North Korean Economy Watch

According to the Associated Press (via Los Angeles Times):

The North Korean’s note, scrawled in pen, was simple: “I want to go to South Korea. Why? To find freedom. Freedom of religion, freedom of life.”

The ex-logger, on the run from North Korean authorities, handed the note over to a South Korean missionary in the Russian city of Vladivostok last week in hopes it would lead to political asylum.

Just before he was to meet Thursday with the International Organization for Migrants, a team of men grabbed him, slapped handcuffs on him and drove off, rights activists in Moscow said Friday. He was spirited away to the eastern port city of Nakhokda, where he is sure to be handed back over to North Korean officials and repatriated to his communist homeland, activists said in Seoul.

Police in Vladivostok refused to comment. A senior South Korean diplomat in Vladivostok said he had no information. Officials from the U.S. consulate in Vladivostok could not be reached for comment.

The 51-year-old would be the third North Korean logger in Russia in a week to make a bid for asylum. On March 9, two other North Koreans who had fled their jobs as loggers managed to get into the South Korean consulate in Vladivostok.

Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency reported last week that two North Koreans climbed a fence, ran past the guards and entered the consulate, saying they wanted political asylum. ITAR-Tass carried a similar report.

The incidents focused attention on the precarious existence of tens of thousands of North Koreans sent by the impoverished regime to work in neighboring Russia.

Russian government figures from 2007 put the number of North Korean laborers at 32,600, most of them working in logging in the remote east.

The Rev. Peter Chung, a Seoul-based activist, said there are about 40,000 North Korean loggers in Russia, but that some 10,000 of them have fled their work sites. Some are finding work as day laborers while others are in hiding as they try to map out how to win asylum in foreign diplomatic missions.

The North Korean described the conditions as unbearable. His government took half his meager wages, while the North Korean company operating the logging camp took 35 percent. He kept just 15 percent — about $60 a month — an arrangement that rendered him “virtually a slave,” he told activists.

He eventually fled the logging camp, taking odd jobs to survive. He also became a Christian, Chung and Kim Hi-tae said, which could draw severe punishment, even execution, back home.

The successful asylum bid of two other former North Korean loggers inspired Kim to make a similar attempt, Chung said.

Previous posts on the North Korean loggers in Russia can be found here. More here. And here. And here.

Read the full story below:
3rd North Korean logger attempts to defect in Russia, propelled by dream of ‘freedom of life’
Associated Press (via Los Angeles Times)
Kim Kwang Tae
3/19/2010

Joong Ang Daily
Eldo Kim
3/17/2010

Walking through the busy streets of metropolitan Seoul, Lee (an alias) seems no different than the hundreds of Koreans around her.

Stopping by a cafe, she purchases a cup of coffee and hurries out to the subway station. Following the everyday actions of millions of fellow urbanites, there is nothing unusual about her.

But there is something that sets her apart. Lee is a North Korean refugee who defected in 2005. Lee is also a student at People for Successful Corean Reunification, or Pscore.

Established in 2006, Pscore is a non-governmental organization consisting entirely of volunteers, with bases in Washington, D.C. and Seoul.

While it provides news coverage of North Korea and helping defectors become South Korean citizens, a unique aspect of this organization is that it offers educational programs for refugees. Tutors, a mix of foreigners and English-speaking Koreans, meet one-on-one on a weekly basis with individuals to teach subjects ranging from English to mathematics.

Although Pscore has only run its tutoring program for 20 months, at any given time there are around 60 to 70 refugee students registered.

According to the Ministry of Unification, in 2000, only 312 North Korean refugees escaped to South Korea. In 2008, the number of escapees rose to 2,809. In the past few years, the population of North Korean refugees in South Korea has grown so rapidly that the government is only offering $10,000 in resettlement money per refugee, instead of to the previous amount of $28,000.

Also, Hanawon, a government-sponsored training center for North Korean escapees, has reduced its program cycles from three months to two months.

Pscore seeks to fill the gaps in already existent assimilation aid for North Korean defectors.

One Pscore student, Chae, who asked to be anonymous, defected from North Korea in April 2006. After enrolling in college to study medical science, she was surprised that 40 to 50 percent of the lectures were in English. Looking for English lessons, Chae found Pscore through friends who were being tutored already. A year has passed, and she feels that her English lessons will be invaluable to her goal of becoming a nurse in the United States.

Like Chae, 70 percent of Pscore students seek help mostly in English as its usage has increased in South Koreans’ daily lives and the workplace.

“In the 21st century, the acculturation process of South Korea has been profoundly influenced by the West. The culture shock that North Korean emigrants experience when they settle in South Korea is worsened by the constant presence of English, a language that is restricted mostly to the elite in North Korea,” said Choi Hyun-chul, the president of the Korean Society for Journalism and Communication Studies.

As a young organization, there are still problems that the organization must fix.

“Frequently, there are tutors who are not very sincere about their work or do not put in all their effort in teaching refugees.” says Lee, a 35-year-old North Korean college student, citing several English tutors who frequently canceled meetings or didn’t show up. She said that perhaps Pscore should be more selective in choosing its volunteer tutors.

Score hopes that South Koreans would be more willing to welcome North Korean refugees with open arms, rather than a cold shoulder.

“On a societal level, the atmosphere in South Korea is not very supportive or encouraging of the refugees. The average citizen doesn’t care much about their issues,” said An Seung-woo, secretary general of Pscore.

Mary Anderson, an American teacher in Seoul who tutors for Pscore, commented likewise.

“Tutoring the students is simply delightful, and without a doubt, they’re some of the hardest working students I’ve ever seen. But, there is shockingly a lot of prejudice. I knew a North Korean woman dating a Canadian man in South Korea who desperately wanted to move to Canada because of how unwelcome she felt in South Korea.”

Pscore is looking forward to conducting research about reunification of the two Koreas and expanding their tutoring program in the future.

“Whenever a refugee gets accepted into college or achieves employment, we feel a sense of distinct accomplishment and pride,” says Pscore.

UPDATE 3: The Swedish Embassy has been gratned to the unnamed second American.  According to Reuters:

North Korea has allowed Swedish diplomats to visit a U.S. citizen detained nearly two months ago after allegedly entering the country from China, the U.S. State Department said on Monday.

“We can confirm that on March 14 the DPRK (Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea) granted the Swedish embassy, our protecting power, consular access to a detained U.S. citizen,” said State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley.

Crowley declined to provide any further information about the U.S. citizen. Sweden represents U.S. interests in Pyongyang in the absence of formal diplomatic relations.

The United States said in January that North Korea had informed it that it was holding the American, but since then has provided no information about the case.

North Korea’s official news agency said the American was detained after crossing into its territory from China, accusing him of “trespassing” and saying he was under interrogation.

South Korean news reports have said the border-crosser was a 28-year-old man who said he entered the socialist North because no longer wanted to live in the capitalist world.

I doubt anybody in the  KFA has the balls to try this.

(more…)

According to the Korea Times:

Canada granted 66 North Korean defectors refugee status in 2009, which is almost 10 times higher than in 2008, a report said Saturday.

Radio Free Asia, quoting a report from the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, said that more North Koreans are expected to receive the status as there are 59 defectors currently under review.

The North American country’s first case of granting refugee status to a North Korean was in 2000. In 2008, there were seven more cases.

…

According to the radio, a total of 93 North Koreans had also settled down in the United States as of last December.

Read the full article here:
66 North Koreans Given Refugee Status in Canada
Korea Times
Kim Sue-young
1/31/2010

According to KBS (h/t RoK Drop):

The number of North Koreans who fled to South Korea in 2009 is known to be close to three-thousand.

A Ministry of Unification official said more than 2,200 women and almost 680 men from North Korea entered South Korea in 2009, totaling more than 2,950 in a preliminary tally.

The official added that this makes the cumulative number of North Korean escapees total approximately 18-thousand, which is almost certain to surpass 20-thousand in 2010.

Soms interesting supplementary information was posted at Yonhap:

The number of North Korean defectors hiding in China is estimated to have shrunken in recent years to almost one tenth the level seen in the late 1990’s, a U.S. demographer said Thursday.

The assessment is a controversial but important factor in shedding light on the conditions of those North Koreans who live in China. The defectors live under the constant fear of deportation because their country considers defection a capital crime.

Activists and relief groups say tens of thousands of North Korean defectors live in China, but Dr. Courtland Robinson at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health said the number may have dropped to between 6,000 and 16,000 as of 2007.

“About a decade ago, people were literally being starved to death and fleeing to China,” Robinson said in an interview, putting the 1998 figure between 50,000 and 130,000. Famine had reportedly killed as many as 2 million people in North Korea in the mid-1990s.

An official at South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles affairs involving North Korea, said he could not support the figures given by either activists or Robinson, arguing it was impossible to determine the exact number of those defectors in hiding.

Robinson, speaking on the sidelines of a conference on North Korean defectors in Seoul, said he had turned to local residents in China as informants to assess the number of defectors living in their towns. He then applied demographic methods to come up with what he called “plausible ranges” of a population.

“The very essence of these measurements is to start selecting sites randomly, not sites where you think North Koreans may be living,” he said.

“It’s a combination of things that has contributed to the decrease. Tightened border security on both sides is one,” Robinson said. “Defectors have also evolved in terms of their understanding of how difficult it is to live in China.”

China reportedly stepped up its crackdown on North Korean defectors ahead of its hosting of the Summer Olympics in August 2008. Under a treaty forged in 1998, China is believed to arrest and repatriate North Korean defectors even though they could face imprisonment, torture and even execution.

Chinese residents are reportedly rewarded with cash if they report North Korean defectors, who find it difficult to hide their identities or get a job because they can’t speak Chinese.

Robinson said defectors have apparently accelerated the pace at which they “move on through China,” heading to countries such as Thailand where it is deemed safer or easier to go to South Korea.

Over 16,000 North Koreans have come to South Korea since the 1950-53 Korean War that ended in a truce rather than a peace treaty. The annual number of defectors is increasing year by year and the Unification Ministry expects the accumulated figure to top 20,000 this year.

According to Voice of America:

Thai immigration authorities say they took more than 1,000 North Koreans into custody this year, compared with less than 400 in 2008 when Beijing tightened security for the Olympics.

Read the full article here:
Increasing Numbers of North Korean Refugees Head to Thailand
Voice of America
12/30/2009

UPDATE: This story was picked up by Yonhap, the Korea Herald, and the Choson Ilbo  (twice).–probably because of Joshua.

ORIGINAL POST:
By Michael Rank

Chinese police have reported how the bodies of 56 North Koreans attempting to flee to China, including seven children, were found floating in the Yalu river in 2003.

An official notice issued by police in the border town of  Baishan in Jilin province describes how 53 corpses were discovered by local people on the morning of October 3, 2003, followed by three more at 5 a.m. the following day.

“An examination found that the dead were all citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Postmortems showed that the 56 bodies had all been shot. The evidence suggests that they had been shot by Korean armed border guards when attempting to cross illicitly into China,” says the document, dated October 7, 2003.

The dead consisted of 36 males and 20 females, including five boys and two girls.

The bodies were cremated locally on October 6, and township officials are “awaiting instructions from higher authority” on what to do with the ashes and with possessions found on the bodies. The document was issued by Badaogou police station in Baishan, a town in Changbai Korean Autonomous County which covers a large area on the North Korean border.

I am grateful to “treasuresthouhast” who posted the document here. He took it from an unnamed Chinese blog which apparently reposted it from bbs.163.com.

The third edition of the SAIS U.S.-Korea Yearbook chronicles important developments in North and South Korea that characterized their relations with their allies and enemies in 2008. Each chapter was written by SAIS students in the course, “The Two Koreas: Contemporary Research and Record,” in the fall of 2008. Their insights were based not only on extensive reading and study, but also on numerous interviews conducted with government officials, scholars, NGO workers, academics and private sector experts in both Washington and Seoul.

The Yearbook is divided into two parts: South Korea’s Foreign Relations and North Korea’s Foreign Relations. In the first part, student authors explore the dynamic foreign policy changes that were brought about by the Lee Myung-bak administration, and how these policies affected South Korean politics both at home and abroad. In the second part, student authors explore how shifting power dynamics both in the United States, as well as among the member states of the Six-Party Talks, affected North Korea’s foreign relations in 2008.

Here are links to the North Korea chapters:
Chapter 6:  The Torturous Dilemma: The 2008 Six-Party Talks and U.S.-DPRK Relations, by Shin Yon Kim.

Chapter 7:  U.S. Alternative Diplomacy towards North Korea: Food Aid, Musical Diplomacy, and Track II Exchanges, by Erin Kruth.

Chapter 8:  North Korean Human Rights and Refugee Resettlement in the United States: A Slow and Quiet Progress, by Jane Kim

The US Korea Institute has also published a New Working paper:

“State Over Society: Science and Technology Policy”
Download Here
ABSTRACT: Since the late 1990s, the Kim Jong Il regime has laid an explicit emphasis on the role of science and technology (S&T) as an instrument of national power. Facing external security challenges, domestic economic stagnation, and rising political uncertainty stemming from the succession issue, North Korea has sought greater scientific and technological development for national revival. Yet few analysts have interrogated the contours of North Korea’s S&T policy or explored its dilemmas for the regime in Pyongyang. Considered a means of modernization, S&T strikes at the heart of manifold dilemmas facing the North Korean leadership as technology poses formidable challenges to the maintenance of political control by introducing new pressures to the balance of power between state and society. In this paper, Rian Jensen, a former USKI Student Fellow, identifies the goals of North Korea’s S&T policy, outlines its mode of implementation, assesses how science and technology is recalibrating North Korean state-society relations, and identifies key policy implications for the US government.

Herald Tribune
Lee Su-hyun
2/11/2009

After she defected here from North Korea in 2006, Ahn Mi Ock was shocked to learn that most South Koreans lived in small apartments and had to struggle to buy one.

Ahn, 44, had fully expected that once in the South she would enjoy the same luxurious lifestyle portrayed in the television dramas she had watched on smuggled DVDs. It had not occurred to her that the fashionably dressed characters sipping Champagne in the gardens of stylishly furnished houses were not, well, average South Koreans.

That disappointment aside, she and many other North Korean defectors find themselves plunging into the unaccustomed wealth of South Korea’s entertainment and news media, fascinated by the astonishingly free flow of information and critiques of political leaders, but also searching for tips as to how to navigate this strange new society.

“When I first came here, I was glued to the TV screen every waking moment,” said Ahn, a former art teacher who now works in a restaurant.

Most newly arrived North Koreans spend up to three months at government settlement centers, taking crash courses in capitalism and democracy. They are also taught basic skills like how to use ATMs and home appliances.

But many say they still feel insecure about moving into the real world. With no previous exposure to a free press and 60 years of separation between the South and the North, they sometimes feel they are speaking different languages.

“I was so surprised when I first saw a music video here and didn’t understand a word of a rap song - in Korean,” said Yu Chong Song, 27, who is studying Chinese at Dongkuk University.

That’s where close study of South Korean media comes in.

Recent defectors say that in North Korea, the typical resident might watch half an hour of television news about how Kim Jong Il, the national leader, spent his day. They might spend another hour watching popular dramas, often involving the fate of the nation - assuming the electricity supply allows.

As for newspapers, the 20 former North Koreans interviewed said home delivery was only for the privileged. Those who did have access said the contents were boringly predictable, and that a better use of newsprint was for rolling cigarettes.

But in their first 6 to 12 months in South Korea, they said, they spent at least three hours a day watching television: talk shows, reality shows, quiz shows. (When they first arrived, they had few acquaintances and no jobs, and so had a lot of time on their hands.)

They said they paid closest attention to news and dramas, because they thought these provided the most useful portrayals of South Korean society. The hope was that by using television to study the differences between the two countries before daring to face actual South Koreans, they could reduce the chances of embarrassment.

Kim Heung Kwang, 49, a former computer science teacher who now works in an organization that finds jobs for defectors, said it was only by watching a television movie that he learned that a host should offer his guests a drink.

“Not only must I offer something to drink,” he said, “but ask if they want coffee or tea and whether they want sugar or milk, and then how many spoonfuls.”

Still, there are limits on media study as a learning tool. It is not always clear how much of what they are viewing is truly representative of South Korean life, and how much is fantasy.

“I stopped watching television dramas, because it was getting in the way of my relating to the South Korean people,” said Kim Heung Kwang, who said he still was not sure whether South Korea was a place where mistresses were bold enough to tell their lovers’ wives to get lost.

Ahn, for her part, was concerned about how her 19-year-old daughter might cope with the lust-consumed South Korean men, who apparently devote much of their daily routine seeking unencumbered romance - or so television dramas had led her to believe.

To alleviate their confusion, a Newspaper in Education program to encourage young people to read was introduced a year ago at Setnet High School, an alternative school for North Korean defectors. There, they can ask an instructor to explain concepts they encounter in newspaper pages.

“What is business and sales?” asked Park Jeong Hyang, 18, during a Setnet class.

“Amateur? Is that something to do with sports?” asked Mah Gwang Hyuck, 23.

“Can you explain what marketing is again?” asked Kim Su Ryun, 18.

Especially troublesome are the loan words, mostly derived from English, used in almost every sentence, and South Korean words not used in the North. But perhaps even more difficult to understand is the media’s role in South Korea.

The defectors express shock that the media can point a finger at a head of state. “I don’t know how President Lee Myung Bak can continue running the country after getting so much criticism,” said Cho Eun Hee, 23, a Setnet student.

All those interviewed agreed that freedom to challenge the government is desirable but felt uncomfortable seeing so much of it.

“Television even broadcasts scenes of politicians fighting in the National Assembly. That can’t be good for the image of the country,” Ahn said.

Still, Kim Heung Kwang saw some merits. He was impressed to see his modest apartment complex featured in a television news report about tenants of a nearby prayer house complaining about construction noise. He was familiar with the dispute and felt the reporters were relaying the facts fairly.

Cha Eun Chae, 20, said that in North Korea, there was no way of knowing how the economy was performing, because every story was upbeat: “They would always say, ‘The harvest was good this year.’ But we saw our neighbors starving.”

Over time, as the newcomers learned to read and understand them, the local media became more relevant to their everyday lives. Noticing that self-promotion is important in South Korea, one university student aspiring to a career in business scrutinizes newspaper columns and editorials for hints.

“I want to learn how to articulate my ideas while accommodating others’ opinions,” he said. “And I see that in the way editorials here are written - for example, on the controversy over embryonic cloning.”

Not everyone succeeds in applying media models to interaction with South Koreans.

Kim Keum Hee, 38, who works as a cleaner at a public bathhouse, tried to mimic a hotelier she had seen in a television drama.

“But I just couldn’t do it,” Kim said. “I’m still not used to being friendly when I don’t mean it.”

From the Family Care Foundation:

The U.S. has set a quota of refugees at 80,000 for 2009, 19,000 of them from East Asia, including North Korea, China, Tibet, and Burma. It is to give priority to 100 refugees from the region who want to join their families who are already in the U.S.

How many North Korean refugees will be accepted is not specified, but they are to come under the Priority-1 Group, where each refugee will be screened individually, and Priority-3 Group, where refugees will be given priority in joining their families who are already in the U.S. Some 600 refugees will be let in under Category P-1 and 100 under Category P-3.

Since the U.S. first accepted a North Korean refugee under the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004, a total of 75 North Korean refugees have settled in the U.S.