Mick Hartley

On Tuesday a couple of North Koreans working in a Siberian logging camp were reported to have sought asylum at the South Korean consulate in Vladivostock. Claudia Rosett actually visited one of these logging camps in 1994, and here recalls what she saw, and gives some background:

These camps were the legacy of a 1967 Brezhnev-era deal between the Soviet Union and the North Korean regime of Kim Il Sung. The Soviets supplied the equipment and the forests, in rough terrain where during the long winters the temperature dives far below zero. North Korea supplied–and supervised–the lumberjacks. The two governments sold the lumber abroad and divvied up the profits.

In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. Surrounded by a freer Russia, these logging sites carried on as de facto slave labor camps, totalitarian outposts of North Korea. For the Russian foreign ministry at the time, this was a human-rights embarrassment. One Russian official told me there was "harsh treatment" in the camps, including "torture, beatings" and even "controversial" deaths. But the Russian Ministry of Agriculture, which was raking in money from the lumber sales, saw it as an excellent deal worth continuing. One of their spokesmen explained that Russians would not be willing to log such hostile turf for the pittance the North Koreans were paid.  […]

I found and interviewed a number of North Korean lumberjacks who, despite the risk, had run away from the camps and were in hiding in Russia. I had assumed they'd been sent from North Korea to the camps as a form of punishment. They said no. Conditions inside North Korea were so bad that in some cases they had bribed officials there to be given a chance to come work in these logging camps. It brought them a step closer to the free world. But defecting was horribly dangerous. North Korean agents would hunt them. The penalty, if caught, could be death. Church groups were willing to help them. But among all the officialdom of the then-democratizing Russia there was no place systematically willing to offer sanctuary–not the offices of the United Nations nor the International Committee of the Red Cross nor the legations of such free countries as the U.S. or South Korea.

Inside the camps themselves the scene was bleak. Portraits of Kim looked down on barracks with nothing but plastic sheeting over the windows. Loudspeakers broadcast anthems of glory to rail-thin loggers in ragged clothes.

At one of these enclaves a North Korean worker was on duty, opening and closing a very ordinary gate. There was no drama to it. He was just a gaunt man, standing in the snow, wearing sneakers with no socks–peering out from that transplanted bit of North Korea into a world where asking for even a taste of his rightful human portion of liberty could bring him torture and death.

In the 16 years since, stories have surfaced from time to time about these North Korean lumber camps in Russia. Last August the BBC reported that they are operating still. Perhaps these days the loggers have socks? The horror is not these camps per se but the iron grip of the North Korean system behind them, which has destroyed millions of its own and can terrorize them even in other lands. Meanwhile, the world looks on, recording here and there the desperate requests for asylum, all of it blending into yet more business as usual. When does it end? What will it take?