Although I have worked in China on and off for the past 10 years, I have only had occasional glimpses of the horrors taking place in neighbouring North Korea.
Related programme: China/North Korea: The Great Escape
The exodus to China began with the famine of the late 90s, which is thought to have killed between 2 and 3 million people - although the North Korean government claims the figure is 220,000. In March 2009, the World Food Programme announced that 9 million of North Korea’s 23 million population are in dire need of food. The exodus will continue.
As our investigations began, we soon realised the safety of the North Koreans we met in China should be our first and our main objective. Officially, foreign journalists are allowed to operate freely in China. In reality, however, there have been over 300 cases of interference with the press in the past couple of years. If we had been arrested, our tapes and notes could have been seized, and this would have revealed the identities of our contacts, who could then have been arrested and repatriated.
After a few days in north-east China we met one North Korean woman who, together with her husband and 18-month-old child, had previously been caught as an illegal immigrant in China. The family had been held at a detention centre in China for a few months before being shackled and sent back. Once in North Korea, all the detainees were strip-searched, the male guards forcing their hands inside women’s vaginas to check they weren’t smuggling anything. The authorities then evaluated each person’s reason for fleeing. The woman we met was deemed to have escaped in order to avoid the famine but her husband was accused of having political motivations. He was taken away and tortured - and died a few days later. She was allowed to return home to her village, where her baby subsequently died of malnutrition.
Human Rights groups estimate that some 300,000 North Koreans live in hiding in China. They are on the run from both the Chinese authorities, who want to send them back, and from Chinese bounty hunters, who hope to turn them in for a reward. Our contacts took us to a Chinese detention centre where 8000 North Koreans had been processed in the first six months of last year, before being sent back. Most prisons in China are hidden from view, but this one stood imperiously next to a main road, as if it were a warning sign to all North Koreans in China.
As a ‘new boy’ on Unreported World, this was the first time I’ve been asked to make a report with people who were all risking their lives. They knew, and we knew, what would happen if we were caught filming or if our presence alerted the Chinese authorities or bounty hunters to their safe houses.
Is it worth taking those risks? I suppose that is the question that many journalists ask at some point. Can a report like this ever make the difference to people’s lives? I don’t know. I hope so.
Few know the true horror of what is going on inside North Korea. But nobody we met, however terrible their situation in China, wanted to go back there. When the day arrives that the country opens up, there will surely be an outpouring of countless stories of abject misery and unbridled cruelty.
