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Death Rules the Land the World Forgot
The London Times
February 4, 1999James Pringle sees the bitter harvest of Stalinist failure in North Korea
Cold, weak and starving North Koreans fleeing a Stalinist land, where oxcarts trawl city streets for bodies and women have stopped marrying and having babies, were yesterday facing a nightmare that could snuff out their last hopes of gaining sanctuary in China.
Since January 1, Chinese authorities in two border provinces have been involved in a crackdown and are searching homes. They are fining Chinese citizens 5,000 yuan (?375), the equivalent of a year's income, if they give shelter even for one night in the present -20C (-3.5F) temperature to North Koreans fleeing a civil society that has broken down and now resembles medieval Europe.
Residents along the Chinese side of the frozen Tumen river dividing China from the bankrupt Democratic People's Republic of Korea say Chinese police patrols have warned them: "You must not care if the escapers starve to death. Don't help them, and don't let them into your homes."
In a situation that is, as one refugee put it, "always worse this year than last year", these exiles - perhaps 100,000 in number - have none of the protection provided by international law.
The Chinese policy sends dozens of weeping refugees back across the river, including bartered North Korean brides smuggled over the border for Chinese husbands and sold for ?125, and stunted orphan children. An atmosphere of fear and anxiety has gripped the entire 1,000-mile frontier between the two neighbouring Communist states.
Tears started in the eyes of a 47-year-old North Korean woman as she told me in a Chinese home where she had been given shelter: "I'm heartsick. I face certain death if I am returned. They will strangle me or put me in jail or a labour camp where I will die of hunger and cold."
North Korean refugees, including orphan children, showed me scars where they had been battered or tortured after being sent back during earlier escapes. Refugees say 70 per cent of prison inmates die of starvation.
The refugees said that bellicose North Korea, which last month threatened to wipe out America "for good", had issued an order to the population: "Tighten your belts until 2004. Prepare for war to liberate the South."
Even North Korean border guards are hungry, refugees said, though this did not stop them pursuing a shoot-to-kill policy ordered last year by North Korea's 56-year-old dictator, Kim Jong Il, who has gradually consolidated power since the death of his father, the "Great Leader", Kim Il Sung, in 1994.
Residents of Tumen and other Chinese towns and villages report nightly shooting along the river that forms the border in this region of deforested mountains.
From a hillside just above the river, I looked down through binoculars into the town of You Sen, which has a population of 5,000. In mid-morning, not a wisp of smoke came from the chimneys of its austere private homes or the six factories, which stood desolate like tombstones.
There was only a handful of people shuffling in the street, no motor vehicles, and only a single bicycle. On the outskirts, women were bent double as they dragged sleds laden with kindling.
Most people, eating only a gruel made from stalks and leaves, and potatoes if they are lucky, are now too weak to go into the mountains to gather wood. There were footprints in the snow on top of the ice on the river, proof of nocturnal crossings. Graves lined the far bank in places, as North Korean troops patrolled a ridge.
Elsewhere, I watched soldiers break the ice and draw water from the river about 50 yards from where I stood on the Chinese bank, within hailing distance.
Opposite Musan, a coal-mining town which had a population of 130,000, refugees hiding in Chinese homes told me that 40,000 miners were out of work, and that even the mining machinery had been sold in China.
In the devalued currency, the won, salaries were less than a pound a month, possibly the lowest in the world, but North Koreans do not even have that now. Half the flats were empty, their owners having died or fled.
From talks with dozens of refugees, I do not believe that there have been "huge natural disasters" like the floods and tidal waves which Pyongyang claims have occurred over the past four years, but only routine local flooding.
This disaster is man-made, created by Stalinist policies that do not permit reform for fear of toppling North Korea's totalitarian leaders in one of the world's last Marxist states.
Refugees say that 90 per cent of industry has shut down, except munitions factories needed for the "liberation" of the South and for the sale of missiles and armaments overseas. However, the Chinese authorities, whose fines for border violations have increased tenfold in the past year, have understandable concerns. China hardly needs more mouths that are in need of feeding and if Beijing were to open the border, untold numbers would cross.
China has economic problems of its own which are throwing millions out of work in moribund state industries and the Government fears instability. Beijing would not want to see the collapse of its North Korean buffer, a cataclysm that could bring South Korean, and possibly American, troops to its border.
Here, then, is the picture of life and death. In every North Korean city, people huddle together in the waiting rooms of railway stations. There is no heating but the crush of people provides some warmth. Mothers abandon their children in the hope that they will be fed, but several die every day.
Trains are very infrequent, and they do not run to any timetable. They have no heating, no working toilets and excrement is piled up. Most of the windows are broken. "People are not allowed to travel without a permit, but the system has broken down and they get on the trains to go somewhere to attempt to find food," said Chae Sum Chun, a refugee.
Mr Chae told me that, in the electric battery factory where he used to work, out of a workforce of 4,000 there had been 300 funerals in a single month last June. Marriage as an institution has virtually collapsed and so has the family. "Girls do not want to marry any more because they do not want to give birth," said Zhen Mi Ok, a married woman. "What is the point? There is no food for the babies." Most births that do occur are at home - hospitals have no food or medicines. Few mother have their own milk. Babies, for the most part, are fed the same gruel of powdered stalks and leaves, unless they are among the fortunate few receiving World Food Programme assistance.
Mothers abandon their homes because they cannot feed themselves, even less their husbands and children.
Most international aid food goes to the army and cadres of the North Korean Workers' (Communist) Party, and members of the Kim Jong Il clan - like Albania under Enver Hoxha, North Korea is a clan-based autocracy.
Aid agencies say the growth of 61 per cent of North Korean children has been stunted. Kang Ming Hua, a 16-year-old girl, is the same size as a ten-year-old ethnic Korean girl on the Chinese side.
"I was always so hungry," she said as she ate an apple to a tiny core and told me about the dead children she had seen "over there". I talked to children who had buried other youngsters.
Refugees claim the North Koreans have created a huge Potemkin village for the 100 or so diplomats and foreign relief workers in Pyongyang.
Refugees told me how, when foreigners are coming on inspection tours, all children are ordered to stay indoors, so that they will not be seen begging and stealing.
Cultural life is dead. There is no singing and no laughter, no films or theatre. "Yet while they are with their children, mothers can still smile," one woman said.
Personal security has collapsed and woman do not go on the streets after dark. "You can't talk about law and order," said one refugee woman here.
"People are stealing night and day. Robber bands of soldiers and ruffians attack communities."
On the Chinese side, many people are still willing to help, despite the heavy fines. They include ethnic Chinese and not just the ethnic Koreans who inhabit this part of the province of Jilin. "I am already old, so what am I afraid of?" asked Pak Tae Jun, an ethnic Chinese-Korean. "I won't let people starve. We know in the rest of the world they give help for humanitarian reasons. We are doing the same."
Educated refugees say that there is no chance of overthrowing the Kim Jong Il regime. "It is impossible to revolt or organise anything secretly because there are spies everywhere," one man said.
Huge slogans in bright white characters on the hillside of North Korea here say "We will do things our way" and "Dear Leader Kim Jong Il will bring back the era of Kim Il Sung and become a youthful hero."
But what Mr Kim has wrought is a new heart of darkness in Asia, a vast field of the dead and the dying from which the world has so far largely averted its eyes.
- - -
February 4, 1999
James Pringle reports from the border of China and North Korea
'Through my binoculars, looking across the frozen Tuman, I could see evidence of a starving society that has descended into medieval barbarism.'
THIS week I witnessed and heard scenes of human suffering with virtually no parallel. Through my binoculars, looking across the frozen Tumen River, I was able to see firm evidence of a society that after years of starvation has descended into medieval barbarism.
According to refugees, three million North Koreans have died of famine out of a population of just 20 million, the result of a Stalinist regime that prefers to see children die rather than open its impoverished country to the world.
While the privileged ruling class and military leaders are looked after in the capital Pyongyang, often fed from overseas aid, nothing is getting through to this remote border province that famine has gripped for four years. One of the few signs of life are the ox carts picking up the bodies of the dead, not unlike those that took away victims of the Black Death in Europe.
A young North Korean man asked me: "Why don't you give us food, because we are starving?" He sat in a house on the Chinese side of the border, in second-hand jeans and jacket that the householder had just broken the law to give him.
Pak Son Un had just buried his sister-in-law in a makeshift grave near by. She had been shot by North Korean guards as she crossed the Tumen some months before in search of food. The guards had crossed after her at night and stuffed her body into a hole. Pak recognised her from her clothing. Pak's brother had also been captured on that trip, had spent weeks in prison and then been shot. Pak, a self-possessed man of 32, was not asking for food for himself, but for his people. Somehow, it seems, the world community and the pop stars and politicians who came to the aid of Ethiopia and Cambodia have forgotten the North Koreans, perhaps because this hermit Communist kingdom seems so remote and at odds with the world ever since the Korean War.
Pak, too, had been caught by North Korean guards on his last trip. He had been stripped and tied to a wooden post for two hours in bitter cold, before being battered. But they told him he was lucky to be alive because Kim Jong Il, the new "Great Leader" of the People's Democratic Republic of Korea, had recently ordered a "shoot-to-kill" policy. Pak later escaped from a labour camp.
This week in Beijing, David Morton, World Food Programme representative in Pyongyang, was asked to compare the famine with those in Ethiopia and Cambodia. He replied: "It's on the same scale, but it's different."
It is different. Unlike Ethiopia or Cambodia, there are no pop stars singing We Are the World or television cameras or visiting politicians or celebrities. Here there are no camps, for this is a hidden famine.
There is not the grisly cavalcade of human skeletons tottering out of Cambodia's jungles I witnessed in 1979, nor the children with distended bellies I saw in African famines. In North Korea, people starve and die quietly in their homes. Yet, unlike those other Third World tragedies, this is a famine in an industrialised state.
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