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SUNDAY REPORT
Leading His Flock of Refugees to Asylum
A missionary helps North Koreans flee via China and Mongolia. Risking
death, the escapees brave the elements and jail.
By Valerie Reitman, Times Staff Writer
ERENHOT, China -- It is their last supper together,
and the shepherd has gathered his small flock of North Koreans around
a table piled with steaming plates of shredded pork, rice and braised
tofu. But the seven refugees are too nervous to do more than nibble.
Among them: a woman claiming to be an elite worker in North
Korea's nuclear missile program; a muscular former soldier whose
heavily scarred arms attest to a previous escape attempt; a woman
who had been sold as a bride. Urged to "be strong, be cold,"
she is leaving her toddler behind. Their guide and pastor
is Chun Ki Won, an affable South Korean who once sold golf clubs
to high-flying Japanese businessmen. Despite his good nature and
Christian heart, Chun doesn't really trust his charges. Still, he
is risking his life to help them. "We're at the last
moment," Chun says now as they grip one another's hands and
pray. The women weep softly. "Please God, keep us safe. Please
let them be all right." These "chosen ones"
are at one of the final stops on an underground railroad to freedom
in South Korea. Each started the journey by slipping across the
border to China, where they sought out or stumbled upon a network
of safe houses in which Christian missionaries hid them and taught
them religion before spiriting them hundreds of miles across northeastern
China. In just one hour, they will attempt to crawl under
a 7-foot barbed-wire fence into Mongolia. If things go well, the
next time Chun sees them will be in Seoul. If not, they
could die. Deep down, Chun is also nervous, for he knows that danger
is all around. The elements could foil them, or if Chinese authorities
capture the group and send them back to North Korea, they could
be beaten or even executed. On the tiny screen of his video
camera, he shows them footage of the terrain ahead: the dirt-and-sand
road that parallels the fence; the foot-high prongs meant to keep
out trespassers; and their goal, the Mongolian watchtower in the
distance. They can rejoice if they get that far, even though they'll
temporarily go to jail. Chun has bribed the Mongolians to hand the
group over to South Korean Embassy officials. "Move
quickly. Don't run," Chun instructs them in the most reassuring
voice he can muster. "There could be trucks, or guards or dogs."
If they are stopped, he warns, only the two who are fluent
in Chinese should speak. They are to identify themselves as shepherds
accompanying foreign scientists studying "desertification"
of the plain. They are en route to their house down the road. They
are to gripe that the researchers aren't paying them enough.
"I've had to lie ever since I met you guys," Chun
jokes, acknowledging his mission's moral compromises and small payoff.
Experience has taught him that assimilation is difficult and that
if they make it to the South, these North Koreans will likely be
trading one form of misery for another: Most won't work; won't help
others escape; won't go to church or pray. They'll squander their
money on gambling and booze. "They always cry in front
of me before they go," Chun says. "They say, 'I'll live
the rest of my life for Him.' But they always forget it."
They may do far worse and report him to authorities. One missionary,
Kim Dong Shik of Lynchburg, Va., has disappeared and there is speculation
that he was kidnapped by North Korean police. "You
never know which one will betray you," Chun says.
Defections on Rise War split the Korean peninsula half
a century ago, dividing millions of families. North and South are
technically still at war, and their border is the most heavily militarized
in the world. Despite its fitful expressions of interest in reform
and rapprochement, North Korea remains one of the most closed societies
on Earth. Until a few years ago, at most a few dozen North
Koreans managed to defect to the South each year. But Chun
and others like him have led hundreds to freedom by taking them
first in the opposite direction, into the Chinese hinterlands. Their
motivation is Christian charity as well as a yearning to reunite
the Korean peninsula. Thanks largely to the efforts of
Chun and other activists, 583 defectors showed up in Seoul last
year, nearly double the number that arrived in 2000. At least 838
have arrived so far this year, a few at a time. Chun got
involved after visiting China in August 1999, when he saw a North
Korean woman being sold as a bride to a Chinese man while her husband
stood helpless. He also met a young girl who woke up one morning
to find that her mother and sister had been sold, leaving her to
beg in the streets. "I could not erase the sense of
helplessness of that man and young girl who saw their families sold
right before their eyes," he recalled. "It tormented me."
Since then, he has helped more than 150 refugees get to Seoul.
An additional 350 wait in his safe houses north of the winding
Tumen River, which forms the border. On one side is North Korea,
a land where famine has killed an estimated 2 million people in
the last decade. On the other is northeastern China, where markets
groan with beef, apples, bananas, green vegetables, spices and the
Korean staple, kimchi. North Korea comes clearly into view
from some vantage points on the Chinese side. Occasionally, a soldier
can be seen sitting on the riverbank. Along one bend, a huge portrait
of Kim Il Sung stares down from a bucolic railroad station. Bald
mountains, stripped of trees for firewood, expose their bulging
ribs. The North Korean town of Namyang, seen through a
pay-per-view telescope, seems eerily unpopulated; its low-slung
buildings appear to be mostly empty. Refugees say daily
existence there is filled with horrors. They report that they subsisted
on roots and leaves boiled into putrid soups; witnessed authorities
shooting people who stole corn from the fields; saw loved ones starve
to death and buried them in old rice sacks on mountain slopes packed
with bodies. In order to get out, North Koreans might use
a watch, trinket or the equivalent of a few dollars to bribe the
bedraggled guards sitting sentry every few hundred feet. Or they
might evade the guards and then wade or swim to the sparsely guarded
Chinese side. In winter, they can trot across the river's icy bends.
Once in China, poor and malnourished children have prowled
the open-air market in Tumen to beg for food. Adults sought out
work on farms or in factories. Some have been desperate enough to
storm into diplomatic missions in a bid to gain sanctuary.
Their presence has become increasingly uncomfortable for authorities,
and China has been cracking down. China considers the North Koreans
economic, rather than political, refugees--people who, like millions
around the world, simply seek a better life elsewhere. It has a
treaty with North Korea, traditionally an ally, to return the refugees.
North Korean soldiers also have crossed the porous border to round
them up. Although refugees can blend in physically because
the area is heavily ethnic Korean, those who can't speak at least
rudimentary Mandarin rarely venture outdoors. The underground
railroad is one of the few ways out of this predicament. Refugees
know that it is largely run by Christian missionaries. Even though
it is an alien concept for people brought up in an atheist society,
they know that it improves their odds if they are religious -- or
at least pretend to be. They also learn that the South
Korean government provides each defector a relocation bonus of about
$28,000, housing, and job training -- an astounding package for
people who have earned at most a few hundred dollars their entire
lives. Missionary's Motivation Divorced with two
children in their early 20s, Chun, 46, has an easy laugh and a quick
wit that he uses to put edgy refugees at ease. He worked his way
up from waiting tables to managing a hotel in Seoul, which he did
for 17 years. Flush with success, he launched ventures that boomed
and failed, including a golf equipment business in Tokyo and a Japanese-style
restaurant in Seoul. The failed ventures saddled him with $200,000
in debt. He sold his home and furnishings and sent his children
to live with friends. For months, he subsisted on noodles
and scraped together subway fare. He contemplated suicide and kept
a bottle of pills handy. He gradually came to view the tough times
as a sign from God that he wasn't meant to be a capitalist. He is
studying now to be a Presbyterian minister. Drawn to helping
North Koreans and the idea of unifying the two Koreas, he established
a mission he named Durihana, meaning "two become one."
It survived on donations from about 600 subscribers. Providence
seems to smile on him just when he is most desperate, Chun says.
Once when he had run out of money, one of the largest churches in
Seoul, Durae Presbyterian, gave him $10,000 to help the North Koreans.
Chun's mission pays for safe houses in China. For food. For
train tickets to the border. And for Korean-language Bibles. He
takes most of the refugees through Mongolia, but has routes through
the jungles of Vietnam and on to sympathetic, non-Communist countries
such as Thailand and Cambodia. Maps of the escape routes
decorate the walls of the modest apartment four flights above a
restaurant that serves as both Chun's home and Durihana's offices.
Before heading to China to pick up a group of refugees, he
quietly lays the groundwork with the South Korean government. The
underground railroad is so sensitive that top South Korean officials
say little about it on the record. It is not clear how they feel
about Chun. However, Chun says five government agents regularly
tail him in Seoul. In this case, Chun knows authorities
will want to debrief the woman who works in the missile factory.
The higher the Communist party rank in North Korea, the more thrilled
the government is. Once in Seoul, North Koreans are interrogated
to determine whether they are who they say they are. Because the
northerners have no passports, birth certificates or other documents,
the South Koreans are always on the lookout for spies, or for Chinese
pretending to be North Koreans to get the resettlement bounty. Then
it's off to a residential camp where they learn how to shop, use
the subway and Internet, and drive.Chun sets out from home early
on a Saturday morning on this trip, leaving behind his girlfriend
and his two beloved dogs--a schnauzer and a poodle--named Duri and
Hana. Flight to China Aboard a direct flight from
Seoul to Changchun in northeastern China, Chun fiddles with his
newest gadget, a hand-held global positioning device. It will come
in handy in the Chinese hinterlands. He is met at the dingy
airport by a Korean Chinese missionary whose cell phone rings to
the tune of "Amazing Grace." In a beat-up truck, they
head to nearby Jilin and a safe house located in a cluster of drab
buildings. The local missionary helps Chun with the three suitcases,
a box and a knapsack filled with donated clothing. At this
first stop, Chun will minister to refugees' souls and try to soothe
their anxiety; he won't include any of them on this trip. He realizes
that he controls their fate, and it weighs on him heavily. All the
same, he has no formula for choosing who will go, and when. The
decision is part practical, part political, part gut. If
he brings too many on one trip, they are more likely to be caught
and the South Korean government might balk at accepting them. Those
with relatives already in the South get preference. He considers
the mix as well: whether children should go, and with whom; who
is in the most danger; who will do well in the South and who has
become a committed Christian. Chun and the local missionary
climb several filthy flights of stairs and slip into a sparsely
furnished apartment. Two bare bulbs light a tidy room. The smell
of simmering rice wafts in from the kitchen. Ten North
Koreans are sprawled on green-foam tiles that might be found in
an American playroom. Futon mattresses lie on the side of the room.
A few Korean-language Bibles are strewn about. Each day,
the refugees rise at 5 a.m. to worship and read the Bible. There
is little else to do, and the refugees take the stress out on each
other. They fight. Fighting is one reason so many get caught; it
draws the attention of neighbors, who alert the police.
Chun knows that some of them might be convicts or North Korean double
agents. Once, a woman tried to use him as a drug-runner.
Chun still vacillates between sympathy and anger. "They
are just people at the end of their rope," he says, adding
in jest, "If I wasn't religious, I'd kill them."
Just now, the group seems quite civilized--and savvy. But they are
auditioning for a future trip. They cluster around as Chun preaches,
telling the group that faith is not just about praying or reciting
the Bible. "It's about how you deal with people.... If you
fight with others, you're attacking God." "Being
wealthy is not what makes you happy," he continues. "When
you get to South Korea, you'll have money and housing. But the South
Korean guy who doesn't have that, has friends and family. Is that
fair?" "If they study one hour, you have to study
10 hours. When they walk, you have to run. In South Korea, you can't
catch up because you're not in a fair game. You start complaining,
and that's the problem. North Koreans are taught to be lazy. From
the time you're born, everything is free." Visiting
Safe Houses This time, Chun's entire group will be from
another area, around Yanji, at the eastern end of the Chinese-North
Korean border. Many of the elderly Korean Chinese citizens here
arrived when the Korean peninsula and adjacent area were under Japanese
occupation from 1910 to 1945. Hence, some of those who come across
the border from North Korea have distant relatives to help them.
In the next two days, Chun will shuttle among five safe houses,
preaching, reassuring and making his choices. He stops
by one tidy apartment where a woman cares for four North Korean
children. They look healthy and well-adjusted--but very small for
their ages. For many, it is as if they stopped growing precisely
when the famine started in their home country in the mid-1990s.
A 6-year-old boy who looks like he's 3 cuddles up in a foreigner's
lap. He says he wants to be a minister when he grows up. He was
left in a church by his uncle about 18 months earlier, so malnourished
he could barely walk. A girl, now 13, was found begging in the market.
Two boys who are 10 and 11 but look 6 or 7 were told by their parents
that they'd return for them. The woman tries to pass the
younger children off as her own. She has enrolled them in school,
and they have rapidly picked up Chinese. Nevertheless, she's not
sure how long she can continue the ruse because Chinese couples
are supposed to have only one child. At another apartment
lives an 11-year-old girl who hasn't been outside the building in
three years. Chun fears that nosy neighbors would realize she's
not in school and doesn't speak Chinese. She came across the river
with her mother. An elder sister disappeared in the train station
when they arrived. "I'm going to get you to South
Korea," Chun tells the girl as she draws in a notepad he's
given her. "I know you'll be a good student." He asks
the girl's mother to hold out for a little while longer.
After making his rounds, Chun hastily settles on a list of five,
and makes calls on his cell phone to the safe houses where they
are staying. At the last minute, he decides to add a young couple,
bringing the total to seven. The Seven Chosen
Late on a Monday afternoon, the group assembles in the apartment
of a missionary-businessman in Yanji. There is Chun's trophy,
the 32-year-old woman who claims to have headed a small unit in
a North Korean nuclear missile plant. Tiny, with glasses and eyebrows
that look as though they were tattooed on, she was an elite cadre
in the North Korean Communist party, went to college, learned how
to use guns and grenades, and every year reported for reserve duty.
Or so she says. She grew disillusioned when her sister
couldn't get treatment for tuberculosis and malnutrition. She crossed
the river to China, where a church helped her get medicine for her
sister. But North Korean authorities caught her bringing it back.
Police questions about church and karaoke -- "enjoying life,"
as she puts it -- made her start thinking about how North Korea
controls its people. "You can't laugh when you want
to laugh or cry when you want to cry," she says, dabbing at
tears. "I could never think of the meaning of life, or religion,
because I always had to think of the party." She picks
at a callus on her hand, developed in 2 1/2 years of farm labor
in China. Her saving grace is that she's learned to speak Chinese
reasonably well, which will help on this journey. Also
chosen is a small 35-year-old man with dark curly hair, who is clad
in a black jacket. He left North Korea three years ago after his
older brother and nephew died of hunger. He worked on a Chinese
farm, was captured and spent 14 months in a North Korean labor camp,
escaped to China again and has lived for a year in a safe house.
"I couldn't deny God, and so I was treated like a political
criminal in North Korea," he says. "I want to live for
God. I want freedom." The muscular build of another
39-year-old defector attests to his 10 years in the North Korean
army, where he says he was on a special forces team along the South
Korean border. With his family starving, he headed to China
and worked on a farm for two years. But when he got home, he found
that his wife and daughter also had fled. He returned to China to
try to find them but was caught and sent back to North Korea. He
escaped by breaking a window on the train back to his hometown:
His forearms still bear the scars. He says he beat up three
policemen when he escaped, so he is not afraid of the authorities.
But he is wary of the others in the group, and he asks a reporter
about his prospects in South Korea. "Are North Korean refugees
doing well in South Korea?" he asks. "Can people have
the jobs they want to have? I can do any kind of work."
A 24-year-old woman with long brown hair was lured to China
by the promises of an illicit job broker. Instead, he sold her for
$400 as a bride to an ailing Chinese farmer, who took her to his
remote village to work on the farm. After she gave birth to the
son the family wanted, they began to abuse her. An acquaintance
in the village helped her run away, urging her to leave her 2-year-old
behind. "Be strong, be cold," the acquaintance said. In
Yanji, she met an accomplice of Chun's, who pressed Chun to take
her along. She admits that religion baffles her.
"I cannot believe 100% in God," she says. Nevertheless,
she's concluded that South Korea and America are more prosperous
than North Korea because they are religious. "I want to see
with my own eyes what God has done to help the South Korean people,"
she says. She seems almost giddy. Then there is the young
couple. The man, 25, is confident, bordering on cocky. He has been
sent back to North Korea five times -- four from China and once
while trying to escape with Chun through Vietnam. His 20-year-old
girlfriend is making her first attempt. She is stylishly dressed
and pretty. Chun teases her about her earrings, which she says family
members in Yanji gave her. Her parents, a brother and a sister will
be on a trip that leaves a week or two later. Carrying a small knapsack,
she is the only one to bring any luggage. The last member
of the group is particularly nervous. He was caught once before
and sent back. Chun's mission channeled $10,000 through a web of
sources to free him and the cocky 25-year-old. Both had been threatened
with execution in North Korea. Journey to Mongolia
Chun will leave the seven early in the rough four-day trip
in a green-and-yellow 1960s-era train to the Mongolian border. A
trusted Chinese Korean man will accompany them the rest of the journey
and keep in touch with Chun by cell phone. Chun appoints
the missile-factory worker as the group leader. "She
knows everything," he tells the group, assembled now in the
living room of a downtown Yanji safe house. "Just obey her.
Don't ask her any questions.... I told her everything, and I told
only her. If I tell everybody everything, you'll get into a fight.
You can't make it unless you pray to God." The woman
from the missile factory and the forced bride are to sit together
and act like sisters. The couple will stick together, and the other
three men will pretend to be friends. "Now, let's
pray," Chun says. The group leader weeps softly. As
dusk falls, they slip out of the apartment two by two by three and
walk to the train station. Chun pays for their tickets, $50 apiece,
for the journey in hard, turquoise seats. They dare not fly or even
travel in the train's sleeping compartment because officials would
check for identification cards. Around them, passengers
hoist big burlap sacks onto overhead luggage racks. Dim fluorescent
tubes barely light the cars. By the time the seven board the train,
just an hour after it started its journey, the squat toilets already
reek. As the train chugs out of the station, the cityscape
quickly gives way to fields and horse-drawn carts, illuminated by
a brilliant harvest moon. Vendors hawk grilled chicken, corn on
the cob and magazines. Four of the seven shell out some of the pocket
money Chun has given them, buying several copies of the same magazines.
Chun chastises them: "Spend the money carefully. Just buy one
and share it." Chun uses the time after he has left
the train to call on accomplices and visit more safe houses. On
his way to Hohhot, the capital of China's Inner Mongolia province,
he is asked which of the seven will do well in South Korea.
The forced bride? "She'll just be trouble," he says.
The young couple? "They'll just give me a hard time."
Why does he bother, then? He believes it's his Christian duty.
"If you look at their character, there's no reason to
bring any of them in," he says. "Some people say, 'Why
don't you just bring in the good ones?' But I think that's wrong.
They're all God's people, and we have to save them because otherwise
they'll die.... It's my mission." In Hohhot, Chun
hires a taxi for the five-hour drive to the border. On the way,
a camel occasionally comes into view in the brown fields. Sheep
and goats outnumber people. Huge trucks heaped with sacks of potatoes
rumble by. He uses the daylight to videotape the fence where the
refugees will make their crossing. But the taxi gets stuck in the
sand. After several attempts to push it out, the driver flags down
one of several trucks working on what appears to be a road-building
operation. He makes a deal with the truck driver to carry
a group of "researchers" back to the fence that night
on his flatbed. The truck seems like a Godsend. It will take them
directly to the crossing point. A previous group had to start farther
back and wandered for two days. A 10-year-old boy died of dehydration.
Arrival by Train Now in a private room of a restaurant
in Erenhot, the last town before the Mongolian border, Chun greets
the refugees who have arrived by train. He gently teases them.
Relationships among them have clearly changed. The missile
worker has become close to -- perhaps even romantically involved
with -- the special forces man, according to the Chinese guide who
accompanied them. The former soldier was nearly arrested by police
for smoking on a railroad platform, putting himself and possibly
the entire group at risk. It is also clear that the group
has a new de facto leader: the young man Chun added with his girlfriend
at the last minute. He seems the most calm and confident.
Seated at a big round table, Chun tells the group that the Mongolians
will confiscate any money and valuables they have, and suggests
that they give it all to him for safekeeping. He assures them that
he'd give it back when they get to Seoul. But no one gives him a
thing. "Whatever they have is such a small amount.
They can't even get a meal in South Korea with it," he explains
later. "They don't even trust me -- they think I'm somehow
doing this for my own purposes." Chun urges them to
"eat tonight, even if you're not hungry," but the heaping
plates of food go largely untouched. They are too nervous.
With Chun's final advice, they grasp one another's hands tightly
and pray together one last time. "Let's thank God,"
Chun says. By now, the forced bride's giddiness has turned
to fear. The cocky young man says he "won't sleep
till we're on the plane to South Korea." Chun gives him a cell
phone and tells him to call as soon as the group makes it across
the border. As they climb onto the truck's flatbed, a fierce
wind stings their cheeks. A few snowflakes flutter down as a big
full burnt-orange moon rises, turning white as it finds its place
high in the sky. The stars littering the sky offer a dim halo of
light as the truck gets closer to the border and the Mongolian watchtower
comes into view, perhaps a mile away. The driver pulls
up close to the fence, kills the headlights, and the defectors quickly
jump 5 feet to the ground. They dash for their lives. It takes them
no more than a minute to crawl under the fence and disappear into
the night. Ten minutes later, Chun's cell phone rings.
In a trembling voice, the leader describes where they are. Chun
tells them to keep going, that they've only made it across the Chinese
border but are still inside the no-man's-land between countries.
Chun is excited too. Things are going even better than planned.
An additional 25 minutes go by. The phone rings again. Nearly
out of breath, the leader exclaims, "We're here!"
Epilogue Several weeks later, the group would be flown
to South Korea. But on a mission three months later, Chinese
authorities arrested Chun and a dozen refugees along the Mongolian
border. Charged with smuggling, he was held for seven months
before appeals from South Korea and the United States, and the payment
of a $6,000 fine, won his freedom. Though he lived largely on bread
and water and his cell was crowded and cold, he says he was spiritually
happy in jail. "I guess the words of the Bible kept me going,"
he says. The woman who claimed that she worked in the North
Korean missile plant really hadn't. Her husband had. She now works
in a beat-up cell phone factory in a Seoul industrial park. She
thinks constantly about the family she left behind in North Korea,
especially her 6-year-old son. "I'm here, amid this
plenty, all alone," she says. Other refugees who remained
in China were caught because they did not have Chinese identification
cards. Among them were the parents and two brothers of
the young leader's girlfriend, as well as the 11-year-old girl who
hadn't been outdoors for years -- and her mother. Chun
has also heard that some of those who were captured offered to inform
on him. But as soon as he got back to Seoul, he was working
the phone. Although he won't be able to return to China because
of his arrest, Chun will continue with his mission. "Now
that I have personally experienced a bit of the hardship they've
gone through," he says, "I'll help them even more than
before."
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