Saturday, March 21, 2009

Trapped in Purgatory

Originally posted on Neon Tommy.com


He watched his father die of starvation. It started with bouts of diarrhea as the digestive system broke down, and before long, the body was unable to process even the morsels that were offered. There was no food, other than the bark scraped from trees and occasionally, a life-saving potato. But the famine deepened. After his father's death, his 7-month-old daughter wasted away. Fearing that his own end was fast approaching, he decided it was time to escape North Korea and search for sustenance across the border.

For the sake of this story, his name is Paul. He is a North Korean refugee seeking asylum in the United States Revealing his real identity would jeopardize his chance to find peace and finally forget the horrors in his past. He is a wanted man, at least, by the government that betrayed him.

Speaking at an event at the University of Southern California Wednesday night, Paul captivated the audience with a tale of struggle and despair. He had crossed the border into China, travelling from city to city in an effort to escape deportation. But he didn't speak the language. He was an outsider who, riding the bus one day, was captured by Chinese officials working in alliance with the North Korean government, and thrown back to a fate much worse then the one he had left.

"There is a secret treaty between China and North Korea to return immigrants," said guest speaker and immigration lawyer Sharon Joung. The Chinese government adheres to a policy of "forceful repatriation" for North Korean refugees, as a favor to its neighbor. Upon his return, Paul was sent to prison for "political treason."

As Russia came to realize in 1999 when it returned immigrants to North Korea, the North Korean government openly executes those guilty of "political treason." Those first-time offenders able to avoid death are sent to a political prisoner's camp. According to Joung, North Korea currently holds an estimated 200,000 political prisoners, "who are subject to forced labor, beatings, torture, starvation and execution."

Paul, with Joung translating, described the prison he was condemned to as "like the hell in the Bible."

"They would make us work for 10 hours consecutively and make us run while we were working so that we can't sit down and rest," Paul said. "At night they would start beating people, saying that it was 'part of the punishment.' A lot of people were put to death because of that beating."

At the time of Paul's internment, North Korea was suffering a famine that lasted from 1994 to 1998 and killed approximately 2.3 million people (although figures vary from 600,000 upward, depending on the source.) "At first," Paul said, "when it started out with one or two people dying, it was an unusual thing. But then it got to a point where so many people died that we didn't even feel anything."
Paul was released after three months, but quickly embarked on his dangerous trek once again. During his second attempt to hide in China, he met a Christian missionary who taught him the Bible. "I became a Christian," Paul said. "I became part of a team that was training North Korean refugees to become missionaries. There were about 300 North Korean refugees that were secretly being educated about the Bible."

Christianity is considered "political treason," Joung later said. "In North Korea, by law, if you cross the border without permission, if you encounter a Christian or even enter a church, that's considered political treason and you will be sent to prison for years."

"In North Korea, what the government fears most is not a nuclear weapon, but the religion of Christianity," said Paul.

But Paul continued to teach others about Christianity, despite the harsh punishment he faced by doing so. He travelled to South Korea through Mongolia, the route of most refugees attempting to escape the North and avoid the Chinese, and began building a church for North Korean refugees. During that time, 200 fellow missionaries, including many of Paul's friends, were captured during a visit to China and sent to political prisoner's camps. These men, even though they held South Korean citizenship that was granted to them automatically when they entered the country, were not protected by their new government. "I was very disappointed," said Paul. "I realized that my safety was not protected by my South Korean citizenship."

According to USC doctoral student Eunice Kang, whose research is titled "North Korean "Refugees?" The Inadequacies of International Refugee Law," North Korea frequently send spies into the South, many posing as refugees, in order to repatriate those who have fled. With China, Vietnam and Laos all sharing the communist ideologies of North Korea, refugees are surrounded by unfriendly forces no matter where they turn.

Not only does automatic South Korean citizenship do a poor job of protecting North Korean refugees from being seized by their previous government, but it also extinguishes their ability to seek a safer life elsewhere. International immigration law determines that the right of asylum will be denied to those who have been granted "firm resettlement" elsewhere, Joung explained. Because their South Korean citizenship is considered "firm resettlement," North Korean refugees are unable to seek asylum in the United States and other countries. Couple this dilemma with the fact that North Korean refugees have no means of safe escape other than through Mongolia to South Korea, where they are immediately strapped with citizenship, and their plight seems unavoidable. They are trapped.

"I believe the South Korean government is unable to provide the necessary protection, but I do believe the U.S. can," said Paul. "That's why I'm here."
There are currently 200 North Korean refugees waiting to be granted asylum in the United States. From 2004 to 2007, only 37 refugees were accepted.

Joung and her law partner Amina Diaz, of the law offices of Chan Yong Jeong in Los Angeles, are trying to convince judges that the "firm resettlement bar" to North Korean refugees seeking asylum in the U.S. is being unfairly interpreted. "North Koreans are not given choices as to where they seek asylum," said Joung. "The South Korean citizenship should not be working against them."

Judges are "not applying the North Korean human rights act as it should be applied," according to Diaz. North Korean refugees are "treated like second-class citizens" in South Korea, forced to live in housing blocks specifically for North Koreans, given restrictions on travel and assigned security officers who keep track of their every move. "The condition of their residence is so substantially restricted that they can't be considered resettled," said Diaz.
Paul's words seemed hard to form at times, as he stood in front of a crowd of Americans, trying to describe the hardships that had brought him here, hoping for safety at last. He is one of the lucky ones.

"I made a choice," he said. "I thought: either I can just die [in North Korea] from starvation, die on the way out from being shot, or I can find a way to get somewhere else. So I thought I'd just take a chance."

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