Asiaweek.com | Korea: 'Escaping Paradise'

Somewhere in the slopes of China's Changbai mountains, Park Jang Jin boils water to make tea for a rare guest. His tiny mud hut is nestled high in the hills, safely secluded not only from the authorities, but also from the general population. North Korean refugees such as Park have been crossing the Tumen River into China en masse since the outbreak of famine several years ago, and many now live in a state of acute vulnerability along the border region. "Even here in the wilderness I live in fear," Park tells me. "I don't know you, but I must trust you. I don't know the people who help me, but I must trust them too. Every day I'm afraid I will be caught and returned to North Korea."

The rest of the world may be eagerly awaiting the historic Seoul-Pyongyang summit in June, but for those refugees in limbo between North Korea and China, life is far removed from the warm glow of the impending rapprochement. Last November, seven North Koreans made the headlines when they escaped to Russia via China. Despite pleas by Seoul and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to grant them refugee status, both Moscow and Beijing chose to return them to an uncertain fate in North Korea.

For Pyongyang, which was launching a worldwide diplomacy blitz, the spotlight on its fleeing citizens was hardly welcome. The negative press resulting from the incident prompted the regime to pull out all stops in nabbing its refugees. The age at which one is subject to criminal penalties was lowered from 16 to 12, and North Korea and China stepped up cooperation in cracking down on river crossings.

Park, 44, confirms the tougher climate. A small, scruffy man with scattered facial hair and a missing left ear, he says when he first waded through the Tumen River in the summer of 1997, it was feasible to risk the trek into China, find food and then sneak back into North Korea. On-site executions, beatings and other punishments always hovered as real dangers, but the trip was worth taking. Until he was captured in March last year, Park ventured several food missions.

"I was released from prison last November because I was about to die, and the situation changed," he says, pouring water into a chipped clay teacup. "My wife was dead from malnutrition, my son had run away for a better life and my neighbours had disappeared. I was on the blacklist because of my escapes to China. I really had one choice - to make one last trip."

The situation, which is driving more and more starving North Koreans to seek hideouts in China's remote mountains, teeters on escalating into Pyongyang's worst nightmare. Saddled with a crippled economy, the regime of Kim Jong Il has suffered a shortfall of one to two million tons of food a year since 1995 - and faces an equally sizable loss of loyalty. Park and dozens of other escapees say the great myth is wearing thin. Year after year of natural disasters, severe food shortages and gradual news of the outside world are causing the people of North Korea to consider a difficult question: perhaps their country is not paradise on earth.

Kim Jae Joon and five other North Koreans sit cross-legged in a tool shed at a farm near the base of the mountains. A 20-year-old farmer, Kim has over the past few years crossed the border regularly in search of food. He says that when he was caught last August, the interrogations had been elevated to "torture" status.

He was sent to four detention centers, questioned for days at a time, hung upside down between interrogations and finally incarcerated in a tiny cell just one meter high. A 300-watt bulb hung from the ceiling. He was fed three meager servings of low-grade wheat porridge a day. "I could not stand, and the light was so bright and hot that I couldn't sleep," he recalls. "After four months of eating the porridge, I got sharp intestinal pains and a contagious skin disease called ohm [scabies]." The prison authorities, who prefer that inmates do not die in their cells, assumed Kim had just a few days to live and sent him home.

The migrants who survive the interrogations are categorized as either political or economic outlaws. Pyongyang last year broadened the definition of a political outlaw, previously referring to ideological defectors, to include anyone who contacts a Christian or a South Korean, or attempts to participate in family reunion activities.

According to North Korean migrants, political outlaws are now typically sentenced to a life term in extremely remote prison camps. The outlaw's family rarely finds the location, so bribing a guard for release is nearly impossible. As for economic outlaws, missionaries and merchants who do business in Pyongyang say that on Sept. 9 the penalty was doubled from three months to six months in prison.

Kang Sang Hun, 21, who sits stone-faced next to Kim, relates that when he returned to North Korea in September after a food mission, he was caught with 20 Chinese yuan in his pocket. The authorities interrogated him for two weeks, then decided that he was "the worst economic outlaw."

Kang endured a full six months at a labor camp. Every day he was sent to dig a deep hole no smaller than 3 meters by 5 meters - a challenge for a strapping young man, a colossal feat for a malnourished, maltreated prisoner. "We were forced to lean over at a 45-degree angle while we dug," he says. "Our backs hurt and we were always tired and couldn't dig the hole." Failure to complete the task brought on beatings with a shovel handle. "The guards hit our legs until we couldn't walk," says Kang. "If we couldn't work, then we were deprived of sleep by being forced to stand up and down all through the night."

A riot in a Chinese detention center in the border town of Tumen in April attests to the fear of punishments meted out to river crossers. The Chinese government offered a simple account of a disturbance that was quickly brought under control. But members of China's underground operation that helps North Korean migrants say a large number of rioters had "gone crazy" over the impending trip back to their country. (Sixty were eventually repatriated.)

"These North Koreans who come over here to China are given no food and must cope with the fear of meeting North Korean agents posing as Christian missionaries and of ending up in a North Korean prison where few survive," says a Chinese Christian pastor who helps the refugees. "The food distribution system for these people has been shut off."

Peter Smerdon of the World Food Program in North Korea says the northeast is particularly hard hit, "because it has the harshest winters, little arable land and non-functioning factories." He adds: "Those who are part of the public distribution system receive 200 grams of food rations a day. In May and June this will be reduced to 150. The minimum daily requirement is 500 grams." Which suggests the exodus of desperate North Koreans will continue - as will the crackdown against them.