L.A. Group Helps North Koreans Hiding in Asia Reach Freedom

From his one-bedroom apartment in Artesia, Pastor Douglas Shin helps conduct a modern-day underground railroad for North Koreans who have fled their homeland.

Working with a human rights network that stretches halfway around the world, Shin has helped 75 North Koreans hiding in Asia to reach freedom in South Korea. His efforts and those of other humanitarians have touched and given hope to thousands of others.

Human rights groups say that 100,000 to 300,000 North Koreans have risked their lives to venture into China in the six years since a famine struck one of the world’s most closed countries.

Shin describes his effort--called Exodus 21--as a 21st century equivalent of delivering enslaved people to freedom.

“North Korea is a big concentration camp,” said Shin, who visited the Communist state in 1997 and 1998.

The most common escape route is across the Tumen River into northeast China. There, Shin’s associates, along with other human rights and Christian groups, offer guidance, shelter and food for the often malnourished North Koreans.

Some refugees live temporarily with relatives and friends in northeast China, where ethnic Koreans have lived for generations. But their illegal residency there subjects them to arrest and forced return to North Korea.

Through Shin’s contacts, some refugees make their way to Mongolia, where the political climate is freer. From there, Shin’s contacts in Seoul have secured permission for some fortunate ones to fly to South Korea.

Using the Internet and the telephone, Shin is in daily touch with contacts throughout Asia. When he receives word that one of his charges has arrived safely in Seoul, he rejoices.

“I feel the way I did when my baby boy was born,” he says, recalling that Joseph’s heart was not beating when he was delivered in an emergency caesarean section nearly two years ago. It’s like bringing to life someone who was almost lost, the Seoul-born Shin says.

His comments are replete with religious metaphors, reflecting his calling as a minister of the Calvary Chapel, an evangelical church movement. Each Sunday, Shin ministers to high school and college students at a Presbyterian church in Koreatown, the Great Vision Church of Los Angeles.

Shin, 46, whose family immigrated to the United States when he was 20, was ordained five years ago, after pursuing careers in filmmaking and private business.

The refugees’ plight, he says, is even more desperate than that once confronted by the boat people from Southeast Asia. Yet the North Koreans are not getting the assistance they deserve, Shin says, because people around the world are unaware of the extent of their misery and the human rights abuses they face.

He hopes that will change after next month. Representatives of a Seoul-based commission will submit petitions with 10 million signatures, weighing 3 tons, to the United Nations secretary general in New York. The petitions demand that the U.N. grant refugee status to the North Koreans in exile.

Shin’s foray into the world of refugees began after visits to China and North Korea in the late 1990s.

Group Formed at Breakfast Meeting

Returning to Los Angeles, he contacted Hyong S. Koh, a well-connected Korean American attorney and human rights activist.

They met with human rights attorney Judith Wood, a Messianic Jew who grew up hearing a relative describe her escape from Auschwitz. Over breakfast, the three hatched Exodus 21.

They talked about setting up a base in Asia to ease the refugees’ hardship. Mongolia was picked because of its proximity to China, its abundance of land and its laissez-faire attitude toward outsiders.

In January 2000, Shin left for Mongolia. With the help of local soldiers in Sumbre in eastern Mongolia, he pitched a yurt, a circular tent, and decked it with a banner reading, “The Great Vision Church of Los Angeles.”

Traveling between the yurt and an apartment in Ulan Bator, the Mongolian capital, Shin fed, clothed and found shelters for refugees. Help came from many quarters, including some of the 1,000 Koreans in Ulan Bator, which has two weekly flights to Seoul.

Financial supporters of Exodus 21 in Los Angeles include the Great Vision Church, attorneys, an anonymous donor and a Korean grandmother who is Shin’s neighbor.

Among the beneficiaries of Shin’s mission was a North Korean agent named Li. Befriended by South Korean and Korean American missionaries while he was an operative in Siberia, the Communist agent began to study the Bible and became a Christian.

After being outside his country, North Korea seemed unbearable, Li said. So, not long after his homecoming, he crossed into China, where he sought to make contact with an uncle in South Korea. His effort failed and upon his return to North Korea, Li was detained as a political prisoner.

Two years ago, during a bathroom break, he bolted, scaling seven prison fences, Li recalled. He went home to ask his wife to escape with him. She refused.

Leaving her and their two young children behind, Li returned to China. He lived in hiding, relying on human rights workers and missionaries for sustenance.

Shin took up Li’s case when the North Korean defector was preparing to leave for Mongolia. Shin traveled to China, met him in a hideaway and gave him a set of clothes and money before they went their separate ways.

Li made a 1,000-mile journey to Mongolia by train, car and foot. To evade border guards, he sometimes walked backward and erased his footprints.

After crossing into Mongolia, he hid for a day in a septic tank, then trashed his old clothes and buried his shoes before setting out again.

After a week of staying with the minister’s contact in Mongolia, the North Korean again hooked up with Shin. For months, Li lived in Ulan Bator with Shin and another refugee in the pastor’s apartment.

Through contacts in Seoul, Shin filed a successful “homecoming application” with the Ministry of Unification on Li’s behalf. In January, Li flew to Seoul, where he is now undergoing months-long re-education, designed to prepare North Korean defectors for a new life in the South. Under South Korean law, North Koreans automatically become citizens.

Another refugee who made it to Seoul says the life of an ordinary North Korean is so dire, few outsiders can fathom it. Mothers get so desperate at times that they spank hungry children crying out for food--to hush them, said H. Lee, who made it to Seoul with her husband and two children with Shin’s assistance.

“Can you feel the pain of the mother who must whack her child because she has no food to give?” she asked.

Starvation Reportedly Claims Millions

Since 1996, more than 2 million men, women and children in North Korea are believed to have died of starvation blamed on the government’s ill-conceived agricultural policies.

The daily food ration for the ordinary North Korean is about five ounces of grain, according to a U.N. agency report. Mothers stretch the meager ration by adding wild roots and grass, but these can cause severe intestinal ailments.

Lee said some families abandon their young in marketplaces, hoping they will have a better chance of surviving by begging or stealing.

Some make their way into China. Known as kkotjaebi or “flower swallows,” these youngsters in tattered clothes wander the streets of northeast China begging for food.

After dodging armed border guards, North Korean escapees have to skirt Chinese authorities, who periodically round up the refugees and repatriate them.

A 52-year-old refugee told human rights workers that his skull and a leg were broken during interrogation after he was turned over to North Korean authorities.

Human rights organizations say as many as 100,000 North Koreans are in hiding, primarily in China, but also Mongolia, Russia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand.

The North Koreans in China are classified as “economic migrants,” and do not qualify for assistance guaranteed to refugees under international law.

Wood, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Human Rights Project, says there is no question that North Koreans in China are political refugees. Her group hopes to persuade the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to open an office for the North Koreans in Mongolia.

If they had refugee status, temporary centers could be established to process them to South Korea or other countries, said Sang-Chul Kim, secretary-general of the International Commission to Help North Korean Refugees and former mayor of Seoul.

With half of the more than 1 million Korean Americans tracing their roots to North Korea, they would find sponsors, human rights officials say.

Since Shin’s return to Los Angeles from Mongolia in December, he continues to direct the complicated maneuvers of Exodus 21. Calls often rouse him from sleep.

“Four people have successfully crossed the border into Mongolia,” a caller told Shin last week.

Shin dreams of building a refugee sanctuary in Mongolia, recalling its pristine landscape, populated by 2 million gazelles but only 70,000 humans. The people of Korea and Mongolia have had friendly contacts going back to the 13th century.

“It would be a good marriage because Koreans can help Mongolians cultivate much-needed farming in exchange for letting them stay on their land,” he said.

From the cramped apartment Shin shares with his wife and two children, he prays for deliverance of the people of North Korea. For his part, he works around the clock. “The rest is up to God,” he says.