Escape from North Korea (16 page)

SIBERIA'S LAST GULAG

T
he trunk line of the new underground railroad runs through China, but a branch line originates in Russia.

This leg of the underground railroad serves a sad subset of North Korean fugitives: men who escape from logging camps in Siberia and the Russian Far East, where their government has sent them to work in conditions that amount to slave labor. There are an estimated thirty thousand to forty thousand North Koreans working in Russia. Many are loggers, but others work in construction, mines, and other industries.
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During their stay in Russia, an unknown number of the North Koreans take the opportunity to escape. Human rights activists put the number of runaway loggers as high as ten thousand, although that might be inflated.
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Since the mid-1990s, roughly one hundred ex-loggers have arrived in Seoul from Russia with the help of Christian activists. Others have found their way across
the Russian border to China, where they managed to get work on the black market or obtained passage on the new underground railroad, eventually reaching South Korea.

The North Korean lumberjacks and other contract workers are in Russia as part of a business deal negotiated by the Kim family regime more than forty years ago. Pyongyang has a long-standing commercial arrangement with Moscow to provide low-cost labor for Russian logging operations in the birch and pine forests of the far eastern reaches of the country.
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This is the desolate area, in Siberia and the Russian Far East, that used to be home to the forced-labor camps of the Soviet gulag. The North Koreans who toil there today have in some locations taken the place of the political prisoners banished to the camps by the old Soviet dictators. The logging sites are so remote, the work so arduous, and the living conditions so onerous that it is difficult to find Russians who will agree to do the jobs. Pyongyang is only too happy to step in—for the right amount of foreign exchange, of course—and sell the services of its citizens.

It has done so since 1967, when North Korea and the Soviet Union concluded an agreement to supply workers for the Russian timber industry. Under the original deal, struck by North Korea's founding President Kim Il Sung and then Secretary General of the Soviet Union Leonid Brezhnev, North Korea provided the workers and managed the logging sites. The Soviet Union furnished the forests, fuel, and equipment. Pyongyang sent in the lumberjacks, usually for three-year terms of work and always under the close watch of the North Korean security agents who accompanied them.
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The lumber was sold abroad, and the profit was divided between the two nations. Japan was an early client; China is said to buy the lumber today.

Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The logging camps in the former gulag were an embarrassment, a symbol of the totalitarianism that the Russian people had
rejected. When the Soviet–North Korean agreement on the camps expired at the end of 1993, Russian human rights groups pushed for the inclusion of human rights protections for the North Korean loggers in the new accord that was then under negotiation. The human rights commissioner of the Russian Parliament, himself a former prisoner of the gulag, declared that a secret protocol in the original Soviet–North Korean agreement would be henceforth illegal. That protocol had authorized North Korean security agents to operate on Russian soil and stipulated that Soviet police would arrest any North Korean logging-camp runaway and turn him over to North Korean agents. A revised agreement was signed in 1995 that included protections for the North Korean workers. Those protections have been largely ignored and are disregarded even today. The treatment of the loggers has shown little improvement, and human rights advocates say Russian law-enforcement officials continue to cooperate with the North Korean security agents to track down and repatriate runaway lumberjacks.

The loggers' work is a modern-day form of slave labor. Much of a worker's salary goes to the North Korean government. The North Koreans are forced to undertake backbreaking work over long hours under austere conditions. The lack proper training, safety equipment, and even clothing warm enough to protect them from the freezing Siberian winters, where temperatures can reach twenty degrees below zero. In the hours when they are not working, the workers are confined in prison-like facilities policed by North Korean guards. They are required to attend the same kind of government propaganda sessions they are forced to take part in at home. The camps have their own prisons, where workers who commit ideological crimes are punished with low rations and violent treatment.

Media reports about the logging camps began to surface in the early 1990s. Russian journalists, exercising their post-Soviet
freedom to report on hitherto forbidden subjects, were the first to cover the story. Western media soon picked it up. One of the early reports ran on the front page of the
Wall Street Journal
in 1994. Moscow bureau chief Claudia Rosett described her clandestine visit to several logging camps in the municipality of Chegdomyn, two hundred miles northwest of the Siberian city of Khabarovsk. She painted a vivid and disturbing picture of what she saw there. Recent news reports suggest that little has changed in the nearly two decades since she wrote her articles.

Rosett described a camp that “could be almost anywhere in North Korea.” A giant portrait of Kim Il Sung looked out across the wooden barracks. A sign in huge red Korean letters exhorted the loggers: “Democratic People's Republic of Korea, to Victory!” Loudspeakers played anthems glorifying the North Korean state.
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It was winter and bitterly cold when Rosett visited. She recounted how, despite the weather, the North Korean gatekeeper at one camp was shod in sneakers with no laces or socks. It was an image, she later wrote, that haunted her for years. In her words, it was that of a man “peering out from that transplanted bit of North Korea into a world where asking for even a taste of his rightful human portion of liberty could bring him torture and death.”
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At another camp she observed loggers toiling in torn pants and felt shoes. The North Koreans were bone-thin, fed on rations of cabbage and rice supplied by Pyongyang. Hungry loggers sometimes slipped away from the camp to beg door-to-door from the Russians in a nearby settlement, the same way that North Koreans who cross the Tumen or Yalu River into China knock on the doors of houses in the first villages they encounter. She quoted a local housewife: “One Korean came here, and you could see he was just starving. I gave him bread and salt pork.”
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Stalin once shipped political undesirables to work, and often die, in camps like these. For North Koreans, however, being sent to a logging camp is not a punishment; it is a privilege. For North Koreans
lucky enough to be selected to work in Russia, the logger's life is a dream job, the opportunity of a lifetime. The reality of life in North Korea is reflected in the fact that workers compete vigorously for the opportunity to be sent to Siberia. The logging jobs are allocated by factories. Workers who want to become loggers pay bribes to the officials who make the selections.

“Mr. Chang,” a pseudonym for an ex-lumberjack now living in Seoul, explained how the selection process worked when he competed for a logging job in the mid-1990s. He believes it operates the same way today.

First, a worker must belong to what is known as the “loyal” class of citizens with “pure” family histories. That means that he must have no ancestral ties to South Koreans, capitalists, or Christians.
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Second, Pyongyang requires that the applicant be married and have at least one child. In the cruel reckoning of the regime, wives and children act as hostages, ensuring the return of the logger. Mr. Chang, who was employed at a car factory in a city not far from the capital, explained that he met the basic requirements because he came from a good family—he has relatives who work for the government in Pyongyang—and he has a wife and daughter.

Third, an applicant needs to pay off the decision makers. To get the logging job, Mr. Chang paid a bribe of $300 to a Workers' Party official at his factory. He considered himself lucky for having struck a good bargain. Some of his colleagues had to pay bribes of as much as $1,000. Others went into debt to get the jobs, pledging to bring home gifts of hard-to-get items such as TVs or refrigerators. “You can't imagine how tough the competition was to be selected as a worker,” Mr. Chang said. “For example, if there are three openings in a factory of fifteen hundred workers, everyone will be competing for these three openings.”

Mr. Chang had high hopes for his logging job. The money was far better than it was at home, even with the big cut of his salary that went to the government. He also anticipated that he would have
the opportunity to buy goods not readily available in North Korea. Mr. Chang didn't know how much his government actually received for his labor, but of the salary that he knew about, he remitted 70 percent to his hometown government. He received 30 percent in the form of vouchers for use in Russian stores.

Mr. Chang left for Russia in 1995 with high expectations. They were soon dashed. He received his promised salary the first month, but payment was erratic in subsequent months. By the end of the first year, payment stopped altogether. He decided to run away. Railroad tracks ran through the forest near his camp, and he managed to hop on a freight train headed to Khabarovsk. There he found an off-the-books job working on a construction site, but it wasn't long before he was arrested for being in Russia illegally. Hoping to avoid being sent back to the logging camp, he told the police he was a Chinese citizen of Korean heritage and had come to Khabarovsk looking for work. He was desperate to avoid being turned over to North Korean security agents. In his calculation, being confined in a Russian jail for the crime of illegal entry into Russia was far preferable to being sent back to the logging camp and then incarcerated for the crime of running away. Authorities eventually found out his true nationality, and he was turned over to the North Korean secret police. Instead of returning him to the logging camp, the agents put him and other escaped loggers on a train to North Korea.

Human rights organizations reported at the time on the treatment of runaway loggers in the custody of North Korean security police in Russia. They were kept in iron chains and sometimes had casts forcibly put on both legs in order to keep them from escaping again.
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Mr. Chang was fortunate—no fetters, no casts. When the train slowed down, he and two friends jumped off, suffering only minor cuts and bruises. It was evening, and they ran into the woods. As they watched the lights of the retreating train in the fading light, they decided to walk along the track until they reached a town, where they would seek work. Mr. Chang spent the next three years
wandering from place to place in Siberia, staying one step ahead of the Russian police and North Korean agents. He begged, did odd jobs, and occasionally resorted to theft. Eventually a Christian activist helped him get to China. After four years on the run in China, another Christian helped him reach South Korea.

Mr. Chang doesn't remember the name of the Christian who helped him in Russia, but it might have been Phillip Buck, an American pastor of Korean heritage.
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Pastor Buck was one of the early developers of the new underground railroad in China. He began his mission work in 1992 in Russia, though, with runaway North Korean loggers. He developed techniques there that he later used to greater success in China.

“I wanted to be close to North Korea,” he explained years later about his decision to move to the Russian Far East as a missionary. While he lived in Russia, he would often pay a visit to Khasan, a tiny border settlement south of the Far East city of Vladivostok on the Tumen River. The pastor would stand on the bank of the river, gaze at his native country, and pray.

In Russia in the early 1990s, Pastor Buck was shocked at the lack of concern the South Korean government showed for the North Korean loggers. Despite its rhetoric about welcoming North Koreans to the South and despite its constitutional obligation to do so, the South Korean government had little interest in helping North Koreans reach safety, he said. Most of the loggers he helped in Russia were turned away by the South Korean Embassy or Consulate if they went there to ask for asylum.

In her 1994
Wall Street Journal
article, Claudia Rosett reported that ninety loggers had requested asylum at South Korean consular facilities in Moscow and Vladivostok, only to be denied. She called the presidential Blue House in Seoul and received an explanation
that was amazing both for its content and its candor. “The government isn't accepting them, in order to avoid getting on the nerves of North Korea” a spokesman for President Kim Young-sam told her. Pyongyang had warned Seoul that it would consider any loggers who were granted asylum by South Korea as having been kidnapped. It threatened “decisive countermeasures,” the presidential spokesman said.
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