North Korean refugees beg China to save them from death

THEIR fate hangs in China’s hands. Nine people, including an 11-month-old baby are literally begging China to save them from certain death.

‘Save us China, you’re our only hope’

THEIR fate hangs in China’s hands.

Nine people, including an 11-month-old baby are literally begging China for their lives.

The group, all North Korean refugees, face prison, torture, sexual violence and death for daring to escape the secretive country, according to human rights activists.

The nine, who all recently crossed to China via Vietnam, should instead be allowed to travel to a third safe country, Human Rights Watch has argued.

It has also called on China to reveal the whereabouts of the nine immediately.

Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said North Korean citizens who were forcibly returned faced a grim and uncertain future.

“North Korea subjects its citizens who are forcibly returned to incredibly harsh abuses, including incarceration in prison camps, torture, and execution,” he said.

A South Korean soldier, left, undergoes an experience on what it is like to be held in a North Korean cell.

“Beijing should abide by its international obligations and allow the nine refugees to resettle in a safe third country.”

Family members told HRW, the group crossed into China on October 16, before travelling onto Vietnam.

However, the group were arrested more than a week later, during a random check on a bus in Mong Cai, in northeastern Vietnam near the Chinese border.

It is understood Vietnamese authorities then handed over the group to Chinese police in Dongxing, in China’s southern Guangxi province, before they were transferred to a military garrison in the town of Tumen, in Jilin province, near the North Korean border.

Now activists fear the nine face not only prison, but certain execution upon their return to North Korea which in 2010 adopted a decree making defection a crime of “treachery against the nation,” punishable by death.

A female North Korean soldier looks out from behind a barbed-wire fence around a camp on the North Korean river banks across from Hekou, northeastern China's Liaoning province.

Those who have managed to escape have told HRW that anyone caught and repatriated from China face prison and abuse in political prison camps (kwanliso), which are operated by the State Security Ministry.

If human rights groups are to be believed, the camps are something to be feared.

In December 2013, Amnesty International release secret satellite images of North Korea’s repressive prison camps.

The images showed massive expansion to camps 15 and 16, known as Yodok and kwanliso, taking place to accommodate more than 50,000 prisoners.

One former security official at Camp 16 told Amnesty of just one of the brutal ways guards executed prisoners.

He said detainees were forced to dig their own graves and were then killed with hammer blows to their necks. He also witnessed prison officers strangling detainees and then beating them to death with wooden sticks.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un inspects the new subway train at Pyongyang’s Kaeson station. Defectors say questioning Kim or the regime will only end in punishment.

Mr Robertson said there was no doubt the nine refugees faced the same outcome unless China allowed them safe passage to a third country.

“If China sends them back to North Korea, they could well be sending them to their deaths,” he said.

China classifies North Koreans in the country as illegal “economic migrants” and sends them back, according to HRW.

One defector who knows only too well the brutality that the North Korean authorities are capable of is Yeonmi Park, who escaped the country at just 13.

The now 22-year-old, who actively campaigns against the country’s alleged human rights abuses, spoke at the 2015 One Young World Summit in Bangkok just days ago and said it was time for the west to take Kim Jong-un seriously and to stop making fun of him.

Yeonmi Park grew up believing North Korea’s leader was a god who could read her mind. Picture: Insight

“His haircut is funny. He is fat. He is like a cartoon character somehow, and he might try to kill me but now I am free, so I can say anything I want,” she told the summit.

“But Kim Jong-un is not a joke to me. He was a God I had to worship every day. He is a murderer. Making fun of dictators cannot be enough. Why is it so funny?”

She also revealed how her mother was “sold to traffickers for less than the price of an iPhone for around $65, while she was sold for $260.

At the same summit one year earlier she revealed how at age nine she saw her friend’s mother publicly executed for watching a Hollywood movie and during her own escape from North Korea was forced to witness her own mother’s rape.

She also revealed how she was brought up to believe that their leaders were godlike and how anyone could be sent to prison for even doubting it.

Ms park said it was time the West stopped laughing at Kim Jong-un.

“North Korea is the only country in the world that executes people for making unauthorised international phone calls,” she said last year.

“North Koreans are being terrorised today,” said Ms Park. “There’s no internet. We aren’t free to move, sing, read, wear or think what we want.”

She also revealed the fate and risks women faced at the hands of traffickers who are used to help them escape.

“I saw my mother raped. The rapist was a Chinese broker. I will never forget his face. The rapist had targeted me. I was only 13 years old,” she revealed.