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Starving fugitives 'sold as sex slaves'
to Chinese men
By James Palmer
19 November 2002
Thousands of North Korean fugitives
living and hiding in China are forced to become slave
labourers or prostitutes, or are sold and resold to
Chinese men as "sex toys", campaigners said
yesterday.
There are between 10,000 and 300,000
Korean refugees hiding in China and monitors for Human
Rights Watch (HRW) found those they spoke to were resigned
to a sub-human existence in China. Many fear they will
be captured and sent home to serve a life sentence in
one of North Korea's notorious prison camps, where inmates
are reportedly experimented on with chemicals, starved
or shot.
Yu Sang Jun, a North Korean farmer,
and his South Korean rescuer, Chun Ki Won, were in London
yesterday to urge the international community to condemn
China for failing to recognise thousands of North Koreans
as refugees.
Mr Yu's wife and his four-year-old
son starved to death in the North Korean famine of the
late 1990s, when they were reduced to eating grass and
tree bark.
In 1998, he and his seven-year-old
son, Chul Min, joined hundreds of thousands of refugees
risking death to flee to China. Beijing treats them
as "economic migrants" and deports them to
North Korea, where they face execution for fleeing -
a crime tantamount to treason.
While working in near-slave conditions
in a cement factory, Mr Yu was found by Mr Chun, a South
Korean missionary who has rescued more than 150 North
Korean refugees in China. Mr Yu fled with 10 others
to Mongolia but Chul Min, then aged 10, lost his guide
and died in the desert.
In December last year, Mr Chun was
arrested in China while attempting to transport 12 North
Koreans, including a pregnant woman, across the Mongolian
border. He served seven months in a Chinese jail.
Mike Jendrzejczyk, of HRW, said: "North
Korea bears the main responsibility for this exodus
of refugees, who are fleeing hunger and human rights
abuses. But the Chinese government has important responsibilities
too; forcibly returning asylum-seekers is a blatant
violation of international law."
The group is also calling on China
to stop the arrest and intimidation of missionaries
and aid workers. Mr Chun, who is visiting Britain with
an evangelical humanitarian group, Christian Solidarity
Worldwide, said: "Yu is free now, but he has lost
everything."
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