Korea Awaits
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The arrest by Red China of 62 refugees from communist North Korea underscores an issue that will face whoever wins the White House. The benighted souls who were arrested in China planned to seek asylum in a foreign mission in the Red Chinese capital. If the Chinese communists run true to form, those jailed stand a high chance of being repatriated by force to the prison camps of their Stalinist kinsmen. Under the North Korean penal code, the apotheosis of kangaroo “Socialist Legality,” attempted defection is a capital offense, but is rarely enforced for those who have not converted to Christianity. For those who have converted to Christianity, the result is all too often doom. Religion, it seems, represents a potent threat to the status of the “Dear Leader” as godhead.
The refugees – since the famine of the 1990s, between 50,000 and 300,000 of them have already reached Red China – are the victims of the cynical and sometimes lethal diplomacy between the two Koreas and their giant neighbor. Pyongyang is terrified that if word slips out that its subjects can move northward with impunity, the country will hemorrhage its population after the fashion of Communist East Germany. The Beijing camarilla feels a residual ideological affinity for Pyongyang and does not wish to see the collapse of the regime, especially if it means being saddled with the costs of large numbers of refugees. Most cynically, Seoul fears that embracing the defectors will undermine what is called its “Sunshine” policy in respect of North Korea.
The only consistent force for principle in all this has been America, where the Congress has placed the issue on the map. Matters could be alleviated by pressuring Red China to ensure that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees gains access to the border areas where most of the asylum seekers are concentrated. One lever would be an American threat to boycott the Olympic Games, scheduled to be held in Beijing in 2008. But this is not a humanitarian crisis, such as an outbreak of cholera. Rather, it is a clash of political systems. That is why the work of such organizations as Radio Free Asia is so important. They puncture the propaganda from the regime that the outside world must always deal with “Little Kim.” The refugee crisis will only come to an end when the root cause – the moral and ideological bankruptcy of the communist tyranny in Pyongyang – is defeated.