Mick Hartley

From the Times (£):

Russia is seeking to deport a North Korean defector to Pyongyang despite warnings that he will face execution or detention in a prison camp.

Choe Myong-bok worked for three years in a logging camp run by the North Korean authorities in the Amur oblast in the far east of Russia, before he escaped in 2002.

He moved to St Petersburg and has lived there ever since. He was detained by police during a document check last month, after which a court ordered that he be repatriated. He and his girlfriend, a Russian citizen, have two small children.

Olga Tseytlina, a lawyer acting for Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights organisation, said: “He could face the death sentence or torture if he is sent back to North Korea.”

That should, I think, read, "He will face the death sentence or torture if he is sent back to North Korea.”

This month Russia and North Korea renewed an agreement on the repatriation of each other’s citizens who are “found to have illegally entered or been living in either country’s territory”. There are no recorded cases of people fleeing from Russia to North Korea.

Ha! Very droll.

Memorial said the agreement made the Russian officials and security service employees who enforce the deportation of North Koreans “accomplices to criminal acts”.

The European Convention on Human Rights, to which Russia is a signatory, forbids the deportation of migrants to countries where they face execution or torture….

North Korean logging camps in Russia date from 1967, when Nikita Khrushchev allowed them to be built in remote regions in the Russian Far East and Siberia. Profits from the work by North Korean prisoners were split 60-40 in Moscow’s favour. In the 1970s, North Korea began sending ordinary workers, rather than prisoners.

The United Nations has described conditions at the camp as slave-like. Despite this, defectors say that many North Koreans seek work in the camps, where labourers are woken every morning with songs praising the ruling Kim dynasty, because they are relatively easy to escape from. There are about ten such camps in Russia, housing thousands of workers.

There are also believed to be hundreds of North Koreans living illegally in the regions surrounding the camps. Their chances of finding refuge are minuscule: between 2004 and 2014, Russia granted permanent refuge to two out of 211 North Korean applicants.

For a glimpse into life as a North Korean labourer in Russia, check out this Daily NK interview with a man who spent two years there:

We’ve heard that the authorities monitor and track workers by sending special surveillance agents. Can you tell us a little about these people?

They are agents dispatched by the State Security Department (SSD), and are officially called “assistant managers,” but this is just a clever lie. We called them “the third.” [Managers are called “the first,” and secretaries are called “the second.”] The third are the scariest.

Why don’t you call them security agents? Why do you call them “assistant manager” or “the third?”

If the Russian government found out that North Korea has placed SSD agents in the country, they’d likely be deported. That’s why they pretend to be assistant managers. But the truth is that their function is to monitor and control the workers.

In the last broadcast, we learned that a single company can use about 500 workers. How can one SSD agent possibly manage such a large number of workers?  

In addition to the official agents, there are also people who work as “secret informants.” This setup is quite similar to North Korea’s domestic situation. The informants monitor and track the behavior of their fellow workers and submit reports to the third. The workers don’t know who these informants are. Normally, there is one informant for ever 5 or 6 workers, and they live and work right alongside the ordinary workers. They carefully monitor the ideological purity of their coworkers and secretly report it to the SSD agent. That’s how the third is able to maintain real time knowledge of every worker’s whereabouts and situation. 

If there is one informant for every five workers, that means that a company of 500 workers will have 100 informants. Is that right?

Yes, that is the case.

That is a surprisingly large number. Next, I want to ask about the living conditions. Laborers live in group units. I’m curious about the lodging. How was it?  

The workers spend the duration of their time living in a shipping container [converted into a trailer]. All 500 workers usually just go back and forth between home and the construction site. About five or six individuals live in one container. None of the laborers have the chance to live in an apartment. The Russian companies that hire North Korean laborers install the containers right next to the construction site. The workers eat and sleep in them. An electric furnace is used to heat water. We used to dream about using a proper bathroom or a bathhouse to wash….

Did the other foreign workers also live in containers? 

Not all of them. For those who did live in containers, the conditions were much different from ours. Compared to us, they were able to keep more of what they earned, so they could buy whatever food their hearts desired.  Seeing their living conditions made me quite upset. We’re both human. We were doing the same work, but we were getting treated like insects. It felt so unfair. They lived better, ate better, and earned more than us. They worked 8 hours per day, but we were forced to work from 8:00 am to 11:00 pm. It was a slave-like existence. It made me fume….

What happens to workers who try to escape and get caught? 

They send you back home if they catch you trying to escape. But before they send you back, they put your arms and legs in casts, and fix them in place using iron bars. Then they cover it all up with bandages. This makes it very difficult to move. To Russian people who might happen to see, it looks like an injured person. They are sent on an airplane with the casts in place, and will be executed as soon as they arrive back in North Korea.