China arrests 15 North Korean escapees near Laos

Under cover of darkness, the 15 North Koreans – 13 women and two children – approached the river, where they expected to catch a speedboat out of China to Laos, bringing them one step closer to freedom.

They had traveled more than 2,500 kilometers (1,500 miles) across China to get to that point, hoping eventually to fly from Southeast Asia to Seoul. 

Suddenly, Chinese police appeared and arrested all of them.

Instead, they will likely be repatriated – a fate that awaits nearly all North Korean escapees in Chinese police custody – and will likely be punished for fleeing.

The incident occurred on the night of Aug. 21, according to a South Korean human rights group, Korea Unification Solidarity, that had been helping the escapees.

The Chinese guide leading the group had sent a video clip to update their status to some of their family members who had already made the journey to South Korea. They were arrested moments later.

According to Korea Unification Solidarity, the escapees were on their way to South Korea – in a roundabout route. 

After first fleeing North Korea to China, they were divided into two groups to avoid detection. Each group took a different route across China to the southern city of Kunming, and once reunited they planned to cross the border to a Southeast Asian country. 

“The two groups arrived safely in Kunming and merged, but when they sent a video of their arrival at the riverside, the police raid started,” Jang Se-yul, a representative of Korea Unification Solidarity, told RFA Korean. “When I asked another guide, he said that they were all caught at the riverside.”

An escapee living in Seoul identified by the pseudonym Lee for safety reasons told Jang that his younger sister was among the group of 15 arrested escapees.

“Ten days ago, my younger sister and her group of 15 people left Yanji, Jilin Province, to go to Kunming and they were arrested by the Chinese police.” Lee said, according to Jang. “Their whereabouts became unknown after the video clip was sent by the Chinese guide.”

The three-second-long video clip provided to RFA by Lee via Jang shows several women, presumed to be among the 15 escapees, moving toward a river in pitch darkness to board a boat.

RFA has not been able to independently confirm which river is shown in the video or any of Jang’s statements about the incident.

According to Jang, the group consists of 13 North Korean women and two children who had lived temporarily in the northeastern Chinese provinces of Heilongjiang and Jilin.

Illegal migrants?

Although many in the international community are critical of China for forcibly repatriating North Korean escapees, Beijing maintains that they are not refugees, but illegal economic migrants, and that it must repatriate them because it is bound by two diplomatic agreements with Pyongyang.

The arrests come about a month after South Korea celebrated its first-ever North Korean Defectors’ Day, a new holiday that will henceforth fall on July 14 and celebrate the stories and struggles of North Koreans who have resettled in South Korea.

During the holiday events, South Korean President Yoon Seok-yeol pledged to make “every diplomatic effort to prevent our compatriots who escaped North Korea and are living overseas from being forcibly repatriated.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, repatriations temporarily halted as the border between China and North Korea were closed down, but now that the border is open again, repatriations have resumed.

When RFA contacted South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for comment on the arrests, the ministry’s spokesperson Lee Jae-woong said that there was nothing that could be confirmed.

But he said that South Korea maintains that North Koreans residing overseas should not be forcibly repatriated under any circumstances.

South Korea’s Ministry of Unification told RFA that it reiterated that position and that it is currently verifying the facts. 

Translated by Jay Park. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.