THE MOTIVATION FOR LEAVINGThe North Korean criminal code prohibits unauthorized departure to another country. Article 117 of the 1999 North Korean Criminal Code mandated a punishment of a maximum of three years labor re-education for crossing the border without permission. Article 47 of the Code stated that “one who escapes to another country or to the enemy in betrayal of his motherland and people” will receive a punishment of a minimum of seven years labor re-education, and for serious violations the mandated sentence is execution and forfeiture of all property.5 These provisions violate the fundamental right to leave one’s own country, a right enshrined both in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13(2) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 12(2), to which the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) is a state party.6 Beyond the force of the criminal code is the suffocating cradle-to-grave propaganda of the North Korean government, which ceaselessly portrays North Korea as paradise on earth and China, South Korea, and the United States as horrible places of poverty and injustice. To shatter the bounds of this all-encompassing construct and even consider the possibility of crossing the border into China is indeed tantamount to treason in the mind of a North Korean citizen. South Korean anthropologist Chung Byung-Ho provides the following summary description of the decision to leave the homeland: For the people in North
Korea,
crossing the national border is not a simple act for better living. It
is considered as an ultimate resistance to the regime, on the same
order as suicide. The state has indoctrinated the population rather
successfully up to the level of a quasi-religious community. Thus,
crossing the border means an act of secession, an act of betrayal, and
the ultimate crime.7
Refugees International’s own interviews with North Korean refugees in Yanbian confirm this sense of crossing the border as treason. According to one young man from Onsung, interviewed in June 2004, “Escaping is a shameful experience.” A 48-year old woman from Ch’ongjin said that she felt like a traitor for coming to China. When she was arrested in China and deported, a 32-year-old woman from Hoeryong was initially placed in a National Security Jail, where the guards repeatedly told the captured defectors that “a man without a country is worse than a dog at a funeral.”8 The primary motivation for North Koreans to leave their country is survival. China considers all North Korean entering the country to be economic migrants, but this does not do justice to the level of suffering and deprivation that North Koreans experience. The North Koreans interviewed by RI in 2003 and 2004 were almost all facing extreme circumstances when they left their homeland: food deprivation as the result of the collapse of the Public Distribution System, which supplied the basic food basket to North Korean families until the mid-90s famine; loss of employment as state enterprisesceased to function; death of family members in the famine, which shattered the support networks for the individual; health problems, either personal or of a family member, which led the individual to seek money for medicines in China. The vast majority of the North Koreans that RI interviewed were from North Hamgyong province, one of the poorest provinces in the country and one deliberately cut off from national and international food assistance during the famine as part of a “triage” strategy to husband scarce food resources.9 Among the 65 people that RI interviewed in Yanbian, only two cited political reasons for leaving. One 28-year-old woman said that one reason she left, in addition to accompanying her brother, was that her family was in the “hostile class,” the lowest and least privileged of the three strata in the North Korean class system.10 A 43-year-old woman from Onsung said that her parents were suspect because her father was a businessman (who later defected to South Korea) and her mother had studied in Germany and Russia. Her parents were treated like political prisoners. As a result, her own background was suspect and she didn’t want to pass this down to her children, so she decided to leave for China.11 |
Executive Summary Introduction The Scope of the Problem The Motivation for Leaving The Situation in China Treatment Upon Deportation The Case for Refugee Status for North Koreans in China Protection for North Koreans in China South Korean Policy United States Policy and the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004 Recommendations ----------- Notes Appendix: Interviews between Refugees International and North Korean Refugees Acknowledgments |
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Acts of Betrayal: The Motivation for Leaving
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