Escape from North Korea (8 page)

Even Kim Il Sung had Christian connections. His father attended a Protestant missionary school, his parents were churchgoers, and they took their son to worship services. The Christian message apparently didn't stick. As Bradley K. Martin has noted, “Who . . . would have imagined that the man whose rule wiped out nearly every trace of religion in North Korea—except worship of himself—had been until his late teens not only a churchgoer, but, moreover, a church organist?”
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When Kim Il Sung came to power, he labeled Christians and other religious believers as counterrevolutionaries and targeted them for repression. Many Christians fled south. Believers who remained in North Korea were killed, jailed, or forcibly relocated to remote areas in the north of the country.

When Kim Il Sung consolidated his power after the end of the Korean War, he banned religion. By 1960, the number of houses of worship operating in North Korea—Christian, Buddhist, or other—was a grand total of zero. That held true until 1988, when, under pressure from international religious groups, the regime opened a Protestant show church in Pyongyang and permitted a few carefully selected people to attend worship services. Four churches operate
in Pyongyang today—two Protestant, one Catholic, one Russian Orthodox—and serve as showcases for foreign visitors. There are no Catholic clergy in North Korea, so Mass cannot be celebrated. State-sponsored religious federations oversee the official Christian churches and the few operating Buddhist temples. The federations also interact with foreign visitors.

The overwhelming majority of North Korean refugees have little or no exposure to religion before they arrive in China, according to a survey conducted by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. Most have never encountered any religious activity, seen a place of worship, read religious literature, or met a religious leader. Before reaching China, their knowledge of religion is limited largely to the antireligious propaganda they learned at school and from the state-controlled media.
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A few North Koreans surveyed by the commission spoke of Christians who were punished for their beliefs in North Korea. Two of the interviewees provided grisly eyewitness testimony of executions of Christians who had engaged in unauthorized religious activities. In one episode, a father and daughter were shot after authorities learned that the daughter owned a Bible. In another, five secret Christians were bound, laid on a highway, and run over by a steamroller. According to the witnesses, the five condemned Christians were given an opportunity to live if they renounced their religion. They refused.
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And yet many North Koreans who escape to China, although they've been warned against Christians all their lives, end up turning to Christians for help. This is particularly striking given that some of the Christians are South Koreans or Americans, two other groups of people the North Korean regime has demonized. That so many North Koreans in China entrust their lives to Christians is a measure of the refugees' desperation. But it also reflects the remarkable success of the Protestant missionaries who have flocked to the Sino-Korea border area since the mid-1990s. Many of the missionaries
are South Korean or Korean-American. They operate underground, without the approval of the Chinese government and at risk of arrest, imprisonment, and expulsion from the country.

Seoul and Beijing normalized diplomatic relations in 1992, opening the door for South Koreans to visit China more easily. Businessmen flooded in, and so did missionaries. The missionaries saw an opportunity to contact fellow Koreans who had been unreachable since the division of the peninsula. China bars proselytizers, so the missionaries entered the country using a range of guises that allowed them to obtain visas: teacher, student, tourist, businessman. As one American recounted, missionaries had to be creative to find ways to stay in China. This is still the case. The missionaries in China today are Protestant, representing a range of denominations and a variety of churches and humanitarian groups from South Korea and the United States. Some of the missionaries are ordained ministers; others are lay workers. Many of the humanitarian workers, even those with nonsectarian organizations, are inspired by their Christian faith to help North Koreans in China.

By the late 1990s, the severity of the North Korean famine was well known, the number of refugees in China was rapidly increasing, and the missionaries were beginning to organize. They established shelters to feed and house fugitives, and they developed systems to help them escape. They built ties to local Christians, who, as the first line of contact to refugees, would direct needy people onward to the missionaries.

One of the founders of the effort to aid North Koreans in China is Tim Peters, a lay Christian worker from Michigan. Peters is probably the best known rescuer in the business. He has testified before the United States Congress. His photograph has appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine's Asia edition. He travels the world raising awareness of the plight of the North Koreans in China, asking for money and recruiting helpers.
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From his perch in Seoul, Peters has become the voice of the North Koreans who are hiding in China and the unofficial spokesman of the new underground railroad. He decided early on that his Caucasian face could be a liability in this line of work, especially in northeast China, where, unlike in many other parts of China, Westerners are relative rarities. While he works closely with Korean-Americans and South Koreans who are on the ground in China, his base of operations is in Seoul, where he can speak freely.

Every Tuesday evening at seven o'clock, Peters leads the Catacombs meeting, where people who work with North Korean refugees in China gather to exchange notes. The Catacombs meeting takes place in an art gallery in central Seoul that is owned by a Korean couple who have moved to the United States. The gallery is closed to the public for the evening, and chairs are arranged in a circle in the center of the small main room under a portrait of Jesus. The meeting attracts a mix of Christian activists, visitors from the Sino-Korean border who are in Seoul on R & R, and locals who work with resettlement agencies that aid North Koreans.

Before he became involved in helping North Koreans, Peters's mission work took him to Japan, South America, and the South Pacific. In the mid-1970s, he took a fateful trip to the then authoritarian country of South Korea. He worked on human rights issues there and was eventually deported for handing out antigovernment pamphlets. He returned to Seoul for a while in the 1980s and then again, for the third time, in 1996. By then, South Korea was democratic and prosperous, and Peters asked himself why God had called him there. What need was there for him to fill? “One night it just dawned on me,” he told an interviewer. “I wasn't here this time for South Korea. I was here for the North, to try to do the Lord's work and help people there. It couldn't have been any clearer.”
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In 1996, Peters founded Helping Hands Korea, an organization dedicated to providing aid to North Koreans who flee to China. By
the late 1990s, Helping Hands Korea had set up shelters for refugees and, as Peters euphemistically put it in testimony before the United States Congress, the organization was “coordinating logistical support for their escape to third countries.”
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In other words, the new underground railroad had opened for business.

Working with colleagues from South Korea, Japan, the United States, Southeast Asia, and, especially, China, Peters helped set up a network of Christians who facilitated North Koreans' escape from China. Their explicit model was the underground railroad that led African-American slaves out of the South to freedom in the nineteenth century. Like the original underground railroad in America, the new underground railroad in China was organized to operate in what Peters calls “separate, secure nodes,” so as to protect the identities of both the workers and the refugees. During an operation to transport refugees, for example, the locations of the safe houses remain secret. Rather than have the guide pick up the refugees at the safe house, which would necessitate revealing the address, the house manager will escort the refugees to a public place, where their guide will meet them.

One of the hardest aspects of his work is deciding whom to help, Peters says. Resources severely limit the number of North Koreans Peters's network can transport on the new underground railroad, and there are more prospective passengers than there are spaces. He admits to sleepless nights over some of the decisions he has had to make. There is no set of established criteria for winning a ticket on the new underground railroad, but some general guidelines have emerged over the years.

“The South Koreans or Korean-Americans on the ground in the border areas are the first ones to send up a flag as to who is needy,” Peters said. “They conduct interviews of refugees to find out more about their background, and they try to filter out those who may not be telling the truth. They try to find out who needs help and who needs it desperately.”

Peters's first priority is to help those who would suffer most if they were to be arrested and repatriated. That category includes women who are obviously pregnant. North Korea forces repatriated women to have abortions, even in the final months of pregnancy, and it kills newborns it believes have Chinese fathers. Also on the priority list are North Koreans with medical problems that make it unlikely they could survive the rigors of detention if arrested and sent back. So, too, are North Koreans who are at risk of being identified as Christian or as having had contact with Christians; North Korea metes out especially harsh treatment to Christians.

For Peters, the toughest calls involve refugees who claim to be North Korean officials, especially if they are peddling information that they offer to trade for passage on the new underground railroad. “These are really dirty guys,” Peters said. If they are telling the truth, then they were complicit in the crimes they wish to confess. Only people who participated in such abuses would have evidence that they took place, and their victims are almost certainly dead. “Most of these guys you can't trust with last year's Christmas tree,” he said. “But then again, some of them might have information that would have a bombshell effect on the whole human rights situation. They might have highly incriminating evidence about what goes on inside North Korea. That's the kind of dilemma that keeps me up at night.”

In 2010, Peters considered a request for help from a man who said he was a state security agent and had explosive evidence of human rights abuses in the prison system. The agent and his family had fled to China, and he wanted to negotiate a deal whereby Peters's network would help them get to South Korea. By the time a request for help reaches Peters, it is usually well authenticated, and in this case he believed the man had been a security agent, as he claimed.

He agonized over the decision. If the state security agent “really had something that would cause the international community to pay attention, to say, ‘Oh, my God, it's true—we've got documented proof from someone inside the system,' that would be a huge force
multiplier,” Peters explained. The news would make headlines around the world, and it could have an enormous impact on his work by calling international attention to the human rights abuses in North Korea. On the other hand, the state security agent was surely responsible for the deaths of many innocent people. In the end, Peters decided to help. He negotiated a deal, agreeing to bring out the man along with one of his children.

At the time Peters related this story, the operation to extract the state security agent and his child was still in progress and the duo had not yet reached South Korea. The South Korean intelligence agency would debrief the man upon his arrival and evaluate his information. Peters still wasn't sure he had made the right decision. “We helped those two,” he said “but what two didn't we help?” He may never know whether the man's information will help save North Korean lives in the future. He does know that by his decision to help the North Korean security agent and his child, he was unable to provide passage out of China for two other North Koreans who did not have blood on their hands.

South Korea's Ministry of Unification keeps track of the number of North Koreans who arrive in the South each year. The numbers showcase the growing success of the underground railroad in helping North Koreans escape from China. In 1998, seventy-one North Koreans reached safely. In 1999, as the underground railroad was gearing up, that number more than doubled, to 148 arrivals. By 2002, only three years later, the number of arrivals exceeded the thousand mark, to 1,140. By late 2000s, close to three thousand North Koreans were reaching the South every year.
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The new underground railroad has many conductors. It is impossible to know how many North Koreans who escape are assisted by Christians, how many are aided by other humanitarian workers, and how many pay brokers to help them get out. Sometimes conductors who do it for money work hand in hand with those who don't. Christians may hire brokers to help with part of the journey or aid
them in gathering information. Some church people or humanitarian workers won't knowingly employ brokers, believing, as one Christian drily put it, that in a crisis, the broker won't be thinking in terms of the North Koreans' welfare. Others say brokers are essential and that they couldn't do their work without them.

The charitable groups that help North Koreans in China operate on a very small scale. They often are one-man operations—typically a sole missionary who is supported by his congregation back home in South Korea or the U.S. and who has lined up local Christians to work with him. During the years he lived in China before his arrest, Phillip Buck, a pastor from Seattle, guided more than one hundred North Koreans out of China. Tim Peters said in 2010 that he had helped rescue thirty-seven North Koreans in the previous year. Liberty in North Korea, a nonsectarian group based in California, set a goal in 2010 of rescuing one hundred North Koreans over the next couple of years. The numbers are small, but they add up.