Escape from North Korea (41 page)

The world can point to few successes, if any, in negotiating with North Korea. The country's illegal nuclear program and global arms trade continue apace despite widespread international opprobrium and sanctions, and in defiance of the regime's myriad promises to shut
them down. Its other illicit activities continue, too—drug running, counterfeiting, insurance fraud, computer hacking. The suffering of the North Korean people continues unabated, despite a mountain of authoritative reports on the regime's human rights abuses from the United Nations, the United States, South Korea, and a panoply of international organizations. The Kim family regime in Pyongyang remains impervious to the carrots and sticks that the international community employs.

There are, however, two things that the regime plainly fears: the outflow of its citizens and the inflow of information. Pyongyang's crackdown on citizens who try to leave reflects the essential insecurity at the core of every totalitarian regime. So, too, does its suppression of information coming from any source other than itself. It is the response of a government that understands just how subversive the truth can be if a significant segment of its population is exposed to it. The regime knows that information, if spread, threatens the very essence of its power. This gives it a powerful incentive to keep its citizens from encountering any and all unauthorized information.

Pyongyang is right to fear the new underground railroad and the information invasion that it has launched. An informed population is more likely to rise up against the regime and demand its ouster. The seeds of the collapse of the Kim family regime are being planted by those who flee.

The lessons for those who care about the suffering of the North Korean people should be clear: Expand the new underground railroad. Find ever better means of delivering information to those left behind.

The challenge for world policy makers is to tap the power of the new underground railroad, nourish the capacities of the North Korean diaspora, and formulate policies to speed along the process of liberation and reunification. This deserves to be a regional effort, involving the United States, China, Japan, South Korea, and Russia,
the same countries that are part of the on-again, off-again nuclear negotiations with Pyongyang.

The main obstacle to action is China. Beijing understandably fears having a large, semipermanent refugee population on its border, with its potential for creating heavy social and economic burdens. That is no excuse for China's failure to live up to its legal and humanitarian responsibilities to protect the North Korean refugees within its borders, but it is an entirely reasonable concern. That said, there is no reason that China should have to bear this burden alone.

The solution is to bring the new underground railroad above ground.

What if China were merely a way station for North Korean refugees, a place where they stayed briefly before transferring to resettlement facilities in other countries? Instead of being forced to hide in China, North Koreans who crossed the river would have a better option. They could go to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees or another designated humanitarian organization and receive immediate protection. If the North Koreans were processed swiftly in China and then departed, Beijing would have little reason to fret about the financial or social costs of managing a large, illegal population on its border. Nor, in case of a crisis in North Korea, would it have to worry about struggling by itself with a flood of refugees.

The United Nations has many shortcomings, as it has proved many times over in its failure to restrain North Korea on WMD and nuclear proliferation and its inability to reduce the suffering of the North Korean people. But the international organization has demonstrated that it does one task well: caring for refugees. The Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees excels at that work. If Beijing allowed the U.N. agency to do its job and operate on the Sino-Korean border, the UNHCR's record elsewhere in the world demonstrates that it could be highly effective.

Unlike refugees who cross borders just about everywhere else in the world, North Koreans who reach Chinese soil already have a guaranteed home: South Korea. The United States, Japan, Canada, and European countries have taken in small numbers of North Korean refugees, and it would be desirable for them to accept more, if only to signal the importance those countries place on assisting the displaced North Koreans. But there is no need for them to accept large numbers of refugees. It's natural and appropriate that South Korea should be the destination for the overwhelming majority of North Korea's freedom seekers. For reasons of language, culture, family, and proximity to the North, almost all North Koreans who escape opt to live in South Korea. That is as it should be.

The logistical issues of bringing the underground railroad above ground are complex, but it's possible to address them. To minimize the length of their stay in China, the North Koreans who arrive in China could, with Beijing's approval, move on to temporary facilities in neighboring countries. There they would be interviewed and processed for resettlement in South Korea or wherever else they want to go. A dozen international humanitarian organizations, including such groups as Doctors Without Borders, have offered in the past to help establish refugee centers in neighboring countries to care for the North Koreans.
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Mongolia, which has good relations with both Koreas, could be one such place. Its geographical location close to northeast China, where the overwhelming number of the refugees are located, is also a point in its favor.

Thailand already is acting as a de facto resettlement center for hundreds of North Koreans every year under a quiet arrangement with South Korea. North Koreans who reach Thailand are housed in a detention center in Bangkok, where they are interviewed and processed for resettlement by the South Korean government before leaving for Seoul. The whole process takes about a month. The South Korean government pays most of the costs of caring for them while they are in Thailand.

A resettlement model that could be instructive here is the successful rescue of two million Indochinese refugees in the late 1970s and '80s. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the United States accepted 1.2 million Indochinese refugees. Australia, Canada, and France each resettled more than one hundred thousand, and other countries took in significant numbers. Paul Wolfowitz observed this process firsthand as assistant secretary of state for East Asia from 1982 to 1986. According to Wolfowitz, a key to the success of the Indochinese resettlement program was the partnership between the first-asylum countries of Southeast Asia—Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore—and the countries of final resettlement. Wolfowitz called the system “a great humanitarian achievement” and has urged that countries adopt a similar effort on behalf of the North Korean refugees in China. Under his proposal, “even relatively modest levels, for example, twenty-five thousand per year, could permit resettlement of a quarter of a million refugees over a ten-year period.”
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Bringing the underground railroad above ground would provide another benefit for China. It would allow it to fulfill its obligations under the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention and its 1967 protocol to care humanely for refugees within its borders. By doing so, China would signal the world that it is a responsible nation and prepared to stand by its word. Its current refusal to live up to these responsibilities puts it in the category of international scofflaw. It throws into doubt China's commitment to all the global treaties it has signed and ratified.

Showing compassion to the North Korean refugees would also signal the world that China has a heart. That is not always evident to those who follow its treatment of democratic activists, Tibetans, Uighurs, and other of its citizens who defy the government. Beijing's forcible repatriation of North Koreans has the effect of aligning China's behavior with the savagery of the Kim family regime, the world's worst abuser of human rights. It puts China in the category of the
uncivilized nations, a designation it does not otherwise deserve. China's mistreatment of some of its citizens, appalling as it sometimes is, usually does not sink to Pyongyang's level.

Treating the North Koreans humanely ought to be an easy choice for Beijing. The North Korean refugees pose no threat to its authority, and Beijing would pay no domestic political price for treating them well. It would have the additional benefit of putting China in good stead with its top trading partners: the European Union, the United States, Japan, and South Korea.

To the extent that North Korean refugees impose a burden on China, a regional resettlement program of the sort suggested above could ameliorate the problem. But not all of the North Koreans hiding in China are a burden for that country. Some North Koreans there make a contribution to China even though they are there illegally. The United States, South Korea, and other countries in the Pacific Rim could help these refugees by encouraging Beijing to provide legal status for them.

North Korean women who voluntarily marry Chinese men, for example, can be a boon to the smooth operation of Chinese society, which has a shortage of women of marriageable age. Arresting and repatriating North Korean brides serves no good purpose. It breaks up families and alienates the women's Chinese husbands. The government sometimes seems to understand this. It often turns a blind eye to the presence of some of the North Korean brides, in effect allowing them to stay indefinitely. It would make better sense to legalize the women's immigration status.

The children of Chinese–North Korean unions already qualify for legal status under China's Nationality Law, which guarantees citizenship to the offspring of a Chinese national. Yet many local governments refuse to register such children, or their fathers fail to do so, forcing them into a kind of stateless limbo, as described earlier in my discussion of half-and-half children. Their unregistered status, which denies them education and other public benefits, will
not benefit China as the children reach their teen years and adulthood and seek a productive place in China's modernizing economy. Tens of thousands of these children are growing up in China. It is in Beijing's interests to ensure that they are registered and permitted to take up their full rights as Chinese citizens.

Some of the children are de facto orphans, abandoned by Chinese fathers who cannot care for them and by North Korean mothers who have either fled or been repatriated. Their lack of official papers makes it impossible for foreigners to adopt them. Legislation has been introduced in the United States Congress calling on the State Department to develop a strategy that would enable Americans to adopt these half-and-half children.
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China could facilitate that process by making sure the children receive the Chinese citizenship papers to which they are entitled.

China already tolerates the presence of North Korean traders, family visitors, and some kinds of workers, even when they arrive illegally. Immigration programs providing legal protection from repatriation to such categories of refugees would be humane and helpful. Along those lines, China could implement a guest-worker program that would allow North Korean laborers to stay in China legally.

Despite its long alliance with North Korea, China today is no whole-hearted fan of that country. It recognizes that Pyongyang is a dangerous, unpredictable ally over which it has insufficient control and that Pyongyang's bad behavior could escalate out of control. Yet Beijing persists in the alliance because it fears instability on the peninsula. The biggest challenge for Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo is persuading Beijing that a Korea unified under a democratic, capitalist system would not be a threat to China. To the contrary, it would be an advantage.

A collapse of North Korea would have huge implications for China: disruption of regional trade, refugees streaming across its border, even war. China would almost certainly intervene militarily
to stem chaos in North Korea—and to keep refugees from flooding across the river. But doing so would be costly both economically and in terms of China's international prestige. At some point, China would face difficult choices: Does it go it alone and try to install a Beijing-friendly government that it might or might not be able to control better than it controls the Kim family regime? Or does it work together with Seoul and Washington to find a solution that would include reunification of the two Koreas and permanent stability?

U.S. policy should be to encourage China to see the wisdom of reunification. China is South Korea's largest trading partner, a fact that augurs well for Beijing's economic interests in a unified Korea. Two-way trade between China and South Korea reached $200 billion in 2011 and should hit $300 billion by 2020.
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Contrast that with the growing dependence of North Korea's broken economy on Chinese aid. China provides most of North Korea's food and fuel and Sino-North Korean trade amounts to more than 70 percent of North Korea's total trade.
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In addition, China's goal of developing the three Rust Belt provinces bordering North Korea would be advanced by a stable and economically viable neighbor. In any case, North Korea is an anachronism in a region that has undergone a spectacular transformation from poverty to prosperity in the past half century. The rest of East Asia has grown up around it. Today, 25 percent of the world's trade passes through Northeast Asia. China, Japan, and South Korea are near the top of the list of the world's largest and strongest economies.

As for security issues, surely the United States and South Korea could accommodate Chinese concerns about a unified peninsula. Once the North Korean military threat is gone, the need for an American military presence on the Korean Peninsula would decrease substantially and might disappear altogether. Washington, Beijing, and Seoul need to start talking about such issues now rather than waiting until a crisis makes them unavoidable. That would include
developing a regional plan to address a potential refugee crisis in the event of political destabilization in North Korea.
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