Trafficking Monitor is a blog I created and curate. It offers posts highlighting the multifaceted nature of human trafficking and forced/indentured labour. I draw on a diversity of sources for my posts. You are invited to recommend materials for posting.
By Azeem Ibrahim Executive Chairman, The Scotland Institute The world may be weary of stories of atrocities with constant accounts
of man's inhumanity to man in the media. But recent events in Burma
demand the attention and definitive action from the international
community. A Thailand-based women's group has recently produced a report
that documents more than 100 cases of rape being used as a weapon of
war, mainly in the northeast of the country against ethnic and religious
minorities.
How human traffickers are cashing in on the Chinese market for North Korean women—and how some victims escape.
Steven Kim, an American businessman from Long Island, New York, may be the world’s leading expert on the market for North Korean brides. He acquired this expertise accidentally. He likes to say it was God’s plan.
A decade or so ago he was living in China, overseeing the manufacture of chairs he sold to retail clients in the United States, when he heard about a secret church that catered to the South Korean businessmen who worked in the Shenzhen industrial zone, not far from his apartment. It wasn’t registered with the Chinese government, as required by law, so it operated underground, billing itself as a cultural association. There was no sign on the door and no cross on the roof. The 100 or so congregants had learned about the church as Kim had, by word of mouth.
Kim, a practicing Christian, became a regular attendee. One Sunday he noticed two shabbily dressed men seated in a corner of the room. After worship, he went up to them, said hello, and learned to his astonishment that they were from North Korea. They had escaped across the Tumen River to northeast China and traveled 2,000 miles south to Guangdong province, a journey that took two months. They hoped to find a way to slip across the border into Hong Kong. “They came to church asking for help,” he says. “But the church would only feed them, give them a few dollars, and let them go.”
Kim was outraged. “I asked the pastor, ‘Why do you let them go?’” “Because we’re afraid,” the pastor replied. “If we’re caught helping North Koreans, the church will be shut down.” Kim took the two men home.
That was the start. Kim began to assist North Korean refugees clandestinely. He provided safe houses, food, clothing, and money; eventually he organized secret passage across China to third countries. Before long, he gained a reputation along the new underground railroad as someone North Koreans could count on for assistance. Many of them turned out to be women fleeing from the Chinese men who had purchased them as brides.
Today he runs 318 Partners, a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to rescuing trafficked women in China. It’s named after Article 318 of the Chinese criminal code, the law under which Kim was arrested in September 2003 as he led nine North Koreans in a prayer meeting at his apartment. Convicted of helping illegal migrants, he spent four years in a Chinese prison. His home office now, on a quiet street on suburban Long Island, is a luxurious contrast to the Chinese prison cell he shared with a dozen felons. On the morning of my visit, his cellphone rings repeatedly with calls from South Korea, China, and Southeast Asia regarding a rescue operation in the works. It is not until lunchtime, when most of Asia is asleep, that his phone finally goes quiet.
A missionary on the lookout for North Korean refugees in Yanbian. (Chien-Chi Chang / Magnum)
Kim clearly has his hands full. The only practical escape route for fugitives from North Korea is through China, and human-rights groups say roughly 80 percent of those thousands of refugees are women and girls who have become “commodities for purchase,” in Kim’s words. The most popular marketplaces are in the three Chinese provinces closest to the North Korean border—Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang—but North Korean brides are sold to men throughout China. Many of the buyers are farmers. Some have physical or mental disabilities that make them unsuitable as husbands in the eyes of Chinese women. In almost every case, the men are buying the one thing they want most in life: a wife.
But why import brides from North Korea? The answer is China’s family-planning laws. Ever since the one-child policy went into effect in 1979, Beijing has enforced it through fines, imprisonment, forced abortion, sterilization, and even, human-rights groups charge, infanticide. The policy has had its intended effect of slowing the rate of expansion of China’s population. But there has been an unwelcome side effect: an unnaturally high male-to-female ratio.
Women may hold up half the sky, in Mao Zedong’s famous phrase, but they are treated as second-class citizens in much of modern China. Many couples still favor sons, both to carry on the family name and support them in their old age. In rural areas the birth of a son heralds the arrival of an extra farmhand as soon as the boy is old enough to hold a hoe. Not so long ago in China, an unwanted baby girl might be drowned in a bucket at birth or left unattended to die. These days abortion is the preferred method, and ultrasound tests let couples find out the baby’s sex early in the pregnancy for about $12, well within the means of most couples. There are laws against using ultrasound this way, but they’re widely ignored. “Sex-selection abortion accounts for almost all the excess males,” says the British medical journal BMJ.
The result is an epic surplus of bachelors. The Chinese have a euphemism for permanently unmarried men: guang gun—“bare branches” on the family tree. The unmarried men are often desperate—for companionship, for sex, for household help. In rural areas the bride shortage is exacerbated by young Chinese women’s preference for urban life and modern-minded husbands. Young women are fleeing the farm in droves, attracted by well-paying factory jobs and more comfortable urban lifestyles. In the three provinces closest to North Korea, the ratio of young men to young women is a staggering 14 to 1, according to an estimate from the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.
The situation was all but made for flesh traffickers. As Kim explains, a chain of “suppliers,” “wholesale providers,” and “retail sellers” has developed. Stage one, as he calls it, takes place inside North Korea, where the suppliers lure women from their homes with promises of a lucrative trip to China. These recruiters—either North Korean nationals or Korean-Chinese, and usually male—typically hang out around urban train stations in the border regions and chat up attractive young women who pass by. Their marks are often rural women who have come to the city to sell crops grown on an illegal private plot or scavenged from the forest. They make a tempting promise: you can come home after a few months with more money than you could make in a year here. For an impoverished young woman with no job prospects, it can be an irresistible offer.
Other recruiters travel from village to village, keeping an eye out for potential brides. They spot a pretty young woman and follow her home. Kim explains what happens next. “When they see a widow with a beautiful daughter, they say: ‘Why do you leave your daughter like that? If you send her to China, then she can get money and have an education. Why don’t you send her?’ They keep talking and gain trust, and then—‘OK,’ the mother says, ‘I trust you. Take her.’ Then he takes the girl into China and sells her. This is one of the tricks.” Kim shudders. “Horrible.”
Stories abound of girls who have gone to China and never returned. But many women are young enough, inexperienced enough, or desperate enough to believe “it won’t happen to me.” One former bride I interviewed—she called herself Naomi—described how she was befriended by a traveling salesman from China who offered to guide her to where relatives of her father lived on the other side of the border. She left home in the middle of the night. “I didn’t want my parents to know I was leaving,” Naomi told me. She knew she was taking a risk and didn’t want them to dissuade her. “I thought I would go for a few days and come back.” Only when she was delivered to a Chinese farmer did she realize that the salesman’s “wares” were human, and female.
If trickery fails, recruiters have been known to resort to kidnapping. Hannah, another former bride, was a teacher in Pyongyang until she accompanied the mother of one of her pupils to the border region, hoping to make a little extra money. The friend was planning to purchase fashionable Chinese-made clothing from a Chinese salesman for resale in the capital.
After they concluded the deal, the Chinese salesman invited the two women to dinner. The food was drugged. The two women woke up in a dark room, hands and feet bound, groggy from the narcotic. As Hannah struggled to come to, she heard her friend cry out: “Teacher, I think we’ve been sold!” They were inside China, destined for forced marriages. They never saw each other again. “I never knew such things happened,” Hannah told me.
The supplier’s job ends when he delivers the woman to the Chinese side of the Tumen or Yalu River. His fee, Steve Kim says, runs between $80 and $300 per woman, depending upon the quality of the “product” and the difficulty of the crossing. Out of that sum, the supplier is expected to cover any bribes he must pay to North Korean border guards for information about safe crossing points or an agreement that they’ll look the other way at a prearranged time.
Stage two begins there, where wholesaler providers are waiting to receive the women. The wholesaler’s job is to escort the women past Chinese ID checks to a safer place farther from the border. That is typically somewhere in the Yanbian area of Jilin province. The area’s full name is Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, and it is home to a large number of ethnic Koreans, making it a good place for North Koreans to hide in plain sight—or in the case of the North Korean brides, to be hidden. Some of the women are sold directly to Korean-Chinese men who live in the region. From the woman’s point of view, this is usually the better option. Life with a Korean-Chinese man, in a community where the Korean language is spoken, is preferable to life with a Han Chinese man who speaks only Mandarin and whose culture and food will be unfamiliar.
Other brides move on to stage three and are resold to retailers for between $500 and $800 each. The retailers in turn sell the women to their clients, usually Han Chinese in other parts of the country, for between $1,200 and $1,500 per woman, depending upon her age and appearance.
At some point the woman realizes what is happening to her. She then has two choices: go through with the marriage or try to escape. This is not really a choice. The woman is on her own in a strange country. She knows no one. She doesn’t speak the language. As she quickly finds out, in escaping to China from North Korea, she has exchanged one form of bondage for another. Most accept the inevitable and agree to be sold. They reason, not illogically, that life with a Chinese husband, even an abusive one, is preferable to arrest, repatriation, and automatic imprisonment in a North Korean labor camp for illegally leaving the country. Nevertheless, the couple’s living arrangement will have no standing under Chinese law. Because the woman has no official identity papers, the marriage cannot be legally registered.
Such pseudomarriages may be voluntary—at least in the sense that the woman has the theoretical option of turning down a man’s offer. But it is wrong to consider it a true choice. It is “a means of survival or livelihood,” says Lee Keum-soon, a senior researcher with the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul. Lee has interviewed hundreds of North Korean women who have settled in the South. In many cases, she says, a voluntary marriage is indistinguishable from a forced marriage. The woman’s few alternatives may include prostitution or online stripping. A woman who cannot speak Chinese would not be able to work in a restaurant or a store. The North Korean woman “would quickly realize that there was no alternative but to establish a live-in relationship with a Chinese man to avoid a police roundup,” Lee observes. “She would have to choose to live-in as a relatively safe means of staying in China.”
The rule of law—to the extent that it prevails in China and to the extent that a North Korean with no exposure to such a concept is capable of understanding it—doesn’t apply to North Korean refugees. If a woman has relatives in China, they often urge her, not without reason, to strike a bargain with a Chinese man who will feed and house her in exchange for her labor and sexual favors. If she contacts the police or other Chinese officials, she can expect worse treatment. If the police abide by the law, they will arrest her and send her back to North Korea. If they are corrupt, they will sell her to another bride broker.
North Korean brides are “thrice victimized,” says Ambassador Mark Lagon, former director of the U.S. State Department’s human-trafficking office. “They have fled starvation and human-rights abuses in North Korea,” he notes. “They are subject to abuse as undocumented migrants in China. And if they are sent back to North Korea, they face severe punishment, even execution in some cases.”
How bad can it get? Ask Bang Mi-sun. She crossed the Tumen River, motivated, she later said, by one thought: “I might find refuge in China.” Her husband had died of starvation in North Korea. Her elder daughter had disappeared, and her two younger children needed her help. She hoped to find work in China. Instead, she found Chinese police waiting for her, ready to send her back to North Korea unless she agreed to be sold. Speaking at a press conference in Washington, D.C., she described what happened next: “My first buyer sold me to another buyer, and then that buyer sold me in turn to another buyer, each buyer for additional profit.“
“I was being sold like a beast,” she said. “I remember these Chinese brokers would call us, those who were being sold, pigs. Well, I was the best pig they had. I was sold at top price.” Her first husband told her he had paid 7,000 yuan for her—then the equivalent of about $850. “He told me he would kill me if I did not listen to him.” But she soon got a reprieve of sorts: she was abducted and sold her to another man. “I found out that there are brokers who would take the people who had been sold and take them away and sell them again to a third party. I never knew that this buying and selling of people existed,” she said. “I was sold again and again.” Eventually she was arrested and deported to North Korea, where she was beaten and sent to a labor reeducation camp.
She finally escaped again to China and made her way to South Korea. At the Washington press conference, she stood on a chair, lifted up her skirt, and displayed the deep furrows in her thighs, scars where she’d been tortured. She asked, “Why do North Korean women have to be treated like pigs and sold like pigs and suffer these things?”
Many North Korean brides have asked themselves the same thing, and some have made it to freedom. Kim relies on them to tell the friends they left behind in China. After brides escape, “they tell us there are 10, 15 more women like them in their village,” he says. “And then they call them.”
He lifts his hand to his ear, playing the part of a rescued North Korean woman calling from Seoul to a friend in China. “‘Yeah, I’m here. It’s so-o-o good. Why don’t you come?’” The bride who has escaped then gives Kim’s phone number or that of a colleague in Seoul to her friends. “If they want, they contact us,” he says. “That’s how it happens.” The next step is a phone interview with Kim. Does the woman fully understand the risks of escape? Is she willing to take the chance that she could be arrested and repatriated? If she has children with her Chinese husband, is she prepared to leave them behind?
Some women decide not to leave. “Many women have adjusted to their new lives even though they were trafficked,” he says. They have enough to eat. Their living conditions are far better than anything they experienced in North Korea. Their neighbors help shield them from arrest when security officials come snooping. “The husband is happy, and they’re not complaining,” Kim says. “They’re taking it as destiny. They tell me, ‘Don’t bother our family.’ They are living peacefully.”
If a woman asks for help and Kim agrees, he goes to work quickly. He figures out how much the rescue will cost and begins to organize his network on the new underground railroad. If the woman is still living with her Chinese husband, the first step will be to arrange for her to get to a secure location from which she can begin her journey.
Then he sends out a plea for money to his email list of supporters. Typical is an appeal from a January 2010 newsletter: “We have received another call for help from three trafficked North Korean women in China,” the newsletter states. “They are all from the same hometown in North Korea. According to the older woman named Choi, they have escaped from the captors [and are] hiding in a northern city of Jilin province. We ask your support in prayers and financially.”
The basement price of one of 318 Partners’ rescues is $1,300. Most cost much more—$3,000 or above. Money is so tight that Kim sometimes asks the rescued women to pledge to pay back $1,000 of the costs once they get to Seoul and receive financial help from the South Korean government. There is a rough symmetry in that figure. After all, $1,000 is roughly what a Chinese man will pay for a North Korean bride.
Melanie Kirkpatrick, a writer-journalist based in Connecticut, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
A powerful new video series is exposing modern-day slavery in places where it is extraordinarily difficult to document. Australian filmmakers Ben and Jocelyn Pederick have captured dramatic human stories of slavery in Burma, North Korea, Thailand and China.
Their project is called “An Invisible World: The Lives of Slaves in Modern Asia.” It is produced by Radio Free Asia, whose mission is “to bring a free press to closed societies.”
The films profile trafficking survivors, and parents whose children have disappeared into slavery. The stories reveal the complexity of slavery in Asia by exploring how poverty, ethnic discrimination, war and corruption underpin trafficking today. The series reveals how many traffickers target refugee camps, where people are especially vulnerable.
The films are haunting proof that although slavery is illegal everywhere, it happens nearly everywhere.
YANGON, Myanmar—Myanmar's archaic laws that allow conscription of workers for public projects are the biggest obstacle impeding its fight against human trafficking, a top U.S. diplomat said Wednesday.
"As long as it is still legal for the governments to use forced labor, it will be very hard for there to be improvement" on meeting international standards, visiting U.S. ambassador for human trafficking Luis CdeBaca told reporters.
Forced labor, by local governments or unscrupulous employers, child labor and sex trafficking were also cited by CdeBaca as problems Myanmar needed to tackle better.
CdeBaca said those topics were discussed frankly and openly in his talks this week with Myanmar Home Minister Lt. Gen. Ko Ko and Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin.
"Challenges, of course, remain, given the unfortunate record on these issues, but we saw these initial discussions a recognition of a problem and an openess to act," he said.
An annual U.S. report on trafficking grouped Myanmar in the third, or worst, tier of countries last year for failure to comply with the minimum standards or make serious efforts to curb human trafficking. Others among the two dozen worst were North Korea, Venezuela and Iran.
CdeBaca, who arrived Monday along with U.S. special envoy and policy coordinator for Myanmar Derek Mitchell, acknowledged the country's efforts to combat human trafficking and welcomed its recent decision to stop detaining female trafficking victims involuntarily in a shelter.
Washington long shunned Myanmar under its repressive military government, but the Obama administration reversed policy to try to engage the Southeast Asian country's rulers.
The military-backed but elected government in office since March has made some mild reforms and promised more, and the pace of U.S. engagement has quickened, highlighted by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's visit in December. Several influential members of Congress are slated to visit in the next few weeks.
Myanmar seeks better relations so the United States and other nations ease economic and political sanctions holding back its development.
"We hope there will be more reforms that would be able to be taken into account as we look at the ranking in the coming year. We still have three months left. There is plenty of time for the government to continue to do positive steps towards compliance with these minimum standards," CdeBaca said.
Many are traded as commodities and sexually assaulted.
AFP
Hooded North Korean defectors at a Seoul rally accuse China of human rights abuses, Dec. 9, 2009.
North Korean women crossing into China as defectors are frequently preyed on by trafficking gangs, with some targeted for abduction before they even leave their homes, according to sources in the region.
Sometimes, the process of entrapment begins with brokers scouting for women willing to leave the North, sources say.
“Members of trafficking gangs operate in North Korean cities like Hoeryong, Chungjin, and Hamhung,” said Kim Jae Sung, a North Korean defector living in China.
“If the gangsters see pretty girls walking down the street, they tempt them by asking if they would consider living a ‘good life’ in China.”
Many “fall for the trick” and follow the traffickers, said Kim, who escaped from North Korea’s North Hamgyeong province in 2009 and now works in the Chinese border city of Yanji.
Once they cross the border into China, he said, the trafficked women are “appraised” by Chinese middlemen based on their age, looks, and marital status.
“North Korean women in their 40s are sold for 3,000 yuan [U.S.$ 457], those in their 30s for 5,000 yuan [U.S.$ 761], and those in their 20s for about 7,000 yuan [U.S.$1,066],” said Kim.
He added that the traffickers themselves are often ethnic Koreans, and sometimes—like their victims—defectors from the North.
Many have connections to the North Korean military, he said.
‘Moved and traded’
North Korean women trafficked into China are moved and traded like merchandise, with many sold as “brides,” kept in confinement, and sexually assaulted, sources said.
Many become pregnant with unwanted children.
“Almost nine out of ten North Korean women [who leave their country] fall prey to human traffickers, and end up in rural areas all over China,” said Kim Kwang In, director of the Seoul-based North Korea Strategy Center.
“They are sold to old Chinese bachelors. There, they suffer egregious human rights violations beyond our imagination.”
Kim Jae Sung said that he once visited areas near Beijing where North Korean women are sold.
“One of them, a 23-year-old woman, was confined to a house where she was constantly sexually assaulted by her husband, her father-in-law, and her brother-in-law,” he said.
Another woman, sold to an older Chinese man in a village near Panjin in northeastern China’s Liaoning province, was able finally to run away and escaped to Dandong, a Chinese city on the North Korean border, where she now lives with a friend.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, she said that she had never intended to leave the North. But on a train ride five years ago from Buryong to Chungjin in North Korea, she was offered a drink by an elderly woman.
She drank it and immediately fell unconscious, she said, and when she woke again she was in China.
“I went to sleep a North Korean, and woke up a North Korean defector,” the woman said.
Reported by Jae Wan Noh for RFA’s Korean service. Translated by Grigore Scarlatoiu. Written in Engish by Richard Finney.
WASHINGTON — A leading US lawmaker on Thursday urged President Barack Obama's administration to ratchet up pressure on China and India over sex-trafficking and modern day slavery that flourishes in both countries.
Congressman Christopher Smith, who led the charge for the landmark 2000 law Trafficking Victims Protection Act, said the two Asian giants were among the world's worst offenders in their disregard for forced bondage and sexual exploitation.
He cited in particular Beijing's failure to prevent rampant trafficking of North Korean refugees.
The countries risk being downgraded in the State Department's annual "Trafficking in Persons" blacklist, and could face sanctions including withholding non-humanitarian, non-trade related US aid, he said.
Smith said the problem with trafficking in China has become particularly acute because of the country's "one child" law that has led to a shortage of marriageable women and created "a colossal market for bride selling."
Chinese demographers forecast that by 2020 some 40 million Chinese men will not be able to find women to marry, Smith said, calling the one child policy "barbaric."
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has made women's and children's rights a signature issue, in June called human trafficking a "terrible crime" as she unveiled a US report on the subject.
China and India were listed on the report's "tier two watch list," for countries making "significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with minimum standards" on trafficking.
Lawmakers said however that they risk being regulated to the report's bottom rung, alongside long-time violators North Korea and Burma.
As Congress prepares to take up a reauthorization bill to update the 2000 law for the next decade, the committee's chair Howard Berman said huge challenges remain to combat the 32-billion-dollar-a-year industry that sees humans "reduced to machines for production or pleasure."
Of the world's estimated 27 million modern day slaves, two thirds are in India chiefly in bonded labor, the committee heard in testimony. Smith slammed New Dehli's action on the issue as "not even remotely commensurate with the size of its current problem."
The number of prosecutions for sex industry traffickers have risen nominally in some Indian states, said advocate Beryl Ann D'Souza, who heads anti-human trafficking efforts in India for the Dalit Freedom Network.
Even with laws on the books, D'Souza said the sub-continent's approach needs comprehensive overhaul, as only seven percent of India's police force have received any type of anti-trafficking training.
The great recession may be stalling the housing markets and automobile industries in countries around the world, but in China, one business is booming. The trafficking of foreign women into China for marriage is on the rise, in response to the growing gender gap China's one-child policy has created. Are these unwilling brides modern-day comfort women?
Comfort women, for those not familiar, is the common name given to the (mostly) Korean and Chinese women who were forced into sexual servitude for the Japanese military around World War II. Only in the past few years has the Japanese government even acknowledged the violations which were systematically perpetrated against these women, but have refused to provide any sort of compensation to them. Today, it's China where North Korean, Vietnamese, Filipina, and other Asian women are being trafficked. And while some are forced into prostitution, many find themselves sold into a marriage. And according to some people who work with trafficked women in China, the gender gap that has catalyzed this trafficking is not going away any time soon, and the problem will continue to grow.
Women come to China in a number of different ways. Many of them are offered jobs and a chance to send money home, but find themselves sold into a forced marriage for as little as $700. Others intentionally travel to China to marry, but believe they will have the freedom to stay in touch with their family, hold a job, and exercise other rights their husband ends up taking away. Some are even kidnapped from their homes, smuggled into China, and sold as wives. Much of the bride trafficking of foreign women takes place in the rural parts of China, where the gender gap may be even more pronounced.
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is warning more than a dozen states, including perennial rogues Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Myanmar, of possible sanctions for failing to do enough to fight human trafficking.
In its annual review of how nations around the world are working to eliminate trafficking and sexual slavery, the State Department on Monday put 13 countries on notice that they are not complying with minimum international standards and could face U.S. penalties unless their records improve.
A powerful new video series is exposing modern-day slavery in places where it is extraordinarily difficult to document. Australian filmmakers Ben and Jocelyn Pederick have captured dramatic human stories of slavery in Burma, North Korea, Thailand and China.
The great recession may be stalling the housing markets and automobile industries in countries around the world, but in China, one business is booming. The trafficking of foreign women into China for marriage is on the rise, in response to the growing gender gap China's one-child policy has created. Are these unwilling brides modern-day comfort women?
Image via Wikipedia
