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2/22/08 Wall Street Journal: "Seoul Is Criticized for Decision To Return 22 North Koreans,"
by Evan Ramstad and Sungha Park
    Seoul, South Korea -- South Korea's decision to return 22 North Koreans who may have tried to defect is drawing criticism from defector groups, human-rights activists and some politicians who say government agencies acted too hastily.
    The North Koreans -- 14 females and eight males, three teenagers among them -- floated to South Korea on two small boats, and were repatriated 13 hours after being found Feb. 8 near an island off South Korea's northwest coast. South Korean authorities usually hold North Koreans who venture across the border for several days and conduct lengthy, individual interviews.
    "It's hard to believe that the South Korean government truly investigated and earnestly asked them if they want to live in South Korea in such a short time," said Son Jung-hun, an officer in a North Korean defectors group called the Committee for Democratization of North Korea.
    The situation gained urgency early this week after several South Korean news outlets, citing government sources anonymously, reported that some, and perhaps all, of the 22 people were executed after their return to the North. A representative at South Korea's National Intelligence Service said yesterday that the agency hadn't been able to determine what happened to the North Koreans after they were returned.
    The agency has defended its role in the episode, saying the people aboard the boats told investigators they lost control of their craft, drifted to shore in the South and wanted to return. The agency said there were fish nets and oysters in the boats, and the North Koreans explained they were fishing.
    Critics said the presence of so many women and children on the boats, along with the fact they were traveling during the Lunar New Year holiday, suggests the group was trying to leave North Korea.


11/18/07 Washington Post Foreign Service: “As More Take a Chance On Fleeing North Korea , Routes for All Budgets,”
By Blaine Harden
    Seoul -- Brokers here are busily selling what they call "planned escapes" from North Korea .  North Korea 's underground railroad to the South is busier than ever because the number of border guards and low-level security officials in the North who are eager to take bribes has increased exponentially.  China is not supposed to return people to a country where their lives are at risk. But it routinely repatriates North Koreans it has detained, human rights groups say. 
    When defectors do succeed in reaching South Korea , they are often debilitated by guilt over the kin they left behind. And such guilt is not unjustified, because the North Korean government often sends relatives of defectors to forced labor camps. 
    That occurs as a matter of policy when defectors are government or military officials with inside information about the workings of Kim Jong Il's dictatorship. 
    Defectors from Pyongyang , the capital, can also expect their families to be ordered to labor camps, according to Lee, the former North Korean army officer, who said his relatives were all dead when he defected. 
    Punishment may also be inflicted on the families of ordinary people who manage to leave. "I just go crazy to think that because of me my parents and my sister may be in a labor camp now," said a 40-year-old woman who two years ago fled her North Korean coastal town in a fishing boat, along with her husband and teenage son. She and her husband had run a small business trading fish for food and consumer goods. 
    She has since heard that her mother, father and sister were forced from their homes by the authorities and relocated to a farming area in the interior. 
    "We have hired brokers to try to find them, but the guide sent to find them has been arrested," said the woman, who lives in a Seoul suburb and did not want her name published for fear that her family would be further punished. 
    "You cannot know how heartbreaking it is to leave your family in this way." 
    Fees and Incentives
    Seoul-based brokers say they often accept payment on an installment plan -- with little or no money upfront. Once an installment-plan defector gets to Seoul and has access to some of the $43,700 that South Korea doles out to each new asylum seeker, brokers typically demand far more than their basic fee. 
    "My boss is willing to put up all the money to pay the bribes to get someone out," said a Seoul-based broker who was formerly a North Korean military officer. "But when you get to Seoul , you have to pay double for this service." 
    This broker, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he has a child and other relatives back in North Korea , said his company usually charges less than $2,000 for bringing a defector to Seoul via China and Thailand . That automatically jumps to $4,000 for those who cannot offer cash upfront. 
    To help defectors remain solvent as they adjust to life in the booming capitalist South, the Seoul government now pays out money over time rather than in a lump sum, according to Chun Sung-ho, the Unification Ministry official. It also offers incentives for finding and holding jobs. 
    About a quarter of the money goes directly for housing, eliminating any chance that it could be paid to a broker. 
    Guilt and Longing
    Even after they pay off brokers for their own passage to Seoul , North Koreans who settle in the South often end up spending many thousands of dollars more to try to bring out loved ones left behind. 
    Lee Moon-jae, 81, fled North Korea more than five decades ago. He soon remarried in the South and raised two sons. But he continues to wrestle with the guilt and longing he feels for the wife and two sons he abandoned. 
    Two years ago, he said, he paid $4,800 to a broker to bring him face to face with one of his lost sons, who is now 58. They met for three days and two nights in a hotel on the Chinese side of the border. 
    At the end, Lee said, his son declined to defect -- and returned home to his wife and children. Before his son left, Lee said, he gave him $1,700 in cash, a digital camera and some clothes -- but Lee later learned that his son lost it all while swimming across the Tumen River that separates China from North Korea. 
    So Lee has raised $3,250 for brokers who promised him they will again contact his family. This month, he said, they hired agents who are already out searching. He has asked them to set up another border meeting or, if possible, smuggle out his entire family, including his aging North Korean wife. 
    They all live in the interior of the country, and Lee says that moving them to the border is complicated and perhaps foolhardy. 
    He says he is not sure he should be trying to do this, but he is desperate to see them again. Talking about it brings tears to his rheumy eyes. 
    "I do not have much time before I die," he said. "What should I do?" 
    Special correspondent Stella Kim contributed to this report.

10/6/07 Wall Street Journal: “Review and Outlook: Freed in Beijing ,”
    President Bush has accepted the invitation of President Hu Jintao to attend next summer's Beijing Olympics -- to the anger of human-rights activists, who are calling for a boycott of the Games.
    Here's a suggestion: Between now and then, the President might consider welcoming to the Oval Office one Steve Kim, an American businessman who was released recently from a Chinese jail. Mr. Kim spent four years in prison for the "crime" of helping North Korean refugees who had escaped their homeland and were hiding in China , hoping to make their way to South Korea .
    Mr. Kim, who is from the Long Island, New York town of Huntington , is in the furniture business and since 1987 has been importing products from China . In the course of doing business there, he became aware of the plight of the refugees, who, according to numerous estimates, number in the tens of thousands. Instead of turning over the refugees to the United Nations, as it is required to do under international law, China hunts them and returns them to North Korea , where they face uncertain and often harsh fates.
    With help from the congregation of his hometown house of worship -- Good Neighbor Community Church -- Mr. Kim raised money to help the refugees. He rented two apartments, where refugees could hide out until they could hook up with the underground railroad that would deliver them to safety in the South. The aim was to fatten up the starved Northerners so that they could pass as South Koreans during the journey across China .
    Mr. Kim was arrested on September 26, 2003, along with nine North Koreans and two Chinese humanitarian workers. The Chinese were sent to jail for two years. No one knows what happened to the North Koreans, who presumably were repatriated. If they are still alive, it can be said with near certainty that they are not as lucky as Mr. Kim, who has finally come home to his wife, Helen, and their three children.

3/10/07 Wall Street Journal: “Kim the Counterfeiter,”
By Ed Royce (a member of the House Foreign Affairs and Financial Services Committee)
    Drinks flowed as North Korea 's top negotiator and his American counterpart met in New York this week in celebration of Pyongyang 's promise to give up its nuclear weapons. It was hard to believe that just five months ago North Korea actually exploded a nuclear weapon, for which it was roundly condemned. But that condemnation is gone today -- as is any frank discussion of the criminal nature of the regime, including its highly sophisticated operation to counterfeit U.S. currency.
    Troubling signs indicate that the Bush administration is prepared to push aside North Korea 's illicit activities, "resolving" issues surrounding Macau-based Banco Delta Asia, which was found to be complicit in the counterfeit operation. Regardless of the outcome surrounding Banco Delta Asia, active vigilance against North Korea 's robust and global illicit activities is essential. Confronting North Korea on its illicit activities, as a study I will release on Monday shows, makes the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula more likely, not less.
    Remarkably, North Korea is the first country since Hitler's Germany proven to counterfeit another's currency. And in a little-noticed report sent to Congress last September, the Treasury Department found that the forgeries, high-quality "Supernotes," are "being produced and distributed with the full consent and control of the North Korean government." This includes both $100 and $50 bills, from the older series to the newer "big head" notes. Approximately $50 million of them have been seized from circulation since 1989.
    Estimates on the amount of revenue generated from Pyongyang counterfeits range from $15 million to $25 million per year, but the actual amount may be considerably higher. As one government analyst put it, "We have no idea how much they're counterfeiting, because it's so good." Left unchecked, these counterfeits could eventually weaken confidence in the U.S. dollar, with global consequences. Alarmingly, some countries -- such as Ireland , Taiwan and Peru -- have temporarily refused accepting our $100 bills.
    North Korea 's counterfeiting network is global, employing a diplomatic presence in more than 60 countries. An IRA splinter group leader has even been arrested for distributing these bogus bills. Including drug trafficking and other illicit activities, the criminal sector is responsible for 35% to 40% of North Korea 's exports.
    For Kim Jong Il, crime does pay. And given its ties to international criminal organizations, Pyongyang has access to a vast smuggling network that could allow it to move almost anything in or out of the country, including weapons of mass destruction.
    Realizing this, the administration stood up the Illicit Activities Initiative in 2003. Its task was to attack the criminal lifeblood of the regime -- which it did. The designation of Banco Delta Asia as a "willing pawn" of the North Korean government in September 2005 led banks throughout the region to sever contacts with the country, shaking Pyongyang and leading the regime back to the negotiating table.
    When North Korea rejoined the six-party talks, its representative wanted to discuss one thing: money. Pressure -- not appeasement -- worked. But in a concession to Pyongyang , the U.S. committed to "resolve the issues concerning Banco Delta Asia" within 30 days of the Feb. 13 agreement.
    It is unclear what this will mean exactly -- but now that a deal has been made, U.S. officials who once pressed the case against Pyongyang 's counterfeiting are talking about the "broader interest." They are lately referring to the North Koreans as "only depositors" at Banco Delta Asia, as if Kim Jong Il was attracted by its interest rates. The Illicit Activities Initiative has now become enmeshed in the State Department's bureaucracy, losing the coordination, energy, and access to top officials it previously enjoyed -- and losing steam.
    Some may believe that tolerating North Korean counterfeiting is a small price to pay for disarming Pyongyang of its nuclear weapons. This discounts the potential impact on the world's economy. It also sends the unhelpful signal to the North Koreans that as long as they make promises on their nuclear weapons, the U.S. will bend on its laws.
    Ending North Korea 's nuclear weapons program must be our primary objective. However, the aggressive enforcement of our laws enhances rather than conflicts with the diplomatic effort to do so. Putting a stop to Pyongyang 's counterfeit operation and other criminal activities would sever a key subsidy for North Korea 's weapons of mass destruction program and frustrate Kim Jong Il's payments to his inner circle. It would also condition Pyongyang into respecting international norms.
    Can we really expect a regime that counterfeits our currency to abide by a nuclear weapons agreement? Only when North Korea ends its criminal behavior are prospects for peace and security in Northeast Asia real. Let's help Pyongyang go straight.

3/6/07 Wall Street Journal: “Kim the Kidnapper,”
Commentary by Melanie Kirkpatrick
A deputy editor of the Journal's editorial page.
    When Japanese negotiators sit down tomorrow in Hanoi for bilateral talks with their North Korean counterparts, here's the question at the top of their agenda: Where is Megumi?
    Megumi Yokota is among the Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korea in the 1970s and '80s and still missing today. "There will be no normalization of ties if the abductee issue is not resolved," Japan 's lead negotiator, Koichi Haraguchi, told reporters in Hanoi yesterday. Japanese diplomats aren't known for their bluntness, yet Mr. Haraguchi's direct statement echoes the words of virtually every other senior Japanese official on this subject. North Korea says the matter is closed.
    This week's meetings are part of the elaborate six-party agreement reached in Beijing last month under which North Korea promises to give up its nuclear program in return for aid. Tokyo signed on to the accord, reportedly under U.S. pressure, but refuses to participate in the energy assistance that is part of the deal unless progress is made on the abduction issue.
    Japan 's firmness comes directly from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. He became aware of the abductees' plight in the 1980s, when he was private secretary to his father, Shintaro, then Secretary-General of the Liberal Democratic Party, and family members went through the younger Mr. Abe to request a meeting. When he won his own election to the Diet, in 1993, he became the first politician to fight for return of the abductees. He feels their suffering and the pain of their families "in his heart," says a politician who is close to him.
    Megumi, who was abducted in 1977, has become the symbol of the movement to free the abductees. She was 13 years old and on her way home from school when she was snatched off the streets of the western Japanese city of Niigata by North Korean agents. Imprisoned in the hold of a ship and taken to Pyongyang , she was forced to teach spies how to pass as Japanese. In 2002, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il admitted to kidnapping Megumi and 11 other Japanese citizens.
    Their stories are equally heart-rending: A young couple disappear in Kagoshima Prefecture while on a date at a beach, where they had gone to watch the sunset. A 23-year-old woman vanishes in Europe; the last her parents hear from her is a postcard from Copenhagen . A mother and daughter go missing during a shopping trip in Niigata Prefecture . At the time, police who investigated these and other disappearances had no notion of North Korean involvement. In recent years, Japan has reopened many of the missing-persons files from the era but the scent has grown cold. There are only 17 people on the official list of abductees -- the most recent was added in November -- but officials say privately that the victims may number in the "hundreds." South Korea , whose appeasement-minded government prefers not to talk about the kidnappings of its citizens, has 485 people on its list of abductees.
    Pyongyang allowed five of the Japanese abductees to return home in 2002. (They were required to leave behind their Korean spouses and children as guarantees that they wouldn't badmouth their captors.) It claimed the rest of the abductees had all died, but the causes of death they cited were so absurd as to be unbelievable -- a 20-something young woman who dropped dead of a heart attack; a man who drowned while swimming in the ocean during a typhoon; and so forth. Megumi was reported to have hanged herself. But the DNA evidence provided by Pyongyang in her case and others proved to be fraudulent.
    "Megumi" is a household name in Japan , thanks largely to the efforts of her parents to keep her story alive. Her mother, Sakie, met with President Bush in the White House last year. At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in January, the Japanese government hosted a sushi reception and screening of "Abduction," a documentary about her disappearance. Last month, in Tokyo , Mr. Abe attended a press conference at which American folk singer Noel Paul Stookey, of Peter, Paul and Mary fame, debuted his plaintive "Song for Megumi." Meanwhile, a Japanese advocacy group last week announced it would use balloons to scatter 100,000 waterproof leaflets over North Korea offering a $10,000 reward for information on the abductees.
    Among the promises the U.S. made to North Korea as part of the Feb. 13 nuclear disarmament deal is a pledge to begin the process of removing it from the list of terror-sponsoring states. When Vice President Dick Cheney visited Tokyo last month, Mr. Abe urged the U.S. not to do so until the abduction issue is resolved. While President Bush has spoken eloquently in the past about human-rights violations in North Korea , that issue appears not to be high on the U.S. agenda these days. Chief U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill is holding talks in New York with his North Korean counterpart this week. A good question for him to ask is, Where is Megumi?

1/9/07 Wall Street Journal: "South Korea's Balancing Act: Citizen Who Escaped From North's Custody Touches Diplomatic Nerve,"

1/9/07 Wall Street Journal: " South Korea 's Balancing Act: Citizen Who Escaped From North's Custody Touches Diplomatic Nerve,"

12/18/06 Wall Street Journal: “Pastor Buck Is a Rescuer . . .”
By Melanie Kirkpatrick
Deputy Editor of the Journal's editorial page.
    This being The Wall Street Journal, we went straight to the bottom line. How much, we asked our visitor at a recent editorial board meeting, does it cost to free one North Korean refugee hiding in China ?
    The Rev. Phillip Buck pauses a moment before replying, apparently making the yuan-to-dollar conversions on the abacus in his mind. "If I do it myself," he says, "the cost is $800 per person. If I hire a broker to do it, it's $1,500."
    Pastor Buck is a rescuer. It's a job title that applies to a courageous few -- mostly Americans and South Koreans and predominantly Christians -- who operate the underground railroad that ferries North Korean refugees out of China to South Korea, and now, thanks to 2004 legislation, to the U.S. Mr. Buck, an American from Seattle, says he has rescued more than 100 refugees and helped support another 1,000 who are still on the run. For this "crime" -- China 's policy is to hunt down and repatriate North Koreans -- he spent 15 months in a Chinese prison. He was released in August.
    The plight of the tens of thousands of North Korean refugees in China is a humanitarian crisis that has received scant world attention. It won't be on the agenda of the six-party talks, which are scheduled to restart today in Beijing . But the experience of Pastor Buck and other rescuers is worth noting as negotiators sit down with Kim Jong Il's emissaries. North Korea won't change, they believe, so long as Kim remains in power. Follow that logic, and regime change is the proper goal.
    The refugees, Pastor Buck argues, are the key to regime change in North Korea and, by inference, the key to halting the North's nuclear and missile programs. Help one man or woman escape, he says, and that person will get word to his family back home about the freedom that awaits them on the outside.
    Others will follow, and the regime will implode. This is what happened in 1989, when Hungary refused to turn back East Germans fleeing to the West, thereby hastening the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
    Pastor Buck was born in North Korea in 1941 and fled with his brothers to the South during the Korean War.
    He emigrated to the U.S. in the '80s, becoming a citizen in 1992. When famine hit North Korea in the late '90s, and millions died, he raised relief funds in Korean churches in the U.S. "I helped send 150 tons of flour and rice to the North," he says, "and 70 tons of fertilizer . . . This was a time when government rations had stopped and people were living off grass."
    But on visits to the North, he soon realized that the government was stealing the food intended for starving citizens. "I changed my mind" about the efficacy of aid, he says, and in 1998 he joined the effort to help people escape. "If you see someone who is drowning in the river, wouldn't you reach out and help that person?" he asks. "That's what was in my heart."
    Pastor Buck is nothing if not determined. In 2002, while in a Southeast Asian country with a group of refugees he had guided there, his apartment in Yanji city, in northeast China , was raided. Nineteen refugees were captured and a copy of his passport was confiscated. With his identity now compromised, Mr. Buck returned to the U.S. and underwent legal proceedings to change his name. John Yoon, the name he was born with, was dead; Phillip Buck was born.
    The new Pastor Buck returned to China , where, on May 25, 2005, he was arrested and eventually convicted of the crime of helping illegal immigrants. Thanks to the intervention of the U.S. government, he was deported before he could be sentenced.
    Another American, Steve Kim, was not so lucky. Mr. Kim, a furniture importer from Huntington , N.Y. , has been in prison in China since September 2003, sentenced to five years for smuggling aliens. Mr. Kim, who, like Mr. Buck, is of Korean ancestry and is a Christian, became aware of the plight of the refugees during business trips to China . He funded two safe houses and paid for refugees' passage on the underground railroad. Beijing refuses to grant him parole, saying foreigners are not eligible. His wife and three children will pass their fourth Christmas without him.
    Mr. Buck, meanwhile, will celebrate Christmas at home in Seattle, along with four refugees, now settled in South Korea, whom he has invited to spend the holiday with him and his family. These refugees -- two men and two women -- have harrowing personal tales of starvation, death and repression in the North and desperate lives on the run in China .
    One young man, who asks that his name not be used for fear of retribution on family members still at home, spent time in the North Korean gulag, after being captured in China and repatriated. He was tortured, he says -- rolling up his trousers at a recent press conference in Washington , D.C. to display the scars on his legs.
    One morning at roll call, he recounts, one of his cellmates, a man who had been badly beaten during the night, was too sick to get out of bed. The guards ordered the prisoners to carry the injured man into the woods and bury him. "I keep thinking, maybe he would still be alive if we hadn't buried him," the escapee says. The name of the dead man was Kim Young Jin. The name of the prison is Chong Jin. Says the man who escaped: "I am very glad to be here, and tell the people in America how life in North Korea really is."
    Pastor Buck spent last Christmas in jail. "My cellmates were criminals," he says, "12 in all, murderers and rapists." His diary entry for Dec. 24, 2005, notes that he distributed the chocolates his children had sent him as Christmas gifts to his cellmates. And this year? "I am so excited that I can celebrate this Christmas with lots of joy," his diary entry for last Thursday reads.
    His final words are for the refugees. "I pray, let the Christmas spirit be with those North Korean refugees still in China . Let them be safe too."

10/21/06 Wall Street Journal: “Desperate Refugees Driven By Famine and Oppression,”
    In regard to the moving essay “Great Leadership” by Suki Kim (editorial page, Oct. 16):
    Driven by famine and brutal oppression, hundreds of thousands of North Korean refugees have fled to China . There, they still face tremendous suffering as the numerous gut-wrenching letters from them to Radio Free Asia (RFA) indicate. One typical letter states, "But the Korean-Chinese people abused us because we couldn't speak Chinese. They arranged jobs for us but took our wages. All of us North Korean refugees have nowhere to go to complain. This has lasted for six years. I don't know what to do now. I have thought many times about committing suicide."
    Also, the Chinese police periodically conduct raids, each rounding up hundreds of the refugees. The police immediately arrange for Chinese soldiers to send the refugees to certain torture and death in North Korea . In one particular case, after the soldiers handed a refugee over to the North Korean guards at the Chinese-Korean border, "[a Korean guard] seized her and another speared her hand -- the soft part between thumb and forefinger -- with the point of a sharpened steel cable, which he twisted into a leash. 'She screamed just like a pig when we kill it at home in the village,' the soldier later told his relative. 'Then they dragged her away.'"
    While this brutality occurs month after month, many members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) send their adult children to the United States to study, to work and to live permanently. Ultimately, they take advantage of lenient American immigration laws and arrange to bring their parents here to savor the good life. These privileged Chinese enjoy the freedoms and prosperity of the U.S. even while their relatives and other comrades in the CCP orchestrate the brutalization of helpless Korean refugees.
    The time has come for Washington to address this sickening hypocrisy. Namely, we Americans should give Beijing an ultimatum: If Beijing does not allow the North Korean refugees to transit freely through China to reach sanctuary in the U.S., Japan or another democracy, then Washington (in alliance with other Western governments) shall (1) prohibit any CCP member or his relatives from entering any Western country and, (2) deport all CCP members and their relatives who are residing in a Western nation but who do not possess its citizenship.
Dwight Sunada, Ph.D.
Stanford, Calif.

10/16/06 Wall Street Journal: “Great Leadership,”
by Suki Kim
    Despite the much-touted label of being the most secretive nation in the world, the one thing everyone knows about North Korea is that its people have been dying in massive numbers from starvation and persecution for decades, the reality of which seems to have bypassed the nations involved in the on-again-off-again six-party talks -- whose diplomacy has apparently failed. By landing a punch at the nonproliferation policy of the U.N. Security Council, an organization soon to be led by South Korean Ban Ki Moon, North Korea yet again thwarted its former promises of stopping all nuclear activities. The Bush administration is advocating harsher ways of punishing a country they maintain is a member of the "axis of evil" through tougher sanctions and cutting off its financial sources, neither of which has worked so far in stopping North Korea from doing whatever it wants to do. Now that it claims to have become the world's ninth nuclear power, I wonder what will change, if anything, for its people.

* * *
    On June 25, 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea , my mother's brother, then age 18 and living in Seoul , was kidnapped by the North's soldiers. Fleeing the bombs, my grandmother, with her five children, fought through the panicked crowd onto the jam-packed, southbound train when someone screamed out that young men should give up their seats for women and children. My grandmother spent her remaining life haunted by that last moment, of her eldest son rising and reassuring her that he would be on the next train. Hers turned out to be the last train out of Seoul . Later, a neighbor reported seeing him tied up and being dragged away by the North Korean soldiers. Korean Confucian ethics holds that there is no bigger sin than abandoning one's family, and yet neither Korean government has granted reunions for the millions of separated families, except for a handful who have been used as a showcase for the failed peace summits.
    In February 2002, I traveled to Pyongyang in an effort to locate my uncle. I never found him, but I spent about a week with the Workers' Party leaders, ranging from the chairman of the Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries to the then-ambassador to the Permanent Mission to the U.N., who repeatedly told me that their real enemy was not South Korea, with whom they are still technically at war, but the U.S., which, along with the Soviet Union, had drawn up the 38th Parallel in 1948 and perpetuated the war by isolating them through sanctions. They were mystified as to why the United States was allowed to have nuclear weapons when it was the only nation in history to have deployed them on civilians, never mind starting wars all over the world.
    My most vivid impression of Pyongyang was that an entire generation must have been eradicated for such a place to exist. Nothing on their empty, energy-deprived streets indicated that anything prior existed. Every book, piece of artwork and building was either made by the Great Leader or about the Great Leader. Their only official newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, was four pages long and consisted almost exclusively of praise for their Great Leader. Their state-controlled TV showed mostly undated footage of the Great Leader. Everywhere I went, music played in the background and the subject of the lyrics was inevitably the Great Leader.
    The regime of North Korea has done a most efficient job of wiping out Korea 's 5,000-year history, imbued with Buddhism, Shamanism and Confucianism, with one amnesia-inflicting spell called "Juche," its political philosophy of self-reliance. And what seems to make the Great Leader so "great" is that he has replaced their lost memory. For my uncle to have survived there, he either would have had to forget everything he had known, or learned to believe in the Great Leader. Or it is possible that he held on with the hope for the two Koreas to reunite; my grandmother did, until she passed away 25 years after he went missing.
    In the 1970s in South Korea , I grew up with the anthem, "Our Wish is Reunification," which children still sing. Today, however, South Koreans readily claim North Koreans as their siblings and yet they hesitate upon the topic of the Kim Jong Il regime's collapse, which might lead to the breakdown of 38th Parallel and to millions of refugees pouring south. President Roh Moo Hyun's increasingly less popular "sunshine policy" has provided a conduit through which money is funneled into North Korea for supposed economic reform, although it now looks as though it has effectually funded the North's nuclear program.
    South Korea is not the only one who fears the consequence of Kim Jong Il's demise. Neither China nor Russia , North Korea 's biggest allies and neighbors, wants to foot the bill for refugees. As many as 300,000 North Koreans have crossed the northern border since the Korean War despite a joint crackdown from North Korean agents and Chinese police. For Japan , the threat from North Korea has provided a basis for lobbying for remilitarization and a revision of their post-World War II, U.S.-sponsored pacifist constitution. America, whose soon-to-be downsized 32,000 troops are still stationed in Seoul's Yong San Garrison, does not want to forfeit its control over the region to China, whose trading relationship with South Korea and economic hold over the North have grown rapidly in recent years. The prospect of One Korea benefits no one except the welfare of the North Korean people, whom the mighty six-party nations seem to have forgotten. So why are we relying on their decision on what to do about North Korea ?
    Just last month, the World Food Program launched an appeal for more funds to fight the food shortage in North Korea, worsened by the August flood that had, according to the state's figures, killed and left homeless hundreds, although various human rights groups claim numbers closer to hundreds of thousands if not millions. Over a third of all children are reported to be malnourished. According to Amnesty International, 400,000 have perished from political persecution; 150,000 are still held in underground concentration camps. Since the much condemned July 4 missile tests, humanitarian aid has been cut drastically.
    In the 1970s, South Korean propaganda posters of starving children were forced upon us to show that North Korea was hell on earth and that its leader was a selfish, ruthless despot. In the decades since, during which time a famine killed over a tenth of North Korea 's 23 million people, not much has changed at all. The 38th Parallel is still there. The most the Bush administration has done in its diplomatic strategy about North Korea is to call it evil. The peace talks are continuously stalled. The U.N. is in yet another emergency huddle to figure out a way of handling the problem. Now that North Korea claims to be a nuclear power, what will be different?
    In the meantime, the Siberian winter is quickly approaching for the people of North Korea , where heat and food are scarcer than ever. The Rodong Sinmun headlines after the nuclear test revealed just one brief congratulatory paragraph on the success of the test, which has turned the rest of the world upside down. The other articles were about the floral baskets delivered to their Great Leader from the various communist parties of China , Laos and Cuba .
    Ms. Kim, a 2006 Guggenheim fellow, is author of "The Interpreter" (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2003).