Torture in [North Korea] [other countries]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 early years of the 21st Century gvnet.com/humantrafficking/NorthKorea.htm
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 the
DPRK. Some of these links may lead to
websites that present allegations that are unsubstantiated or even
false. No attempt has been made to
verify their authenticity or to validate their content. ***
FEATURED ARTICLES *** An Auschwitz In Jeff Jacoby, The www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/02/08/an_auschwitz_in_korea/ [accessed 29 August 2011] Nor is it breaking
news that Human Trafficking Thrives Across
N.Korea-China Border The Chosun Ilbo, 03 Mar 2008 www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/MMAH-7CE5ZU?OpenDocument [accessed 14 December 2010] 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 *** Human Rights
Reports » 2005 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices U.S. Dept of State Bureau of Democracy,
Human Rights, and Labor, March 8, 2006 www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2005/61612.htm [accessed 14 December 2010] 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) UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, 4
June 2004 www1.umn.edu/humanrts/crc/korea2004.html [accessed 14 December 2010] [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 The Dong-A ILBO, MAY 01, 2009 english.donga.com/srv/service.php3?bicode=060000&biid=2009050137348 [accessed 14 December 2010] 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 The Chosun Ilbo, 03 Mar 2008 www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/MMAH-7CE5ZU?OpenDocument [accessed 14 December 2010] 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 Voice of America VOA News, 9 August 2012 editorials.voa.gov/content/a-41-2008-03-14-voa4-84655987/1481324.html [accessed 30 August 2012] Conditions inside US lashes out at NKorea's
"horrendous" human rights record Agence France-Presse AFP, afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5g2nl0vV3cTyhiS8E5loJ9St3dSLw [accessed 14 December 2010] Tens of thousands
of North Koreans, fleeing hunger or repression at home, have travelled across
the border to 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 The Dong-A ILBO, December 15, 2006 english.donga.com/srv/service.php3?bicode=040000&biid=2006121564548 [accessed 14 December 2010] WOMEN WHO ARE SOLD
INTO SLAVERY
- Ms. G (age: 26), a former nurse from the North who made it across the
border to Barbara Demick, seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002707584_koreans28.html [accessed 14 December 2010] 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 Richard Spencer in [accessed 14 December 2010] The women who flee Why Norbert Vollertsen, Front Page Magazine,
June 15, 2005 www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1423544/posts?page=1 [accessed 14 December 2010] 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. Editorial, The San Diego Union-Tribune, May
15, 2005 www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050515/news_lz1ed15top.html [accessed 14 December 2010] 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 Report, Jul 5, 2003 www.dailynk.com/english/data_view.php?bbs_code=ebbs1&bbs_number=5&page=6&keycode=&keyword= [accessed 23 April 2012] 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 Christopher Hitchens, Slate Magazine, May
2, 2005 [accessed 14 December 2010] In Freedom House Country Report - Political Rights: 7 Civil Liberties: 7 Status: Not Free 2009 Edition www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2009/north-korea [accessed 27 June 2012] Human Rights
Overview Human Rights Watch [accessed 14 December 2010] Library of Congress Call Number DS932 .N662
1994 lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/kptoc.html [accessed 14 December 2010] An Auschwitz In Jeff Jacoby, The www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/02/08/an_auschwitz_in_korea/ [accessed 29 August 2011] Nor is it breaking
news that The Democidal Famine In R.J. Rummel, OrthodoxyToday -- Sources:
Many of the specifics were taken from a report by Seong Ho Jhe, published in
" orthodoxytoday.org/articles4/RummelKorea.php [accessed 14 December 2010] [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. Escaping Sarah Buckley, BBC News Online, 28 July
2004 news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3932591.stm [accessed 14 December 2010] 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 Al-Muhajabah, Islamic Blogs, January 30,
2003 www.muhajabah.com/islamicblog/archives/veiled4allah/003778.php [accessed 14 December 2010] I've been reading
about the gulags of Grim fate for N. Korean prisoners Mike Chinoy, Cable News Network CNN, www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/east/10/30/nkorea.political.prisons/index.html [accessed 14 December 2010] Hidden in the
valleys between high mountains in the northern provinces of 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 Doug Struck (with Special correspondent
Joohee Cho), Washington Post Foreign Service; Page A01, www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A41966-2003Oct3¬Found=true [accessed 14 December 2010] Han, a Communist
Party official in 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." Why North Korea is No. 1 Christopher Hitchens, Newsweek
International, July 8, 2001 www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2001/07/08/why-north-korea-is-number-one.html [accessed 30 August 2012] It's the
totalitarian aspect that strikes you first, as it did me when I visited A Prison Country Dr. Norbert Vollertsen, Opinion Journal,
April 17, 2001 [accessed 9 September 2011] 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
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Torture in [North Korea] [other countries]Human Trafficking in [North Korea Street Children in [North Korea] [other countries]Child Prostitution in [North Korea] [other countries]