North Korea

Fiona Bruce Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Davies, and to have secured this debate at such a momentous time, so soon after the succession of Kim Jong-un, the new leader of North Korea, following the death of his father, Kim Jong-il, last month. It was even more gratifying to hear, only yesterday, of the North Korean Government’s announcement that they will grant an amnesty for prisoners to mark the birthdays of those two leaders. We look forward to hearing more news about the prisoners to be released.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

On that amnesty, does my hon. Friend hope for the release of Dr Oh, who has not seen his wife and daughters for 15 years?

[Fiona Bruce]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising that very important case, on which a number of my colleague parliamentarians have made representations. I believe that the Minister is aware of that case, and I look forward to hearing his comments. I also hope that further representations can be made to the North Korean Government about the release of Dr Oh’s family as part of the amnesty.

The amnesty announcement emphasises what many see as a fresh opportunity, at the start of a new era, to forge further relationships with the people of North Korea. That is the hope of many people in Britain who have worked often for years to develop relationships, and indeed friendships, with people in North Korea to share knowledge, understanding and support. Several of my parliamentary colleagues from the all-party group on North Korea have visited the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—the DPRK—in recent years, as have many other delegations from the UK. Interestingly, in 2010, that included the Middlesbrough Ladies football team, who apparently attracted a 20,000-strong crowd of spectators.

On a more modest level, but no less importantly, the Speaker of the House of Commons has met the Speaker of the North Korean Assembly, Choe Thae-bok. Mr Speaker was able to raise human rights concerns with his DPRK counterpart in a very constructive discussion. Most recently, the DPRK authorities extended an invitation to the Archbishop of Canterbury to visit their country soon, and I hope that he accepts.

The most recent visit of the all-party parliamentary group was in autumn 2010, after which it produced a report, “Building Bridges Not Walls: the Case for Constructive, Critical Engagement with North Korea”. The report describes a welcome commitment from DPRK officials to dialogue, with particular reference to negotiating a peaceful resolution as regards the relationship between North and South Korea. “Building Bridges Not Walls” also states that the APPG had

“the opportunity to see some encouraging developments, including the establishment of a Russian Orthodox Church in which Russian diplomats freely worship; a Protestant seminary; the work of British Council teachers; English-language teaching at Kim il-Sung University…a newly opened e-Library at Kim il-Sung University; and the establishment of the impressive Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), with a faculty of teachers from the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. These are welcome developments which we hope will…contribute towards the establishment of a more open and prosperous society for all the people of North Korea.”

I believe that I speak on behalf of many people in this country who fervently hope that the accession to leadership of Kim Jong-un will further pave the way for that.

The APPG delegation also voiced concerns that cannot be batted away with diplomatic niceties about the need to discuss grave human rights issues in North Korea through a process of constructive critical engagement. That should be done in the same way that President Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher established the Helsinki process with the Soviet Union. The APPG reports says:

“It is time for peace, and ‘it is time for Helsinki with a Korean face’.”

In other words, as the human rights researcher David Hawk says, a process is to be encouraged that would

“pursue peace, engagement, and reconciliation in association with the promotion and protection of human rights”.

That sums up more eloquently than I ever could the process that many in Britain desire to see develop in this new era. I would appreciate the Minister’s comments on how the British Government can help to facilitate dialogue to that end.

I turn to the protection of human rights, on which it has to be said that North Korea has, by any international standard, a deplorable record. I was stirred to call for this debate by a visit two months ago to the UK Parliament by a remarkable young man who is now in his late 20s, Shin Dong-hyuk. I understand that he is the only person ever to have escaped from a North Korean prison camp. On hearing Shin’s story, I was moved, by compassion for the North Korean people, to highlight their dignified suffering in order to encourage support for them in their plight. May I record that I called for this debate holding no hatred of the people of North Korea? I am motivated by a deep love for the North Korean people, and by concern for their needs and their deep suffering over decades.

[Mr Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Fiona Bruce]

I will certainly give way to my hon. Friend, particularly as he is chairman of the Conservative party human rights commission, of which I am privileged to be a serving member.

[Mr Buckland]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. May I reinforce her remarks about the evidence of Shin Dong-hyuk, which was not only moving but informative? He taught us that life in the prison camps was very often the only way of life that families who had been born into captivity knew. When he came to the west, he learned for the first time about the Nazi holocaust, and it instantly reminded him of some of his experiences in North Korea. Is that not very powerful testimony of the depth of deprivation of human rights from which the people of North Korea are suffering?

[Fiona Bruce]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. If you will indulge me, Mr Davies, I shall shortly go into further details of Shin Dong-hyuk’s testimony to us.

It was in meetings with the Conservative party human rights commission, and at an event that I chaired on behalf of the Henry Jackson Society, that Shin Dong-hyuk told his life story. It is the personal testimony of someone who was born into a North Korean prison camp, lived there for 23 years and then escaped. As my hon. Friend says, his story was authoritative, valuable and deeply moving.

Shin Dong-hyuk was born in camp 14 in 1982. Shin described the conditions he endured for the first 23 years of his life. When he was 14 years old, his mother and brother were executed in front of him because they tried to escape. He was held for seven months in solitary confinement. The torture he faced was unimaginably inhumane. With extraordinary dignity and lack of bitterness, he described to us how he was hung upside down by his legs and hands from the ceiling, and on one occasion his body was burned over a fire. His torturers pierced his groin with a steel hook; he lost consciousness.

On another occasion, Shin was assigned to work in a garment factory. Severe hard labour is a common feature of North Korea’s prison camps. He accidentally dropped a sewing machine, and as a punishment the prison guards chopped off his middle finger. According to Shin, couples perceived by the authorities to be good workers are arbitrarily selected by prison guards and permitted, even forced, to get married, with a view to producing children who could, in turn, become model workers. Children born in the prison camp are, like Shin, treated as prisoners from birth. As a child in the prison school, Shin recalled the teacher, who was also a prison guard, telling the children that they were animals whose parents should have been killed. He told them that, by contrast, he, the teacher, was a human, and that they should be grateful to be alive.

Shin also recalled seeing, while at school, a seven-year-old girl in his class being severely beaten because she was discovered to have picked up a few grains of wheat on the way to school. The beating continued for two hours, and her classmates had to carry her home. She died the next day.

In 2004, at the age of 22, Shin met a fellow prisoner who had seen life outside the camp. This prisoner described the wider world to Shin. Initially, Shin did not believe him. His entire life until then had been spent behind the barbed wire of the prison camp, and he thought that this was the extent of life. Eventually, the other prisoner convinced him, and Shin’s curiosity developed. Together, they decided to try to escape, and in 2005 they put their plan into action. What then followed is a story of agony and ecstasy. In a written testimony available on the internet, Shin recalls:

“I had no fear of being shot at or electrified; I knew I had to get out and nothing else mattered at that moment. I ran to the barbed wire. Suddenly, I felt a great pain as though someone was stabbing the sole of my foot when I passed through the wire. I almost fainted but, by instinct, I pushed myself forward through the fence. I looked around to find the barbed wire behind me but Park”—

his friend—

“was motionless hanging over the wire fence! At that desperate moment I could afford little thought of my poor friend and I was just overwhelmed by joy. The feeling of ecstasy to be out of the camp was beyond description. I ran down the mountain quite a way when I felt something wet on my legs. I was in fact bleeding from the wound inflicted by the barbed wire. I had no time to stop but sometime later found a locked house in the mountain. I broke into the house and found some food that I ate, then I left with a small supply of rice I found in the house. I sold the rice at the first mining village I found and bribed the border guards to let me through the North Korean border with China with the money from that rice.”

Shin described to us first seeing the country of North Korea outside the prison camps, and said that, to him, it looked like paradise.

Shin’s story will be published in March this year, in a book called “Escape from Camp 14”. I hope that many of us will read it. I am aware that the Minister met Shin, and I look forward to hearing his reflections on their discussions. The Archbishop of Canterbury and Mr Speaker also met Shin, and expressed what an impact that encounter had on them. Shin, however, is by no means the only North Korean defector to have spoken in Parliament; earlier this year, Kim Hye-sook addressed a meeting organised by the APPG. She spent 28 years in the North Korean prison camps, and was first jailed at the age of 13. Kim was forced to work in coal mines even as a child, and witnessed public executions.

What Shin Dong-hyuk and Kim Hye-sook have in common is that they were victims of North Korea’s appalling “guilt by association” policy, which punishes people for three generations for the alleged crimes of a family member. Kim’s grandfather had gone to South Korea during the Korean war, and for that reason her family were regarded as hostile elements by the regime, and jailed. According to lists of detainees, which I have been sent, many others in the camps are jailed for being Christian.

It is estimated that there are approximately 200,000 prisoners in such camps, and over the years human rights reports by organisations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Christian Solidarity Worldwide have catalogued stories from survivors of the camps, who testify to the widespread use of forced labour, executions, torture, rape, sexual violence, forced abortions, infanticide and religious persecution. One, Kim Wu-yeong, told CSW:

“Christianity is public enemy number one in North Korea. If someone is a Christian in North Korea they are a political enemy and will be either executed or sent away to a political prison camp.”

Further information can be found in the book “North Korea: a Case to Answer, a Call to Act”, published by CSW in 2007 and available on the internet.

One of the most remarkable books I have ever read is “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea” by Barbara Demick. If hon. Members read just one book on North Korea, I would recommend this one. It is available from the Library and tells the life stories of several escapees from North Korea to South Korea—people who have not lived in prison camps, but who have none the less suffered greatly over the past several decades in many ways, in a country where freedom of speech and movement is minimal and malnutrition is commonplace. I remember reading and being so saddened by one mother’s story; I identified with her. In the 1990s, when there was a severe famine in the country, she was forced to search the countryside for grass and bark, which she would mash up and feed her family. Both her husband and her loved son died during that famine.

Despite the passing of that terrible famine, malnutrition still affects many millions of people who live in North Korea. The current humanitarian situation is dire and food aid is desperately needed. The World Food Programme and UNICEF conducted an assessment last year that shows that food needs are acute. The problem has continued over many years with such serious implications for growth that the North Korean army has, I understand, now reduced its height requirement for men from 4 feet 8 inches to 4 feet 3 inches. Our fellow men and women are living at this time, in the 21st century, when there is so much plenty in so many other countries, but they live in another part of the world with such shortages in a country that, as the book “Nothing to Envy” describes, was once a developing nation but is now going backwards. Compassion should surely move us to do all that we can to provide food aid and to support international aid agencies that are willing to help.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing the debate. She is moving on to one of the most important issues on this subject—humanitarian assistance. As well as making it very clear to the new regime in North Korea that the brutality and the other matters that we are all very deeply concerned about need to stop, we need to ensure that humanitarian assistance gets to the people of North Korea, as opposed to the Government and the regime, which could well be entering a new, dangerous phase.

[Fiona Bruce]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. One of the issues that I will ask the Minister to address is the monitoring of humanitarian food aid across the country. Currently, food rations are distributed by the DPRK under the North Korean Government’s food distribution programme, on which millions of people are dependent, but it meets less than half the daily calorific needs of most recipients.

To underline the urgent need for food, I will relate some of the descriptions given to the APPG at a meeting here in Parliament, just a few weeks ago, by Baroness Amos, the UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Co-ordinator, after she visited the country late last year. I hope to report what Baroness Amos said accurately. She stated that the background to her visit was that in 2011, for the first time in 16 years, the North Korean Government made an international appeal for assistance—welcome news. By a UN assessment, she said that 16 million people in the DPRK are now in need of food aid and that the number is increasing because of the growth rate, especially in women and children.

Baroness Amos recounted that during her visit she was at pains to stress to the North Korean Government that humanitarian aid is impartial. She visited a hospital, a market, a biscuit factory, a Government food distribution point and a co-operative farm. She reported a situation of chronic poverty and underdevelopment, with an annual gap of about a million metric tons in the amount of food needed, according to the DPRK’s own targets. People live mainly off maize, cabbage and occasionally rice. There is no oil, although if people live near the sea, there is occasionally fish, but no meat. She asked some mothers when they last had an egg: no one could tell her. So there is virtually no protein for people in need of food aid. In fact, there are hardly any animals to be seen.

The nutritional deficit in children is acute, and there are major structural problems with food production, with severely low production from land and an almost total lack of mechanisation. Indeed, another visitor to North Korea, who went last month, told me this week that she had seen only three tractors over several days of travelling across the countryside.

Transport is a major problem. Baroness Amos reported seeing steam lorries—something she had never seen anywhere else in the world—where coal is burnt on the back of lorries to create steam and three out of four of them appeared to be broken down.

Food for much of the population comes from the public food distribution system and is obtained on production of ration cards. People receive about 200 grams of food a day, on average, although the DPRK’s own target is about 600 grams. Needs are particularly acute outside the capital Pyongyang. People living in Pyongyang rarely travel out of it, and vice versa, so the desperate needs of those outside the capital are perhaps not as well understood as they could be.

Will the Minister advise us about the endeavours of the British Government to facilitate the provision of food aid to North Korea, either directly or through international aid agencies? Will he press for unrestricted access for humanitarian aid organisations to all parts of the country and inform us what the British Government are doing, by themselves or through the European Union or United Nations, to address the crisis? What efforts have been made to ensure monitoring of aid and what assessment have the Government made of the effectiveness of international aid and the ability of international humanitarian organisations to reach North Korean people in need?

I want to highlight two other concerns: the situation of abductees and the plight of refugees. The Minister will, I hope, be familiar with the case of Dr Oh, who has been mentioned. There are many other cases. Will the Minister tell us what the latest position is regarding Dr Oh’s family and what efforts the British Government are making to press the North Korean authorities to account for the large number of foreign abductees, believed to run into several thousand, and to release them? What steps can the British Government take to work with Governments of countries whose citizens have been abducted and with international organisations such as the UN to secure their release?

Additionally, what steps can be taken to urge China to desist from the forcible repatriation of North Korean refugees and to tackle the plight of refugees who subsequently suffer at the hands of human traffickers? The number of women affected in that way runs into tens of thousands.

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on her speech, which I am listening to with interest. Does she agree that there has been quite a lot of discussion in the media about nuclear and military issues and the backward economic situation, but that human rights in Korea has had little exposure? Does she agree that that needs to be remedied urgently?

[Fiona Bruce]

I agree. I hope that this debate will raise awareness of those two key issues.

The former UN special rapporteur for human rights in North Korea, Mr Vitit Muntarbhorn, has called on the international community to

“mobilise the totality of the UN to promote and protect human rights in the country”.

Will the Minister advise us whether the British Government would consider taking a lead to seek the establishment of a UN commission of inquiry in this respect on the subjects that my hon. Friend mentioned? In particular, what steps is the Minister taking to press the new leadership to open up access to international human rights monitors, including the UN special rapporteur for human rights, who has repeatedly been refused access? Can the Minister say whether any progress has been made in negotiation and dialogue with the DPRK authorities by the new UN special rapporteur to the DPRK?

With reference to the prison camps, such as the one Shin Dong-hyuk described, I understand that the North Korean authorities regularly say that these are not prisons as described. Will the Minister, through a process of Government engagement between the two countries, endeavour to arrange access to some of the camps for British parliamentarians, such as those from the APPG, who have already sensitively endeavoured over several years to build constructive relationships with North Korean people? In this regard, I pay tribute to the chairman and founder of the APPG for North Korea, Professor Lord Alton of Liverpool and his colleague in the House of Lords, Baroness Cox.

I welcome the British Government’s improved funding support, despite their austerity programme, for the British Council’s English teaching work within North Korea. It is particularly pleasing to note that English is now being taught as the second language in the DPRK. I should particularly like to offer my congratulations on the recent acceptance of the first two scholars to study at Cambridge university, which is to the credit of our Government, the Foreign Office and those scholars.

I welcome the Minister’s thoughts on what can be done to encourage the flow of information from the outside world into North Korea, perhaps through support for radio broadcasting.

I understand that there are some 400 North Korean refugees here in the United Kingdom. The book, “Nothing to Envy”, which I have mentioned more than once already, describes how difficult modern life, with all its choices and complexities, is for North Korean refugees. What support is available for them in the UK to help them prepare for a better future for themselves and their country? Is there dialogue between the Government and those refugees to aid our country’s understanding of North Korea and in turn help build relationships with that country?

I thank the Minister for meeting Shin Dong-hyuk personally. I believe that that is an indication of his sincere concern about these issues. Will he also consider meeting Dr James Kim, a remarkable man who has founded Pyongyang university of science and technology—PUST—within the past two years, when he visits Parliament on 15 February? Perhaps after hearing of the wonderful story of hope that the establishment of that university provides, the Minister may consider making representations to the Department for International Development to give support to PUST, if not on a wider basis for North Korea.

It is encouraging that the UK Government have developed, over the past 10 years, diplomatic relations with the DPRK. I pay a particular tribute to our diplomatic staff in North Korea, especially our new ambassador, Karen Wolstenholme, who I am sure will follow in an equally exemplary manner her immediate predecessor in the British embassy in Pyongyang, Mr Peter Hughes, whose ongoing concern for the people of North Korea has been evident to me whenever I have had the pleasure of meeting him.

What a positive step it would be if the United States established diplomatic relations with the DPRK and thereby effectively formally ended the Korean war. Can the Minister advise us what steps, if any, the British Government may be taking to encourage the Americans in this respect?

Shin Dong-hyuk told me that the North Korean people cannot change their situation by themselves. They need help from the international community. I hope that the Minister gives us an indication of what we can all do to give more hope to the people of North Korea.