North Korea, Russia and "Contract Workers"

Captain Ed catches something in the NY Times. In a nutshell, it is now the South Koreans who are dissuading North Koreans in Russia from defecting. Ed suspects a rather cynical realpolitik:

Seoul appears to be less concerned with security issues than with appeasing and enabling the Stalinist North Korean government. Suddenly now that the two Korean capitols are immersed in nuclear negotiations, the South Koreans have withdrawn the traditional and laudable hospitality they've offered to their cousins escaping Kim Jong-Il's oppression and starvation. Russians have followed suit, if only because they don't want North Korean refugees staying in Russia permanently due to Seoul's refusal to accept them.

I think he’s quite probably right. However, there’s one huge fact that the original article gets wrong, one that to my mind completely changes the situation (no criticism of Ed, he wasn’t to know this). As regular readers will know I lived and worked in Russia for a number of years. While there I had several rather bizzare dealings with the North Korean state (all a rather longer and complicated story than I want to tell here). Brooke:

About 2,500 North Koreans, largely construction workers, work in the Maritime Territory, which includes Vladivostok and borders on China and North Korea.

and

In the mid-1990's, the Russian authorities were relatively lax about North Korean workers who managed to flee Siberian logging camps.

and

In November, when the authorities of the Amur region signed contracts in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, for 2,000 North Korean lumberjacks, guarantees against flight were a top demand by the Russian side.

The problem? These people are not contract workers in any sense which we would understand, making a personal decision about where and how they will work. They are slaves of a Stalinist regime, sent off into Siberia to work in conditions as bad as those described in Gulag Archipelago. The Russians were relatively unconcerned about escapees as they had only just closed their own camps. Things have obviously changed again but have a look at this in the Moscow Times from 3 years back:

Serfdom Alive and Well in Russia
10 August, 2001
By Valeria Korchagina
Staff Writer
Some 10,000 North Koreans are working in Russia under the supervision of their country's security forces.

( Sorry, I don’t have paid access to this archive.)
What the South Koreans are doing may well be in the grander interests of the country as seen by the Government but it stinks morally. They are refusing aid and comfort not just to refugees, but to escapees from modern day serfdom and slavery....yes, the North Korean version of the KGB is just as bad as the old one run by Stalin and Beria, the only difference that I am personally able to describe is that they will, at times, succumb to well aimed bribery. (BTW, it may be illegal for Americans to bribe representatives of foreign governments, not so for the English thankfully.)

These construction sites and logging camps are little pieces of North Korea on Russian soil, along with the guards, tortures and executions of that State. This is why, whatever the Russian Government demands, individual Russians help escapees as described in the story. Seoul’s actions, if correctly described, stink to high heaven.