This week, during Jiang Zemin’s sixth — and, very likely, final — visit to the United States, the Chinese President and US President George W. Bush will discuss a wide range of issues, notably North Korea’s recent declaration that it is developing nuclear arms and America’s move to force Iraq to agree to United Nations weapons inspections.

But many foreign policy experts and political leaders worry that Bush and Zemin will fail to deal with Asia’s most tragic human rights disaster: starving North Korean refugees trapped on the border between China and North Korea.

"Because of the famine in North Korea, North Koreans have fled their own country in droves seeking food. But how does China treat these starving, malnourished, terrified men, women and children who flee to their country as a last desperate hope for survival? It puts a price on their heads, and it penalizes its own citizens if any one of them offers food or shelter while rewarding people for turning them in," says Suzanne Scholte, president of the Defense Forum Foundation, a human rights advocacy organization based in Washington.

In moving testimony delivered last June in the US Senate, Scholte said China will not allow the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to visit the North Korea-China border, compounding the misery of the refugees, whose numbers are estimated as high as 300,000.

Scholte says the fleeing North Koreans must hide in caves, in holes in the ground and in "safe houses." She says many are constantly on the move, going from town to town, trying to stay ahead of the Chinese police. "China knows that to return these defectors to North Korea is to guarantee their imprisonment, torture, and possible death, but it continues to repatriate them in violation of the international documents that it has signed," says Scholte. "China calls them ‘economic migrants,’ but as Seung-yong Lee, of the humanitarian organization Good Friends, has stated: ‘Their flight to China is their last resort for survival, not a means to accumulate wealth. The simple crossing of the river makes them political offenders regardless of their initial motivation.’"

Joseph E. Longlois, director of the Asylum Division at the US Immigration and Naturalization, is sympathetic to the plight of the North Koreans. However, he says it is sometimes a challenge determining who qualifies for refugee status. "A person who flees famine is an ‘economic migrant’; a refugee is someone who faces persecution if they return home," says Longlois. "Refoulemant — the act of returning people who face persecution — is a violation of international law."

Because it is a crime in North Korea to leave the country without permission or to complain about the food situation, the North Koreans who flee across the Chinese border are automatically guilty of a crime against the state for their simple desire to survive.

Field surveys conducted by the Seoul-based Citizens Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, reveal that over 50 percent of the women refugees crossing into China have been subjected to some form of human trafficking, sold as wives to Chinese farmers, sold as sex slaves to brothels, sexually exploited, or subjected to hard labor. The Alliance also determined that 22 percent of the refugee children are orphans, 26 percent have parents suffering from serious disease and 38 percent had single parents incapable of caring for them.

"It is a monstrous tragedy that those who seek to help these refugees must work in secret, must work in fear of being jailed for trying to feed the starving and give refuge to the orphan," says Scholte. "You have on the one hand a refugee population in desperate need of assistance and on the other hand a humanitarian community willing to provide that assistance at great personal sacrifice and risk. Yet, the policy of the government of China is to persecute both groups…. Again and again, we hear the same cry from the North Korean refugees: ‘We will kill ourselves if you make us go back to North Korea.’"

Scholte believes the North Korean refugee crisis can be resolved if the US, South Korea and Japan honor requests for all North Korean asylum seekers. She has thinks the US Congress should set aside funds fund for a refugee camp for North Korean refugees.

"A refugee camp is vitally needed to respond to the immediate humanitarian crisis," says Scholte. "Each day the North Korean regime commits murder against its own citizens. Today, by extremely conservative estimates, 42 people will die in the North Korean political prisoner camps and another 391 people will die from starvation from a famine caused by government policies. Do we really want to maintain this status quo?"

Scholte believes the United States must ask that China stop all repatriations of North Korean refugees, and must demand that China allow the UNHCR access to the country.

"It is in China’s economic interest to comply with this request," says Scholte.

"China must choose between access to the Free World’s markets or propping up an evil and corrupt totalitarian hell."

Scholte’s appeal to Congress last summer has apparently resonated in the correct corridors of power: Congressman Henry J. Hyde (R-Illinois), chairman of the International Relations Committee in the Republican-controlled US House of Representatives, has drafted legislation regarding the "treatment of nationals of the Democratic Republic of Korea." Hyde’s legislation will grant fleeing North Koreans special immigration ranking "for the purposes of eligibility for refugee status under section 207 of the Immigration and Nationality Act…or for asylum." Similarly, Congressman Christopher Cox (R-California), chairman of the House Policy Committee, has issued a policy statement condemning North Korean president "Kim Jong Il’s oppressive regime."

"(Kim Jong Il’s) Stalinist government continues to deny the most basic human rights to the people of North Korea," says the Cox policy statement. "As a result, the North Korean refugee crisis is getting worse, and poses an immediate threat to the stability and prosperity of the regime. As the United States led the way in formulating a comprehensive humanitarian policy for the Vietnamese boat people, the United States must once again lead the way in helping the people of North Korea to flee Communist rule."

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— Arab News article dated 21 November 2002