Escape from North Korea (20 page)

Earlier that day, unbeknownst to Hong, two of his colleagues, American women in their early twenties, had been picked up by police on a highway near Beijing and arrested in connection with
the same crime. The trio worked for Liberty in North Korea, a California-based nonprofit dedicated to helping North Korean refugees. The organization is known by its acronym, LiNK. Its mission is helping North Koreans escape from China on the new underground railroad. Hong co-founded LiNK in 2004 when he was an undergraduate at Yale University.

Hong and the two women stood accused of helping six North Koreans plot to reach the American Consulate in the city of Shenyang in northeast China, where they planned to ask for political asylum. Hong, LiNK's executive director, was the mastermind of the operation. The women, who had been sheltering the refugees in a safe house in another city, were helping him execute it. But on the afternoon the group intended to enter the consulate, the rescue operation went badly awry. The story of the Shenyang Six, as the refugees came to be known, speaks volumes about the hardball tactics the Chinese government employs against North Korean refugees. It also shows how Beijing tries to intimidate the United States and other governments into silence about its harsh treatment of North Koreans.

At noon on Friday, December 22, 2006, Hong, his colleagues, and the six North Koreans were in place at a KFC a few hundred yards from the entrance to the American Consulate in Shenyang. The group had arrived early that morning from the northern city of Yanji after a twenty-hour train trip. Now it was time to embark on the last and most dangerous leg of their journey. They ordered some sandwiches and sat down at a table near a window, close enough to see the Stars and Stripes waving over the main gate. Hong took out his cellphone, dialed the phone number of the consulate, and asked for a political officer. Two months earlier he had shepherded three North Korean boys to the same consulate.
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That operation had succeeded—the boys were safely ensconced in the consulate waiting for permission from Beijing to leave for the United States—and he had every expectation that this rescue mission would, too.

“This is Adrian Hong,” he told the American at the other end of the line. “I've been here before. I have more packages to deliver. Please let the consul general know I'm in town.”

The reaction of the consular official was the first hint that something could go wrong. Instead of saying that he would come right out to the main gate and usher them past the Chinese guards and into the consulate, the American asked for Hong's phone number and told him that someone would call him back. A few minutes later, Hong's phone rang and the caller identified himself as a consular official. His tone was icy as he informed Hong that the consulate would not accept the group. “We suggest that you take the North Korean refugees and go to the UNHCR in Beijing.” In other words, let the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees handle this problem. The Americans didn't want anything to do with it.

Hong couldn't believe what he had just heard. Not only had an official of the United States refused to accept the North Koreans, but, by speaking openly on the telephone, he had effectively turned them over to the Chinese government. American diplomatic posts in China are subject to round-the-clock electronic surveillance, and it was a fair assumption that their phone call had been monitored. Sure enough. Within minutes, Hong saw a van pull up in front of the KFC, and six burly men jumped out. They were not wearing uniforms, but it was obvious they were security officials. A few minutes later, six more men appeared in another van.

Hong knew they were in trouble, but he forced himself to remain calm. He instructed the group to go down the street a few blocks to a café, where he would meet them later. Then he picked up his briefcase and walked in the opposite direction to an ATM machine at a nearby bank. While pretending to use the cash machine, he took out his phone and called the State Department in Washington, D.C., hoping to find someone who would countermand the decision made in Shenyang. It was after midnight in Washington, but
State's operations desk answered immediately. He was transferred to two duty officers, who quickly patched in David Sedney, the No. 2 person at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Sedney told Hong the same thing: We can't help you; take the refugees to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees in Beijing. As Hong pressed the end-call button on his cellphone, he looked around him. The street was now empty of traffic. The intersection in front of the consulate had been cordoned off, and he counted more than one hundred uniformed law-enforcement officials standing by.

Hong had to come up with a plan quickly. He joined the rest of the group at the café and explained the situation. He offered to escort them back to the shelter in Yanji, but none of the North Koreans wanted to go back into hiding. They decided they had no choice but to head for the UNHCR office in Beijing, as the American official had advised. Their next stop was a hotel, where they hired a van and a chauffeur to drive them through the night to Beijing, about four hundred miles away. Worried that his photograph had been captured on the Chinese security cameras outside the consulate, Hong decided it would be best if he traveled separately. He told his colleagues he would meet them at the Intercontinental in Beijing, and, after seeing the group off in the van, he headed to the airport and caught a flight to Beijing. About four o'clock the next morning, December 23, the police stopped the van on the highway and arrested the two LiNK workers and the six North Koreans. They were taken back to Shenyang, where they were put in a jail on the outskirts of the city.

The six North Koreans included two orphan boys, ages sixteen and seventeen; a twenty-two-year-old woman; and three women in their forties. One of the older women was the mother of one of the three boys who had made it to safety in the American Consulate in October and was awaiting permission from Beijing to leave for the U.S. Another woman had relatives in Hawaii. A third had family in South Korea.

After Hong's arrest in Beijing, he was flown to Shenyang and transferred to the jail where his colleagues and the Shenyang Six were being held. A week later, on New Year's Eve, Hong and his two LiNK colleagues were deported, thanks in part to the efforts of the U.S. government, which interceded on their behalf with the Chinese authorities. Under Chinese law, they could have spent years in jail for helping the refugees.

As he was being escorted from prison, en route to the car that would take him to the airport for his flight back home to Los Angeles, Hong passed the cell that held the two boys he had tried to rescue. He pulled away from his escort, ran to the barred window on the cell's door, and yelled a few words of encouragement to the two boys inside. As he walked out of prison, a sense of failure overwhelmed him. “There is nothing like looking in the eyes of someone who thinks they are going to die,” he said. “They both had that look—like there was no hope.”

For refugees, there is one thing worse than life on the run in China; it is being caught and repatriated to North Korea. For rescuers, there is one thing worse than being arrested and jailed in China; it is the capture of the North Koreans under their care and the knowledge that the people they were trying to help now face detention, deportation, and possibly death.

Every North Korean hiding in China lives under the shadow of possible arrest—the knock on the door in the middle of the night, the police raid on his place of work, the arbitrary stop and ID check on a train or public street. Evading capture is the ruling factor in every decision a North Korean makes—where to live, where to work, whom to marry. How well will his employer protect him? Do her in-laws have the means to bribe local officials to overlook her illegal status? Can the missionaries who offer protection be trusted?

Every North Korean in China also knows what awaits him should he be arrested and repatriated back across the river. A prison sentence is a given. Under the North Korean penal code, “willful flight to another state” can be deemed treason and subject to the death penalty. Helping someone flee across the border also can be punished by death.
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In practice, the severity and duration of the punishment varies from prisoner to prisoner and jailer to jailer. The rule of thumb is that anyone who the authorities believe has had contact with South Koreans, Americans, or Christians while in China is considered guilty of a political crime and receives the worst treatment. That usually means incarceration in a political prison camp or a labor correction camp. A repatriated North Korean who fled to China looking for food or work is not punished as severely. He generally receives a lesser sentence and has a better chance of survival.

The first stop for a repatriated refugee is a detention and interrogation center on the border, where he is questioned and sentenced. According to David Hawk, who interviewed numerous refugees for his comprehensive study of North Korea's prison system, the interrogations follow a set pattern. The first questions are “ ‘Why did you go to China, where did you go, and what did you do in each place?' ” And then, more ominously: “ ‘Did you meet any South Koreans?' ‘Did you go to a Christian church?' ‘Did you watch or listen to South Korean TV or radio?' and ‘Were you trying to go to South Korea?' ”
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An affirmative answer to any of this latter category of questions means an automatic sentence in a political prison camp or a labor reeducation camp. In the hope of avoiding the worst, the returnee's challenge is to stick to “no” answers even in the face of a few days of hunger or beatings. Staying out of a political prison camp or a labor reeducation camp greatly increases a prisoner's chance of survival. A returnee's sentence has nothing to do with the rule of law. There seldom is a trial or any kind of judicial proceeding before the returnee is sent to prison.

Many returnees end up in short-term detention centers. These jails, often in the prisoner's home province, also are characterized by brutal conditions: hard labor, sub-subsistence food rations, torture. But the sentences generally are shorter. Even so, many inmates die in detention or are granted sick releases to die at home. The local detention centers sometimes also house common criminals, who may be separated from the returnees for ideological reasons. The jailers want to keep the returnees from corrupting the criminal—that is, spreading the word about the freedom and prosperity in China.
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Seo Won-kyong's story of arrest, repatriation, and detention is typical of what happens to many North Koreans who are hiding in China. Seo was arrested after police raided the lumber factory where he was working in Heiliangjong Province and he failed to produce a Chinese ID card. After two months in a Chinese jail, he was repatriated to North Korea, where he spent a month in jail on the border before being shipped off to a detention center in his home province. “It was a horrible place,” he said. It was “worse than anything I had ever experienced.”
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Seo Won-kyong considered himself fortunate not to have been sent to a political prison. He credited this stroke of luck to two factors. When a refugee is repatriated, the Chinese police routinely hand a copy of their arrest report to the North Korean authorities. In Seo's case, the Chinese report somehow failed to mention the contacts he'd had with foreigners and Christians. That was his first lucky break.

His second break had to do with money. At the time of his arrest, Seo had with him about eighty American dollars. He knew it would be confiscated by the Chinese police, and he managed to swallow the money before being strip-searched at the Chinese jail. He later recovered it by picking it out of his feces. When he was sent back to North Korea, he used the money to bribe the officials in charge of assigning the returnees to prisons; he paid them to ensure his transfer to a local detention center. Even so, he almost died of starvation.
His food rations consisted of a single layer of boiled corn, served three times a day on an aluminum plate.

After nearly three months of this diet along with occasional beatings and incarceration in an unheated cell in winter, he was near death. The prison officials apparently decided they didn't want him to expire on their watch. Seo Won-kyung described the humiliating procedure by which the warden determined which prisoners were on the brink of death. Prisoners were ordered to drop their trousers and bend over. An official then pinched their buttocks to see how much flesh was left, making a calculation about whether an inmate was likely to live or die. Seo Won-kyung was assigned to the soon-to-die category and transferred to a jail nearer to his hometown. An official at the hometown jail recognized him and got word to members of his family. His wife was permitted to visit and bring him food. Seo's health improved slowly, and he was released in an amnesty in honor of Kim Il Sung's birthday. The date was April 15, 2005, four months after he had been forcibly returned to North Korea.