catman
Joined: 18 Jul 2004
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 Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2007 11:58 am Post subject: Leaving North Korea at any price |
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SEOUL - Brokers here are busily selling what they call "planned escapes" from North Korea.
Given enough money, the brokers say, they can now get just about anyone out of the dictatorial Stalinist state that human rights activists call the world's largest prison.
A low-budget escape through China via Thailand to Seoul, which requires treacherous river crossings, arduous travel on foot and several miserable weeks in a Thai immigration jail, can cost less than $2,000, according to four brokers here.
A first-class defection, complete with a forged Chinese passport and an airplane ticket from Beijing to Seoul, goes for more than $10,000. From start to finish, it can take as little as three weeks.
North Korea's underground railroad to the South is busier than ever because the number of border guards and low-level security officials in the North who are eager to take bribes has increased exponentially.
With the disintegration of North Korea's communist economy and the near-collapse of its state-run food distribution system, the country's non-elite population is in dire need of cash for food and other essentials, experts agree.
"More than ever, money talks," said Chun Ki-won, a Christian pastor and aid worker in Seoul who says that in the past eight years he has helped 650 people elude Chinese authorities and settle in Seoul.
New breed of defection broker
Religious groups once dominated the defection trade in North Korea, but in recent years defectors themselves, many of them former military and security officers, have begun to take over, several brokers and religious leaders said.
This new breed of broker, based in Seoul, uses personal and institutional contacts to hire North Korean guides and to bribe officials. The guides make clandestine contact with defectors, then escort them to the Chinese border, which in most places is a river that they swim in summer and walk across in winter after it freezes. On the other side, Chinese-speaking guides take over.
"I didn't know it could happen so fast," said a 37-year-old North Korean defector who paid $12,000 to a broker in Seoul in 2002 to get her 11-year-old son out. The woman did not want her name published because this month she and her siblings are paying another broker to smuggle out their mother.
"It only took five days for my son to be plucked out and taken across the river into China," she said, adding that two weeks later he was in South Korea. "I was dumbfounded when I got a call from officials at Seoul airport and my son was here."
For years, North-to-South defections amounted to just a trickle. Most of those coming out were men in their 30s and 40s who held positions that made fleeing relatively easy, such as diplomatic work abroad or border duty with the military. Generally, they escaped without help.
Just 41 defectors sought asylum in South Korea in 1995, but nearly every year since then the number has risen, the flow enhanced by the networks of brokers and agents that sprang up. More than 2,000 North Koreans settled here last year, according to the government in Seoul.
As the number has increased, the typical sex and age of defectors have also changed. There are more women and more families, according to Chun Sung-ho, an official at South Korea's Ministry of Unification.
Those figures do not include the many more North Koreans who are hiding in China without connections to brokers who can bring them on to South Korea. The New York-based human rights group Amnesty International estimates their number at about 100,000, a substantial proportion of whom are women who have been sold into prostitution.
For all the functionaries who are newly willing to take money to look the other way, for all the recent diplomatic optimism that North Korea may be opening up, working on the underground railroad remains extremely risky.
"It is possible to get people out, but you cannot say it is easy," said Lee Jeong-yeon, a former North Korean military officer who defected in 1999. A lot of guides and brokers get caught, he said, adding: "The policy is for 100 percent execution of those caught helping people to defect. I personally saw several such executions."
Lee, whose identity was confirmed by the South Korean government, said he worked for three years along the Chinese-North Korean border, where he supervised agents who pretended to be brokers and guides in order to infiltrate and disrupt the smuggling trade.
"The successful brokers are experienced people who have good contacts in the military, and they bribe the guards," said Lee, who said he has used his contacts to smuggle 34 North Koreans across China and into Southeast Asia. "Guards are rotated often, and new people have to be bribed."
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