[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 5]
[Senate]
[Pages 7060-7063]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         NORTH KOREAN REFUGEES

  Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I will draw attention to two topics 
today. I will address the comments made about stem cell research 
because we have exciting things happening in that field that I will 
report to my colleagues.
  First though, there is breaking news, with Reuters, the Associated 
Press, and several other outlets reporting that shortly we may have a 
group of North Korean refugees formally accepted by the United States 
for the first time since the Korean peninsula was divided by war over 
half a century ago. This is being reported by a couple of news outlets. 
I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the news report 
and a related article.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the Associated Press, May 3, 2006]

               Officials: U.S. Assists N. Korean Refugees

                            (By Foster Klug)

       Washington.--The Bush administration is working to bring a 
     group of North Korean refugees to the United States and could 
     have them in the country within two weeks, a State Department 
     official said Wednesday.

[[Page 7061]]

       The group would be the first from North Korea given 
     official refugee status since passage of the North Korean 
     Human Rights Act in 2004, officials say.
       The State Department official, who spoke on condition of 
     anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity, said the 
     refugees are in a Southeast Asian nation, and if bureaucratic 
     hurdles can be cleared, they could be in the United States 
     soon.
       A separate U.S. government source said the six refugees 
     include several women who were sold into sexual slavery or 
     forced marriages. The source, who also spoke on condition of 
     anonymity, has been in contact with a person who helped 
     shepherd the refugees into the Southeast Asian nation and who 
     has had regular contact with them.
       Both officials would not identify the nation, saying they 
     were worried the refugees or their families could be harmed 
     by North Korean agents. Officials also worry that publicity 
     could slow down or scuttle the painstaking bureaucratic 
     process that must be completed before the refugees can leave 
     the Southeast Asian nation for the United States.
       The issue of North Korean human rights has gained attention 
     in Washington as international diplomatic efforts to rid the 
     North of its nuclear weapons programs have stalled.
       Lawmakers and human rights activists have expressed 
     frustration at the State Department's slow pace in helping 
     North Korean refugees settle in the United States; part of 
     the North Korean Human Rights Act specifies that the 
     department make it easier for North Koreans to apply for 
     refugee status.
       The U.S. special envoy on North Korean human rights, Jay 
     Lefkowitz, told a congressional hearing last week: ``We need 
     to do more--and we can and will do more--for the North Korean 
     refugees.''
       ``We will press to make it clear to our friends and allies 
     in the region that we are prepared to accept North Korean 
     refugees for resettlement here,'' he said.
       President Bush appointed Lefkowitz last year.
       North Korea long has been accused of torture, public 
     executions and other atrocities against its people. Between 
     150,000 and 200,000 people are believed to be held in prison 
     camps for political reasons, the State Department said in a 
     report last year.
       Human rights activists have said that U.S. Embassy workers 
     in Asian countries have refused to help North Korean 
     refugees.
       Last year, Timothy Peters, founder of Helping Hands Korea, 
     told lawmakers at a hearing that embassy officials in Beijing 
     rebuffed him when he tried to arrange help for a 17-year-old 
     North Korean refugee.
       ``I thought to myself, `Is this the State Department's 
     implementation of the North Korean Human Rights Act?''' he 
     said.
                                  ____


           North Korea: Policy Changes May Foster New Hunger

       Seoul, May 4, 2006.--Recent decisions by the North Korean 
     government to suspend the operation of the World Food 
     Programme, ban the private sale of grain, and fully reinstate 
     the discredited Public Distribution System could lead to 
     renewed hunger for North Korea's already poor and destitute 
     people, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released 
     today.
       The 34-page report, ``A Matter of Survival: The North 
     Korean Government's Control of Food and the Risk of Hunger,'' 
     examines recent worrisome developments in North Korea's food 
     policies, its marginalization of the World Food Programme 
     (WFP), its refusal to allow adequate monitoring of food aid, 
     and the implications of the government's new policies. Human 
     Rights Watch noted that only a decade ago, similar policies 
     led to the famine that killed anywhere from 580,000 to more 
     than 3 million, according to independent researchers and 
     nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
       ``While most international discussion of North Korea is 
     about nuclear weapons, hunger remains a serious problem,'' 
     said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. 
     ``Regressive policies from a government that doesn't allow 
     free expression or independent observers to monitor the 
     situation could someday lead to a repeat of the food crisis 
     of the 1990s.''
       In October 2005, North Korea reversed some of its most 
     applauded economic reforms by banning the private buying and 
     selling of grain, the main source of nutrition for most North 
     Koreans. The government asked the WFP, which had been feeding 
     millions of the nation's most vulnerable people for a decade, 
     to end emergency food aid. The agency believes the request is 
     premature, and proposed a new, considerably smaller aid 
     package. The North Korean government had not formally 
     accepted the offer as of the end of April.
       The government also announced in October that it was fully 
     reinstating the Public Distribution System (PDS), which 
     provided coupons for food and consumer goods to North Koreans 
     through their places of work or study. During the food crisis 
     of the 1990s, millions of people who depended on their PDS 
     rations died from starvation. Many more suffered severe 
     malnutrition and hunger as the system broke down. The crisis 
     ended by massive amounts of international food aid and the 
     tolerance of private markets, helped in recent years by 
     improved harvests.
       ``Forcing the World Food Programme to radically reduce its 
     food shipments and monitoring, and making it illegal for 
     ordinary North Koreans to buy and sell grain, is a recipe for 
     disaster,'' said Adams.
       Recent news reports suggest that North Koreans in many 
     parts of the country were not receiving rations, six months 
     after the authorities announced they were fully reinstating 
     the PDS. A Chinese man of Korean descent who recently visited 
     his relatives in the northeastern part of North Korea told 
     Human Rights Watch that none of the five homes he visited had 
     received any rations since November 2005. ``They received 
     half a month's worth of corn for the months of October and 
     November, but that was it,'' he said. ``And that, I heard, 
     was only for working men, and nobody else in the families.''
       The South Korean NGO Good Friends also reported in the 
     April edition of its monthly newsletter, North Korea Today, 
     that residents of Pyongyang received only 10 days of food 
     rations in April. Citing an unnamed official at Pyongyang's 
     food management administration, the report said that in May 
     there would be no rations at all.
       North Korea has a long history of providing food on a 
     priority basis, feeding the preferred class, such as Workers' 
     Party members and high-ranking military, intelligence and 
     police officers, while discriminating against the so-called 
     hostile class. If past patterns hold true this year, the 
     government will first send food to ``war-preparation 
     storage'' and preferred citizens, and only then to the 
     general public through the PDS, leaving many North Koreans 
     hungry.
       Until the famine in the 1990s, food rationing was perhaps 
     the single most important way of controlling the population 
     in North Korea. As people could receive rations only from 
     their place of work or study, the system largely kept the 
     population immobile and obedient, so that they wouldn't risk 
     losing their only source of food.
       ``The government is apparently trying to turn back the 
     clock to regain some of the control lost when it allowed 
     people greater freedom to move around and buy grain,'' said 
     Adams. ``The government should reverse its new policies, 
     which make it harder for hungry people to find the food they 
     need to survive and stay healthy.''
       The government should prioritize assisting the vulnerable 
     population by providing aid to those who can't obtain food 
     through their work. North Korea should allow international 
     monitors unfettered access to beneficiaries. Major food 
     donors, including China and South Korea, should monitor 
     distribution of their aid in a way that meets international 
     standards as employed by the WFP.
       Human Rights Watch urged the North Korean government to:
       Allow international humanitarian agencies, including the 
     WFP, to resume necessary food supply operations and to 
     properly monitor aid according to normal international 
     protocols for transparency and accountability;
       Ensure its distribution system is both fair and adequately 
     supplied, or permit citizens to obtain food in alternative 
     ways, through direct access to markets or humanitarian aid; 
     and
       End discrimination in the distribution of food in favor of 
     high-ranking Workers' Party officials, military, intelligence 
     and police officers, and against the ``hostile'' class deemed 
     politically disloyal to the government and Party.
       Human Rights Watch takes no position on whether countries 
     should have market or command economies. But it is clear from 
     the devastating famine and pervasive hunger of the past--well 
     documented by the United Nations and NGOs--that the PDS and 
     the country's official food industry have miserably failed 
     North Korean.
       ``Millions of North Koreans died painful deaths from 
     starvation while the rationing system was in place,'' said 
     Adams. ``There is little reason to believe the North Korean 
     government is now capable of providing enough food to all its 
     citizens.''

  Mr. BROWNBACK. I certainly hope and pray the reports are true. I hope 
that the six to eight refugees being referred to in the articles will 
soon have a chance to be welcomed by thousands of Americans who have 
worked hard for their freedom, especially those of Korean heritage in 
this country.
  I particularly recognize the Korean Church Coalition and a number of 
people who risked their own lives to form an underground railroad of 
sorts--reminiscent of what happened in my State and many other places 
across this country years ago--along the Korean-Chinese border. We have 
a fairly open border between Korea and China. You can get from North 
Korea into China, but you cannot get out of China. The Chinese have, to 
date, not been very cooperative in allowing North Korean refugees to 
pass. They have even captured North Korean refugees and sent them back 
to North Korea to an uncertain future and possible death,

[[Page 7062]]

and in many cases, as well as a lot of persecution and mistreatment in 
a North Korean gulag, of which we have satellite photographs. I have 
held hearings on gulags containing, we believe, around 200,000 North 
Koreans. We also believe, over the last 15 years, approximately 10 
percent of the North Korean population has died, primarily of 
starvation, although also from the gulags and at political prisoner 
camps.
  The people are walking out of North Korea. They are walking into 
China. We do not know how many, but the estimates have been as many as 
100,000 to 300,000. They are now living off the land there in an 
illegal status, in great difficulty, and in harm's way in China.
  If we get these refugees coming into the United States, they will be 
the first refugees coming into the United States. It is built on the 
North Korean Human Rights Act, which this Senate and this Nation passed 
a year and a half ago, allowing these refugees from North Korea to 
enter into the United States.
  The act basically builds on what took place toward the Soviet Union 
before it had collapsed where we were in negotiations on nuclear talks, 
we were not getting anywhere, and we raised human rights issues of what 
took place regarding two Soviet dissidents in the Soviet Union.
  We said it was not fair how they are treating their own people. The 
same thing is happening in North Korea in how North Korea is treating 
their own people, to the point this oppressive regime of Kim John is 
trying to build weapons of mass destruction; they are a weapon of mass 
destruction on their own people, killing, as I noted, we believe around 
2 million North Koreans through starvation. This is abhorrent.
  If the refugees do come to the United States, this is a moment of 
celebration, even though it is only a few. It is a statement by this 
country that we will not tolerate the mistreatment of people taking 
place in North Korea. I applaud this effort.
  I applaud the administration for working on this particular topic, 
and particularly Jay Lefkowitz, the special envoy from the 
administration on human rights in North Korea.
  If reports this morning from Reuters and the Associated Press as well 
as various other news outlets prove to be accurate, we may shortly have 
a group of North Korean refugees formally accepted by the United States 
for the first time since the Korean peninsula was divided by war over 
half a century ago.
  I hope and pray that these reports are true, and I hope that the six 
to eight refugees referred to in the articles will soon have a chance 
to be welcomed by the thousands of Americans who have worked so hard 
for their freedom, especially by those of Korean heritage.
  A year and a half ago, Congress passed and President Bush signed into 
law the North Korean Human Rights Act. It was the first significant 
piece of legislation dealing with that nation's dictatorial regime 
since the cessation of hostilities in July 1953. The act called for a 
U.S. policy on North Korea based on a commitment and respect for human 
rights and human dignity, and fundamental freedoms, including the 
freedom of thought, conscience religion or belief. By referring in the 
act to core Helsinki principles adopted in 1975 that informed and 
animated our dealings with then Soviet Union and its eventual 
dissolution and the resulting freedom for millions without a single 
shot being fired, the act similarly commits the United States to pursue 
in North Korea the same devotion to human dignity and human rights.
  Yet since the passage of the North Korean Human Rights Act, the 
negotiating approach has been to subordinate the human rights and human 
dignity of the North Korean people. Instead, what we have done is to 
pin our hopes on the possibility of another framework agreement in 
which the parties would be coerced yet again into tossing more 
lifelines to a fragile but oppressive regime in Pyongyang in exchange 
for the possible exchange of yet another promise not to use weapons of 
mass destruction.
  In none of these negotiations have we been able to engage in talks--
either in the multiparty context or even unofficial bilateral 
discussions--on issues that promote and do justice to both American and 
universal ideals. Rather than focusing the debate on the regime's 
policies of persecution and starvation and to the massive failure of 
its economic policies that in the mid-90s directly resulted in the 
deaths of millions of North Koreans, the parties have done little to 
strengthen democracy and promote human rights in North Korea.
  I appreciate that there are strong political pressures especially 
from our allies to negotiate over the North Korean regime's so-called 
``peace for security'' demand. And in the interest of searching for a 
diplomatic solution, the President and Secretary Rice have done 
precisely that. In fact, the recent rounds of six party talks were the 
most sustained effort by the United States.
  But the President himself has also done much more, in both word and 
deed. In the past 2 months, the President released two of the most 
remarkable statements of his presidency. Last month, the President 
called to attention China's treatment of a North Korean refugee named 
Kim Chun Hee. Missing since December, when Miss Kim was arrested in 
China and deported back to North Korea, it isn't known whether she is 
dead or alive. As the President's envoy for North Korean Human Rights 
Jay Lefkowitz said of Miss Chun in a Wall Street Journal editorial, 
``Every movement needs heroes. . . . Either she will be a living figure 
in a jail somewhere or, God forbid, she'll be a martyr.'' As far as I 
know, we have no word from the Chinese Government and certainly not 
from the North Koreans on the fate of Miss Chun.
  The President also issued a statement after a meeting that he himself 
called one of the most moving of his presidency. He spoke of a grieving 
mother and brother who yearned to be united with her daughter and his 
sister, Megumi, who was only 13 when she was abducted by the North 
Korean regime more than 30 years ago; he met with a young child of 6 
named Han Mee Lee who with her family were at the center of an 
international controversy created by vivid video footage of their 
valiant struggle for freedom at the gates of an embassy in China; and 
he met with a former North Korean soldier who defected to South Korea 
in pursuit of what his conscience and his heart told him were his 
inalienable and God-given right to liberty and freedom.
  I ask unanimous consent at this time that this statement by the 
President be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

 Statement on China's Treatment of Kim Chun-Hee by the Press Secretary

       The United States is gravely concerned about China's 
     treatment of Kim Chun-Hee. Despite U.S., South Korean, and 
     UNHCR attempts to raise this case with the Chinese, Ms. Kim, 
     an asylum seeker in her thirties, was deported to North Korea 
     after being arrested in December for seeking refuge at two 
     Korean schools in China. We are deeply concerned about Ms. 
     Kim's well-being. The United States notes China's obligations 
     as a party to the U.N. Convention relating to the Status of 
     Refugees and its 1967 Protocol, and believes that China must 
     take those obligations seriously. We also call upon the 
     Government of China not to return North Korean asylum seekers 
     without allowing UNHCR access to these vulnerable 
     individuals.

  Mr. BROWNBACK. Last July, the President also met with Kang Chol Hwan, 
whose book the Aquariams of Pyongyang, chronicled Mr. Kang's life as a 
9-year-old gulag inmate to his eventual freedom. Just as Natan 
Scharansky was Reagan's symbol of what freedom from the Soviet 
communist system meant to free people everywhere, Kang is Bush's symbol 
of what freedom means to North Koreans.
  History will record these acts by President Bush to unilaterally 
broaden the narrow agenda of the Six-Party Talks as among the wisest 
and humane--acts that trump and negate the false perception that the 
President is indifferent to concerns about human rights in North Korea. 
These bold and compassionate acts will figuratively place on the 
bargaining table--if the Six Party Talks are to ever resume--

[[Page 7063]]

the faces and names of North Koreans who have suffered and continue to 
do so.
  By so publicly raising human rights issues to the highest level, the 
Oval Office of the President no less, President Bush is merely 
following the examples set by President Reagan and Pope John Paul 
during their struggles with a much larger and more threatening nuclear 
power.
  We may now have an opportunity--if the press reports are accurate--to 
take an additional but necessary step to demonstrate not just by words 
but by action what human rights mean. We need to accept North Korean 
refugees into the United States as provided by the North Korean Human 
Rights Act.
  That it appears to have taken more than a year and half for the 
possibility of officially accepting North Korea refugees has been 
troubling to Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. In a 
bipartisan letter to Secretary Rice, Congressman Frank Wolf and others 
called on the administration to do more. And last year, both 
Congressman Wolf and I wrote to Secretary General Kofi Annan to 
pressure China into allowing UNHCR, the U.N. agency for refugees, into 
Yanji Province near the North Korean border and other affected areas to 
assess the situation with respect to the North Korean refugees.
  I was disappointed to learn that the first report required under the 
North Korean Human Rights Act was issued with the statement that no 
progress had been made on accepting refugees. As the act makes clear, 
admission would be conditioned upon a thorough vetting process by DHS 
and other appropriate agencies. But without any action by us, it is 
difficult for us to demand that the Chinese should also change its 
policies, and it presents a problem for us in asking other countries to 
do the right thing if we have not been able to do the same. If the U.S. 
cannot admit what may be less than 10 refugees in total if the press 
reports are correct, then the whole premise of the act itself is 
unsustainable.
  I am hopeful that this may be changing and I hope it is changing. The 
hopes and prayers of thousands in the faith community and among Korean 
American communities are vested in this possibility of the first 
admission of North Korean refugees into the United States.
  If and when these people come, it will offer hope to millions and put 
American on the right side of history. Such an act is consistent with 
the bold steps that Ronald Reagan took and Pope John Paul urged during 
the years of the cold war, and in the process made the world a better 
place.
  If ever there were huddled masses yearning to be free, it's the North 
Koreans, whether hiding out in the forests of China or working as 
trafficked victims in brothels or as orphans prowling marketplaces for 
crumbs.
  If these refugees are granted refuge in the United States, it would 
constitute one of the great acts of compassion by this nation.
  And I hope we take this opportunity to lift our lamps and show a way 
out of the darkness for the North Korean refugees.

                          ____________________