U.S. Urged to Use Clout with Beijing on Behalf of North Korean Refugees
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WASHINGTON, D.C., May 13 (OneWorld) - The United States should press China to help solve one of the world's worst humanitarian crises by ending its policy of repatriating North Koreans, according to a new report from a leading refugee advocacy group.
Refugees International likened North Koreans' troubles to the so-called killing fields of 1970s Cambodia under Pol Pot and also urged Washington to pressure Beijing to allow U.N. refugee officials to conduct a needs assessment along the Sino-Korean border. ''The U.S. needs to pursue a more serious and persistent diplomatic strategy with China, which remains the primary obstacle to improving the protection available to North Korean asylum seekers,'' said the report, released Thursday. Joel Charny, vice president of policy at Refugees International and the report's author, said there were some 50,000 North Koreans in China. Higher estimates--some as high as 300,000--likely included people who cross the border to collect food, which they take back to North Korea, he added. Such cross-border traffic has become increasingly common since North Korea acknowledged the existence of private markets and began to loosen central control of its economy in 2002, Charny said. Chinese authorities consider all North Koreans who remain in northeast China to be illegal economic migrants, he said, but they should be classified as refugees. ''Like Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, North Koreans live under an all-encompassing reality of oppression, so to talk about economic migrants in that context is not meaningful,'' Charny said at a briefing Thursday for journalists, legislative staff, and others. Charny said his organization recognized that its chief demands were ''utopian'' and unlikely to materialize because of Chinese reluctance to do anything that would alienate its North Korean ally. However, he said Chinese fears of a potential massive influx of refugees were Beijing to open its borders would be allayed if it agreed, instead, to provide or facilitate ''quiet humanitarian assistance'' for North Koreans residing in or seeking transit to third countries through China. ''This will not result in a massive influx barring another famine in North Korea,'' Charny said. North Koreans crossed into China in large numbers in the mid-1990s, when famine killed as many as two million of North Korea's 22 million people. South Korea also has been cautious about pressing China and North Korea, for fear of antagonizing the Pyongyang regime and jeopardizing asylum seekers. Some 2,000 North Koreans were resettled in South Korea last year, bringing to 6,500 the number who have sought refuge in the south in the past decade. Turning to the United States, Charny's report said the administration of President George W. Bush was ''powerless to involve itself directly in protecting North Koreans in China.'' But it added that Washington had not done enough to convince Beijing to change its policy of rounding up North Koreans and sending them back. Washington, under pressure from Christian and conservative activists, has added human rights to a North Korea agenda dominated by the goal of stopping Pyongyang from building nuclear weapons. Beijing's help is essential to that effort. Congress passed a North Korean Human Rights Act last October but the law has largely gone unimplemented. For example, the measure allows the United States to accept North Korean refugees but none have been admitted so far, mainly because of security restrictions imposed after the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Prospects for U.S. action on North Korean refugees could be dim, said Kurt Campbell, international security program director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, DC-based think tank. ''The U.S. can't dictate to China. It has a laundry list of things it wants Beijing to do,'' ranging from the nuclear weapons issue to devaluing the Chinese currency, to assuaging U.S. complaints of unfair trading practices, Campbell said. The Refugees International report, based on interviews with 65 North Koreans in Yanbian, China acknowledged that ''while Chinese policy is to arrest and deport North Koreans as illegal economic migrants, the actual implementation of this policy at the local level in Yanbian is tempered by intra-ethnic solidarity that Korean-Chinese officials feel for their deprived brothers and sisters from North Korea.'' Many Chinese in Yanbian, it added, either experienced or heard their parents' tales of having been sheltered and cared for in then more prosperous North Korea in the 1960s, during the political and cultural upheaval and famine that marked the Cultural Revolution. Several North Koreans cited in the report said that Chinese border guards helped them when they first crossed into the country, according to the report. However, matters appear to have worsened for North Koreans in China since activists began to raise the public profile of their plight by organizing groups of North Koreans to enter foreign embassies in Beijing in the spring of 2002, the report added. ''Local officials in Yanbian have had less and less leeway to tolerate the presence of North Koreans in the prefecture,'' it said. ''The reaction of the national authorities to these events is to order the local government security forces to round up illegal North Korean migrants and deport them.'' The report also acknowledged that some North Koreans, denied the opportunity to gain legal employment, had resorted to crime to support themselves and this contributed to Beijing's decision to ramp up repatriations. The thousands who have been forcibly sent back to North Korea face internment in labor camps or even execution, the report said. To illustrate this point, Refugees International screened video footage that it said showed the summary execution in North Korea last March of two men accused of smuggling women into China. Meanwhile, economic factors are adding to the pressure on North Koreans to flee in search of food or asylum, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in the country told a Washington, D.C. briefing Thursday via video conferencing from Texas. Richard Ragan, Pyongyang-based country director with the U.N.'s World Food Program (WFP), said private markets had opened across North Korea, not just in the capital, since 2002. But relaxed price controls, coupled with cutbacks in government supplies of food through public distribution centers, had led to 100-percent inflation and severe hardships for civil servants and industrial workers whose wages were boosted in 2002 but have remained frozen since. As a result, many families spend 80 percent of their disposable income on food. ''This clearly is unsustainable,'' Ragan said. Ragan said WFP needs $14 million or 40,000 tons of food per month to meet its target of feeding some 6.5 million North Koreans. He said the United States, of which he is a citizen, gave 40,000 tons of food last year but none so far this year. U.S. contributions are made in kind, not cash, and it takes three months for U.S. food donations to reach beneficiaries, he said. In contrast, cash contributions from other donors, including Japan and China, are used to buy food in Asia that can be delivered to beneficiaries within 30 days, he added. |
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