Human Trafficking in [North Korea Street Children in [North Korea] [other countries]Child Prostitution in [North Korea] [other countries] |
Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery In the
first ten years of the 21st Century -
2000 to 2009
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
(DPRK or North Korea) is a source country for men, women, and children trafficked
for the purposes of forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation. The most
common form of trafficking involves North Korean women and girls subjected to
involuntary servitude after willingly crossing the border into the People’s
Republic of China (PRC). Once in China, they are picked up by
traffickers and sold as brides to PRC nationals, often of Korean ethnicity.
In other cases, North Korean women and girls are lured out of North Korea to
escape poor economic, social, and political conditions by the promise of
food, jobs, and freedom, only to be forced into prostitution, marriage, or
exploitative labor arrangements once in China. In some cases, women and girls may be sold
to traffickers by their families or acquaintances. Women sold as brides are
sometimes re-abducted by the traffickers or are sold by husbands who no
longer want them. In some cases, North Korean women are sold multiple times
to different men by the same trafficker. Many victims of trafficking, unable to speak
Chinese, are held as virtual prisoners. The illegal status of North Koreans
in the PRC and other Southeast Asian countries increases their vulnerability
to trafficking for purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation. - U.S. State Dept Trafficking in
Persons Report, June, 2009 [full country report] |
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CAUTION: The following links have been
culled from the web to illuminate the situation in ***
FEATURED ARTICLES *** Nor is it breaking news that North
Korea operates a vicious prison gulag -- "not unlike the worst labor
camps built by Mao and Stalin in the last century," as NBC News reported
more than a year ago. Some 200,000 men, women, and children are held in these
slave-labor camps; hundreds of thousands of others have perished in them over
the years. Some of the camps are so hellish that 20 percent or more of their
prisoners die from torture and abuse each year. The dead can be of any age:
North Korea's longstanding policy is to imprison not only those accused of
such "crimes" as practicing Christianity or complaining about North
Korean life, but their entire families, grandparents and grandchildren
included. Human
Trafficking Thrives Across N.Korea-China
Border www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/MMAH-7CE5ZU?OpenDocument english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200812/200812100035.html
A 26-year-old North Korean woman, Mun Yun-hee crossed the Duman (or Tumen) River into
China in the dawn of Oct. 22 last year, which at that point was some 40 m
wide, guided by a human trafficker. She was being sold to a single
middle-aged Chinese farmer into a kind of indentured
servitude-cum-companionship. Both of them wore only panties, having stored
their trousers and shoes in bags, because if you are found wearing wet
clothes across the river deep at night, it is a dead giveaway that you are a
North Korean refugee. Mun was led to a hideout, and the
agent left. Asked why she crossed the river, she replied, "My father
starved to death late in the 1990s, and my mother is blind from hunger."
Her family owed 300 kg of corns, beans and rice and sold herself for the sake
of her blind mother and a younger brother. The middleman paid her 350 yuan, or W46,000 (US$1=W939), equivalent to half of the
grain debt. ***
ARCHIVES *** Bur of Democracy,
Human Rights & Labor - Country
Reports on Human Rights Practices - 2005 TRAFFICKING
IN PERSONS – There
were no known laws specifically addressing the problem of trafficking in
persons, and trafficking of women and young girls into and within Concluding
Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) - 2004 [62] The Committee notes the lack
of information in the State party report on human trafficking, in particular,
involving children. NK
Defectors Describe Horrors of Human Trafficking english.donga.com/srv/service.php3?bicode=060000&biid=2009050137348
Bang Mi-sun, who came to the South
in 2004, spoke first. She said she fled the North to feed her two children
after her husband starved to death in 2002. “I thought that if I went to
China, I could eat heartily and lead a better life than in North Korea. What
waited for me was a wretched life,” she said. “I was sold to a disabled Chinese man for
585 dollars at a human trafficking market and resold to another man.” Bang was caught by Chinese police
and repatriated to North Korea. There, she was subjected to severe corporal
punishment and forced labor. “I was
put in a detention camp and flogged. I was battered so badly that I cannot
walk well now,” she said. Human
Trafficking Thrives Across N.Korea-China
Border www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/MMAH-7CE5ZU?OpenDocument english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200812/200812100035.html
A 26-year-old North Korean woman, Mun Yun-hee crossed the Duman (or Tumen) River into
China in the dawn of Oct. 22 last year, which at that point was some 40 m
wide, guided by a human trafficker. She was being sold to a single
middle-aged Chinese farmer into a kind of indentured
servitude-cum-companionship. Both of them wore only panties, having stored
their trousers and shoes in bags, because if you are found wearing wet
clothes across the river deep at night, it is a dead giveaway that you are a
North Korean refugee. Mun was led to a hideout, and the
agent left. Asked why she crossed the river, she replied, "My father
starved to death late in the 1990s, and my mother is blind from hunger."
Her family owed 300 kg of corns, beans and rice and sold herself for the sake
of her blind mother and a younger brother. The middleman paid her 350 yuan, or W46,000 (US$1=W939), equivalent to half of the
grain debt. Human Trafficking
In North Korea Conditions inside North Korea are dire.
They include a severe food shortage, a lack of basic freedoms and a system of
political repression that includes a network of government-operated prison
camps. The approximately two-hundred thousand prisoners in these camps are
subjected to reeducation and slave-like conditions. US
lashes out at NKorea's "horrendous" human
rights record Tens of thousands of North
Koreans, fleeing hunger or repression at home, have travelled
across the border to China in recent years.
But China has an agreement with its close ally to repatriate them as
economic migrants, a policy strongly criticized by refugee aid and human
rights groups. Returnees can face
harsh punishment including jail terms and forced labour
and even death, according to rights groups. North Korean women crossing the
border into China are generally "most vulnerable" to trafficking
given their illegal status in China and their inability to return home, he
said. Amnesty International said it
had documented cases of North Korean women being lured from their homes and
trafficked as "sex slaves" into China, where they are sold as
brides in forced marriages. Victims
of Human Trafficking Speak WOMEN WHO ARE SOLD INTO SLAVERY - Ms. G (age: 26), a former nurse
from the North who made it across the border to China in February was
appalled after she was sold to a family. She was the only woman in the house
with 62-year-old father, 32 year-old oldest son and other three men. Her
worst fears turned into reality when the father and four sons each demanded
her to share their bed every night. She was forced to go through this ordeal,
even when she was sick or had her period. She did not have anyone to turn to,
because there was not even a village nearby. She put up with this life for
about eight months. North
Korea exporting workers into lives of slavery GOVERNMENT ACCOUNT - Almost the entire monthly
salaries of the women here, about $260, the Czech minimum wage, are deposited
directly in an account controlled by the North Korean government, which gives
them only a fraction of the money. To
the extent that they are allowed outside in this village 20 miles west of The refugees forced to be sex slaves in China The women who flee North Korea
believe nothing could be worse than their dictatorship's famine and labor
camps. But many change their minds
after they cross the Most of the patients in the
hospitals suffer from psychosomatic illnesses. They’re worn out by compulsory
drills, innumerable parades, mandatory assemblies beginning at the crack of
dawn, and constant, droning propaganda. They are tired and at the end of
their tether. Clinical depression is rampant. Alcoholism is common. Young
adults have no hope, no future. Everywhere you look, people are beset by
anxiety. North
Korea's horrors cannot be tolerated By the best estimates, between 2
million and 3 million North Koreans starved to death during the 1990s.
Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have been confined in a network of
brutal forced-labor camps. The world now has sufficient eyewitness accounts
and other documentary evidence to conclude beyond any doubt that these camps
are the scenes of horrific crimes – summary execution, torture, privation and
abuse on a hideous scale, forced abortions and infanticide, and more. The Hidden Gulag: Exposing www.hrnk.org/hiddengulag/executiveSummary.html EXECUTIVE
SUMMARY - This report
outlines two distinct systems of repression: first, a North Korean gulag of
forced-labor colonies, camps, and prisons where scores of thousands of prisoners
— some political, some convicted felons — are worked, many to their deaths,
in mining, logging, farming, and industrial enterprises, often in remote
valleys located in the mountainous areas of North Korea; and second, a system
of smaller, shorter-term detention facilities along the North Korea–China
border used to brutally punish North Koreans who flee to China — usually in
search of food during the North Korean famine crisis of the middle to late
1990s — but are arrested by Chinese police and forcibly repatriated to the
DPRK. Worse Than 1984
- North Korea, slave state In Freedom
House Country Report - Political Rights: 7 Civil Liberties: 7 Status: Not Free Human Rights Overview by Human
Rights Watch – Defending Human Rights Worldwide U.S. Library of Congress
- Country Study Nor is it breaking news that North
Korea operates a vicious prison gulag -- "not unlike the worst labor
camps built by Mao and Stalin in the last century," as NBC News reported
more than a year ago. Some 200,000 men, women, and children are held in these
slave-labor camps; hundreds of thousands of others have perished in them over
the years. Some of the camps are so hellish that 20 percent or more of their
prisoners die from torture and abuse each year. The dead can be of any age:
North Korea's longstanding policy is to imprison not only those accused of
such "crimes" as practicing Christianity or complaining about North
Korean life, but their entire families, grandparents and grandchildren
included. The Democidal Famine In North Korea [scroll down]
This is not all. In this "classless" communist society, the
regime has divided North Koreans into a rigid hierarchy of three classes, and
fifty-one subdivisions, depending on a person's status within the communist
North Korean Workers Party and the military, their perceived faithfulness to
communism, and family backgrounds. In other words, Kim uses the very food
people need to live as a tool to reward and punish his subject slaves. Thus,
vast numbers of people whose loyalties are questioned or may be deemed
useless to the regime do not receive enough food to live long. The worst off
are those people and families incarcerated in Kim's concentration or forced
labor camps. They receive the lowest food allowance of all, in spite of their
being forced to work from 5 am to 8 pm. ILLEGAL WORK - They seek work - perhaps in
mines, factories or cattle farms - but are often swindled out of their
earnings. A mine owner might promise
them 500 yuan a month, but actually they are paid
less than half, or nothing at all - forced into acquiescence by the fear of
being reported to the authorities. the
horrifying situation in North Korea I've been reading about the gulags
of North Korea, in which an estimated 400,000 people have died since 1972. Up
to 200,000 people are still imprisoned there today, according to this report.
When a person is accused of a political crime, they and their family are sent
to the camps. There is also a policy of infanticide and forced abortions in
the prison camps. Grim
fate for N. Korean prisoners Hidden in the valleys between high
mountains in the northern provinces of North Korea lies one of the country's
darkest secrets -- political penal labor prisons. Behind the walls of a Kwan-li-so conditions and treatment are brutal. "People are starved to death, worked
to death, frozen to death over a period of time, and it's just absolutely
horrific, reminiscent of what we've read coming out of the old Gulags under
Stalin," says Kansas Republican Sen. Sam Brownback. Along with political prisoners, up to three
generations of their families also are banished without trial -- usually for
lifetime sentences in a system of "guilt by association," the
report finds. Opening
a Window on North Korea's Horrors Han, a Communist Party official in
North Korea, was walking home from work when he heard he was in trouble. He
had smuggled a radio back from China after an official trip. He listened to
it late at night, huddled with earphones on and shades drawn, to hear music
that brought him a whisper of sanity and took him away from the horrors of
his day. Now, someone had found it, or
someone had told. If a farmer or laborer had a
radio, he could have been released," Han said. "But I was an
official. In my case, it would have been torture and a life sentence in a
political prisoners' camp." It's the totalitarian aspect that strikes
you first, as it did me when I visited North Korea last winter. Fifty years
of ultra-Stalinism have made the very idea of a private life almost
unthinkable. Every move and utterance is planned and scripted, with an entire
people endlessly mobilized for a cult of hysterical adulation. The president
of the country is a dead man named Kim Il Sung, whose rotund visage glares
from every wall. All other official leadership posts are held by his son Kim Jong Il, whose birth is said to have been attended by
miraculous signs and portents. All films, all books, all newspapers and all
radio and television broadcasts are about either the Father or the Son.
Everybody is a soldier. Everybody is an informer. Everybody is a unit.
Everything is propaganda. Human rights are nonexistent.
Peasants, slaves to the regime, lead lives of utter destitution. It is as if
a basic right to exist--to be--is denied. Ordinary people starve and die. They
are detained at the caprice of the regime. Forced labor is the basic way in
which "order" is maintained. All material used herein
reproduced under the fair use exception of 17 USC § 107 for noncommercial,
nonprofit, and educational use. PLEASE
RESPECT COPYRIGHTS OF COMPONENT ARTICLES. Cite this webpage as: Patt, Prof. Martin, "Human Trafficking &
Modern-day Slavery – DPRK ( |
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Human Trafficking in [North Korea Street Children in [North Korea] [other countries]Child Prostitution in [North Korea] [other countries]