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Nicholas Eberstadt, Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute and United States Committee for Human Rights in North Korea Board Member, discusses the situation of North Koreans who have crossed the border into China. He examines the roles that China, South Korea and the United States have played and what they can do now to reverse this refugee crisis.
TRANSCRIPT:
JERRY FOWLER: My guest today is Nicholas Eberstadt. He is Henry Wendt Scholar for Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute and is on the Board of the United States Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. He has written extensively on Korea and East Asia. Last week, he had an op-ed in the New York Times on saving North Korea’s refugees. Nick, welcome to the program.
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Thanks for inviting me.
JERRY FOWLER: Nick, your op-ed in the New York Times last week was addressing the situation of North Koreans who have crossed the border into China. Give us just the broad overview; how many North Koreans are in China, and why are they there?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: We do not know exactly how many are in China, north of the North Korean border with China. That, of course, speaks to the problem, the tragedy that has compelled them to seek sustenance across the border. This problem of North Korean refugees in China is now a problem going into its second decade. It began in the mid 1990s with the famine that befell the DPRK in North Korea in the mid 1990s. That famine was the only episode in recorded human history in which an urbanized and literate society, during peacetime, was subject to such a crisis.
JERRY FOWLER: Can I just interrupt for a second? You say that the famine befell North Korea as though it kind of came from the heavens. What exactly went into this first recorded famine in an urbanized environment?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: I am glad you asked that question because of course it did not fall from the heavens; it fell from the Great Leader and the Dear Leader, from Kim Il Song, who died in 1994. It was the longest serving Communist ruler of any society. By the way, Kim Il Song is still treated in the North Korean Constitution as the Eternal President of the country, so in that sense, I guess you could say this famine fell from the heavens. His son, Kim Jong Il, has inherited the absolute rule of the totalitarian society, of DPRK or North Korea. An incredibly distorted and clearly destructive set of economic policies and arrangements have been embraced by the North Korean regime for decades as part of their militarized program for eventually defeating and absorbing the ROK or South Korea, our South Korean ally in the southern half of the Korean Peninsula. With the end of Soviet aid at the end of the Cold War, the North Korean economy headed into a pre-death spiral that resulted in the deaths of untold hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of North Koreans, and many other hundreds of thousands North Koreans fled across the border to seek survival and sustenance in China. This has been an ongoing tragedy, and we do not know how many tens or hundreds of thousands of North Koreans are in China at this moment, in part because the Chinese government regards these people who have fled, takes the posture, that these people are economic migrants, not refugees, and so they treat them as illegal or positive criminals. On the other side of the border, there is a North Korean government that treats unauthorized exit from the DPRK, which is of course paradise, as an action very close to treason, and punishable by torture or prison, or often death, and for all of those reasons, the North Koreans outside of the country have an immense incentive to lay low, to stay in hiding, and not to be counted by anyone. Some of the NGO work and some of the other reports that are being done on the plight of these wretched, unfortunate people suggests that the totals may be in the scores of thousands, maybe, possibly even in the hundreds of thousands. If these numbers are roughly correct, and the sorts of suffering that we hear about, which we know through the general lot of these people can be taken into account, it is possible that this refugee crisis is second only to Darfur as the second major refugee crisis in the world at the moment.
JERRY FOWLER: I want to ask about the conditions that these people are living in China, but before I do that, let me just ask how, you said that they go underground because of their tenuous situation in China, but just how easy is it for outsiders to get to that region of China? North Korea is obviously a very closed society. China is more open than it used to be, but I would think it might not be that easy to get to the border area.
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: There is a border that stretches for hundreds of kilometers, hundreds of miles, between China and North Korea, mainly along the Yalu River, and in some portions of this border, guards on both sides are not present or terribly attentive, sometimes some parts of this are fairly shallow and it is possible to ford or even wade across in some parts, so there obviously has been unauthorized or untracked movement of people back and forth. As far as Westerners or other outside NGO people coming in to try and interact, clearly if one is of European heritage, broadly speaking, one is going to stick out more than if one is Korean or of Korean background or Chinese background, but there is certainly more access to this large area now than there was in the past.
JERRY FOWLER: What are the conditions that the North Koreans are living in when they cross into China?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: I think it is fair to say that the general conditions are of constant fear and immense danger because as essentially stateless persons in a rather unwelcoming, almost no man’s land, these people who are searching for survival, are victims to any sort of two-legged predator that may wish to make use of them. The women who cross the border, we hear again and again, become either violated—often one hears about that—or they are trafficked; in some cases they consent to marriages of convenience on the other side of the border. There is less perceived use for the men and children, and one hears a lot of awful stories about how they are attacked or beaten or how they perish in other sorts of tragic circumstances. It is a life of fear.
JERRY FOWLER: To what extent does China undertake organized efforts to find these people and ship them back to North Korea?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Because the Chinese government has, and continues to maintain the posture that these unfortunates are not refugees under the understanding of the United Nations Convention relating to the status of refugees, that these people are kind of economic migrants looking for a better job, the Chinese government goes through recurring cycles of police activity to round people up and to send them back to the DPRK. The Chinese government also either actively welcomes or tacitly approves the North Korean government’s episodic use of secret police teams that scour the cross border countryside on the Chinese side, looking for North Koreans and refugees whom they apprehend and take back summarily. As I mentioned, the fate for these people is not attractive. There is torture, there is prison, there is execution. The North Korean side set up actual types of prison camps for these refugees when they were befouled back to North Korea called 9-27 camps, September 27th camps after an edict that Kim Jong Il decreed about these quasi-traders that happened to come down on September 27th one year. In North Korea, furthermore, the political punishment system often works in such a way that relative to the third degree—I guess that would mean to one’s second cousins, everyone from one’s immediate family through one’s second cousins—can be rounded up and imprisoned for a political crime if a political convict is sent to a prison. There is an even greater risk to people who remain in the DPRK.
JERRY FOWLER: You have made reference a couple of times to the status of refugees under international law, and we should probably just clarify that someone who leaves their country for economic reasons is not considered under international law a refugee, but somebody who fears returning to their home country because of the threat of persecution is a refugee. I guess the idea would be that these North Koreans may leave for economic reasons, but then once they leave, they have a valid fear of persecution when they return.
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: If they have a valid reason to believe that they will be punished because of leaving, that I believe, classifies them—a lot of this terminology is in French from these conventions and so forth; what do they call it, a refugee sur la place?, individuals who stay abroad, and the fact that they are abroad creates a threat to their body or to their survival.
JERRY FOWLER: Or the fear arises once they go abroad?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Exactly.
JERRY FOWLER: Part of your proposal is to create, what you call, “an underground railroad,” that would facilitate the movement of these North Koreans to South Korea, where constitutionally; they have a right to citizenship. One of the things that you suggest in the op-ed is that South Korea is not that eager to take these people. Why would that be?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: The current South Korean government has an almost schizophrenic approach towards North Korea, and it has an almost schizophrenic approach to questions of human rights, especially for Korean people. On the one hand, one has a government in South Korea now, which is maybe largely, maybe disproportionately operated by former human rights champions or human rights activists themselves; people who were in jail or under different sorts of danger during the military era, the pre-democracy era in South Korea in the 1970s or 1980s, but for some strange reason, these people are very reluctant on the whole to extend the question of human rights to human rights in North Korea. The reason seems to be, as best I can understand it, that the current South Korean government is engaged in an attempted program of detente reconciliation with Kim Jong Il’s regime in North Korea. They have called this program “sunshine” or sometimes they call it engagement; it is now labeled “the peace prosperity policy”—it goes by different names as the old names become unpopular, I suppose—but because the current government is mindful of its pleasing or angering of the Kim Jong Il regime, they have been very cautious, almost fearful to pursue what one might have thought would have been their legal obligation under their own constitution to rescue Koreans who are in need of help.
JERRY FOWLER: What about China? China, as you have said, does not care to have these people on their territory; why would they not embrace a program to transport them out of Chinese territory that does not involve sending them back to North Korea?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Of course, as we know, the Chinese government has not embraced anything like this for ten years and more. The Chinese government has been—I think we can fairly say—heartless about the plight of these poor people. What I, and my colleague Christopher Griffin, suggested in the op-ed piece which you referred to earlier—thank you for mentioning it—was that if the United States government were to become an advocate for these refugees, the cost-benefit balance for the Chinese state might change, whereas it is perfectly reasonable in Beijing’s view at the moment, to turn attention away from this humanitarian tragedy. If the United States speaks up loudly and indicates American interest in the plight of these people, and indicates an American interest in facilitating their safe passage from the border to other countries, China’s cost-benefit calculus could substantially change. The Chinese government has not been reminded publicly by any government or institution of significance that it has a number of international obligations that it is ignoring right now; not just the refugee’s convention; the convention on torture, the conventions on diplomatic and consular relations. Sometimes when North Korean refugees get to Beijing, they try to escape to embassies, and Chinese police have stormed embassies and have—heartbreaking story—literally yanked people out of these safe havens back to sure punishment or death in North Korea. Nobody in the drama so far has spoken publicly to China about its real existing legal obligations with any force. China also has other considerations in its portfolio. The 2008 Olympics is coming up, and I think the Chinese government has good reason to wish those Olympics to be a showcase of Chinese successes, rather than an international platform for exposing of callous humanitarian inactions on China’s part. The Chinese government has all sorts of other reasons for wishing to cooperate with the United States on issues that matter to the United States. If what the United States and American allies and international human rights community activists wish to see is a Chinese government tolerance of sort of an informal underground railroad passage out of China, rather than any sort of displaced persons camps in China or some sort of thing like that, it seems to me that the Chinese government might have good reasons for wishing to cooperate, but we do not know whether they would cooperate or not because we have not tested, we have not tried.
JERRY FOWLER: Which brings me to the ultimate question; why has the United States not added this to the issues it discusses with China? What are the political obstacles to putting this on the table?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: I cannot for the life of me understand why the American government has not put this on the table, especially an American administration which repeatedly says that it champions a freedom agenda. These are refugees and victims whose plights tug the heartstrings of any American administration, regardless of their freedom agenda. This sort of movement of people would also have, I would think, very positive impacts within the North Korean dictatorship itself because it would show for the first time that there is an alternative to this sort of life with the Kims that has been the fate of the North Korean people for almost sixty years. It could actually bring about some of the sorts of reforms that people have been talking about for decades on North Korea and not seeing. I can only guess that it is a sort of fit of absent-mindedness, but maybe that is not the actual explanation.
JERRY FOWLER: The issue that we read about most in the press with regard to North Korean, obviously, is its nuclear program. If this refugee issue were put into play, what type of effect would it have on the diplomacy surrounding the nuclear program?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: I can only speculate here, of course, I suppose if one is a diplomatist attempting to achieve a specific written document, putting additional variables in play might seem to be a distraction or an inconvenience, and of course, these refugees, like other refugees at other points in time in history have been considered very inconvenient by states people in a number of different countries. They have been considered inconvenient, certainly, by states people and diplomatists in South Korea, to mention just one country. I would think, however, that exit, voice and loyalty, having the example that it is possible to opt out of North Korea could have an almost revolutionary affect upon the notion of accountability for the North Korean dictatorship, and accountability could be the first step towards genuine performance on this nuclear drama the international community has been caught up in for the last decade and a half.
JERRY FOWLER: Nicholas Eberstadt is Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute and on the Board of the United States Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Nick, thanks for taking the time to be with us.
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Thank you so much for inviting me; it is a real pleasure.
