SEOUL — He was a trombone player in North Korea who liked to whistle the Irish ballad “Danny Boy” as a private serenade for his wife. His son gained a medical degree in Pyongyang and wanted to become a professor.
Sometime late last year, the two men disappeared into the North Korean gulags that hold a special place of punishment for defectors caught by Chinese authorities and sent back over the border.
“That’s when I started to think it was better off if my entire family just died,” said Heo Yeong-hui, who fled North Korea in 2014 and paid smugglers to try to bring her husband and son through China to reunite in South Korea. “I thought, ‘I would pay for my husband and son to be killed.’ If they could end their lives, I would give any amount of money they asked for. But, of course, that isn’t possible.”
Even as diplomacy moves at a dizzying pace with North Korea, many human rights activists and others take issue with what’s missing. So far, the talks have cautiously avoided a direct spotlight on the North’s staggering record of abuses and political repression, in apparent attempts to keep the outreach with Kim Jong Un from unraveling.
Also little discussed in the high-level dialogue is Beijing’s role in shipping back defectors snared by Chinese security forces. Any comprehensive peace deal with Kim must deeply involve China, the political and economic big brother of the North. But a full reckoning on rights abuses will also touch on China’s practice of declaring the defectors to be economic migrants rather than people fleeing oppression — and deporting them.
“Sadly, through thick and thin in the bilateral relationship, one of the things Pyongyang and Beijing continually agree on is they don’t want North Koreans seeking freedom by fleeing across China,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch. “There is no sugarcoating the fact North Korea systematically tortures every North Korean sent back by China.”
