Korean Rights Activist Speaks

On New Year’s Day in 2003, Mike Kim left his comfortable job as a financial planner in Chicago and traveled to the border between North Korea and China—a place where thousands of North Koreans go to flee oppression and famine suffered under a closed communist government. He had no immediate plans to return.

The eventual author of “Escaping North Korea: Defiance and Hope in the World’s Most Repressive Country”—a book that documents his time trafficking North Korean refugees through a 6,000-mile modern-day underground railroad—Kim trained part-time with Tae Kwon Do instructors in order to get a visa to live in China. Meanwhile, he devoted himself to the human rights efforts that would become the subject of his book.

“You can be imprisoned in China for simply feeding a North Korean refugee,” Kim said to an audience in Pound Hall at the Law School last night, highlighting what he called “one of the worst human rights crises in the world”—the situation facing North Koreans fleeing their country.

Kim said that he first learned about the human rights issues in the North Korean border region during a vacation to China earlier in 2003.

“I asked my assistant to clear my calendar for two weeks so I could travel to China,” he said. “I wanted to try some authentic Chinese food.”

While in China, Kim met a North Korean refugee for the first time in a shelter. “I felt really disengaged from it all when I came back from China,” said Kim. “I wanted to do something to help the North Koreans.”

For much of the talk, Kim read passages from his book on topics ranging from the young North Korean refugees, whom he called “child warriors,” to North Korea’s sex trafficking problem.

He recalled one trip when he took four North Korean teenagers from the border to the consulate in Shanghai where he knew they could be temporarily protected.

“They have endured what the [United Nations] has labeled a modern-day famine in North Korea.” One of the teenagers received a bowl of white rice as his birthday gift every year, Kim said on the severity of the hunger crisis in North Korea.

The route over which Kim trafficked refugees runs from North Korea, through China and four other countries where the refugees are not officially recognized, to Thailand, which is currently the only country of the six that has opened its borders to North Korean refugees.

Now an MBA student at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, Kim is also the founder of Crossing Borders Ministries, a non-governmental organization dedicated to assisting North Korean refugees in China.

“For Law School students, we want to hear about the plight of refugees and the legal system, but it’s also useful to hear personalized accounts of what we can do to be advocates,” said Cosette D. Creamer, a second-year law school student who helped organize the event on behalf of the Harvard Law School Advocates for Human Rights.

Kim said he will continue to work on raising awareness about the refugees.

“It is seen as a largely Korean issue,” he said. “So we are trying to get people outside of the Korean community involved.”