I've shared this story on my google reader, Facebook and through email yesterday... If you haven't read this story through these sources from me yet, I'm sharing this on my blog today...
If you prefer to read the story in Chinese version, you can try
here or
here. Otherwise the news report below has a lot more details...
From the Sunday TimesONE of the bravest men I have ever met is locked in a Chinese prison this weekend, facing the risk of being sent back to certain execution in his native North Korea.
His story stands for the human suffering that endures while diplomats craft a controversial agreement to disarm North Korea of its nuclear weapons and to grant its dictator, Kim Jong-il, the peace treaty and the recognition that his regime has sought for decades.
The man is Yoo Sang-joon, a refugee from North Korea who lost his wife and younger son in a famine under Kim’s Stalinist system in the 1990s, and who then escaped across the border into China.
His personal tragedy did not end there, for his surviving son, Chul-min, aged 10, perished in the Mongolian desert in a forlorn attempt to evade Chinese security forces and North Korean agents hunting down the refugees. After that numbing bereavement, Yoo, who is about 36, found solace in the Christian religion, fell in with a group of South Korean missionaries and devoted himself to helping others escape to freedom.
He could have stayed in comfort and safety in South Korea but he chose to return to hostile territory as a rescuer.
Yoo hid people in chilly apartments, smuggled food to families living like troglodytes in pits concealed in snow-covered fields, bought clothes for the escapees and taught them how to get past checkpoints.
One year ago he took the risk of meeting me to explain how the underground network smuggled people from the frozen wastes of northeast China to the border where the slow-flowing Mekong River divides Laos from Thailand.
“Helping other people makes it easier to deal with my grief for my son,” he explained, as we huddled in a dank hotel room. “I try to get the orphans out first. You will understand why.”
Cool, dispassionate and dignified, he trusted to elaborate security precautions – The Sunday Times agreed to call him Nam Hong-chul, informing readers that this was a pseudonym – and to luck.
However, his luck ran out a few weeks ago when he was caught in a dragnet to sweep up the escape network.
......Those caught are detained in special jails, then escorted under armed guard across one of the bridges linking China to North Korea.
Horrifying scenes have been witnessed even here. Chinese soldiers have told their relatives of watching, nauseated, as the North Koreans force thick wire through the hands of the prisoners or under their collarbones, yoking them like animals to the slaughter.
In one well documented crime, North Korean security agents beat a man to death in front of the Chinese as soon as he was handed over, recognising him as a dissident.
The only thing standing between Yoo and a fate like that is his slender green-and-gold South Korean passport.
The South Korean embassy in China is aware of his case and the government in Seoul has said that it does all it can to help its citizens.
However, refugee campaigners fear that the left-leaning administration of President Roh Moo-hyun is prone to appease both the Chinese and the North Koreans in its quest for a diplomatic agreement before general elections next month.
“We have good reason to believe that the Chinese have on occasion in the past ignored the naturalisation of some former refugees, thrown away their South Korean passports and just returned them to the North Korean authorities,” said Tim Peters, a Christian pastor who runs a charity to aid refugees.
“That would mean instant execution for someone like Yoo Sang-joon, known to be helping escapees.”
Demonstrators on his behalf picketed South Korean government offices last week, just as the prime ministers of North and South Korea held talks to promote the south’s “sunshine policy” of conciliation towards Kim.
Peters hopes that behind the scenes foreign governments will be making the case to the Chinese that their interests are best served by respecting Yoo’s South Korean citizenship.
Chinese lawyers have said that the mere act of helping refugees does not break any article of the penal code and the Chinese have apparently begun to heed calls for decent behaviour towards the refugees.
Reliable sources say that a few months ago the Chinese government issued a directive that pregnant women were not to be sent back to North Korea.
It came after a weight of testimony that women were subject to forced abortions on return, that babies born to them in prison were left to die and, in some cases, the infants were murdered or their mothers forced to kill them by prison guards.
The Chinese decision appears to follow diplomatic representations and private lobbying to persuade the authorities in Beijing that the situation was intolerable for a nation proposing to welcome the world to the Olympic Games next summer.
However, its most telling aspect is that the Chinese must have accepted that the stories of child killings were true. That has profound legal implications. Human rights groups are trying to collect evidence that may one day be used against Kim’s underlings in prosecutions for crimes against humanity. “Despite the directive to cut back on repatriating pregnant refugee women, the policy is not being enforced uniformly,” Peters warned.
......The fate of Yoo, who has done all that he humanly could to help his own people, now poses an immediate test of the proposition that diplomacy gets results from authoritarian regimes.
If you want to help him, please scroll down this page and see how you can help by sending a letter to the Chinese minister of Justice and Wen Jiabao.
