Escape from North Korea (17 page)

Pastor Buck operated safe houses in Khabarovsk and Vladivostok, where he also ran a church. Escaped loggers would learn about the pastor and his work through the local Korean grapevine and show up on his doorstep. He would provide a place to stay and give them food; if they decided to seek asylum in South Korea, he would offer to help them get out of Russia. North Korea had security agents in the region, and the kind of work Pastor Buck was doing was dangerous. In 1993, a South Korean missionary couple was murdered; the wife was strangled and the husband was bludgeoned to death. The Russian police did little to investigate the killings, which Pastor Buck believes were carried out by the North Korean security police. He led a demonstration in front of a police station in Khabarovsk, demanding a more thorough probe, to no avail.

The pastor advised North Korean loggers against approaching the South Korean Consulate in Vladivostok. It was too risky, he told them. It was a good bet that the consulate was under surveillance by the North Korean security service, and a logger on the run risked being kidnapped before he could reach the consulate's front door and then shipped back to North Korea.

Even South Korean diplomats weren't safe from North Korean agents in Russia. In 1996, a South Korean consul by the name of Choi Duk-keun was murdered in Vladivostok. The circumstantial evidence strongly suggested that it was a North Korean hit job. Choi Duk-keun was responsible for monitoring North Korean activities in the region. He was walking up the stairs to his seventh-floor apartment
when he was hit on the head and stabbed twice in the stomach. He was carrying his passport and more than a thousand dollars in cash when he was attacked, but the assailant stole nothing. The National Institute of Scientific Investigation in Seoul performed an autopsy on the dead consul's body and determined that he had been killed by a poisoned needle.
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Pastor Buck counseled the loggers in his care to travel to Moscow and apply for asylum at the South Korean Embassy. He bought them tickets on the Trans-Siberian Railway and gave them money for expenses on the long journey. It takes nearly a week to travel the 5,300 miles from Khabarovsk to Moscow—across the vast Siberian taiga and over the Ural Mountains. Before the loggers left, he would pull out a city map of Moscow and trace the route from Yaroslavsky Rail Terminal, the terminus of the Trans-Siberian, to the South Korean Embassy, and he would coach them on what to say when they got there. Two or three loggers would travel together, bunking in the cheap “hard-class” compartments. Of the hundreds of loggers the pastor helped in some form in Russia, only a handful reached South Korea.

One-quarter of a million North Korean men have worked in Russia since the late 1960s, according to scholar Andrei Lankov.
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The exposure of 250,000 North Koreans to Russia's more open society is bound to have had some effect on their thinking about their own country; perhaps the comparative liberty also affected the people to whom they recounted their experiences once they returned home. Even during the Communist era, Russia was a more liberal and prosperous society than North Korea. Half a continent away from Moscow, Siberia was the Wild East, the Soviet equivalent of the American Wild West, where residents got away with conduct forbidden elsewhere in the country.

A visitor to Siberia during that time period would have seen capitalism in action on a small scale—an apple seller on a city street or a merchant on a train platform hawking bread and hard-boiled eggs. Such sights would have been marvels to the North Korean workers changing trains in Khasan or Khabarovsk before heading into the forests. So, too, would have been the bright lights of the Soviet towns through which they traveled en route to their camps. The well-fed, warmly clothed Russians, though poor by first-world standards, would have seemed rich beyond measure to North Korean eyes.

By the 1990s, the Russian Far East was inundated with South Korean products and South Korean businessmen. There was so much business activity that Seoul opened a consulate in Vladivostok in 1992. North Korean loggers might have seen South Korean goods on display in Russian stores. North Koreans, although they hear from an early age that South Korea is an oppressive and poor country, suddenly became acquainted with the products of a modern industrialized country and realized that their image of the South was inaccurate.
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Pastor Buck, an American, recalls that the Russian Far East “wasn't a very nice place to live, but it was far better than in North Korea.”

Also in the 1990s, loggers sometimes got hold of radios that allowed them to listen to KBS, South Korea's state-owned radio station. KBS broadcast special programming to Korean speakers in North Korea, and its signals reached Russia, too. Korean-language radio programs also aired on Russian radio stations. In his book
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader
, Bradley K. Martin quotes an ex-logger who talked about the impact that listening to KBS had on him. “They had people criticizing the government on various issues,” the ex-logger exclaimed. “So I experienced some ideological change. My friend and I kidded each other, ‘Let's go to South Korea.' Ultimately it was that ideological change coupled with fear of execution that prodded me to defect.”
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Twenty years later, North Korean loggers in Russia continue to work under conditions that have remained remarkably similar over the decades. The loggers “reportedly have only two days of rest per year and face punishments if they fail to meet production targets,” the U.S. State Department noted in its 2011 report on human trafficking.
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In 2009, a reporter for the British Broadcasting Company traveled to a logging camp, where he observed facilities nearly identical to those described by Claudia Rosett in the mid-1990s. The camp the BBC reporter saw was home to fifteen hundred loggers, some of whom lived in mobile homes decorated with portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. The reporter saw a giant monument inscribed with the words, “Our Greatest Leader Kim Il Sung Lives With Us Forever.” The Russian director of a small local timber firm that had a contract with the logging camp told the BBC reporter that the North Koreans work year-round, with two days off per year. One logger said he earned the equivalent of $200 a month, but that he hadn't been paid in three months.

Under the administration of President Lee Myung-bak, who took office in 2008, South Korea says it no longer turns away lumberjacks who reach one of its consular facilities in Russia. On a subzero day in March 2010, two runaway loggers approached the South Korean Consulate in Vladivostok. The consulate is a turreted, red-brick building that looks as if it had been a merchant's mansion back in czarist times. The North Koreans climbed over the wall, ran past the guards, and entered the consulate, where they requested political asylum. Several weeks later, they arrived in Seoul.
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Also in March 2010 and also in Vladivostok, another North Korean logger made his bid for freedom. He was not so fortunate. The man, known only as “Kim,” was waiting in a car outside a hotel, where he was to meet with officials from an international aid group who promised to help him reach the South Korean Consulate. As
he was sitting in the automobile, another car pulled up to the hotel. Several men in civilian clothes got out and told the driver of Kim's car that his passenger was a criminal. They proceeded to put handcuffs on Kim, forced him into their car, and drove off.

Kim left behind a note, penned the previous day and given to a South Korean Christian at a safe house in Vladivostok. The note read: “I want to go to South Korea. Why? To find freedom. Freedom of religion, freedom of life.”
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He was not seen again.

OLD SOLDIERS

W
hen “Mr. Jung” joined us at our table in the cocktail lounge of a hotel lobby in Seoul, the man who had arranged the meeting, our mutual friend, did not recognize him. It was as if a stranger had suddenly filled the empty chair across from us.

“I just had my eyes done,” Mr. Jung announced with a broad smile, clearly delighted that he had fooled his old colleague. His eye job was the latest in a series of face-changing operations he had undergone. He explained: “I've had plastic surgery to change my appearance so I can go back to China.”
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Our friend complimented Mr. Jung on his new look and then, remembering his manners, performed the introductions. “No names, please,” said Mr. Jung, shaking my hand. I agreed to keep his real name confidential, and his new name—“Mr. Jung”—is born. Given the line of work he is in, it can be safely assumed that “Mr.
Jung” is only the latest in a long line of aliases he has used in his years on the job.

Mr. Jung is a rescuer. His area of professional expertise is bringing home South Korean prisoners of war who have been held against their will in North Korea since the Korean War ended in 1953. He was part of a clandestine network of South Korean civilians who operated in the Sino-Korean border area during the 1990s and into the early 2000s. Their mission: Find the POWs in North Korea, facilitate their escape to China, and return them to South Korea. His rescue operations were authorized and funded by senior officials in the administration of President Kim Young-sam.

In 2010, the South Korean government estimated that there were at least five hundred South Korean POWs from the Korean War still alive and being detained illegally in North Korea.
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Pyongyang said what it has been saying since 1953: It holds no South Korean POWs against their will.

This is a lie. The evidence—collected from, among other sources, the handful of POWs who have escaped to the South in recent years—overwhelmingly supports the South Korean government's assertion that some of its soldiers are still alive and being forcibly detained by North Korea. Time is running out. The men who fought in the Korean War are now elderly. A soldier who was twenty years old when the war began in 1950 would be older than eighty today.

These old soldiers have been held illegally by North Korea since the conclusion of the Korean War. Their detention is a violation of the Geneva Convention's requirements on the prompt return of POWs after hostilities end. It also violates the 1953 Armistice Agreement to the Korean War, which required the immediate repatriation of POWs. The terms are set out in Article III of the Armistice Agreement, which reads in part: “Within sixty (60) days after this agreement becomes effective, each side shall, without offering any hindrance, directly repatriate and hand over in groups all those prisoners
of war in its custody who insist on repatriation to the side to which they belonged at the time of capture.”
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Tens of thousands of South Korean soldiers went missing at the end of the Korean War. At the time of the armistice, the United Nations Command could not account for the whereabouts of nearly eighty-two thousand South Korean servicemen. Only one-tenth of this number—8,343—were repatriated during the three POW exchanges that the United Nations Command and North Korea conducted shortly after the cease-fire.
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Over the years, successive South Korean governments have devoted Herculean efforts to tracking down the status of each missing soldier. South Korea has checked names of the missing against the original war-time military rosters. It has taken testimony from military defectors and others who escaped from North Korea. As the years passed, 22,562 South Korean soldiers whose names appeared on the original list of the missing were identified as having been killed in action. The change in status to “killed” from “missing” was important to the soldiers' families. It gave them emotional closure, allowed them to perform funeral rites, and permitted them to benefit from government grants available to relatives of deceased soldiers. Korean names can be very similar, and some names on the original lists of the missing were found to be duplicates. By 2011, the South Korean government had reduced the official number of soldiers deemed to be missing in action to 19,409. Where are they? The Ministry of Unification answered the question in a bland statement: “It is reasonable to assume that a significant number of South Korean POWs have not been repatriated but are being held by the North Korean side.”