Defecting from N. Korea, vowing: ‘We are ready to die’

BEIJING — Choi was worried about her sister in North Korea.

The last time they spoke, two months earlier, her sister had sounded desperate. She said she had been imprisoned and beaten, and could no longer bear the torment. She said she wanted to flee and join Choi in South Korea.

She said she would carry poison, to kill herself if she were captured.

For Choi, 63, a grandmother with large brown eyes and a steely fortitude, getting the rest of her family to South Korea was the most important thing left in life. She had fled North Korea 10 years ago. Her son had made it out too, as had her sister’s daughter, now a hairdresser living near her in Seoul, the South’s flashy capital.

Choi longed to be reunited with the sister, a 50-year-old dressmaker with her own home business, and also the nephew she had left behind. She wanted to get them to safety, out of the reach of the government that had arrested her husband, her brother-in-law and her son-in-law on suspicions of helping people leave. One evening this past summer, Choi got the news she had been waiting for.

As she opened her apartment door, her niece, 25, shouted: “My brother called. He said: ‘We crossed the border. We’re in China. Get the car.’ ”

Choi, who must go by only her last name to protect her and her family against possible retribution from the North Korean government, was jubilant.

Defectors usually leave North Korea by crossing into China. The border is tightly guarded by soldiers under the command of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, who views those trying to leave as traitors.

China deports the North Koreans despite having signed a 1951 United Nations convention not to return refugees to countries where they will suffer persecution.

An unexpected hitch

Choi and her niece started making arrangements for the clandestine overland journey after the sister’s phone call.

They soon faced an early hitch. The group of defectors was larger than they had expected. The sister and her son, 28, were joined by the son’s girlfriend and two of his friends.

Now there were five people to move through China without attracting notice.

Choi and her niece phoned a South Korean man whom they had hired to handle the escape. Known in the smuggling business as a broker, he had arranged the niece’s journey out of the North during less tense times five years earlier.

Most of all, Choi remembered her sister’s warning. She would kill herself rather than be sent back.

The perils of China

Choi and her niece had paid the broker an advance fee of $13,000, most of it earned by the sale of the niece’s apartment in Seoul. They would need to pay him much more if the group reached the South safely. As the risks of defecting have risen, so have the fees charged by brokers.

The broker hired by Choi and her niece was rusty at the job and greedy. Instead of handling the sister’s journey himself, he subcontracted the case to a North Korean woman in Seoul who was married to a Chinese man. The husband, in turn, hired a relative in China to pick up the group in a van after they sneaked across the border.

Lost on the border

The Yalu River separates China and North Korea. At Hyeseon, a North Korean border town, it narrows to a skinny ribbon.

The river is low in the summer. The sister’s group waded across, the water up to their calves. It was late afternoon.

Finally, the North Koreans found their way out of the woods. The driver located them at 2 a.m. on the edge of Changbai.

Her nephew phoned. “We’re saved. We’re going to live,” he said.

They chatted excitedly on the phone in the van as it traveled toward Shenyang, but the driver asked the women in Seoul to stop calling. Their calls could be monitored by Chinese surveillance. The last word came from the group came at 10 a.m., when they were approaching their destination.

Then there was silence.

The group vanishes

At first, the broker in Seoul and his subcontractor, the North Korean woman, could not explain what had happened. “We are looking for them,” the woman told Choi in a curt voice.

Soon, the woman provided an explanation: The five had been taken hostage.

Several days later, she changed her story: “They must have been arrested.”

Unsolved mystery

The Foreign Ministry in Seoul said it had asked China about the fate of Choi’s sister and her four companions. Sometimes China quietly responds to such requests by releasing the defectors; more often, there is no answer. In the case of the five, China did not reply.

What does Choi think happened?

“My niece and I believe my sister and her son took their lives,” she said. “But it’s not clear whether all five killed themselves.”