As Wars Rivet Attention to Israel and Ukraine, Don’t Forget the North Koreans

For years, North Koreans who manage to escape to China have faced a struggle for survival that ends with many of them forcibly returned to North Korea.

“They are treated as traitors or criminals by North Korean authorities,” said Thae Yong Ho, who was North Korea’s deputy ambassador in London when he defected in 2016, flying with his wife and two sons to Seoul. Then, four years later, he got elected by a wide margin from one of Seoul’s wealthiest districts to South Korea’s National Assembly.

Now Thae is campaigning to publicize the hardships of defectors, leading relatives of some of those held in North Korea to the United Nations and Washington, with the hope of persuading U.N. officials and members of Congress to bring pressure on China to stop repatriating defectors back to the North.

“Beating, torture and executions are routine,” said Thae. “Silence and quiet diplomacy with the Chinese government could not solve this humanitarian catastrophe.” It’s time, he said, for U.N. and U.S. leaders to demand loudly and openly that China accept the right of North Korean defectors in China to go to South Korea or any country that would have them — anywhere but back to North Korea.

Among those whom Thae and the others are to meet in Washington is the new U.S. envoy on North Korean human rights, Julie Turner, a career diplomat, who assumed that position in October, nine months after President Biden nominated her. On her first visit to Seoul in her new job, she decried the repatriation of North Korean refugees, promising South Korean officials to try to make the issue a priority in Washington’s difficult relations with China.

Turner faces what may seem insurmountable obstacles, however, in getting anywhere in her mission. North Korea takes bitter offense at any mention of its horrific abuses of human rights. Neither she nor South Korea’s human rights ambassador, Lee Shin-wha, a professor at Korea University, has any illusions about getting through to Pyongyang.

A sure sign of the difficulties Turner faces was a North Korean editorial attacking her as an ethnic Korean who had been adopted as a baby by American parents. “Turner should know that she was chosen as a political housemaid,” said Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency, denouncing her as a “scapegoat for the ‘human rights’ plots to pressure the DPRK,” the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

The editorial saw Washington’s renewed emphasis on human rights, demonstrated by Turner’s appointment, as “a poor policy set forth by the Biden administration driven into a scrape in the DPRK-U.S. nuclear confrontation.” In other words, according to KCNA, the U.S. was exploiting the human rights issue to buttress its pleas for North Korea to give up its nuclear program. Darkly, KCNA warned that U.S. criticism of North Korean human rights could “backfire on it, spawning severe security issues.”

Almost immediately after she returned to Washington, Turner addressed reports that China had “repatriated” 600 North Koreans. Another 2,000 reportedly are being held in Chinese prison camps awaiting their turn to be led under armed guards to buses that will transport them to the North Korean border. An estimated more than 100,000 North Koreans live secretly in China, merging with the Korean-Chinese community, doing odd jobs, many of the women forced into marriages with poor Chinese farmers.

Quite aside from the intransigence of North Korea and its Chinese protector, however, advocates on behalf of defectors face another huge problem in achieving awareness of the fate of North Korean refugees in China. Despite occasional flurries of publicity, Americans remain largely oblivious to the whole issue of human rights in North Korea. The danger of North Korea firing nuclear weapons rings more alarm bells, but it’s easy to ignore those dire threats as tiresome propaganda.

Vastly compounding the difficulties of raising North Korean human rights to the level of political discussion in the U.S. is the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. As long as Gaza dominates the news, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un would almost have to attack South Korea to compete for headlines.

The struggle, however, goes on. Suzanne Scholte, a tireless worker on behalf of North Korean refugees as chairman of the North Korea Freedom Coalition, has campaigned for years against repatriation of North Korean refugees. In a speech in Seoul, she called for “doing everything in our power to get information in North Korea, by land, by sea and by air.”  

The inference was that South Korea should authorize defectors in the South to launch balloons over North Korea, wafting leaflets, along with candy bars and dollar bills, for North Koreans to read and enjoy. South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol’s leftist predecessor, Moon Jae-in, forced passage of a law banning the balloon drops. The law remains on the books, even if Yoon’s government hesitates to bring charges against defectors responsible for occasional balloon launches.

Radio broadcasts into North Korea are another matter. There’s no telling how many North Koreans hear them, considering that North Korean radios are configured to tune in only to authorized stations and it’s a grave offense to try to listen to foreign broadcasts. Despite the uncertainties, the U.S. government’s Voice of America and Radio Free Asia target North Korean audiences, and short-wave stations in Seoul, supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, beam an hour or two of news and commentary each day into the North.  

Activists can also count on the Otto Warmbier Countering North Korean Censorship and Surveillance Act, passed by Congress a year ago. The act authorizes $50 million in funding for getting information into the North in the name of Otto Warmbier, the student who was jailed and beaten by North Korean guards before falling into a coma and dying soon after he was returned to the U.S. in June 2017. 

Women accompanying Thae to the United States stand as living proof of the need for China to bestow a modicum of mercy on defectors. “Through our visit to the U.S., I would like to make Americans aware of the suffering and stop forced repatriation,” said one woman who had escaped from North Korea via China, while three of her brothers wound up in North Korean prisons. “Help us to stop the agony.”

Another woman told of having been sent from China into North Korea two times, then making it through China to Southeast Asia and on to South Korea. “The North Korean regime would call us traitors or rubbish,” she said. “I am still suffering.”

Beyond words, though, how much can anyone do while Congress is preoccupied with the wars in Ukraine and Israel? A large part of Turner’s job — and Thae’s visit — is to make sure Americans don’t forget the plight of millions of North Koreans.

Donald Kirk has been a journalist for more than 60 years, covering conflict in Asia and the Middle East. Now a freelance correspondent covering North and South Korea, he is the author of several books about Asian affairs.