doesn't believe that pressing Seoul for confirmation of her son's existence is asking for too much.

She's bitter about the refusal of the Unification Ministry and the National Intelligence Service to follow up her claims that the press conference was fake. "They never contacted me. They refused to talk with me on the telephone. I went to the NIS building and said 'show me proof,' but they didn't want to see me. All I want to know is whether my son is still alive." An NIS official said the agency was doing its best to confirm Yu's fate. A top foreign ministry official says that generally it is "hard to imagine" that Pyongyang would have someone impersonate him at a press conference.

Another big problem for Seoul is that putting pressure on China to stop repatriating North Korean refugees, which Beijing says is mandated by a pact between the two countries, could backfire. Seoul's embassy in Beijing is well known for turning away North Korean defectors. China is a signatory to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, but views North Koreans as "economic migrants" and blocks UNHCR access to them.

Beijing, as one of Pyongyang's last friends on the planet, is crucial to the drive to coax North Korea out of its self-imposed but disastrous isolation. The refugee issue is bound to be on the agenda for Chinese President Jiang Zemin's visit to Pyongyang from September 3. But confronting Beijing over refugees might only prompt it to halt its behind-the-scenes wheedling of North Korea's leader to emulate its own reformist policies.

Mindful of China's growing economic power, Seoul has been careful not to upset Beijing since opening diplomatic relations in 1992. "Most sensible people agree the best result [for human rights] can be achieved through quiet diplomacy," says the foreign ministry official. "What if North Korea starts deliberately sending out its people, like Vietnam did? That would burden other countries to absorb them."

SEOUL TAKES THE HARD CHOICE
To compound Seoul's problems, its engagement policy is now fighting for its life. Besieged by the press and compromised by a slumping economy, President Kim can no longer show the largesse that he once did toward Pyongyang to coax it to open up. What's more, the Bush administration is refusing to pick up former President Bill Clinton's more conciliatory attitude to North Korea, which almost resulted in him visiting Pyongyang to seal a deal supposed to end the North's testing and export of ballistic missiles.

The Bush administration wants any talks to cover conventional weapons, a demand Pyongyang rejects. To break the deadlock and resuscitate engagement, President Kim is praying that North Korea's "Great Leader" Kim Jong Il comes to an overdue return summit in Seoul. Until then, any unnecessary needling of Pyongyang is completely off his agenda.

This has bred an official aversion to any publicity that casts Pyongyang in a bad light because it may damage the policy of coaxing the North to engage, which President Kim views as his foremost legacy. Hwang Jang Yop, an architect of North Korea's guiding theory of self-reliance who defected to South Korea in 1997, has been barred by the NIS from accepting an invitation to testify in the United States about North Korea before the House of Representatives Policy Committee. A government war with media groups this year was sparked by stinging editorializing in top newspapers against drawing closer to North Korea. The Unification Ministry refused to answer questions for this article, citing the sensitivity of the issue.

It's a tough choice for Seoul: Act now to save refugees but possibly ruin engagement. Or resist humanitarian impulses in the hope that rapprochement will ultimately do more to help the refugees and North Koreans trapped in their country.

"I sympathize with the government," says Paik Hak Soon, a North Korea specialist at the Sejong Institute, a Seoul think-tank. "The government believes there are much bigger issues at stake. Human rights are important but if we raise them there'll be no dialogue between the two Koreas."

South Korea hasn't always been reticent to play up North Korea's awful human rights record. The fact that it is now has angered rights activists. They point out that North Korean refugees, who are estimated to number from 100,000 to 300,000 in northeast China, have most to lose from Seoul minimizing North Korea's human-rights abuses.

Benjamin Yoon, a veteran activist who as head of the Citizen's Alliance for North Korean Human Rights spearheads a campaign for more action to uncover Yu's fate, says refugees are dying because Seoul and Beijing placed politics over trying to stop repatriations. "A South Korean official told me that we can't raise human rights because this is the first time we have been able to speak with the North Korean government," says Yoon. "But we shouldn't wait for the right time. We have to raise these issues whenever we get the chance."

Seoul provides financial support and apartments to North Koreans lucky enough to make it to the South. And more defectors are arriving, with entries this year expected to double last year's 312. Kim Sang Chul, a lawyer who organized a petition signed by 11.8 million people that was presented to the UN urging it to do more for North Korean refugees, says the government has brought the issue before the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights. Also, embassies in some countries are now helping the refugees.

NO REFUGE OR HELP AT EMBASSIES
"But that's the only thing the government has done," says Kim. "There's no effort to pressure China to give up its repatriation policy. Seoul should exert international pressure on China to let refugees go to a third country where the international community can build camps for them." Kim says Seoul is obligated to act because legally North Koreans are citizens under South Korea's constitution. "It's not effective inside North Korea, but if the people are outside the North then the protection of South Korea must reach them."

Testimonies by defectors suggest some South Korean embassies are less compassionate than lawyer Kim Sang Chul wants. Yu Sang Ju, a 38-year-old former North Korean soldier, says he was rejected by the South Korean embassy in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, when he crossed into that country with a group of 20 defectors last December. He says it was only after human rights activists protested against their imminent repatriation that the embassy reversed its decision. "The Korean embassy indicated to the Mongolian government that they didn't care about us," says Yu Sang Ju. "I thought I'd be saved if we reached a South Korean embassy. But I wasn't welcome."

Human rights activists helping refugees in China say it's unusual for South Korean embassies, particularly in Beijing but lately also in Mongolia, to accept refugees unless they come under public pressure. "The embassies are very negative towards the refugees," says one activist. "If we want to check up on some refugees, the embassy in Mongolia always says they don't know where they are. If the refugees come alone, or are not politically important, they hand them over to the Mongolian government."

Activists see a sad irony in Seoul doggedly pursuing the modification of Japanese school textbooks that gloss over Japan's brutal occupation of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945. Yet Yu Tae Jun, who like all North Korean refugees received South Korean citizenship on arrival, may have been executed by firing squad. Seoul's response to the possible murder of one of its citizens is muted, to say the least. "Where's the outrage? Where's the indignation?" fumes an American missionary who is involved in helping refugees. "These people are de facto South Korean citizens. There's not a word uttered for them."

Yu Tae Jun may be still alive. But if he isn't, there is one positive implication to draw from his death: In staging such an elaborate ruse as a fake appearance to prove that he is alive, Pyongyang has shown itself as sensitive to pressure from human rights groups. If that is just the first step toward more cooperation with Seoul, especially over refugees, then Yu Tae Jun may not have suffered in vain.