North Korea ‘exporting slave labour to fund nuclear program’
English
North Korea’s Kim Jong-un exporting 90,000 slave labourers worth $2 billion to fund nuclear program
North Korea’s Kim Jong-un exporting 90,000 slave labourers worth $2 billion to fund nuclear program
For years North Korea generated hard currency by illicit means, such as arms sales, drug smuggling and counterfeiting US dollars.
But with United Nations sanctions biting, the cash-strapped regime began tapping a new source of foreign cash — slave labour.
North Korea began sending thousands of its own citizens abroad to prop up the regime.
For Rim Il it was a dream job, a chance to earn $120 a month and eat three meals a day.
At the height of the North Korean famine in the late 1990s he leapt at the chance. Now safe in South Korea Mr Il can tell his story.
“There was plenty of rice and even soup with meat. In North Korea this was unimaginable,” he said.
But his job as a carpenter in Kuwait soon turned into a nightmare when he began to work 16 hours a day and was imprisoned in a compound.
He never saw any of his wage, because it went straight back to the regime.
“Looking back I can [see] we were treated like beasts not human beings, we basically weren’t human,” he said.
‘90,000 North Koreans performing slave labour abroad’
North Korean leader Kim Jung-un has doubled the size of the foreign labour program to fund his pet building projects and the pariah state’s nuclear program.
These foreign workers can and should be protected by the host country’s labour laws.
Myeong Chul Ahn, executive director of North Korean Watch
North Koreans now toil in 40 countries. Some work in mines in Mongolia, others in Chinese textile factories, many more on construction projects in the Middle East.
Russia takes the most — 25,000 workers.
North Korean Watch in Seoul has been investigating and wants the United Nations to take action.
“Since Kim Jong-un came to power, slave labour has exploded,” the organisation’s executive director, Myeong Chul Ahn, said.
“We estimate there are about 90,000 and that brings roughly $US2 billion a year to the regime.”
The ABC spoke with three North Korean men who recently defected to South Korea.
They worked in Siberian logging camps, working long hours in freezing conditions, and for that they were lucky to get 10 per cent of their wage.
The men, who wanted to remain unidentified, told the ABC they only had basic tools and no safety equipment.
They said many of their co-workers died but they could not escape because the regime held family members back in North Korea for ransom.
Researcher Seung ju Lee wrote a book about the men’s experiences and said the international community could help.
“While the international community can’t do anything about human rights violations inside North Korea, these foreign workers can and should be protected by the host country’s labour laws,” he said.
Under international pressure, Qatar has sent home some of the North Korean workers who were building the infrastructure for the football World Cup in 2022.
Allegations of slave labor in North Korea
Allegations of slave labor in North Korea
http://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2015/05/15/pkg-hancocks-north-korea-slave-labor.cnn
Long days, no money and no escape: Life of a North Korean migrant worker
Long days, no money and no escape: Life of a North Korean migrant worker
Seoul (CNN)—Rim Il arrived in Kuwait in the dead of night, full of high hopes.It was 1996, during the height of North Korea’s famine and chronic food shortage, a crisis that lasted four years and may have cost the reclusive nation as many as three millions lives.
A carpenter by trade, he planned to send the US$120 monthly salary he’d been promised back to North Korea to support his starving family.
He was grateful for the opportunity to earn a living abroad given the hardships at home. He and his fellow workers were given three meals, which included bread, milk, eggs and beef — things you only dreamed about in North Korea.
But before long Rim’s illusion was shattered.
“I worked for five months but I wasn’t paid even once,” he said.
Rim said he and his fellow North Koreans worked long days toiling on a construction site with little break in between shifts. Living in an abandoned school under tight security, he said they were forced to watch a documentary about then-leader Kim Jong Il during their only night off.
He said he felt like a slave.
“I never even knew I had a passport until we arrived in Kuwait,” he said. “The minders gave it to me at immigration then took it straight back. I never even ha chance to open it.”
Eventually he had enough and managed slip the minders and escape — he claimed asylum at the South Korean Embassy in Kuwait.
Modern day slavery
Rim’s experience is one of 13 accounts that NK Watch, a North Korean human rights group based in Seoul, collected as part of its petition against what they call “modern day slavery.” All the accounts had a number of things in common — up to 18 hours of work each day, little or no pay, no freedom and harsh living conditions.
About 100,000 North Korean workers are believed to be working abroad, according to an estimate by a South Korean government official who asked not to be identified. NK Watch believes workers have been sent to more than 40 different countries — few ever see any money.
Like most of North Korea’s cash, it’s believed to be diverted to the regime’s military and nuclear program, as well as to its elite inner circle.
Kim Kwang Jin, a former North Korean financier, told CNN he once helped this process by funneling money back to the North while working at an insurance company in Singapore that acted as a front for the department that funds projects for the Kim dynasty.
“I managed Kim Jong Il’s loyal funds for building palaces and building roads. I received those funds every month and I kept statements of those funds,” Kim, who now lives in Seoul, told CNN.
New leader involved
He says it’s still happening under current leader, Kim Jong Un.
“If each worker is contributing at least $100 per month, it is a really large amount. Several hundred million US dollars every year (are) flowing into Kim Jong Un’s coffers for his nuclear and missile programs.”
But with tighter scrutiny by the international community after recent nuclear and rocket tests, North Korea has not been able to generate income from its illegal activities, including smuggling narcotics and weapons, the head of NK Watch told CNN.
“So now these funds are being used for Kim Jong Un’s secret fund and nationwide construction projects like the ski resort and water park,” said Ahn Myeong-chul, the group’s executive director.
“This form of exploitation existed in the past, but it doubled or even tripled since Kim Jong Un stepped in,” Ahn added.
Ahn filed a petition to the United Nations special rapporteur on slavery last March in Geneva that highlighted the issue of labor exploitation. The petition included the 13 personal testimonies from former North Korean workers.
In an emailed response, the United Nations told CNN that it is currently looking into the allegations and added that they have information the majority of North Korean migrants are being sent to China, Russia and the Middle East.
North Korea Exports Forced Laborers for Profit, Rights Groups Say
FEB. 19, 2015
North Korea Exports Forced Laborers for Profit, Rights Groups Say
Rim Il, a North Korean who says he was sent to work in Kuwait before he defected to South Korea, in Seoul, the South’s capital. Credit Jean Chung for The New York Times
SEOUL, South Korea — When the North Korean carpenter was offered a job in Kuwait in 1996, he leapt at the chance.
He was promised $120 a month, an unimaginable wage for most workers in his famine-stricken country, where most people are not allowed to travel abroad.
But for Rim Il, the deal soured from the start: Under a moonlit night, the bus carrying him and a score of other fresh arrivals pulled into a desert camp cordoned off with barbed-wire fences.
There, 1,800 workers, sent by North Korea to earn badly needed foreign currency, were living together under the watchful eyes of North Korean government supervisors, Mr. Rim said. They worked from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. or, often, midnight, seven days a week, doing menial jobs at construction sites.
“We only took a Friday afternoon off twice a month but had to spend the time studying books or watching videos about the greatness of our leader back home,” Mr. Rim said at a recent news conference in Seoul, the South Korean capital. “We were never paid our wages, and when we asked our superiors about them, they said we should think of starving people back home and thank the leader for giving us this opportunity of eating three meals a day.”
Tens of thousands of North Koreans work long hours for little or no pay, toiling in Chinese factories or Russian logging camps, digging military tunnels in Myanmar, building monuments for African dictators, sweating at construction sites in the Middle East or aboard fishing boats off Fiji, according to former workers and human rights researchers.
For decades, North Korea has been accused of sending workers abroad and of confiscating most of their wages. But in the years since Kim Jong-un took over as leader, human rights researchers say, the program has expanded rapidly as international sanctions have squeezed the country’s other sources of foreign currency, like illicit trading in missile parts.
A 2012 study by the North Korea Strategy Center, a group in Seoul that works with North Korean defectors, and the private Korea Policy Research Center estimated that 60,000 to 65,000 North Koreans were working in more than 40 countries, providing the state with $150 million to $230 million a year. That number has since grown to 100,000, human rights researchers said.
“North Korea is exploiting their labor and salaries to fatten the private coffers of Kim Jong-un,” said Ahn Myeong-chul, head of NK Watch, a human rights group in Seoul. “We suspect that Kim is using some of the money to buy luxury goods for his elite followers and finance the recent building boom in Pyongyang that he has launched to show off his leadership.”
In a report published late last year, the Seoul-based Asan Institute for Policy Studies said that the revenue from overseas workers helped the North Korean government bypass international sanctions, which have been tightened in recent years.
“Earnings are not sent back as remittances, but appropriated by the state and transferred back to the country in the form of bulk cash,” it said, noting that sanctions ban the transfer of bulk cash to the Pyongyang government. “Returning workers also act as mules to carry hard currency earnings back to North Korea.”
NK Watch has collected the testimony of 13 former North Korean workers now living in South Korea, in support of a petition to the United Nations asking for an investigation into what it calls “state-sponsored slavery.” The petition, to be filed next month to the United Nations’ special rapporteur on contemporary slavery, said the migrants worked a minimum of 12 hours a day, were given a few days off a year, and commonly received only 10 percent of their promised pay, or none at all.
NK Watch said that there had never been an official investigation into the practice and that it was appealing to the United Nations in hopes of building on the work of a report last year that documented widespread human rights abuses inside North Korea. That report led to a recommendation that the Security Council refer North Korea to the International Criminal Court.
North Korea has dismissed the report as false and part of an American-sponsored effort to overthrow its government.
The workers interviewed by NK Watch said they were victims of a chain of exploitation and deception.
They described a system where government minders monitored their movements and communications and required them to spy on one another. The minders often confiscated the workers’ passports.
“These workers face threats of government reprisals against them or their relatives in North Korea if they attempt to escape or complain to outside parties,” the State Department said in a report published last year. “Workers’ salaries are deposited into accounts controlled by the North Korean government, which keeps most of the money, claiming various ‘voluntary’ contributions to government endeavors.”
The Workers’ Party, the ruling party in North Korea, instructed a group in Kuwait to send home $500,000 a month, more than its members’ regular salaries combined, a North Korean supervisor who worked there from 2011 to last year told NK Watch.
Former workers in Kuwait and elsewhere said they were forced to work even longer hours and seek odd jobs in the local community, splitting the earnings with government minders who demanded bribes in return for allowing them such opportunities.
One worker told NK Watch that he received only $160 in the three years he worked in a Siberian logging camp in the 1990s, toiling up to 21 hours a day in temperatures often colder than minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit.
He was told the rest of his wages were sent home to his family. But families were given only coupons for state-owned stores, where there was often nothing to buy, former workers said.
Still, in North Korea, the opportunity to work overseas was considered such a privilege that the jobs had to be bought with bribes. Former workers said their biggest fear was when supervisors threatened to send them home when they failed to meet exorbitant production targets or offer bribes. And compared with many of their compatriots at home, they were well fed.
“Once, we were eating our bowls of rice, and one guy broke into tears thinking of his starving children back home, and we all wept together,” said a North Korean defector who worked in a Russian logging camp from 2000 to 2001. He gave only his last name, Kim, for fear of reprisal against relatives who are still in the North.
Mr. Kim said he earned $5.30 a day during the winter logging season. He later learned that Chinese and Russian workers were earning $30 a day for doing much less.
Kim Yoon-tae, a researcher on North Korean human rights, said that the international community could pressure countries that use North Korean labor to honor basic international standards for labor protection, including an end to the practice of giving workers’ salaries to the government.
Mr. Rim said he was paid in cash only once during the five months he worked in Kuwait before he escaped into the South Korean Embassy there in 1997. To celebrate the birthday of Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un’s father and predecessor, supervisors gave each worker about $65 to buy cigarettes.
“Our life was nothing but slavery,” Mr. Rim said.
Rim Il: A North Korean defector Writer 