Window on Eurasia: Russian Rights Activists Denounce Moscow’s Plans to Send Back Those Fleeing from North Korea

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, December 1 – Human rights activists have denounced as “a shame” on Russia Moscow’s plans to sign an agreement with North Korea under whose terms anyone fleeing from that totalitarian state would be handed back immediately and without recourse even to Russian courts.

 

            The accord, not yet signed, was called for by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on September 2, and, besides representing an almost certain death sentence for those who would be returned to North Korea after attempting to flee, reflects a larger and more dangerous shift in Russian standards (sobkorr.ru/infopovod/547A76BBD7574.html).

 

What it shows, the human rights activists argue, is that the Russian government increasingly is adopting the Soviet government’s view than any attempt at flight is by definition illegitimate and thus should be opposed, even if those involved are fleeing from the most intolerable of situations.

 

                Russia has hardly been welcoming to North Korean refugees in recent years. Over the last decade, 211 North Koreans have sought political asylum in Russia. Only two have received it. Many of the others have been kidnapped by North Korean special services, tortured and returned home, often with the help of the FSB, the rights activists say. Moscow even uses North Korean agents as translators when it is dealing with the North Korean refugees.

 

            But as awful as that pattern of behavior is, there are even worse things about Moscow’s approach to those fleeing from Pyongyang’s dictatorship: there are now lumber camps in the Russian Far East where North Koreans are working as virtual slaves and under the eyes of North Korean secret police.

 

            These camps are surrounded by barbed wire; and, the rights activists say, people in nearby Russian regions now joke that if you see three Koreans in the street, “one of them is an officer of the [North Korean] special services.”

 

            In the opinion of the activists, “the Treaty about the handing back of refugees to one of the cruelest regimes in the world can become the latest element in the alternative legal system which apparently Russia intends to form around itself” in violation of the Russian constitution and international accords Moscow has signed.

 

            But they say that this should not come as a surprise: “Already for many years, Russia has been cooperating with authoritarian and totalitarian regimes quietly handing back to them refugees” who are then imprisoned, tortured or even killed. But signing an agreement with Pyongyang is nonetheless a disturbing development.

 

            As longtime human rights activist Aleksandr Podrabinek put it, “in the USSR, the idea that people who ran are traitors predominated. No one had the right to want to live in another country; no one had the right to escape from the supervision of the government.” Unfortunately, this idea remains in force in North Korea and is “ideologically close” to the Moscow regime.