Women fleeing North Korea
By Chang Se-moon
On April 7, one male manager and 12 waitresses, who worked at overseas restaurants owned and operated by North Korea, defected and arrived in Seoul, This is the first time that North Korean employees from a state-run restaurant overseas defected as a group. Interestingly, the 13 North Koreans are middle-class people with a good education. This may be a good time to think about the life of women in general who are fleeing North Korea.
Human rights violations in North Korea, especially relating to women, are one of those issues that most of us would rather not think about, because it makes us feel uncomfortable as there is really not that much we can do about them. I still feel that we should face the problem and search for ways to minimize the cruel treatment that many women in North Korea are going through.
For those of us who care about the issue, outstanding organizations such as the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) and the New Korea Women’s Union (NKWU) continue to gather valuable information so that we can be aware of the problem.
I can think of two publications by the Committee on human rights violations relating to North Korean women. One is the October 1, 2009 report, “Lives for Sale: Personal Accounts of Women Fleeing North Korea to China,” written by Lee Hae Young, and the other is one in September 18, 2015, “The Hidden Gulag IV: Gender Repression and Prisoner Disappearances,” written by David Hawk. Both reports are based on personal interviews of real victims.
According to Lee Hae Young, women fleeing North Korea to China are so desperately poor in the North that they often turn to strangers and become victims of traffickers. Most of the women interviewed by Lee came from the northeastern provinces of North Korea that are close to the Chinese border. The severity of the famine in the area left these women without husbands and fathers. “In North Korea, after the death of their fathers or spouses, many of these women became homeless itinerant peddlers or scavengers until they crossed the border into China, risking their lives in the process.”
According to Lee, there are many more men than women of marrying age in northeast China near North Korea. Chinese men thus pay large sums of money to purchase North Korean women. “As women are a commodity with a high price, they fall prey to traffickers,” while “The price the women bring becomes a bounty for their acquisition. Traffickers seek out the hapless victims of the North Korean regime’s neglect and entrap them into abuse and exploitation in China.”
One problem, according to Lee, is that the Chinese government treats North Korean women as illegal economic migrants, and “sometimes sends them back to North Korea where they are punished because their homeland views them as traitors and criminals.”
One woman Lee interviewed stated that she lost both of her parents and had a difficult time making a living. One day in 2003, she was told by a North Korean woman who later turned out to be a trafficker that she would find a decent job in China. They crossed the border together and one week later, she was sold to a Chinese male. Lee also found out that many North Korean women in China were working as sex slaves with customers that included “South Korean and Japanese businessmen working in the district.”
The 2015 report by Hawk explains in detail the hardships that many North Korean women have to endure after being interned in labor camps. Many stories in Hawk’s report center around Kyo-hwa-so No. 12, located near the Chinese border, to which a women’s section was added sometime after 2008. About 80 percent of roughly 1,000 women prisoners out of a total 3,000 to 4,000 inmates in Kyo-hwa-so No. 12 are women who fled to China but were forcibly sent back to North Korea.
One former female prisoner at Jongo-ri who was interviewed in April of 2015 by Hawk was a Ms. Choi who fled to China in 1998. She lived in Yanbian, China, for ten years but was sent back to North Korea by the Chinese police in 2008. Eventually Ms. Choi was sent to Kyo-hwa-so No. 12 to serve a three-year sentence. Ms. Choi weighed 125 pounds when repatriated. Because of severe malnutrition, her weight decreased to 59.5 pounds by the time the prison authorities “sent for her family to come get her once she lost consciousness when they believed she was near death.” Eventually, she fled to China and on to South Korea.
I do not know what can be done to help these hapless North Korean women. I am grateful to many NGO’s and such organizations as Human Rights in North Korea and the New Korea Women’s Union that continue to do the hard work of finding out the truth about the cruel life that many North Korean women have to go through.
Chang Se-moon is the director of the Gulf Coast Center for Impact Studies. Write to her at: changsemoon@yahoo.com.