Lee and Ling Speak Out

I'm playing catch-up after some vacation time, but Lee and Ling wrote this piece in the LATimes Tuesday detailing their capture and imprisonment.

They concede they entered North Korea briefly, but, sure enough, they were snatched on the Chinese side of the border.

Feeling nervous about where we were, we quickly turned back toward China. Midway across the ice, we heard yelling. We looked back and saw two North Korean soldiers with rifles running toward us. Instinctively, we ran.

We were firmly back inside China when the soldiers apprehended us. Producer Mitch Koss and our guide were both able to outrun the border guards. We were not. We tried with all our might to cling to bushes, ground, anything that would keep us on Chinese soil, but we were no match for the determined soldiers. They violently dragged us back across the ice to North Korea and marched us to a nearby army base, where we were detained.

...

In researching the story, we sought help from several activists and missionaries who operate in the region. Our main contact was the Seoul-based Rev. Chun Ki-won, a well-known figure in the world of North Korean defectors. Chun and his network have helped smuggle hundreds of North
Koreans out of China and into countries -- including the U.S. -- where they can start new lives. He introduced us to our guide and gave us a cellphone to use in China, telephone numbers to reach his associates and specific instructions on how to contact them. We carefully followed his directions so as to not endanger anyone in this underground world.

Because these defectors live in fear of being repatriated to North Korea, we took extreme caution to ensure that the people we interviewed and their locations were not identifiable. We met with defectors away from their actual places of work or residence. We avoided filming the faces of defectors so as not to reveal their identities. The exception was one woman who allowed us to film her profile.

Most of the North Koreans we spoke with said they were fleeing poverty and food shortages. One girl in her early 20s said she had been told she could find work in the computer industry in China. After being smuggled across the Tumen River, she found herself working with computers, but not in the way she had expected. She became one of a growing number of North Korean women who are being used as Internet sex workers, undressing for online clients on streaming video. Some defectors appeared more nervous about being interviewed than others. But they all agreed that their lives in China, while stark, were better than what they had left behind in North Korea.

Full story here.

Book Watch: ESCAPING NORTH KOREA by Mike Kim

Mike Kim is a Korean-American who has spent several years on the Chinese-Korean border working with North Korean refugees. Escaping North Korea combines straight reporting, analysis, impressions and autobiography to give a vivid picture of refugee life.

The result is often harrowing -- stories of human trafficking and North Korean women being sold as wives or slaves to Chinese farmers are among the most frightening things I've ever read -- but also inspiring, even charming.

In one chapter, Kim describes helping four teenaged refugees force their way past a Chinese security guard to enter the British Consulate in Shanghai and request asylum. Its a suspenseful episode - if the guard manages to stop one or more of the kids, its almost certain they'll end up in a gulag back in the DPRK. Kim advises the youths to punch, kick, scratch and even bite their way free if the guard manages to grab them.

Yet despite the danger, Kim takes the time to describe the kids first encounter with McDonald's and Starbucks, and shows them teasing each other and having a laugh as normal teenagers would. It's a striking, hopeful moment, a vivid reminder of how little actually separates those of us outside the DPRK with those within.

Kim's organization is called Crossing Borders, and it's a Christian NGO with a multifaceted approach to aiding North Korean refugees (on the Chinese) that includes placing families in shelters, running orphanages for refugee children and even providing work to some, making small crosses to be sold in the US.

The website stresses that in no way does Crossing Borders require that refugees become Christian to receive their services, but the organization does provide "spiritual healing" and "spreads the message of the Gospel with all refugees."

The regime is clearly threatened by religion, and documents acquired by Open Doors International suggest that North Korea feels Christianity is responsible for the fall of communism in Europe.

Some estimates have put the number of North Korean Christians at over 100,000, Kim writes.

Yet I have doubts about how useful a tool Christianity can be against the regime because of the dangers the converted face if they choose to return to North Korea.

Kim describes meeting one North Korean Christian, whom he calls Mr. Lee, in China just before the man returned to the DPRK.

"Here in China," Lee says. "I've learned about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. I'm thankful that people here have taught me the Bible...When I go back to North Korea, it will be very hard. I will get beaten, and I might even die." Lee then breaks down in tears.

Kim also describes the dangers and difficulties of smuggling Bibles across the border.

The persecution of Christians in the DPRK is abominable. In prisons, they are not allowed even to look at the sky, and many develop hunchbacks or "90-degree curvature of the spine." Some have had their fingernails and toenails pulled out and had nails hammered into their skin.

Executions are also common, and repression in the DRPK is so pervasive, and the slightest infraction - or even suspicion - can get a three generations of a person's family put into a gulag.

Religion may provide hope and comfort to the oppressed, but I'm not yet convinced that returning to the DPRK and becoming a martyr has much practical value.

Information is the key to undermining the regime and bringing about change for the North Koreans, so why risk lives and efforts to teach them about the rewards awaiting them in the next life instead of focusing efforts on spreading the news, politics and history of the outside world that has been denied to them for generations?

Anyone out there have any thoughts?