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JULY
9, 2001, VOL.158 NO.1
Somewhere to Run To
A North Korean family in China makes a bold bid
for asylum뾞nd wins its freedom
BY MATTHEW FORNEY
and DONALD MACINTYRE
Jang Gil
Su. Simple, cartoon-like pictures by a
North Korean child show a starving man cooking
human body parts in a big
pot. |
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Sneaking
out of North Korea involves the simple act of fording the
narrow Tumen river into China. It's so shallow in some places
a child can do it. Moving on to another country뾲hat's a tough
one. As many as a quarter million North Korean refugees have
crossed the line but remain near the border, hiding from
Chinese police. So when seven members of the Jang family
blazed an audacious trail to freedom, China wasn't sure how to
react. After a complex trek in which a South Korean
businessman led them to Beijing, the Jangs gathered June 26
for what they feared would be their final breakfast together.
When they finished, the family matriarch gave everybody,
including her teenage grandkids, small tablets of rat poison:
if the police were to grab them, they would commit collective
suicide. They then marched into a United Nations office to
demand sanctuary. "They preferred death to being taken back,"
says Moon Guk Han, the businessman who helped them.
The Jangs finally won their freedom after a tense three
nights sleeping on the floor of a conference room in the
Beijing office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The
Chinese government agreed to let them fly to Seoul, via
Singapore and Manila. The timing likely worked in their
favor뾲he International Olympic Committee will vote on July 13
on whether to award Beijing the honor of hosting the 2008
Summer Games, which means China's human rights record is under
intense scrutiny. Eighteen months ago, Beijing was roundly
criticized after it repatriated seven North Koreans who had
been granted refugee status in Russia. One recently resurfaced
in Thailand with tales of being chain whipped and forced to
clean toilets with his tongue. "Now is the time to make tough
requests of China," says a Western diplomat.
The Jangs are part of a growing number of North Koreans who
come to China not just to live but also to launch desperate
attempts at reaching third countries. Few make it beyond
China's borders, but there is evidence that more are
succeeding. In the first five months of this year, around 60
North Koreans arrived in Mongolia, up from fewer than 10 in
the whole of last year. Beijing's nightmare is that millions
could start pouring across the border. As a result, Chinese
police relentlessly hunt down North Koreans to send them back;
they recently began house-to-house searches along the border.
If the UNHCR office is suddenly seen as a haven, so much the
worse for Beijing.
With the Jangs, Beijing initially acted tough, refusing for
three days to let the family go. The government finally
allowed them to leave with the excuse that they needed foreign
medical care. It's the latest chapter in a dramatic ordeal for
the family. Fifteen members had crossed the border to China by
1999. One boy, Jang Gil Su, then acquired anonymous fame
through his crayon depictions of life in North Korea. The
simple, cartoon-like pictures showed confessions from
prisoners and a starving man cooking human body parts in a big
pot. Smuggled into South Korea and published in a book, they
generated tremendous sympathy. Jang's life since then has
given him new and terrible story lines. His mother was among
five relatives recaptured and sent back to North Korea, where
she presumably suffers in a labor camp.
The businessman who aided the Jangs, 48-year-old Moon,
comes across as the hero of the affair. The former textile
salesman has worked with refugees in China for five years, and
has helped the Jangs since they first crossed the border. He
met several times with UNHCR officials who urged him to take
the family to Mongolia, he says, but he deemed the trip too
dangerous after he heard reports of refugees getting arrested
on that route. So instead of a quiet escape, he arranged for
the family to take a 24-hour bus trip to the capital. (They
went in two buses, to increase the chances that at least some
of them would make it.) In Beijing, he walked the family into
the UNHCR office, beginning one of the highest-profile asylum
cases China has seen. For the Jangs, it worked out. The
UNHCR's chief representative in Beijing, Colin Mitchell, said
it would have been "unthinkable" to repatriate the family. But
if Moon's gambit forces China to post just a few soldiers
outside the compound뾬r 100,000 at the border뾲he next family to
arrive might have to eat its poison.
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