By Soo Youn
Photos courtesy of the Defense Forum Foundation
The night before Phillip Buck made his last trip to China, his family begged him not to leave. The 66-year-old missionary and Seattle-based pastor was going, as he had been doing for the last decade, to shepherd North Korean defectors to South Korea. “Please, can you not go there anymore? Please stop. You are old enough to be retired. Stay home with your grandchild and us. Just spend time here. You can send them money or pray for them, or arrange something here,” his daughter Maria Yoon pleaded. He already had one close call in 2002, when Chinese authorities raided his apartment and confiscated his passport.
“He said, ‘No, I have to be there. I can’t just sit here and wander around, wondering about what would happen if I’m not there. They’re not going to have enough funds to live on. They’re not going to have enough food. So, I’ve got to go,’” recounted Yoon. “So we said, ‘Please be careful.’ Sure enough, he got caught.”
By his own count, and one that has been confirmed by another North Korean human rights activist, Buck has sheltered more than a thousand North Koreans in China and helped about a hundred get to South Korea safely. Because the Chinese government considers North Koreans economic migrants and not political refugees, helping them is considered illegal human trafficking.
During yet another attempt to move a group of North Koreans from China to a third country, Buck was arrested by Chinese authorities in May 2005. As Buck had warned them, the family knew that, if he were caught, he could be jailed indefinitely. But after a 15-month incarceration, the Chinese government released Buck in August 2006.
After returning to the United States, Buck gave a presentation on Capitol Hill describing his experience. There were no tales of Chinese water torture, or other physical or mental punishment by his captors. But there were interrogations and sleep deprivation.
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Late last year, former South Korean businessman Choi Young-hun was released from a Chinese jail after being imprisoned for almost four years. On Jan. 18, 2003, in what has come to be known as the Yangtai Boat incident, he was arrested, along with fellow countryman and photojournalist Jae-hyun Seok, during a botched attempt to find safe passage for 60 to 70 North Koreans planning to escape to South Korea by way of Japan. Seok, who was released in 2004, and Choi, are just two of a growing number of activists who have been arrested and incarcerated for helping North Koreans escape. In December, three members of LiNK (Liberty in North Korea) were arrested in China for sheltering defectors. They were deported back to the United States in January. Several activists, including Korean Americans, remain in Chinese prisons today. Steve Kim, a businessman from New York state, who provided funds for defectors in China, was tried, convicted and has been in jail since September 2003. Buck said they were held in the same prison.
The vast majority of North Koreans fleeing the country cross the border into China, hoping to make it to South Korea, where they would be granted automatic citizenship. After several months of debriefing and re-education at a facility called Hanawon, defectors are given funds to start a new life. The amount used to be about $30,000 U.S., but is being slashed as Seoul tries to stem the flow of refugees into South Korea. Most defectors, however, cannot move directly from China into South Korea because the Seoul government does not give asylum to North Koreans from China. So they must go through a third country, such as Mongolia, Thailand, Laos or Vietnam. The governments in these countries, unlike China, do not make it a policy to return defectors to North Korea.
Having been born in North Korea before the Korean War, Buck, who had immigrated to the United States in 1982, felt a special conviction to help the countrymen of his birth. When he first started aid to North Koreans, he concentrated on supplying food to the country. From Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994 to about 1996, human rights activists say anywhere from one to two million North Koreans died of starvation. At the time, reports circulated that people had resorted to feeding on corpses, said Buck, then a pastor in Seattle with the name of John Yoon. At that point he said he realized that “feeding North Koreans was futile during Kim Jong-il’s regime,” and shifted his focus to helping North Koreans escape. As his efforts successfully helped more and more defectors, his reputation grew among Chinese and North Korean officials, so he changed his name to Phillip Buck.
Buck was traveling with 14 defectors when he was arrested in China. Four made it to South Korea, but 10 were arrested with him and most likely repatriated. One of the defectors was a woman, Buck said, who hid a small knife on her body and slit her throat and wrist during interrogation by the Chinese, attempting suicide rather than face repatriation. She had previously tried to escape North Korea and had been captured and repatriated; then she, her husband and child had been tortured severely in the same room. That was a fate she refused to face again, according to Buck. He asked his Chinese captors, “Are you going to repatriate her, knowing she will be executed? If you do, I will tell the world China is a country with no human rights.”
In jail, Buck said he had a clean bed in a new building, but he was incarcerated with rapists, murderers and drug dealers. He said that the Chinese were careful not to physically harm foreigners, for fear that word would get out and create negative publicity in their own countries. “Look at me. I’m having a press conference,” he said to a crowd including diplomats, congressional staffers, academics and North Korean human rights advocates, during his first public appearance in the United States. The October event ended with a standing ovation.
“Do you know why North Korea tested a nuclear weapon?” Buck asked the crowd. “To show power to the people because their faith [in Kim Jong-il] is shaking. “
Buck spent most of his presentation talking about horrific conditions in North Korea and his work in China, rather than complain about the conditions of his time in prison. He did, however, say he never admitted to doing anything wrong and always insisted on his innocence.
Buck, a self-described “big fish” in aiding North Koreans, said he knows his capture meant a great deal to the Chinese authorities. But he said his faith sustained and ultimately freed him. “God pressured the Chinese government to release me,” Buck said. “When I was first in prison, I was scared and shaking. Then I thought, ‘I only die once in a lifetime. Think of it as a prayer mountain.’ And I prayed every day.”
But freedom also came at the price of a guilty conscience. “I am free, but I feel bad that others are still in jail. Steve Kim and I were in the same prison,” Buck said. As for the 10 defectors he was arrested with, Buck asked, “If they were arrested, how could I come to the U.S. and sleep in a warm bed and eat? How guilty would I feel?” Their fates are unknown.
Buck said the answer to the political issues involving North Korea is to address the humanitarian issue. “If you pay attention to refugee issues, you have no need for Six-Party Talks.”
But the people who suffered most during his imprisonment may have been Buck’s family. They prayed and visited China several times to get Buck released. “My mother was a wreck,” Maria Yoon said, as she recounted her family’s troubles while her father was imprisoned. “She went into a depression and had to go to a prayer mountain in Korea.” The wedding plans for Yoon’s younger sister, Grace Yoon, were waylaid.
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Another world away in South Korea, Jae-hyun Seok is living a life far removed from his Chinese experience. His situation now is far different than the 14 months he spent in Wei Fang prison.
As a South Korean, Seok didn’t have a lot of organic interest in North Korea, but when he began freelancing as a photojournalist for the New York Times, he started to become interested as defectors made more and more headlines in increasing numbers after 2000.
In 2002, Seok started doing documentary work and planned to go to China to photograph and videotape the journey of North Korean defectors. It was as much a professional opportunity (to document the first mass escape of defectors via boat), as it was a humanitarian one. With the help of Choi Young-hun, who bought the boat, he worked with aid groups, including Douglas Shin’s Exodus 21 and Tim Peters’ Helping Hands Korea, to try to coordinate a plan to get dozens of people out of China. Seok said his purpose was twofold: for history, and for evidence. “China pretends like they don’t know the situation with North Koreans,” he said over tea last summer in Seoul. He had thought his work would provide proof that China’s claims were false.
Seok was directly responsible for about 40 out of the 60 or 70 North Koreans being shepherded together to escape to Japan and then to South Korea. The exact events aren’t clear, even to Seok, but they arrived in a southern Chinese port city at 3 or 4 a.m. Choi left first with half the defectors, and they were arrested shortly afterward. Choi was then taken to a military coast guard station for “questioning,” before leading the Chinese police back to the boat where Seok and the other North Koreans were waiting. This all happened by sunrise.
Seok caught the look on my face before I even had the chance to ask him if he had felt betrayed. “You have to understand [the] situation. I understand. He was probably tortured,” he said by way of explanation.
“I didn’t expect I’d get sentenced as guilty. I thought they were just giving me a hard time as an example to other activists. I was horrified,” Seok said.
His wife, Hye-won Kang, hired top lawyers to work on his case and to get his judgment overturned. His family had a personal connection with the Korean Embassy in China, and the diplomat there visited Seok a few times in jail. Though he was not on assignment with the New York Times when he was arrested, the newspaper and several journalism organizations also lobbied to get him released. Seok was housed with the same kind of hardened criminals as Buck. He also said he suffered no physical abuse, although he had endured frostbite on his fingers. Still, he lost about 40 pounds and had his prescription eyeglasses confiscated for a year.
Seok, who was 34 when he was released, is now living in Daegu, which is about a three-hour train ride south of Seoul. Before his entrée into photojournalism, he taught photography at a college there, and has returned to the academic life and fine arts photography, having launched the Daegu Biennale last year. (When I met him, he was excited that Steve McCurry, the National Geographic photographer who shot the haunting picture of the Afghan girl with green eyes, would be participating.) Since his return, his wife has given birth to their daughter, and he is re-adjusting to his private life.
But upon his release from the Chinese prison, he was treated as a media sensation, with reporters waiting for him both in China, where the government prevented pictures from being taken, and his arrival in Korea. Other journalists knew he was being freed before he did.
The experience appeared to have left him shell-shocked. He said he had culture shock at first, but “tried to ignore it.”
When I spoke with him last summer, he had no immediate plans to go back to China or get further involved in the North Korean issue.
“This is my life. And I wanted to act like I had just traveled for 14 months, and tried not to be exploited by the media [after being released]. I did what I had to do for other people,” he said.
Nayan Sthankiya, a friend and fellow photographer, spent much of his savings and spare time trying, for those two years, to get Seok released. He lobbied the U.S. government and Chinese and South Korean authorities to get Seok out of jail, and he even went to China with Seok’s wife to try to influence the jail’s warden. Sthankiya’s main complaint was that the Korean government didn’t do enough to free Seok, for fear of aggravating China.
Other activists concur. “It used to be that having a U.S. or Canadian passport was enough to get people to act on your behalf, but now everyone is afraid of upsetting China,” one major figure in the Undergound Railroad, the network to help North Koreans escape from China, told me in Seoul.
The exception is Japan, a country that China has long held in contempt and with whom China has particularly strained relations. “No Japanese citizen is in jail, although they have long been active on the Underground Railroad,” said Defense Forum Foundation head Suzanne Scholte. Nongovernmental organizations have often remarked at how unequivocally the Japanese go to bat for their citizens — a pointed jab at the U.S. and South Korean governments.
In recent months, the United States has begun to implement the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004, and has accepted several defectors as political refugees. And defectors who can make it to the U.S. Embassy in China can now find asylum without having to go to a third country. But as the Kim Jong-il regime continues, there is no guarantee for the well-being of those who continue to defect or those who have decided to help them, whatever the repercussions.
But, as Barack Obama has said, there is always the audacity of hope.
Months after Seok’s return to Korea, he received a phone call from a man who said he was a North Korean who Seok had been arrested with in Yangtai. He had finally made it to South Korea.
And in December, Buck toured the United States with four defectors now living in South Korea, in a trip to show them “the real America.” On the eve of an international protest against China’s repatriation policy — Buck attended the rally in D.C. with his guests — I asked him if he would ever go back to China. He nodded. His daughter Maria Yoon was visibly caught off-guard and protested. Just an hour before, she had told me that Buck would not return. Yoon chastised her father: “Do you know what we went through while you were in China? No! You can send money or help other people,” she said. He mentioned something about the alternative and then changed the subject.
