New York Times:
10/19/2006
Norimitsu Onishi
Su-hyun Lee
Last March, Lee Chun-hak, a 19-year-old North Korean, went to the Chinese border to meet with a North Korean money trafficker. Using the trafficker’s Chinese cellphone, Mr. Lee talked to his mother, who had defected to South Korea in 2003. She told him she was going to get him out.
Mr. Lee missed his mother and his sister and brother, and he had a persistent, if half-formed, desire. “I wanted to go to a country that is more developed,” he said, “even more developed than South Korea.”
In June, a young North Korean man appeared suddenly at his home with a message: “Mother is looking for you.” The man then took him by bicycle and foot to the border and handed him over to a North Korean soldier. At the soldier’s direction, Mr. Lee was ordered to leave his identification card and his Kim Il-sung badge, which is worn by all North Koreans to honor the nation’s founder.
The soldier then escorted Mr. Lee across the Tumen River, where on the other side two Chinese men in plainclothes handed the soldier his bribe. Mr. Lee was free to go.
The increasing ease with which people are able to buy their way out of North Korea suggests that, beneath the images of goose-stepping soldiers in Pyongyang, the capital, the government’s still considerable ability to control its citizens is diminishing, according to North Korean defectors, brokers, South Korean Christian missionaries and other experts on the subject. Defectors with relatives outside the country are tapping into a sophisticated, underground network of human smugglers operating inside North and South Korea, China and Southeast Asia.
Learning anything about such a secretive and unpredictable country as North Korea, which isolated itself further by carrying out a nuclear test on Oct. 9, is difficult. Scraps of information provided by defectors often prove unreliable, influenced as they can be by the organizations that shelter and support them while also championing political or religious causes.
But snapshots of life inside the North, and a picture of this smuggling network, emerged from interviews with 20 North Koreans in Bangkok, as well as with brokers, Christian missionaries, government officials and people working in private organizations, in both Thailand and South Korea. The North Koreans in Bangkok were interviewed independently and had all recently arrived in Thailand.
Pieced together, the accounts provide glimpses of a government that, while still a repressive police state, is progressively losing the paramount role it used to enjoy in society, before it found itself incapable of feeding its own people in the famine of the 1990’s. The power of ideology appears to be waning in this nation of about 22.7 million as people have been left to scrounge for themselves, and as information has begun to seep in from the outside world.
The effects of money and corruption appear to have grown sharply in recent years, as market liberalization has allowed ordinary people to run small businesses and has enabled people with connections to prosper in the booming trade with China.
In a country whose borders were sealed until a decade ago, defectors once risked not only their own lives but those of the family members they left behind, who were often thrown into harsh prison camps as retribution. Today, state security is no longer the main obstacle to fleeing, according to defectors, North Korean brokers, South Korean Christian missionaries and other experts. Now, it is cash.
“Money now trumps ideology for an increasing number of North Koreans, and that has allowed this underground railroad to flourish,” said Peter M. Beck, the Northeast Asia project director in Seoul, South Korea, of the International Crisis Group, which has extensively researched the subject in several Asian countries and is publishing a report. “The biggest barrier to leaving North Korea is just money. If you have enough money, you can get out quite easily. It speaks to the marketization of North Korea, especially since economic reforms were implemented in 2002. Anything can be bought in the North now.”
“The state’s control is weakening at the periphery,” Mr. Beck said, explaining that most refugees came out of the North’s rural areas but few from around Pyongyang, where the state’s grip remained strong.
During the North’s great famine in the mid- to late 1990’s, a tide of 100,000 to 300,000 North Koreans is believed to have simply washed into China, and tens of thousands are still believed to be living there illegally, according to human rights organizations. These days, the number of refugees is believed to be much smaller, though there are few reliable figures.
According to the South Korean government, of the 8,740 North Koreans who are known to have fled to the South since the end of the Korean War in 1953, nearly 7,000 arrived in the last four years alone.
But the cost of getting out is significant, according to experts, defectors, brokers and missionaries. There are bribes for the soldiers stationed at the heavily guarded border, a regular cut to their supervisors, money handed to a chain of officials. And that is just on the North Korean side.
At the high end, $10,400 will buy a package deal to get someone out of North Korea and, armed with a fake South Korean passport, on a plane or boat to South Korea within days, according to brokers and a 40-year-old North Korean woman now in South Korea who recently extracted her 14-year-old son. But most North Koreans in South Korea pay on average about $3,000 to get relatives out through China and then Southeast Asia or Mongolia.
Some exits are short-term. One 37-year-old North Korean in Seoul, an employee at a large auto parts maker, said he went to China in April to meet a friend, a journalist in North Korea whom he had not seen in 10 years. For a few hundred dollars, smugglers took the journalist to Yanji, a bustling Chinese town on the border with North Korea, where the two spent the weekend drinking and catching up, the man said in an interview in Seoul.
Like many interviewed for this article, he asked that his name be withheld, for fear of reprisals against friends and relatives still in North Korea. He carried stacks of a South Korean newspaper, The Chosun Ilbo, for the journalist, who had no interest in reading the political stories. Instead, he devoured the business pages, though he puzzled over words like “online,” and marveled at how far the South had outpaced the North economically.
At the end of the weekend, the defector returned to Seoul and his journalist friend to North Korea.
“Doing this would have been unimaginable a few years ago,” he said. “This kind of corruption didn’t exist back then. Now, everything revolves around money.”
Escaping a Shaky Economy
After the end of the cold war, North Korea’s economy collapsed and its leaders adopted a strategy of trying to secure its energy and other essentials by threatening to become a nuclear power. They have adhered to this strategy even as they put into effect economic reforms in 2002, adopting market prices, allowing citizens to run small businesses and joining with South Korea in economic projects.
Though still shaky, the North’s economy has improved thanks to trade with China and South Korea. It grew by 2.2 percent in 2004, the sixth consecutive year of expansion, according to the Bank of Korea, South Korea’s central bank. Defectors and brokers said North Koreans were fleeing their country to rejoin relatives in the South or to look for economic opportunities — not because they were starving, as they were in the 1990’s. The threat of political persecution remains, of course.
In Seoul, Do Sung-hak, 39, a North Korean who came to the South in 2002, said his older brother was sent to prison three years ago after someone reported the brother’s private comments that North Korea was not opening its economy fast enough.
A few months after his release early this year, the brother fled the North with Mr. Do’s help. He is now in Thailand.
Mr. Do, who works as a security guard, said he had arranged to get about 20 people out of the North, using ethnic Korean-Chinese contacts he had made while living for six years in northeast China.
After receiving a request, Mr. Do said he would call a Korean-Chinese intermediary, who would then call a North Korean with a Chinese cellphone that works inside North Korea near the border. The North Korean or a partner would then travel to the relative’s hometown — the price of the service varying according to the distance — and take that person back to the border, where he or she would then talk to the relative in South Korea on a cellphone and make arrangements.
“It doesn’t matter if the person lives in the middle of the country — of course, it takes longer, maybe 10 days,” Mr. Do said. “It’s only a question of money.”
North Koreans living in the South also send money to their relatives back home through the same method, with the brokers taking at least a 20 percent fee, brokers and North Korean defectors said.
A 49-year-old broker in Seoul — nine of whose clients have arrived in Thailand recently — said she operated the same way, adding that those involved in the business in North Korea were Communist Party members.
“You can do that kind of work — being able to travel freely inside North Korea — only if you’re a party member,” said the woman, who added that she earned $2,500 to $3,000 a month.
The demand for this smuggling service has risen along with the increasing number of North Koreans living in South Korea. The North Koreans in the South pay to get their relatives out by working to pay for the fees, borrowing money or using resettlement money awarded to them by South Korea.
One River, Many Hardships
The case of Lee Chun-hak, the 19-year-old who fled the North on June 28, is a typical one. For the past two months, he has been in the Immigration Detention Center in Bangkok, where his mother, Kim Myung-shim, 46, visited him from Seoul the other day.
Mrs. Kim fled to South Korea in 2003, remarried and began working to arrange the defection of Mr. Lee and her two other children, who lived with her former husband in a province bordering China.
The three children were set to leave in late 2005. But before crossing the Tumen River into China, Mr. Lee balked — he did not want to leave his father and grandmother. His older sister and younger brother went ahead and, thanks to the $5,200 paid to brokers, were smuggled into Mongolia and arrived in South Korea last February.
Mr. Lee returned to his everyday life, going to school and, like many others, earning a little money by working at a nearby gold mine. People farmed corn and beans in the area where the surrounding mountains have been stripped bare for firewood.
The economy had improved in recent years, as the authorities allowed people to moonlight at places like the gold mine and to start small businesses. Local residents ate regularly, Mr. Lee said, though the portions were small. Still, he saw perhaps only two or three cars a day, and most people walked or rode bicycles.
After a few months, his sister in Seoul persuaded him to leave. Mr. Lee was now an adult and would find it hard to keep living with his father, who had remarried, Mrs. Kim said.
So on June 27, after his sister had made arrangements with a broker, the North Korean man picked Mr. Lee up in his hometown and took him by bicycle to a spot near the border, where he spent the night, he said. The next afternoon, they rode the bicycle and then walked to the Tumen River. Mr. Lee waded across, accompanied by the soldier.
“As long as you pay the soldiers, you can cross,” Mrs. Kim said, adding that she had paid $3,600 to the brokers for her son’s escape — $1,000 for the North Korea leg and $2,600 for China.
He found his way through China and Laos to Thailand where, following the advice of the brokers, he gave himself up to the authorities. Thailand does not repatriate North Korean refugees, incarcerating them instead while their cases are processed through the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Bangkok. The process takes about three to four months, after which the North Koreans are sent to South Korea, though the United States recently accepted nine North Korea refugees.
Having learned that news in Bangkok, Mr. Lee said he no longer wanted to go to South Korea. “I want to go to the United States to study and become a scientist.”
Doubts About an Ideology
Many of the North Koreans interviewed in Thailand said they wanted to go to the United States, even though they were reared in a country that has demonized America for decades. In school in the North, one defector said, she had had been taught that Americans were “inhuman, promiscuous and dictatorial.”
“Even today, I still sometimes refer to the United States as ‘Imperialist America,’ ” she said, laughing.
But as a fourth grader, the woman said, she began to have doubts about that image of America, after she happened upon a photograph in a magazine. As she recalled, it showed a tightrope walker balanced on a wire between high-rise buildings in Washington. The implicit message was that the United States was such an inhumane country that it forced people to perform such jobs, she said.
“But what I remembered about that photo was the tall buildings,” she said. “There was also a beautiful park and clean, wide streets. It was fascinating. There was nothing like that where I grew up.”
North Korea still unleashes daily attacks against the United States through its official media, but the desire of many of the defectors interviewed to go to the United States suggests that the power of ideology is waning.
“After spending a few months in China, they change their minds about the United States,” said a South Korean missionary who regularly visits the North Koreans at the detention center. “In China, they have access to so much information. They look at Web sites and exchange instant messages with people in South Korea.”
Lee Chan, 36, who fled North Korea one year ago and entered Thailand in June, agreed that anti-American ideology was not as strong as it was in the past.
“People’s perceptions of the United States have changed inside North Korea,” he said. “I’ll give you one example. If you’re caught watching an American movie, the authorities will just swear at you — nothing else.”
In Bangkok, where South Korean Christian missionaries care for the defectors while trying to convert them, Lee Chun-hak’s mother, Mrs. Kim, was worried that her son had become too friendly with Mr. Lee, the defector who had emerged as a leader of the detainees. She was angry that her son had started smoking under Mr. Lee’s influence.
“Please look after Chun-hak,” the mother said to Mr. Lee, adding that her son had birthmarks on his head and face that foretold a great future. “That’s why I’m sending him to America.”
“Please guide my son,” she said, “even though he’s doing well alone.”
Mr. Lee, showing her a pack of Marlboros, said, “He’s doing well — he doesn’t smoke expensive cigarettes like I do.”
“Stop smoking!” the mother said.
A missionary began praying for Lee Chun-hak.
“Pray to God to send you to America,” the mother exhorted her son.
