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US-backed groups push North Korean asylum bids in China
By James Conachy
24 June 2002
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In the past three months, at least 10 groups of North Koreans have been
secreted through northern China to make high-profile bids for political asylum
at embassies and diplomatic missions in Beijing and Shenyang. The largest group
was in March, when 25 North Koreans rushed into the Spanish embassy. This month,
four groups, numbering 25 people in all, have made it into South Korean or
Canadian facilities and were allowed to leave China on Sunday. The most recent
incident was on June 13. A teenager successfully entered the South Korean
consulate, while his father was seized by Chinese security guards and is facing
deportation.
The background to these asylum attempts lies in the repression and worsening
humanitarian catastrophe gripping North Korea. As many as 300,000 people are
believed to have fled across the border into northern China since 1995. North
Korea has been in the throes of food and energy shortages for more than a
decade—since it lost the markets and subsidies provided during the Cold War by
the Soviet Union. Despite evidence that natural disasters and a lack of fuel and
fertilizer had utterly devastated the North’s agricultural production, the major
powers delayed the provision of food and other aid until the Pyongyang regime
agreed to a series of political concessions. While estimates vary, as many as
two million people may have died from starvation in the 1990s before large-scale
UN relief operations went into effect.
Conditions in North Korea have been steadily relapsing back toward a state of
famine in the 18 months since the Bush administration was installed in
Washington. From 1998 to 2001, under the so-called “sunshine policy,” South and
North Korea took steps, tentatively backed by the Clinton White House and Japan,
to end the Cold War military stand-off on the Korean peninsula and open up the
North for investment and transport links. Bush’s inauguration was followed by
the withdrawal of US and Japanese support for the proposed deal with the North.
Military tensions steadily built up last year, climaxing this January when Bush
condemned North Korea as part of the “axis of evil” and accused its government
of “starving its people”.
The accusation of “starving” the North Korean people can be most accurately
leveled against the American and Japanese governments. The hardline US and
Japanese stance against Pyongyang has disrupted the international relief
operations that were underway. This year the US is providing just half the
amount of grain it provided in 2001. Japan, which donated 600,000 tons of food
in 2000, provided nothing at all last year and has given nothing again this
year.
Following the lead of the major powers, other countries have dramatically
scaled back aid for the North. An appeal by the UN World Food Program (WFP) for
$250 million in donations had raised just $25 million by April. Last year, the
WFP was providing nutrition to as many as six million of North Korea’s 23
million people. This year, it has been forced to issue warnings that it might
run out of relief by the end of July.
While the White House has not openly called for a “regime-change” in North
Korea, as it has in Iraq, that is clearly the objective of its policy. It is
seeking to aggravate the social crisis in the North to the point where the
regime either disintegrates or is forced into a settlement that enhances US
dominance in East Asia. In particular, the Bush administration is determined to
prevent any settlement on the peninsula that could lead to demands for the
withdrawal of its military presence in the region and thereby weaken its ability
to maintain pressure on China, which it has declared to be a “strategic
competitor”.
Within this context, it is worth examining what is behind the string of
asylum bids by North Koreans in China. They have not been the acts of isolated
individuals, but are being organised and financed by a network of American and
South Korean Christian fundamentalist groups. These groups have close
connections to the rightwing of the Republican party and conservative US
associations, who, in turn, have close links to those in the upper echelons of
the Bush administration, the Pentagon and the CIA pushing for a tougher stance
against both Pyongyang and Beijing.
The most publicised Christian fundamentalist group involved in the asylum
bids is Exodus 21, which is based in Los Angeles and South Korea. A number of
rightwing Christian web sites in the US openly and actively discuss support and
fundraising for North Korean refugees.
The head of Exodus 21, Korean-American pastor Douglas Shin, recently told the
Washington Post: “I just want the dictatorships of China and North Korea
to let my people go, just like Moses told the Pharaoh.” Shin advocates stopping
aid to North Korea in order to hasten its collapse and absorption by South
Korea. As an example of his thinking, he speculated in an interview in May 2001
about a unified, pro-US Korea undertaking a “physical expansion” and taking over
China’s north-eastern Manchurian provinces.
The legwork of smuggling North Koreans through China appears to being done by
South Korean Christians, with the American organisations mainly providing money.
Both the North Korean refugees and the South Korean activists attempt to blend
in with the two million ethnic Korean Chinese living in the regions of China
that border the Korean peninsula. In May this year, the Korea Times
published a report stating that as many as 100 South Korean Christian
“missionaries” had been arrested inside China while attempting to organise
asylum bids.
The main international spokesman for the asylum bids since they began in
March has been Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor and Christian fundamentalist
who worked in North Korea from mid-1999 to December 2000 on behalf of the aid
agency Doctors Without Borders.
Calls for an East German-style collapse
Vollertsen told journalists following the incident at the Spanish embassy in
March that the aim of getting the refugees out of North Korea was to duplicate
the events in East Germany during 1989. He declared: “We will create a flood of
refugees to embassies and it will lead to the collapse of North Korea. This is
the way it happened in 1989. First there were a few dozen defectors, then
hundreds and then thousands.” After several mass asylum bids, Czechoslovakia and
Hungary opened their borders and allowed tens of thousands of East Germans to go
to West Germany.
The fundamentalist groups are also pursuing other avenues for moving North
Koreans out of China to South Korea. On June 12, four North Koreans applied for
asylum in the South Korean port of Incheon after successfully stowing-away
aboard a Chinese ferry from the port of Dalian. There are rumours that a far
larger incident is being prepared to coincide with the media focus on the region
due to the current World Cup Soccer finals in South Korea and Japan. Vollertsen
boasted to the Japanese Sankei Shimbun on May 22 that he was raising the
funds for an asylum bid by over 1,000 North Koreans, who intended to sail from
China in small boats to Incheon.
According to Vollertsen, he is motivated only by concern for the Korean
people. He claims that during his time in North Korea he saw evidence that much
of the starvation was being directly caused by the Pyongyang regime in order to
punish discontent and keep control over the population. Within months of leaving
North Korea, however, he had appeared in Washington as the guest of rightwing
associations such as the Defense Forum Foundation (DFF) and the National
Endowment for Democracy. The DFF board includes former defense and foreign
policy officials of the Reagan administration and ex-military officers.
In March and May 2001, Vollertsen testified before the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee. His unsubstantiated allegations assisted in providing a
justification for the Bush administration’s curtailment of relations with
Pyongyang. He has made four other trips to the US since, during which he has
been feted by Republican congressmen such as Ed Royce from California and Chris
Smith from New Jersey, who are principal advocates of the Bush White House’s
hardline stance against both North Korea and China.
In August last year, Royce moved a resolution in the US Congress demanding
Beijing stop categorising North Koreans as economic migrants, allow the mass
entry of North Koreans into China and allow international agencies to establish
refugee camps on the China-North Korea border. As well as Smith, among the eight
congressmen who co-sponsored the resolution was Dana Rohrabacher, one of the
most prominent congressional members of the “Blue Team”—a network that views US
conflict with China as inevitable as Beijing develops greater economic and
political clout.
Alleged concern for the plight of North Korean refugees also figures
prominently in the documents of the so-called “US Committee for Human Rights in
North Korea”, which was formed last October and is nothing more than a front for
the Republican rightwing and an ideologue for Bush’s policies. It is made up of
figures like Reagan aide Fred Ikle, former Republican congressman Stephen
Solarz; former Reagan administration assistant national security advisor Richard
Allen; Carl Gershman of the National Endowment for Democracy; and Suzanne
Scholte of the DFF.
While failing to detail these US political connections, the New York
Times and other major American newspapers have now published a number of
stories demonising North Korea over the refugee issue. Reminiscent of the wildly
exaggerated stories circulating about Serb atrocities on Albanians before the
NATO attack in 1999, the New York Times published a series of gruesome
allegations on June 10 that the Pyongyang regime is carrying out the systematic
murder of babies in its prisons. North Korea has denounced the charge as “a
whopping lie”.
Within a climate of anti-North Korea hype, the Republican rightwing
reintroduced another resolution on June 11 demanding China open its borders to
North Korean refugees and international refugee agencies. Supported by the
Democrats and passed 406 for, and none against, the resolution calls for Bush to
make the human rights of refugees a US demand on North Korea.
The issue is also directed against China, which has been an ally of North
Korea. Beijing is already displaying alarm at the fact North Korean refugees
have been used to justify the first demands since the 1949 Revolution to allow
an international body—the UN High Commission for Refugees—to operate inside its
borders. Reports indicate it has initiated large-scale police sweeps to round up
and deport North Koreans.
A picture emerges which, at the very least, suggests the asylum bids may be
intended to assist the Bush administration justify the next stage of increasing
pressure on the Pyongyang regime, and indirectly also on Beijing. A US special
envoy—most likely Jack Pritchard—is scheduled to travel to North Korea this week
for the Bush administration’s first official talks with the regime. Alongside
threats over Pyongyang’s alleged possession of “weapons of mass destruction”,
the refugee question is likely to be raised.
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