North Korean Exiles Seek Higher Profile
By SIOBHAN McDONOUGH, Associated Press Writer , Fri Apr 29, 5:06 PM ET
WASHINGTON - Soon Ok Lee remembers her years in a North Korea prison camp as brutal. From 1986 to 1992, she said, she experienced and witnessed atrocities in prison camps where people like her were forced to live as slaves under the military dictatorship of Kim Jong Il.
Soon and others who escaped North Korea announced Friday the opening of a Washington office of the Exile Committee for North Korean Democracy, a new umbrella group for dissidents.
The committee is made up of 6,300 defectors — almost all of whom live in South Korea — and aims to expand the anti-Kim Jong Il forces within North Korea and form a united front with them, according to Dong Chul Choi, Soon's son and the group's representative in Washington.
The most important task for the committee is "to enlighten North Korean people with genuine spirit of human rights and democracy against the blind loyalty to Kim and idolatry of the dictator," the group said in a statement.
"We are working to topple Kim's dictatorship," said Seong Min Kim, an army captain who fled communist North Korea. "This is a milestone, a starting point. We want to solidify the anti-Kim Jong Il movement in North Korea."
Soon recalled her experiences at a news conference launching the office. She spoke of hunger, long hours of labor and brutality after she was imprisoned on accusations of stealing from her job as a supplier of clothes and other items to government officials. Now 59, she was sentenced to 13 years in prison and spent several years behind bars before being granted amnesty in 1996.
"Once you end up in prison camp, after three months, the body falls apart," she said, describing meals amounting to no more than a pinch of corn. "After six months to a year, the shape changes. You have only a skeleton and skin.
"All the prisoners eventually die of disease, torture, starvation," Soon said. "Until the moment they die, they are brainwashed so they thoroughly claim loyalty to the party."
She said if one member of a family was accused of a political crime, three generations of the same family might be punished. Dong, Soon's only son, was plucked out of university and forced to work on a farm.
Christians seemed to get the worst treatment, Soon said. "They are beaten nonstop, forced to do labor 16 to 18 hours a day. They become disfigured."
After her release, she escaped with her son to South Korea and moved after a few years to the United States. She now works as a church missionary in Virginia.
Disputed Bones: Japan, North Korea and the 'Nature' Controversy
by Gavan McCormack, Japan Focus, 18 April 2005.
On 14 April, the 61st session of the United Nations Human Rights Commission
meeting, adopted a resolution drafted and submitted jointly by Japan and the EU
on the situation of Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea
(North Korea). It called on North Korea to immediately return Japanese abductees
and on the UN General Assembly to take up the question of North Korean human
rights violations in general.[1]
The No 1 abductee whose return is sought by Japan is Yokota Megumi, abducted
from the Japan Sea coast in Niigata prefecture on 15 November 1977, when the
13-year old schoolgirl was returning home from a badminton match. She would be,
if indeed still alive today, a woman in her early 40s.[2]
In 2002, when Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro made his dramatic
day-trip to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and try to normalize
relations between the two countries, North Korea admitted and apologized for
this (and other abductions), explaining that during the two and half decades
since the event, the girl had married a local Korean, Kim Chol Jun, in 1986,
given birth to a daughter the following year, but suffered depression and had
committed suicide while undergoing hospital treatment in March 1993.[3] In 2004,
Two years later, at a subsequent meeting between the two sides and after further
investigations, North Korea revised the date of Megumi's death first to March,
then to April 1994. When the Japanese side demanded evidence of her death, her
supposed husband, Kim Chol Jun, handed over ash and bone fragments. He said he
had kept her body buried in his garden for two years, then dug it up and
cremated it, keeping the remains in his own possession.
In Japan, the National Research Institute of Police Science declared that it
could not extract any DNA from the samples it received, but at Teikyo
University, a private university said to have a high reputation in the field of
mitochondrial DNA analysis, the medical department succeeded where the Police
Institute had failed. The government concluded from the Teikyo study that the
remains were not those of Megumi (whose family had kept her umbilical cord) but
of two unrelated people. It insisted that there was "absolutely no
evidence" to support North Korea's claim that Megumi (and seven others) had
died. Therefore, since there was the "possibility of them being still
alive," it demanded their return.[4] Megumi's parents became the central
figures in a burgeoning national movement demanding that Koizumi's government
impose sanctions or other forms of retaliation against North Korea. For many,
nothing short of the end of the Kim Jong Il regime would suffice.
North Korea reacted with anger to the outcome of the Japanese investigation. Its
formal response, on 24 January, took the form of a North Korean Central News
Agency "Memorandum."[5] It insisted its explanations had been
truthful, and suggested Japan's government must have rigged the tests, using
other bones. It stressed the fact that the Japanese Police Institute and Teikyo
University analyses had come to different conclusions and argued that it was
unscientific and improper to place absolute weight on one conclusion only. It
was "common sense" that DNA material could not be extracted from human
remains cremated, as according to North Korean custom, at 1200 degrees
centigrade. North Korea also protested against the refusal of the Japanese side
to acknowledge its sincere effort to resolve the abduction problem. No sooner
had the Japanese delegation returned from North Korea in November 2004, it
protested, than "some politicians" were calling for economic
sanctions. It denounced the Japanese side for breaking the promise, made in a
statement signed by the head of the Japanese delegation at the time when the
bones were handed over, to the effect that "[w]e promise to hand these
remains directly to Yokota Megumi's parents, and not to publish the
matter." It concluded by dismissing the outcome of the analysis as "a
fabrication by corrupt elements," saying that "[n]ot only has Japan
gone to the lengths of fabricating the results of an analysis of human bones and
refused to concede that the abduction problem has been settled, but it also
completely denies our sincerity and effort. It is they who have pushed North
Korea-Japan relations to this worst-ever pitch of confrontation."
It goes without saying that North Korean statements have little credibility in
Japan. In the dispute over the technical, scientific matter of mitochondrial DNA
analysis, the Japanese government's pronouncements were taken, at least
initially, as definitive. It was assumed, not only in Japan but around the
world, that North Korea's deception had been exposed because Japan's level of
technology was above anything North Korea could imagine.
Observers in Japan and elsewhere also noted that North Korea's story had little
credibility because its account of the abductions had been full of
inconsistencies from the start. The alteration of the date of Megumi's death,
confusion over the hospital at which she had been receiving treatment, the
inherently improbable story that she had been strolling in the hospital grounds
with a doctor when she escaped his attention and hanged herself from a pine
tree,[6] using a rope she had made out of her clothing, beggared belief. There
had also been major discrepancies in the accounts of the fate of other abductees,
who were said to have died in strange traffic accidents (in a country with
little traffic), or of heart attacks or liver failures (when young and
apparently healthy) or from poisoning by a defective gas heater. In two other
cases, apart from Megumi's, in both 2002 and 2004 North Korea provided remains
that it said were "probably" those of a man abducted from Europe in
1980 (Matsuki Kaoru) who is supposed to have died, with his wife and one child,
in 1988, but on both occasions DNA tests showed, apparently conclusively, that
the remains were unrelated.
It was hard in Japan to believe North Korea's account that the remains of all
the deceased abductees had been lost in the floods, dam bursts and landslides of
the mid-1990s. Furthermore, the scraps of evidence relating to Megumi that the
"sincere reinvestigation" promised by Kim Jong Il turned up late in
2004 -- hospital records, traffic accident records, doctors' accounts -- all
seemed to the Japanese implausible. The North Korean attempt to explain the
lacunae in terms of being hampered by the "special agencies of state"
originally responsible for the abductions, which were said to have burned all
relevant documents, carried little water. It was indisputable that the 1990s had
been a decade of acute social and economic crisis in North Korea, in which
hundreds of thousands had died of famine or in extremely straitened
circumstances and much of the country had indeed been devastated by floods and
landslides, yet the Japanese authorities still insisted on verifiable material
evidence.
Japan's government therefore denounced North Korea's 2004
"reinvestigation" as unsatisfactory and "extremely
insincere." Since Pyongyang persisted in denying knowledge of other
Japanese strongly suspected to have been abducted, and since its explanations of
the fate of those it admitted to abducting were implausible, the conviction grew
in Japan that the victims were not dead at all but were being held,
involuntarily, perhaps because they knew too much. Kim Chol Jun, who was
described in 2002 as an employee of a trading company, himself transmogrified by
2004 into a member of a "special agency of state," the very group
responsible (according to Kim Jong Il's 2002 explanation) for the abductions in
the first place. According to several of the abductees who returned to Japan in
2002, his real name was actually Kim Yon Su, and he had been separated from
Megumi for around one year before her supposed death.[7] If that were so, the
story of his having buried, exhumed, cremated, and then retained her remains,
became even more unlikely. Megumi's case became central. Shocked by the
seemingly irrefutable evidence of a North Korean attempt to deceive Japan, and
with no shadow of doubt over the outcome of the DNA tests in the Megumi case,
the Japanese government, under a rising wave of angry public and media pressure,
suspended the humanitarian aid that Koizumi had promised in May 2004 and turned
its attention seriously towards punitive economic sanctions.
However, while North Korea's protestations were dismissed in Japan, they gained
some support from an unexpected quarter. An article in the 3 February 2005 issue
of the prestigious international scientific journal, Nature, revealed that the
DNA analysis on Megumi's remains had been performed by a member of the medical
department of Teikyo University, Yoshii Tomio.[8] Yoshii, it later transpired,
was a relatively junior faculty member, of lecturer status, in a forensic
department that had neither a professor nor even an assistant professor.[9]
Remarkably, he said that he had no previous experience in the analysis of
cremated specimens, described his tests as inconclusive and remarked that such
samples were very easily contaminated by anyone coming in contact with them,
like "stiff sponges that can absorb anything." In other words, the man
who had actually conducted the Japanese analysis pronounced it anything but
definitive. The five tiny samples he had been given to work on (the largest of
them 1.5 grams) had anyway been used up in his laboratory, so independent
verification was thereafter impossible. It seemed likely as a result that nobody
could ever know for sure what Pyongyang's package had contained.
When the Japanese government's chief cabinet secretary, Hosoda Hiroyuki,
referred to this article as inadequate and a misrepresentation of the
government-commissioned analysis, Nature responded, in a highly unusual
editorial (17 March), saying that:
"Japan is right to doubt North Korea's every statement. But its
interpretation of the DNA tests has crossed the boundary of science's freedom
from political interference. Nature's interview with the scientist who carried
out the tests raised the possibility that the remains were merely contaminated,
making the DNA tests inconclusive. This suggestion is uncomfortable for a
Japanese government that wants to have North Korea seen as unambiguously
fraudulent. ...
The inescapable fact is that the bones may have been contaminated. ... It is
also entirely possible that North Korea is lying. But the DNA tests that Japan
is counting on won't resolve the issue. The problem is not in the science but in
the fact that the government is meddling in scientific matters at all. Science
runs on the premise that experiments, and all the uncertainty involved in them,
should be open for scrutiny. Arguments made by other Japanese scientists that
the tests should have been carried out by a larger team are convincing. Why did
Japan entrust them to one scientist working alone, one who no longer seems to be
free to talk about them?
Japan's policy seems a desperate effort to make up for what has been a
diplomatic failure ... Part of the burden for Japan's political and diplomatic
failure is being shifted to a scientist for doing his job -- deriving
conclusions from experiments and presenting reasonable doubts about them. But
the friction between North Korea and Japan will not be decided by a DNA test.
Likewise, the interpretation of DNA test results cannot be decided by the
government of either country. Dealing with North Korea is no fun, but it doesn't
justify breaking the rules of separation between science and politics."[10]
Apart from a brief reference in one weekly journal, no word of this
extraordinary exchange penetrated into the Japanese mass media. Three weeks
after it, the Foreign Minister told the Diet, in answer to a question, that he
knew nothing about the Nature article.[11] Meanwhile, anger at North Korea
mounted and preparations went ahead for what was expected to be the largest-yet
protest meeting scheduled to be held in Tokyo, on 24 April. As for Mr Yoshii,
one week after the Nature editorial he left Teikyo hospital, promoted from lowly
university lecturer to the prestigious position of head of the forensic medical
department of the Tokyo metropolitan police department. Nature reported, in its
third discussion of the case (7 April), that it had been told Yoshii was
therefore not available for media comment.[12] The suggestion, in a
parliamentary question on 30 March, that this smacked of government complicity
in "hiding a witness" drew outrage and the comment from the Minister
of Foreign Affairs that it was "extremely regrettable" for such
aspersions to be cast on Japan's scientific integrity.[13]
Beyond the immediate parties to the dispute, South Korean forensic scientists
also expressed skepticism about the Japanese findings, on grounds of the low
possibility of DNA material surviving cremation and the high probability of
contamination,[14] and Time magazine (4 April) reported that the technique that
Yoshii had used, known as "nested PCR," was one that professional
forensic laboratories in the US avoided because of the risk of
contamination.[15] Early in April, the head of the Japan section of the North
Korean Foreign Ministry told a visiting group of Japanese academics that Japan
must return the Megumi remains, which would then be submitted for analysis to
some independent institution.[16]
The stalemate in Japan-North Korea relations continued. Japan pressed ahead
towards sanctions, even though such a course was not favored by any of the other
parties, including the US, to the Beijing "Six-Sided" conference on
North Korean nuclear questions, and towards further isolating and pressuring the
Pyongyang regime. However, its refusal to address the issues raised in the
international media, especially in the journal of the international scientific
community, undermined its case. It can be assumed that, in pressing the UN Human
Rights Commission to adopt the resolution calling on North Korea to return the
abductees, including Megumi, Japan did not feel any need to draw the Nature
critique to the attention of delegates.
While it may be true that North Korea "routinely and egregiously violates
nearly all international human rights standards,"[17] that does not
diminish the requirement for scrupulousness on the part of the Japanese
government in presenting its case. The Japanese government presumably thought
its claim to the moral high ground in a dispute with North Korea would go
unchallenged, yet the bureaucratically controlled, peer-unsupervised, analysis,
by a single researcher without experience in work on cremated remains, whose
findings could not be confirmed and who was promptly removed from public
accountability when doubts were raised about his work, served to complicate the
issue and to give comfort rather than to undermine the regime in North Korea.
[1] "Statement by the Press Secretary/Director-General for Press and Public
Relations, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on the adoption of the resolution on the
situation of human rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea at the
U.N. Commission on Human Rights," 15 April 2005.
[2] For general details on the abductions, Gavan McCormack, Target North Korea:
Pushing North Korea to the Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, New York Nation Books,
2004, chapter 6, and Gavan McCormack and Wada Haruki, "Forever Stepping
Back: The Strange Record of 15 Years of Negotiations between Japan and North
Korea," forthcoming in a volume edited by John Feffer.
[3] For details of the abductions and the various statements by the two
governments, see, for the Japanese side, the Japanese government's Ministry of
Foreign Affairs web-site and for the North Korean side, statements as reported
in the Japanese media.
[4] Japanese government statement of 24 December 2004.
[5] "Biboroku," Asahi shimbun, 28 January 2005.
[6] Japanese officials, shown the tree in November 2004, estimated that its
trunk was a mere 10 centimeters in diameter, a circumstance that deepened their
doubt about the suicide story. ("Rachi higaisha seizon no kanosei,"
Asahi shimbun, 3 April 2005.)
[7] NHK television, 27 March 2005.
[8] David Cyranoski, "DNA is burning issue as Japan and Korea clash over
kidnaps," Nature, Vol. 433, 3 February 2005, p. 445.
[9] "Netsuzo wa, kiji ka kantei kekka ka," Shukan gendai, 19 March
2005.
[10] "Politics versus reality," Nature, Vol. 434, 17 March 2005, p.
257.
[11] Machimura Nobutaka, Foreign Minister, in response to question in the House
of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee, 23 February 2005.
[12] "David Cyranoski, "Geneticist's new post could stop him
testifying about DNA tests," Nature, Vol. 434, 7 April 2005, p. 685.
[13] Machimura, in response to question in the House of Representatives, 30
March 2005.
[14] "'Nicho ikotsu kantei kobo' senmonka kenkai," Seoul, Yonhap, 25
January 2005.
[15] Donald Macintyre, "Bones of Contention," Time, 4 April 2005, Vol.
165, No. 13.
[16] "'Nihon gaimusho to awanu' meigen," Asahi shimbun, 3 April 2005.
[17] "North Korea: Human Rights Concerns for the 61st Session of the U.N.
Human Rights Commission," New York, Human Rights Watch, 4 April 2005.
Gavan McCormack is professor in the Research School of Pacific and Asian
Studies, Australian National University and visiting professor in social
science, International Christian University, Tokyo. He is author of Target
North Korea: Pushing North Korea to the Brink, and of other essays on North
Korea and Japan-related topics. He is a Japan Focus coordinator. Posted at Japan
Focus on April 18, 2005.
PROTECT HUMAN RIGHTS BY STRUGGLING AGAINST THE USA
Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), Pyongyang, 1 April 2005
A DPRK delegate, participating in the discussion on item 9 "Human rights
performance in all countries of the world" at the 61st meeting of the UN
Commission on Human Rights in Geneva on March 23, accused the EU of its
dastardly act of seeking only its selfish political purpose, backing the US
hostile policy toward the DPRK. He said: The United States is so foolish as to
work hard to apply to the DPRK the "human rights" standards it has
used for launching aggression and war against other countries and toppling their
governments, turning a blind eye to its poor human rights record. The US adopted
the ill-famed "North Korean Human Rights Act" last year, a typical
example of its attempt at "bringing down" the system of the DPRK under
the pretext of "human rights". Its behaviour forcing other countries
to change even their political systems and ways of life is nothing but the
gravest human rights abuse. The present reality teaches a lesson that it is the
only option for protecting the genuine human rights to struggle against the US
with physical strength as long as its policy remains unchanged. The evermore
undisguised policy pursued by the US and the EU to isolate and stifle the DPRK
under the pretext of its "human rights issue" will only harden the
resolution and will of the Korean people to defend the socialist system chosen
by themselves and their independent life and prompt them to fight against the
policy to the last.
PROTECT DPRK REFUGEES: UN SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR
Yonhap, Geneva, 29 March 2005
The United Nations' Special Rapporteur on human rights in North Korea
recommended international protection for defectors from the impoverished
country here Tuesday. Vitit Muntarbhorn, who was appointed to the position by
the UN Commission on Human Rights last year, said in his official report that
the forced repatriation of North Korean refugees should be stopped, while refuge
camps or protection facilities should be provided to them. His report appeared
aimed at China and Russia, two countries that have been criticized for forcibly
repatriating refugees to North Korea in accordance with respective bilateral
agreements with the last Stalinist state and for refusing to grant them refugee
status.
Muntarbhorn, a former law professor from Thailand, also called on North Korea to allow non-governmental organizations unlimited access to the country which had rejected his own proposed visit. He wrote his report based on interviews with government officials, civic organizations and other sources. He also pointed out the distribution of food aid in North Korea should be delivered in a transparent manner to its intended recipients. The UN official also asked North Korea to return any remaining Japanese abductees as soon as possible. The UN body endorsed resolutions against North Korea in 2003 and 2004, urging the country to cooperate with the international community in the investigation of allegations of human rights violations there. North Korea rejects such resolutions as the fruit of a political conspiracy.
Bones of Contention
By DONALD MACINTYRE, TIME, Monday, Mar. 28, 2005, With reporting by Michiko Toyama/Tokyo
In 2002, Kim Jong Il deep-sixed relations with Japan by admitting that North Korea kidnapped 13 Japanese citizens in the 1970s and held them for decades. He tried repairing the damage by sending five of the abductees home in the following months. The remaining eight, according to North Korea, had died. Last November, Pyongyang returned to Japan the cremated ashes and bone fragments of Megumi Yokota, who was kidnapped in her hometown of Niigata in 1977 at the age of 13, and allegedly committed suicide in 1994. Tokyo ran DNA tests on the remains and announced they weren't Yokota's. Public anger ran white hot: conservative politicians and Yokota's parents called for sanctions against North Korea and the government blocked rice shipments. Pyongyang angrily disputed Japan's DNA test, but nobody paid any attention.
It turns out the remains might have been Yokota's after all. In February, the British scientific journal Nature published an article in which the scientist who did the tests admitted they were inconclusive and that the remains could have been contaminated with foreign DNA. "The bones are like stiff sponges that can absorb anything," Teikyo University DNA analyst Yoshii Tomio told a Nature interviewer. The technique Yoshii used, known as "nested PCR," also raised doubts: professional forensics labs in the U.S. don't use it because of the high risk of contamination, according to Terry Melton, a DNA expert at Pennsylvania-based Mitotyping Technologies. Yoshii has declined comment and Japan won't release his results. A Foreign Ministry spokesman says the remains were consumed in the tests, so there is no way to redo them. Yokota's father, Shigeru Yokota, tells TIME he doesn't really understand the issues surrounding the DNA tests but that he's "angry that Japan now looks foolish in its negotiations with North Korea." In a toughly worded editorial in its March 17 issue, Nature said an inconclusive test result might be "uncomfortable," but urged the Japanese government to get serious with its science. "Dealing with North Korea is no fun," it wrote, "but it doesn't justify breaking the rules of separation between science and politics."
Politics versus reality
NATURE, No.434, p. 257 (17 March 2005)
Japan's politicians have to face scientific uncertainty, no matter how uncomfortable it may be. They should mobilize diplomatic means, and not sacrifice scientific integrity, in their fight with North Korea.
The cabinet of Japan's prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, is "burying its head in its hands" in frustration, in the words of one popular Japanese weekly, over a news article that appeared in Nature last month. At issue is whether Megumi Yokota, a Japanese woman kidnapped by North Korea in 1977 at the age of 13, is still alive. In 2002, North Korea admitted to abducting 13 Japanese nationals, several of them taken from beaches while on dates. Since then, North Korea's half-hearted efforts to account for the victims have caused turmoil in the relationship between the two countries (see Nature No.433, p.445; 2005 below).
Claims that most of the victims, including Yokota, have died are unconvincing. North Korea says the remains that it passed to Japan last year are hers. But Japan's tests show that the DNA is someone else's raising the spectre that the North Korean military is still using her to train spies. Japan is right to doubt North Korea's every statement. But its interpretation of the DNA tests has crossed the boundary of science's freedom from political interference. Nature's interview with the scientist who carried out the tests raised the possibility that the remains were merely contaminated, making the DNA tests inconclusive. This suggestion is uncomfortable for a Japanese government that wants to have North Korea seen as unambiguously fraudulent.
The government has responded sharply to the article. At a press conference, Japan's chief cabinet secretary, Hiroyuki Hosoda, reportedly alleged that Nature's article contained "inadequate expressions" and that it misrepresented the scientist's statements. The opinions expressed in the article were "general knowledge" but were not meant to apply to the case at hand, Hosoda said, adding that his statements were checked with the scientist. The scientist himself, meanwhile, is apparently no longer available for interviews.
The inescapable fact is that the bones may have been contaminated. Who knows what they have been through during this hellish episode? According to North Korea, the body was buried for two years before being dug up and cremated at 1,200C, and then kept at the woman's husband's home, before a small sample was passed to Japan. It is also entirely possible that North Korea is lying. But the DNA tests that Japan is counting on won't resolve the issue.
The problem is not in the science but in the fact that the government is meddling in scientific matters at all. Science runs on the premise that experiments, and all the uncertainty involved in them, should be open for scrutiny. Arguments made by other Japanese scientists that the tests should have been carried out by a larger team are convincing. Why did Japan entrust them to one scientist working alone - one who no longer seems to be free to talk about them? Japan's policy seems a desperate effort to make up for what has been a diplomatic failure - or more precisely, a failure of the security alliance between Japan and the United States. The alliance gives the United States rights to place unpopular bases in Japan in exchange for its role in contributing "to the security of Japan and the maintenance of international peace and security in the Far East".
Could Japan, with US backing, have pulled other levers with North Korea? The answer is not clear, but the question can be put another way. If a totalitarian country had abducted US citizens from a beach and carried them back to teach language to potential spies for 25 years, would George Bush or any other US president be standing there with a bag of ashes haggling over DNA test results?
Part of the burden for Japan's political and diplomatic failure is being shifted to a scientist for doing his job - deriving conclusions from experiments and presenting reasonable doubts about them. But the friction between North Korea and Japan will not be decided by a DNA test. Likewise, the interpretation of DNA test results cannot be decided by the government of either country. Dealing with North Korea is no fun, but it doesn't justify breaking the rules of separation between science and politics.
DNA is burning issue as Japan and Korea clash over kidnaps
by David Cyranoski, Tokyo,
NATURE, Vol.433, 3 Feb. 2005 (p.445)
A bitter dispute has erupted between Japan and North Korea over DNA tests used to
establish whether cremated remains belong to a Japanese citizen abducted in 1977.
The argument is the latest twist in an episode that has soured relations between
the two countries for years. During the 1970s and 1980s. North Korea was believed to have
abducted at least 13, and perhaps as many as 100, Japanese citizens to work in its
espionage programme. Now the two nations are falling out over the feasibility of correctly
identifying DNA from the ashes of one of those abducted.
In the autumn of 2002, North Korea ended years of denials and admitted that members of
its armed forces abducted 13 Japanese citizens from Japan and Europe. The North Korean
leader, Kim Jong-il, claimed mat the abductions were carried out by the military without
government permission. Japan says it has evidence of two more abductees, and believes
that there were in fact many more.
Pressure on North Korea to release survivors has since seen five abductees return to
Japan accompanied by their families. Information on eight others, which North Korea
says are dead, has been slow to arrive, leading to speculation that some of them are still alive.
On 15 November last year, Japanese officials returned from talks in Pyongyang carrying what North Korea claimed to be the
cremated remains of Megumi Yokota, who was abducted in 1977 at the age of 13. According to North Korean reports, Yokota married a North Korean, but later killed herself after entering a mental hospital.
At Teikyo University in Tokyo, tests on five samples of the ashes found DNA from two sources — but neither of them matched
DNA from Yokota's umbilical cord, which had been kept by her parents, as is common in Japan. In December, these results were
passed to North.Korea, but on 26 January the Korean government issued a statement that branded them a "fabrication".
According to Hatsuhisa Takashima, a spokesman for Japan's foreign ministry, North Korea called into question the methods used in the tests and
claimed that the remains, which had been heated to 1,200 °C, could not contain any surviving DNA. The North
Korean statement also asked why researchers at Teikyo University were able to extract DNA
when the National Research Institute of Police Science in Tokyo, which also had five
samples to work with, had been unable to do so.
Sample survival
Teikyo University's Tornio Yoshii, one of Japan's leading forensics experts, says there
are several reasons why he managed to extract DNA from all five of his samples. These include the fact that he used a highly sensitive process called the nested polymerase
chain reaction (PCR), which amplifies DNA twice instead of once as in conventional PCR, and the possibility that
his original samples were of better quality than those at the other lab. "Everyone has
their own method" of handling DNA samples, he notes. "There is no standardization."
Little forensic work has been done on cremated specimens in Japan, and most experts,
including Yoshii, thought it unlikely that DNA would have survived cremation at 1,200 C. "I was totally surprised," says Yoshii. But DNA could survive if exposed to such
heat for only a short time. "You can't tell anything from temperature alone," says Hirofumi Fukushima,
a forensics expert at Shinshu University.
Nonetheless Yoshii, who has no previous experience with cremated specimens, admits
his tests are not conclusive and that it is possible the samples were contaminated. "The
bones are like stiff sponges that can absorb anything. If sweat or oils of someone thatwas
handling them soaked in, it would be impossible to get them out no matter how well they
were prepared,"he says.
Takashima says that North Korea has sent remains that it said belonged to an abductee
in the past, only to admit later that they were from another source.
The Japanese government responded to the current incident on 26 January by calling
North Korea's handling of the situation "deplorable", It threatened "stringent actions"
that, according to Takashima, may include the cancellationof 125,000 tonnes of foodaid and
other trade sanctions.
Japanese officials also say that they want to retest the DNA in question. But Yoshii says his
five samples — the largest of which weighed only 1.5 grams — were used up in his tests.
And that, observers say, leaves little prospect of the disagreement being resolved
“North Korean Refugees in China: A Human Rights Perspective”
by James D. Seymour
In the wake of the North Korean famine, which began in 1995, hundreds of thousands of people fled to northeast China. Although many returned and a
smaller number went to third countries, many tens of thousands remain. They face two main problems. First is the mistreatment they sometimes receive.
China does not recognize them as refugees, or even the legality of their being in the country, so they are forced into an underground existence,
making them targets for economic and sexual exploitation.
Secondly, Chinese authorities take the position, at least implicitly, that
their obligation to return these people to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea supersedes any obligations they would have under the international
human rights covenants and refugee conventions. Thus, many people have been forced back to North Korea against their will, where some have been
imprisoned and apparently sometimes executed for the “crime” of leaving the country. Although this situation may have improved somewhat, the refuge
seekers in China live in constant dread of being returned to North Korea,
and are thus in a position to be blackmailed or otherwise abused.
China has been reluctant to allow these people to move on to other countries, and absolutely unwilling for them to travel directly to the
Republic of Korea. For its part, South Korea has been willing to accept them, at least at recent levels (1,040 in 2003), but takes the position
that the real solution to the problem is improving economic conditions in the North.
The international community has gradually been taking a more proactive stance. The United Nations through UNHCR is speaking out more forcefully
than in the past. However, China has generally been unwilling to permit access to the North Koreans in the northeast. It is primarily in the case
of those seeking refuge in diplomatic compounds that the UNHCR has been able to be helpful.
Non-governmental organizations have been active in the northeast, but they operate under severe constraints, and are only able to reach about a fifth
of the local North Korean population. The United States Congress has recently taken a forceful position, and
opened up the possibility of substantial funding to assist these people. However, the measure is widely perceived as part of a religious and
anti-communist agenda, and has been rebuked both by China and Pyongyang.
The paper concludes by outlining some measures that could be taken by China, by the two Koreas, and by the international community to ameliorate
the situation of the North Korean refuge seekers... Read the entire report at: http://www.nautilus.org/napsnet/sr/2005/0527A_Seymour.pdf
James D. Seymour, is a research scholar at Columbia University and the co-author of "New Ghosts, Old Ghosts"
"Boycott or Business?"
by Aidan Foster-Carter, Pacific Forum CSIS
In a cliche beloved of British soccer commentators, inter-Korean relations in 2004 were a game of two halves. Until mid-year all seemed to be going
well, including unprecedented military talks to ease border tensions. On land, symbolically, propaganda loudspeakers fell silent along the
Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), while at sea, substantively, direct radio contact between the KPA and ROK navies began, so as to avoid clashes. Meanwhile
the usual channels of Seoul-Pyongyang dialogue at various levels met routinely, appearing to make progress on a range of substantive issues, such as
cross-border road and rail links.
But July saw a U-turn. Angry on several fronts (more on motives below), North Korea pulled out of most of its hitherto regular talks with the
South. By early 2005 it had not relented, and showed no sign of doing so. Of course, Seoul was not the only one to feel Pyongyang's wrath. On a
wider canvas, the North also notoriously refused to return to Six-Party Talks (both Koreas, the U.S., China, Japan, and Russia) in Beijing on its
nuclear issue, so a fourth round, due by September, failed to take place. Kim Jong-il was widely assumed to be awaiting
the U.S. presidential election - and praying for Kerry. Yet on this front too, as of early January
Pyongyang is still stalling, saying it now wishes to see the character and policy
contours of the second Bush administration. For good measure, as reported elsewhere in this issue of Comparative Connections, North Korea is also
embroiled in a row with Japan - over its continued failure to come fully clean on the fate of most of the young Japanese
whom it admits to kidnapping in the 1970s and 1980s.
In that sense, the current stasis in inter-Korean ties partly reflects the fact that right now North Korea is no mood to talk seriously to anyone
about anything. But there are also specific aspects to this always distinctive relationship between two halves of a divided land. Rather than
discuss non-events - such as rumors throughout the quarter of plans for a second inter-Korean summit - it seems more sensible this time to focus on
two specific matters. One is the refugee issue: a salutary reminder that there is more to inter-Korean ties than merely what the two governments
cook up between them, or fail to. The other is the one field of cooperation that Pyongyang is still keen on, doubtless because there is money in it.
The first goods made by an ROK firm in the Kaesong Industrial Zone (KIZ) - saucepans, as it happens - hit the stores in Seoul just in time for
Christmas, and sold out in two days. So maybe an otherwise bleak New Year is not wholly without hope after all.
Reality Check: Just in Case...
The quarter began with a rare glimpse of plans behind the scenes in Seoul, just in case the hoped-for soft landing fails to arrive. On Oct. 4, to
official alarm (he was threatened with arrest), an opposition MP, Chung Moon-hun,
revealed in Parliament details of secret Southern contingency plans for various Northern scenarios. One,
code-named "Chungmu 3300," designates schools, stadia, and other public facilities to house up to
200,000 North Koreans in the event of mass defections. More radically, "Chungmu 9000" envisages South Korea filling
any power vacuum in Pyongyang. The Unification Ministry (MOU) would establish an emergency headquarters,
with the minister wielding governor-like powers, followed in due course by other ROK ministries. North Korea,
predictably if implausibly, accused the South of wishing this to happen - when in reality it must know that this
is (war apart) Seoul's worst nightmare. This is one of several cases where Pyongyang's professed take on Southern
motives and goals has become decidedly perverse of late.
Refugees Just Keep on Coming
Defectors are a particularly sore point currently. As discussed last quarter, July's airlift of 468 North Koreans
from Vietnam to South Korea infuriated Pyongyang, even though Seoul tried hard to keep it low-key.
With typical paranoia, the North saw a plot linking this to the new U.S. North Korean Human Rights Act
(NKHRA), which
President George W. Bush signed into law Oct. 18. While it is unclear if Pyongyang really believes its own
propaganda, if it has any grasp at all of Southern politics it must be aware of the Roh
Moo-hyun administration's hostility to the NKHRA - one of a range of issues that exemplify a growing divergence of outlook between
Washington and Seoul - as well as Roh's general refusal to prioritize or aid Northern refugees more than the bare minimum.
Lest there were any doubt at all on this, Unification Minister Chung Dong-young - tipped as a contender to
succeed Roh as president in 2008 - spelled it out in a radio interview Jan. 4: "The North's perception that
we are trying to shake the Pyongyang regime by bringing defectors to Seoul is quite different from our policy. We
disapprove of the mass defections. There will be no more large-scale arrivals of defectors in Seoul." Two
weeks earlier, as described below, his deputy announced new measures to curb the refugee flow.
Yet still they come, in growing numbers. Despite tighter security in Beijing's diplomatic quarter, autumn saw a
revival of sanctuary-seeking there. After a group of 29 entered a Japanese school in Beijing on Sept.
1, a further 44 got into the Canadian embassy on Sept. 29. On Oct. 15 another 20 made it into the South Korean consulate. A
week later 29 broke into an ROK school in Beijing, whose extra-territorial status was less clear. On
Oct. 25 Chinese police nabbed three of a group of 14; the rest got into the ROK consulate, which not for the first time had
temporarily to suspend normal operations and close while it processed some 130 North Koreans for
onward travel to Seoul.
Seeking Sanctuary
Further bids were foiled on Oct. 26, when Chinese police arrested 63 DPRK migrants and two ROK activists in
pre-dawn raids on two apartments in Beijing's Tongzhou area. Chinese media, normally silent on such matters,
gave this much publicity; no doubt pour encourager les autres. The North Koreans are believed to have been sent
back home in November to an uncertain fate; their Southern helpers remain in Chinese custody.
With the alternative a long onward trek to seek sanctuary in either Mongolia or Southeast Asia, deterrence may
not work. On Dec. 17 four North Koreans sought asylum at the French embassy in Hanoi; the ROK embassy had
allegedly turned them away, citing "bad circumstances." There was also a fresh, if small, spate in China: the
same day seven more North Koreans, including a female polio victim and a child, fled into the Japanese school
in Beijing (again). A day earlier, four North Koreans got into a South Korean school there; its Chinese owner
then blocked the entrance, closing it for a day.
Overall, the South's Unification Ministry said on Dec. 30 that 1,890 North Korean defectors reached Seoul in
2004: up by nearly half from 2003's 1,281, itself not much more than 2002's 1,139. (Without the Vietnam
airlift, comprising almost a quarter of the total, the rise would have remained at just over 10 percent.) Figures of this
magnitude - still small compared to most global refugee flows - are very recent: cumulative
arrivals in the half century since the Korean War ended in 1953 total barely 6,000. In another new trend, some two-thirds are now
female: 1,167 as of November, compared to 601 males.
Seoul Plays Scrooge
Numbers could well mushroom in future: a South Korean parliamentary report predicts annual arrivals of over
10,000 soon. To prevent this, ROK Vice Unification Minister Rhee Bong-jo cast himself as Scrooge this
Christmas, announcing on Dec. 23 tightened procedures for future would-be defectors.
Intensified screening at embassies abroad will weed out fake asylum seekers (e.g ethnic Koreans from China; 24 slipped in last year) as
well as "murderers [and] criminals sought by international police." According to
MOU, 11 percent of 2004's arrivals had criminal records: Rhee said that henceforth these "will be punished according to domestic law."
Even the law-abiding will have their resettlement subsidy cut by almost two-thirds, from an already meager 28
million won ($26,700) to just W10 million; the remaining W18 million will be conditional on job training.
This move is aimed against brokers, to whom 83 percent of 2004's arrivals paid commission averaging W4 million; in
practice, earlier arrivals often use their grant to pay brokers to bring out family members. Seventy-one
defectors are under surveillance, with several banned from leaving the country. Most are suspected of acting as brokers,
but some might be spies: an ex-sergeant in the KPA security arm who defected in 2003 is being
probed after an illicit trip back to the North last April.
Mean and Short-sighted
Security is of course a proper concern. Yet this set of measures, which
Rhee said will "have a deterrent effect," seems both mean-spirited and short-sighted. Maybe illegal, too: the ROK constitution still formally
claims jurisdiction over the entire Peninsula and all its inhabitants, so can a state seek to exclude its own citizens?
Questionable too, both legally (double jeopardy) and politically, is the idea of re-punishing
those who had fallen foul of Kim Jong-il's regime: some will not be common criminals, and all have arguably suffered enough.
Training is useful, but making life even harder for Northerners to get by in a society where most
already feel alien and unwelcome seems both perverse and cruel.
To do all this from a selfish wish to repel boarders makes mockery of the lip-service paid to unification as the
ultimate Korean dream. Finally, to make Kim Jong-il's victims suffer yet more, in the hope of wheedling their
tormentor back to the table, suggests a failing of not only moral judgment but common sense. Seoul should know
by now that Pyongyang cynically switches its umbrage on and off at will, largely regardless of actions by
others.
Mixed Feelings, and Motives
Still, for an unpopular government it helps that such moves command public support. An opinion poll published on Dec. 30 showed that only 32 percentof South Koreans support NGOs who try to help North Koreans defect,
while 62 percent oppose this. Overall, 50 percent now say they support official policy toward the North; 43
percent are against, down from 57 percent in February. Some 45 percent want Seoul to be more proactive, but 23
percent would halt aid until Pyongyang returns to negotiations. Sixty percent believe the North has changed, up 4
percent since February. Sixty-four percent would buy Northern-made goods, but 34 percent refuse to do so.
Other surveys have looked at defectors themselves. A large-scale study by MOU of 4,072 who arrived since
2000 found that 55 percent gave poverty as their main reason to leave North Korea, while 20 percent left to join
family members in the South. Nine percent cited political discontent, while another 9 percent said they fled to
evade punishment; 3 percent mentioned family troubles. But the ministry's self-serving inference - "Political
oppression is not playing as big a role as we thought" - seems tendentious. A regime that starves its people
surely oppresses as well as impoverishes them. It also creates enemies by brutalizing returned deportees from
China. If they were apolitical before, this turns them; they flee again, this time
for good.
Another, smaller survey found that fully 40 percent of DPRK defectors now in South Korea are unemployed.
Twenty-seven percent have temporary jobs, 11 percent work part time, 5 percent have small businesses, and just
15 percent enjoy stable employment. Seventy-eight percent earn under W1 million monthly, with 15 percent
wholly dependent on state handouts. Partly inspired by the NKHRA, a growing trickle is trying to slip into the
U.S., viewed as a land of more opportunity and less prejudice.
Seoul Even Ignores its Own
But Seoul is equally reluctant to help its own. While Japan mulls sanctions to force North Korea to come clean
on the fate of barely a dozen kidnap victims, putting this issue at the top of its bilateral agenda, South
Korea ignores the 486 abductees that it officially records as held by Pyongyang.
So it was embarrassed at fresh revelations in December about two priests kidnapped in China. Ahn
Seung-un, who vanished in 1995, is said to
be working for the official DPRK Christian federation; his family does not believe he defected. Also in
December, the arrest in Seoul of a Chinese-Korean implicated in the abduction of another ROK priest, Kim
Dong-shik, from China in 2000 has revived criticism of the government for not pressing Pyongyang on this and
other cases. A monthly magazine had named nine of the alleged kidnappers in 2003; several are said to be now
resident in South Korea. A forum on Kim's case, held at the National Assembly in Seoul on Jan. 6, heard claims
from NGOs that he probably died from ill-treatment in 2001. One opposition MP said he will introduce a
bill to compensate families of those abducted by Pyongyang.
The figure of 486 abductees is post-Korean War (1950-53), so it excludes thousands of ROK POWs illegally
detained in the North after the 1953 Armistice. In the past decade 41 of these now old soldiers have escaped,
mostly after a lifetime toiling in the mines of North Hamgyong province in the DPRK's remote and famished
northeast. Even these complain of getting little help or compensation for their sacrifice from their government.
Rare Signs of Backbone
In a rare sign of official vertebracy in Seoul on refugee issues, ROK Foreign Minister Ban
Ki-moon on Dec. 14
criticized the Chinese embassy in Seoul for telephoning an opposition lawmaker, Hwang Woo-yea, to complain
at his chairing a new coalition of 22 South Korean NGOs working to aid DPRK fugitives in China. The caller
reportedly threatened that Beijing would react by taking a harder line on refugees.
Three days later a Seoul court did its bit: awarding compensation of W104 million to the South Korean widow
of Lee Han-young, nephew of Kim Jong-il's former consort Song Hye-rim. Lee had defected secretly via Geneva
in 1982; he surfaced in Seoul in the mid-1990s, only to be murdered in February 1997
by unknown assailants. The court blamed the government for not protecting him against DPRK agents, his presumed assassins.
[...]
As John McEnroe would say: You cannot be serious. Even by Pyongyang's standards this is nonsense. All serious analysts regard Roh Moo-hyun as continuing the Sunshine policy, whether or not they approve. (One might hope that so ungrateful a slap in the face might prompt a rethink in Seoul, or at least some fine tuning; but don't hold your breath.) What then is the North's game? Playing for time, probably, or driven by policy disagreements or even - it is rumored - power struggles. That could result in policy paralysis, or at any rate putting everything on ice until the dust settles and a clear line emerges. Watch this space.
NORTH KOREAN LABORERS IN RUSSIA FORM REFUGEE CAMPS
Donga Ilbo reported that Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported yesterday that DPRK laborers dispatched to Russia turned down a return to their homeland
and formed quasi refugee camps, hoping to go to a third country. The news medium, which covers news in socialist countries, quoted Pastor Douglas
Shin, the leader of DPRK defector support group Exodus 21, as having said, “North Korean laborers working in construction sites or farms in the
Maritime Provinces of Siberia rejected a return home after their contracts terminated or had escaped from their
workplaces and lived in a camp in some places.”
Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported yesterday that North Korean laborers dispatched to Russia turned down a
return to their homeland and formed quasi refugee camps, hoping to go to a third country. The news medium, which covers news in socialist countries, quoted Pastor Douglas Shin, the leader of North Korean defector support group Exodus 21, as having said, “North Korean laborers working in construction sites or farms in the Maritime Provinces of Siberia rejected a return home after their contracts terminated or had escaped from their workplaces and lived in a camp in some places.”
“They hoped to go to South Korea because camp life in Russia is freer and more comfortable than that in the North, but cannot guarantee a future,” said the RFA. “Some camps formed self guard corps or hired Russian gunned guards, preparing against arrests by the North Korean authorities.”
("NORTH KOREAN LABORERS IN RUSSIA FORM REFUGEE
CAMPS", 2005-01-04)
North says Defector has Come from South
December 30, 2004 ㅡ The U.S. 8th Army confirmed yesterday that a South Korean, Kim Ki-ho, 59, who North Korea on Tuesday said had defected to the North, worked at the U.S. 6th Ordnance Battalion from 1984 to 2003 as a quality assurance specialist.
A South Korean intelligence official said the North provided detailed background information on defectors to provide credibility to their claims. North Korea cited Mr. Kim's work records and personal information such as birth place to back its statement.
The apparent defection followed the discovery in October of holes cut in wire fences along the Demilitarized Zone.
It is unknown whether Mr. Kim was involved, but at the time the Defense Ministry said a civilian who had served with an Army unit was the most likely suspect to have cut the fences and then headed to the North.
Russia Turns Sour on North Korean Refugees
By JAMES BROOKE, New York Times, January 3, 2005
VLADIVOSTOK, Russia - The Russian woman in the cafe was in tears, her tea cooling, her potato salad untouched. She had just endured an
hour-long interrogation by a South Korean investigator about her role in sheltering a North Korean defector.
"I had no idea they could talk like that to a Russian citizen," said the woman, who asked only to be identified by her first name, Katia, the gold cross on her sweater flashing as she trembled from her ordeal at the South Korean Consulate here.
In a new twist, diplomats from South Korea now work to discourage defectors from North Korea.
Under new rules, South Korea is reducing resettlement payments to North Koreans by two-thirds. Defectors are to be scrupulously investigated. South Korea says that will help weed out criminals, spies and ethnic Koreans from China.
Human rights advocates say South Korea's stricter policy is intended to curry favor with China and North Korea, and to slow a rising influx of refugees, which hit a record high of 1,850 at the end of 2004.
"The situation in South Korea itself has changed," said an ethnic Korean-Russian travel agent here who used to help North Koreans get to Seoul. "Now it seems that North Koreans are not welcomed there anymore."
South Korea's new restrictions come as new American legislation goes into effect easing admission of North Korean defectors into the United States. One candidate could be a North Korean construction worker who has lived in the United States Consulate here since taking shelter there last autumn.
About 2,500 North Koreans, largely construction workers, work in the Maritime Territory, which includes Vladivostok and borders on China and North Korea. With North Korea planning to open a consulate here in 2005, South Korean diplomats are lowering their profiles in some ways.
Yet in this rough and tumble Pacific port, attitudes toward North Koreans seem to be souring.
A series of murky episodes, including the deaths of four North Korean diplomats in highway accidents here in 2004, have reinforced the sense that North Koreans are less welcome.
In September, five teenage Russians shouting white-pride slogans attacked two groups of North Korean workers here, killing one and injuring another.
The attacks seem to be the tip of an iceberg of racial fears that a collapse of North Korea could bring an uncontrolled flood of Korean refugees to this region, historically an area of Korean migration. Civil defense and military authorities have been drilled on stopping North Koreans from crossing the border.
In the mid-1990's, the Russian authorities were relatively lax about North Korean workers who managed to flee Siberian logging camps.
"I personally signed many such documents, quietly allowing them to go to South Korea or wherever they wanted to go," said one high-ranking Russian diplomat in the region. "We didn't want attention."
But in October, it was front-page news here when 45 North Korean laborers were arrested in Kamchatka, hundreds of miles from their work sites. They apparently hoped to stow away on foreign fishing boats.
In November, when the authorities of the Amur region signed contracts in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, for 2,000 North Korean lumberjacks, guarantees against flight were a top demand by the Russian side.
North Korea's determination to prevent defections by its contract workers in Russia could be seen in the drama surrounding the escape of Hwang Dae Soo, a 28-year-old translator, from confinement in a North Korean apartment here. In November 2003, he avoided forced repatriation by tearing the photograph off his passport just before he was to be placed on a North Korean plane here.
Held in a third-floor apartment, he managed to make a call to his friend Katia, who had worked in a nearby office, said Douglas E. Shin, a Korean-American pastor, who also assisted Mr. Hwang when he was in hiding for a year here.
When Mr. Hwang's Russian friends came to the apartment to demand his release, he broke a window and jumped three stories to the ground, breaking both ankles. Two North Korean guards jumped after him, suffering injuries to their legs.
Katia said she helped her injured friend into the back seat of her brother's car. But one North Korean guard tossed the Russians aside and led a group "yelling at him, trying to beat him, trying to drag him out of the car."
After the Russian police arrived, Katia and her brother drove Mr. Hwang to a hospital and then helped shelter him for a year. Her fears that North Koreans would discover his hiding place increased when Mr. Hwang's North Korean foreman appeared at her office, asking for her.
Fear of discovery prompted Mr. Hwang to have a friend ask South Korean officials about asylum.
"The South Koreans received a direct order not to take care of this issue any more," Mr. Hwang said in a telephone interview in early November. "After I heard this, I was in shock. They did not offer any help, nothing monetary, no advice."
On Nov. 15, though, he gambled and sought asylum at the South Korean Consulate here. When he asked for help, he carried a cellphone, surreptitiously keeping a line open to Mr. Shin, who recorded the encounter. On the tape, Mr. Hwang can be heard arguing that South Korea's Constitution guarantees North Koreans the right to asylum. A consulate official can be heard responding with curses.
When consular officials realized that the exchange had been taped for possible broadcast on South Korean radio, they relented and allowed him to stay, Mr. Shin said. He was finally allowed to fly to Seoul on Dec. 18.
But with security tightening at the South Korean Consulate, the message is clear in Vladivostok: North Korean defectors are not wanted.
"For one year, I feared the North Koreans would try to kill me," said Katia, still distraught after one hour of talking in the cafe. "It never occurred to me that I would have the South Koreans against me."
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