The North Korean software engineer was desperate. He had been sent to northeast China in 2019 to earn money for the North Korean regime. After working long hours under constant surveillance, he found an email address on a website and sent a heartbreaking message in 2021: “I write at the risk of losing my life.”
A young North Korean woman who had been smuggled into China by human traffickers in 2018 contacted the same website earlier this year. She had planned to defect to South Korea, but instead she was being held and forced to earn money through cybersex. “Please help us escape from this house,” she wrote.
The website belonged to the Rev. Chun Ki-won, a Christian pastor in Seoul known for helping North Korean refugees fleeing through China, the route almost all defectors take. He has been convicted by Pyongyang and was once jailed in China for helping hundreds of North Koreans reach South Korea or the United States. But now, the job of helping North Korean defectors has become “nearly impossible,” Chun said.
China has imposed strict limits on border crossings and even internal travel during the pandemic. As they began to unwind in recent months, aid workers received a flurry of calls from the thousands of North Koreans stranded in the country.
However, Beijing’s ever-expanding surveillance state has made eluding authorities more difficult. The number of North Koreans who arrived in South Korea in 2019 was 1,047. Last year, that number dropped to 63.
“They’re watching everything I dothe software engineer said in his first email to Chun in 2021. He arrived in China with thousands of North Korean computer specialists who were sent abroad to earn money for the Kim government, either through work or cybercrime. When he first arrived, he had no plans to run away. But last year, he sent Chun video images of his bruised face and said he was beaten. “I want to live free, even for a single day, even if I die trying,” he wrote.
Lee said the broker who smuggled her told her that if she worked for a boss for three months, they would send her south. Instead, the broker sold it to a North Korean woman who was married to a Chinese police officer in Baishan., a city near the border. The woman forced her to perform sexual acts in front of a webcam for male clients.
In January, Lee turned to Chun, telling him that she and two other North Korean women were about to be sold to another trafficker and needed help.
Helping North Korean refugees requires hiring people smugglers, or trusted “middlemen,” said Lee Hark-joon, who has directed two documentaries about them.
The cost of moving a defector through China has risen to tens of thousands of dollars against thousands of dollars before the pandemic, activists said. In January, Chun hired a broker in Thailand who partnered with brokers in China. The plan was to transport the North Koreans to a safe house in Qingdao, on China’s east coast. Once there, the next step was for all of them to be smuggled into Laos and then to Thailand, where North Koreans can claim asylum in the South.
Chun’s operation began to unravel when the traffickers took the software engineer not directly to Qingdao, but to a house in Jilin. The next morning, they were going to pick up the three women when the police stopped them.
In early February, new brokers took the three women to the Qingdao safe house. But a few days later, the husband of her captor barged in, Chun said.
One of the brokers must have made a deal with him, Chun said.
The software engineer is now in a Chinese jail awaiting repatriation to North Korea, he said. In the North, those who have tried to flee to the South face prison camps or worse. Lee’s whereabouts are unknown.
“I have been helping North Koreans for 23 years.Chun said. “I have never felt so sad and helpless.”
choe sang-hun
THE NEW YORK TIMES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6802415, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-07-13 17:20:08
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