Geneva: The UN has said nearly 20,000 North Korean workers are employed as bonded labourers abroad with a majority of them present in China and Russia, a report that was outrightly rejected by the country as “ill-minded” work of “hostile forces”. “Another issue is that of the North Korean bonded labour which on a first take may involve as many as 20,000 workers. The initial information indicates that majority would be in China and Russia,” Marzuki Darusman, Special Rapporteur for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) said yesterday.
North Korea has rejected the report and termed it as a manipulation. “It is none other than the “Special Rapporteur” that has been wandering here and there under manipulation of the hostile forces, in order to realise and represent their ill-minded political objectives,” North Korean diplomat Kim Yong-Ho, who outrightly rejected the report, said. According to NK Watch, some of the host countries for such workers apart from Russia and China are Mongolia, Malaysia, Qatar, Kuwait, among others.
The South Korea-based organisation, however, differs vastly from the Special Rapporteur’s estimates of overseas workers and pegs the number as high as 1,50,000 workers spread across 40 countries and filling USD 3 billion of the government coffers annually from their salaries. “It is difficult to get an accurate estimate. Most of the information is secondary and based on the testimony of defectors,” said Ahn, Director of NK Watch who was a key witness in CoI report on DPRK and a former guard of prison camps.
“In the past North Korea made money through illegal weapons, fake dollars and drugs. As the international community was watching they are now exploiting the salaries of the overseas worker,” Ahm added. A North Korean worker, pseudonymed as Kim, who escaped from Russia to South Korea in early 200; said that he worked 16 to 19 hours everyday cutting woods but earning USD 130. “95 per cent of the salary was taken by the government to be used for their own means,” he added.
“Many defectors flee through China but are sent back to North Korea which is in violation of refugee convention,” said Leon Saltiel of UN Watch. Saltiel also called on the Swiss government and other governments to freeze bank accounts in different countries of high officials in the Kim Jong-un regime. Addressing the UNHRC earlier in the day, Darusman had said that the referral of the North Korean case to the International Criminal Court is “indeed the single most important way the international community could signal its determination and resolve to pursue this issue at the level it belongs in international criminal law, and thereby sustain further pressure for accountability and change.”
