Tape of Failed Defection Touches a Nerve in Asia

Over and over, television news programs play footage of a pigtailed 2-year-old in pink overalls watching in terror as her mother and grandmother, North Korean defectors seeking asylum at a diplomatic mission in China, are wrestled to the ground and arrested by Chinese police.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, it is not surprising that this image is setting off a diplomatic imbroglio and a larger debate about the increasing number of desperate North Korean defectors who are storming diplomatic compounds in China.

The incident Wednesday took place at the Japanese Consulate in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang. Japan’s Foreign Ministry on Monday demanded that China apologize for arresting people within a diplomatic compound--a violation of international law--and turn over the five defectors: the girl, her mother, father, grandmother and uncle.

South Korea offered to resettle the North Koreans if they are willing to come here rather than go to the United States, their first choice.

More than 100,000 North Koreans are estimated to have fled north into China to escape famine and political repression in their reclusive Communist homeland. But China, in deference to its longtime ally, hands them back to their own country.

Some analysts fear that if more North Koreans come to China, it could turn into a mass exodus that would destabilize the entire region.

In recent weeks, refugee advocates, Christian missionaries and other activists have helped dozens of North Koreans seek refuge in diplomatic compounds in China. In the past six days, 10 North Korean defectors have made desperate bids for asylum in China. In addition to the five at the Japanese Consulate, three defectors managed Thursday to get inside the U.S. Consulate in Shenyang. Two others got into the Canadian Embassy in Beijing on Saturday.

The three at the U.S. Consulate left this morning for Singapore, on their way to Seoul. The couple in the Canadian Embassy were expected to follow shortly.

Despite reports in the South Korean press that the family seized at the Japanese Consulate would go to South Korea, their case had not been resolved as of this morning.

The pigtailed girl, Kim Han Mee, and her family have provided a focus for concerns about the North Koreans. Their images have been broadcast regularly on Japanese and South Korean television and their photographs plastered on the front pages of newspapers.

“They are just ordinary people, but their story is a microcosm of all the troubles, all the hardships experienced by the North Koreans. When you’ve met them, you have met them all,” said Moon Kook Han, a South Korean businessman who has been helping members of the same extended family of North Koreans for several years.

Those arrested last week are related to a defector now living in South Korea, 17-year-old Jang Gil Su, who last year published a harrowing book of crayoned drawings about the family’s life in North Korea. They are featured in his book and have been arrested several times by North Korean authorities.

“Given their background, if they are sent back to North Korea, that will be the end of them. They will be killed,” Moon said.

In an effort to rally international support for those arrested at the Japanese Consulate, Moon on Monday released a short biography of the family. In addition, a six-page statement handwritten by the girl’s mother, Lee Seong Hee, before the attempt to reach the Japanese Consulate explained why they were seeking asylum.

According to the account, Lee was five months pregnant in 1999 when she escaped North Korea with her husband and relatives by swimming across a river into China. Like thousands of other North Korean defectors, the family members thought they could find food and relative freedom in China but instead ended up on the run.

“Rumor was that there was plenty to eat in China, but we could not stay in one place more than an hour because the Chinese authorities were chasing us,” Lee wrote.

After her husband fell seriously ill from a rat bite, Lee was faced a desperate decision: In order to raise money she had to agree to sell the baby to a Chinese peasant family for $200 or go to work in a tea house that was a front for a brothel. Although she had just given birth, she chose the latter.

“If the North Korean people could eat, dress, live like people in other countries, we would not have to sell our baby or our body,” Lee wrote.

She said in the statement that she and other family members would like to go to the United States because they have a relative there, but that she feared attacks by North Korean agents if they resettled in South Korea.

Nam Sim U, a South Korean-born architect who lives in Yardley, Pa., said he has offered to sponsor the family along with the Defense Forum Foundation, a Washington-based conservative group that has been lobbying for the rights of North Korean refugees.

Nam said they are not actually relatives, but “I consider everybody in North Korea to be my family and my friend. We have to help them.”

Chung In Moon, a political scientist at Yonsei University in Seoul, said that the events of the last week are likely to force China, Japan, the United States and South Korea to take a more coordinated stance on dealing with North Korean refugees.

“There needs to be some meetings about how to deal with the possibility of a mass exodus from North Korea. That could be very destabilizing for the region,” political scientist Moon said. He also suggested that refugee activists deliberately targeted the United States for a recent asylum bid in order to involve the Bush administration more deeply.

The effort to penetrate the Japanese Consulate in Shenyang, like others, appeared to be choreographed to gain maximum publicity. The organizers rented a fifth-floor hotel room across the street to watch the action and invited a Japanese television cameraman to film from the window. But the plan quickly went awry.

“The men were supposed to distract the guard while the women went inside. But they were nervous. The men ran in first. The women were slower getting through the gate and they were caught,” said Moon, the businessman-activist.

As the camera rolled, Chinese police lunged for the women and the 2-year-old fell out of a baby carrier on her mother’s back. The mother and grandmother were dragged out of the compound and arrested. Nearly an hour later, the Chinese police went into the compound and brought out the men.

China maintains that a Japanese vice consul in Shenyang authorized the police to remove the North Koreans, which Japan denies. An investigative report released Monday by the Japanese Foreign Ministry, based on interviews with consulate staff, said: “There is no truth that Japan gave permission to the armed Chinese police officers to enter the consulate ground.”

But Japanese officials came in for domestic criticism for failing to act quickly enough, and for the consulate’s apparent bungling of the matter. In the video, also played repeatedly on Japanese television, a Japanese consular staff member was shown handing back to the Chinese officers their caps, which had fallen off while they struggled with the women.

The Chinese responded with their own criticism of Japan. “The real reason behind the row is the swell of nationalism and increasing rightist thinking within Japan,” said a signed commentary on the Web page of the English language China Daily. “Since the 1990s, Japan’s continued economic slump and China’s rapid economic growth has caused Japan’s negative and hostile views of China to surface.”

Times staff writer Valerie Reitman in Tokyo and special correspondent Anthony Kuhn in Beijing contributed to this report.