Give Them Shelter

But a Catch-22 in U.S. immigration policy dashed their hopes. Since South Korea’s constitution grants de facto citizenship to all North Korean defectors, those defectors are considered South Korean citizens under U.S. law–and thus cannot qualify for asylum in America. If they’re “South Koreans,” the logic goes, they aren’t being persecuted in their “home country.” Kim says his calls to the State Department went unanswered. The four teenagers were taken to Seoul, where they now reside.

Thanks to bipartisan legislation passed by the House on July 21, future defectors may have more options. The North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004, introduced by Rep. James Leach of Iowa, clarifies that North Koreans will not be barred from “eligibility for refugee status or asylum in the United States” because of any claim they have to South Korean citizenship. It establishes that, for purposes of refugee resettlement, North Koreans will be distinguished from South Koreans.

According to Rep. Joseph Pitts of Pennsylvania, a cosponsor of the bill, it makes North Koreans “a priority refugee group.” He says its provisions were modeled on those implemented for Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s. The legislation also pressures Beijing to provide the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) with unrestricted access to North Korean defectors living in China. The Chinese government, which maintains close ties to Pyongyang, regards such defectors as “economic migrants” and forcibly repatriates them to the North.

“China hasn’t given the [UNHCR] any access to these people,” says Debra Liang-Fenton, executive director of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. U.N. officials are simply “not allowed to go to the border region.” Consequently, we don’t know how many North Korean refugees are in China. According to Liang-Fenton, estimates range from 30,000 to 300,000. Tim Peters, director of the Seoul-based Helping Hands Korea, believes the world community should focus on “rescuing these people, one person at a time.”

The recently approved House legislation is very similar to the North Korea Freedom Act, a Senate bill first introduced last November by Sam Brownback of Kansas and Evan Bayh of Indiana. Both bills recognize North Korean defectors as refugees and let them apply for asylum in the United States. They also boost financial support for North Korean human rights and pro-democracy NGOs; expand radio broadcasts (including Radio Free Asia and Voice of America) into North Korea; enhance monitoring of humanitarian aid; condition non-humanitarian aid to Pyongyang on substantial human rights progress; urge China and the UNHCR to fulfill their obligations; and call for the establishment of international refugee camps. (The House bill allocates $24 million per year between 2005 and 2008, including $20 million for refugee assistance.) Suzanne Scholte, vice chairman of the North Korea Freedom Coalition steering committee, sees these measures as a breakthrough. She told a joint House sub-committee meeting in April, “Despite the frustration of being involved in this issue for so many years, I have never been more encouraged than by the introduction of the North Korean Freedom and Human Rights Acts.”

“The primary thrust” of the legislation, Brownback explains, “is to get the human rights agenda in the middle of the North Korean six-party talks,” the fourth round of which is scheduled for September in Beijing. The talks have focused almost exclusively on nuclear weapons; but Tim Peters stresses the intimate linkage between the North’s domestic brutality and its aggressive international posture.

How bad are things in the Hermit Kingdom? An October 2003 report of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea found as many as 200,000 North Korean political prisoners being held in slave-labor colonies known as kwan-li-so. It’s estimated that some 400,000 North Koreans have died in the gulag over the past three decades. This winter, a defector claiming to have been a prison guard at Camp 22 in Haengyong told the BBC he’d witnessed chemical weapons being tested on detainees.

In addition, at least 2 million North Koreans have died of starvation since the mid 1990s. As Stephen J. Morris has written in the National Interest, “The great historical achievement of Korean communism is to have caused a famine that has killed off a greater percentage of the population than has occurred anywhere else in the world (Pol Pot’s Cambodia possibly excepted).” A 2002 survey sponsored by the United Nations and the European Union showed that 4 out of every 10 North Korean children are chronically malnourished. Most foreign food aid never gets to the people in need, and is instead diverted to the military and Communist party elites or sold in other markets.

The humanitarian crisis has made Seoul more generous to North Korean defectors than it once was, and the flow of refugees has increased accordingly. As the Economist recently noted, “About 4,000 of the 5,000 or so refugees who have gone South in the past 50 years have arrived since 1999.” The exodus of roughly 460 defectors to the South–via Vietnam, apparently–in late July constituted the biggest single arrival ever.

“It’s kind of a landmark,” says Peters, who hopes the historic defection will prompt “a more realistic appraisal” of the refugee situation by South Korean officials. “They’re on the right track,” he explains, but are still hindered by fears of economic strain and by fears of upsetting Pyongyang. The South Korean government of President Roh Moo Hyun remains wedded to the North-South détente begun by former president Kim Dae Jung in the late 1990s. Known as the “sunshine” policy, this rapprochement strategy calls for dialogue and engagement, while depreciating human rights. Peters and Brownback both label it “appeasement.” “The Chinese have been very disappointing, and I hope they have a price to pay for that,” says Brownback. “The key country, though, that needs to make up its mind in this whole scenario is South Korea.”

A number of lawmakers from South Korea’s ruling Uri party have criticized the U.S. House legislation as an unwarranted “intervention” in North Korean domestic affairs. The opposition Grand National party, however, supports the bill. Not surprisingly, North Korea’s foreign ministry has angrily denounced it, and threatened to boycott the upcoming six-party talks in response. But Rep. Pitts dismisses this as bluster, saying, “I don’t think that China is going to let them withdraw.”

Brownback’s office expects Senate debate on the North Korea Freedom Act to proceed next month. Supporters hope a compromise bill can be enacted before the end of term. One Brownback staffer predicts the chief opposition will come from Joseph Biden of Delaware. Critics will likely demur along two lines: that the legislation could impede progress on the nuclear standoff, and that it is an underhanded attempt to collapse the North Korean regime.

As Peters points out, the legislation does implicitly encourage emigration; it assumes that North Koreans are yearning to vote with their feet. And many of its more hawkish backers no doubt do hope it will spark a mass exodus that hastens the peaceful collapse of Kim Jong Il’s regime. The model here is Eastern Europe, where a flood of East Germans escaping to Austria via Hungary in September 1989 catalyzed the events that brought down the Berlin Wall on November 9 and toppled Erich Honecker’s Communist dictatorship.

Is it quixotic to think Kim’s regime might similarly implode? “I think it is a possibility,” says Brownback, though he acknowledges the differences between East Germany and North Korea. “The goal of the bill is to get the human rights portfolio included in any negotiations with North Korea, [and] that’s a good part of what caused the Soviet Union to collapse, when they engaged the human rights portfolio. I’m sensing myself that we’re going to have a chance to put pretty aggressive pressure on North Korea.”

Duncan Currie is an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard.