From War to Cold War

In May 1945, as the battle for Okinawa raged with terrible loss of life, US President Truman received a puzzling message from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS – the forerunner of today’s CIA). An OSS agent in Portugal had been contacted on May 7, via an intermediary, by Inoue Masutarô, Counsellor of the Japanese Legation in Lisbon, Portugal, of course, was a neutral nation with close links to the Axis powers, and for this reason was the site of some of the more unconventional intelligence activities of the Second World War. [1]
The message from Inoue Masutarô, passed on to the OSS and ultimately to President Truman, was this:
“The Japanese are ready to cease hostilities, provided they are allowed to retain possession of their home islands. Inoue stressed American and Japanese ‘common interests’ against the USSR. He said, though, that unconditional surrender would not be acceptable to Japan.” [2]
Soon after, Inoue again expressed his desire to meet an American official for discussions about the possibilities of a Japanese surrender. “On this occasion”, according to the OSS, “Inoue declared that actual peace terms were unimportant so long as the term ‘unconditional surrender’ was not employed. [3]
This shadow diplomacy was just one of a number of tentative attempts by officials of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs to explore the possibility of surrender in the months leading up to Japan’s defeat in the Asia-Pacific War. In the first half of 1945, contact was also being established with the US via the Vatican, Switzerland, Sweden and the Soviet Union. For most historians, the story is significant above all because these peace feelers raise profound questions about one of the most passionately debated issues of the twentieth century: the claim that the use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified as the only way of bringing about a Japanese surrender. [4]
The Lisbon story, however, also sheds interesting light on another important, but much less well-known, piece of twentieth century history: the repatriation of Zainichi Koreans from Japan to North Korea from 1959 onward. For Lisbon Embassy Counsellor Inoue Masutarô was to re-emerge in the 1950s as the central figure in that story.
The “peace feelers” extended to the US and Britain were largely initiated by a group within the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs associated with Foreign Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru, and his younger close associate Okazaki Katsuo (head of the Foreign Ministry’s Investigation Bureau – Chôsakyoku – at the end of the Pacific War). [5] Inoue appears to have been linked to this group via Okazaki, who was his senior at Tokyo University during his student days. Shigemitsu and Okazaki shared recognition of the USSR as the major threat to Japan, and saw negotiated surrender to the USA, as a means of forestalling subjugation by the Soviet Union.
Although Inoue served in diplomatic posts in Belgium, the US, Poland, Yugoslavia and Portugal, an important part of his prewar work focused on East Asian Communism. In the early 1930s he had served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Asia Bureau Section 2, where one of his main roles was to conduct “research about the Chinese Communist Party”.[6] Reports compiled by the section during Inoue’s tenure of this post suggest that a related target of that research were left-wing Korean guerilla groups in Manchuria, some of which were later to form the core of the Kapsan Faction in the political landscape of the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea. [7] One of the junior but rising members of this guerilla movement, interestingly enough, was a young man named Kim Song-Ju, soon to adopt the pseudonym Kim Il-Sung[8].
After Japan’s eventual and unconditional surrender in August 1945, Inoue returned to Tokyo where he put his prewar experience to good use, becoming one of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ leading experts on Asian Communism. In 1955 he retired from the Ministry and joined the Japan Red Cross Society as the head of its Foreign Affairs Section. However, his extraordinary career in the Red Cross was inseparably linked to his long experience as a Foreign Ministry official with close links to the Japanese intelligence community.
Seen in the context of his previous and subsequent career, Inoue’s brief appearance on the stage of Pacific War diplomacy is significant above all because it symbolizes the link between Japan’s prewar colonial expansion and the postwar politics of the Cold War era. And this link, in turn, is crucial to understanding the forces that led to the mass repatriation to North Korea. Okazaki Katsuo (by then a Liberal Democratic Party politician) was one of the ruling party members who initiated a policy of support for repatriation; Shigemitsu Mamoru, as Foreign Minister in the mid-1950s, enthusiastically endorsed the policy; and Inoue Masutarô, as Head of the Japan Red Cross Society’s Foreign Affairs Section, played the central role in putting the policy into effect.
It was fear of that greater evil – the threat of Communist expansion in Asia – that encouraged some members of the Japanese elite to contemplate the possibility of a negotiated surrender to the lesser evil, the United States. This “common interest” between Japan and the US made it easy for colonial experience to be transferred smoothly to the postwar environment of the emerging Cold War. In other words, it encouraged the survival of colonial attitudes in the postwar world, and the melding of these attitudes into the new ideologies of Cold War Asia. All of this was to become most vividly evident in the repatriation story.

Repatriation and the Cold War Order

The history of the repatriation, which led to the resettlement of 86,603 Zainichi Koreans, together with 6,731 Japanese and 6 Chinese spouses or dependents[9], from Japan to North Korea between 1959 and 1984, casts light on three crucial features of Northeast Asia’s Cold War history. The first feature, as we have seen, was the formative influence of legacies from the Japanese prewar empire on the Cold War order. The Cold War in Asia, it might be said, was always haunted by the un-exorcised ghosts of colonialism.
Secondly, the Cold War era was both an age of ideological conflict between capitalist and communist camps and, at the same time, the age of the apotheosis of nationalism. In the repatriation story, notions of national or ethnic belonging became intricately entangled with concepts of political loyalty or subversion.
Thirdly, the repatriation story reminds us of the crucial role played by international organizations and NGOs in the Cold War order. Organizations like the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross provided channels of communication and mediation between the hostile camps of communism and capitalism. But they also provided a forum in which the Cold War superpowers and their allies sought to enhance their prestige and win support from the non-aligned by appearing in the role of good “global citizens”. For this reason, it sometimes became very difficult to prevent the humanitarian motives of international bodies from being exploited by governments on both sides of the Cold War for their own political ends.
To explore the way in which these Cold War forces shaped the history of repatriation, I shall try to map the approaches to the issue taken by the political establishments of three countries: Japan, the Soviet Union and North Korea. Needless to say, other countries – most notably South Korea and the United States – also played important parts in the story. In addition, repatriation was supported on the Japanese side not just by some members of the political establishment but also, of course, by the Communist and Socialist Parties and wide sections of the media and public opinion. For reasons of space, however, I shall mention these roles only briefly, and focus instead on the political establishments in the three countries which seem to me to have been most influential in determining the course of events. Even within this limited scope, it becomes possible to see the extraordinary way in which the deeply personal decisions of tens of thousands of people to decide where to live their lives became caught up in a far-reaching web of Cold War politics whose ramifications the returnees themselves could never have imagined.

The Japanese Government and “Repatriation by Remote Control”

The first serious moves towards a mass repatriation of Zainichi Koreans to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) occurred in latter part of 1955, and the main initiative came from Japan. 1955 was, of course, the year when both the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the North Korean-affiliated General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Sôren) were founded. The creation of Sôren marked an important shift away from the policy pursued by its predecessor, the United Democratic Front of Koreans in Japan (Zainichi Chôsenjin Tôitsu Minshu Sensen), which had worked closely with the Japanese Communist Party in advocating revolution within Japan. By contrast, Sôren defined Koreans in Japan as citizens of the DPRK, whose task was to work for the development and reunification of their homeland, rather than involving themselves in Japanese politics.
As a long and intriguing article published in the Asahi Shimbun on 2 July 1955 makes clear, Japanese intelligence and security officials were well aware of this shift in Zainichi Korean politics, which they appear to have seen in a positive light.[10] Interestingly enough, this article was published side-by-side with an announcement of the appointment of former diplomat and Foreign Ministry expert on Communism Inoue Masutarô to the directorship of the Foreign Affairs Section of the Japan Red Cross Society, a body which (as the Asahi noted) was sometimes regarded as filling the role of a “second Foreign Ministry”.[11] It seems reasonable to surmise that it was around this time that members of the Japanese political and bureaucratic establishment became interested in the prospect of a mass repatriation of Koreans to North Korea.
The reasons for Japanese official support of a mass repatriation movement were spelled out by Inoue Masutarô with startling clarity during a conversation with William Michel, an official of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on an official visit to East Asia, in May 1956. Inoue reportedly informed the ICRC representative of the following points:
“1. A total absence of humanitarian considerations in relation to the entire Korean problem in Japan.
2. The desire of the Japanese government to rid itself of several tens of thousands of Koreans who are indigent and vaguely communist, thus at a stroke resolving security problems and budgetary problems (because of the sums of money currently being dispensed to impoverished Koreans).
3. According to Mr. Inoue, the Japanese government is said to have decided to undertake repatriation, if necessary by provoking individual demands to go to the North. (This seems to me to have rather large and serious consequences.)”[12]
But (as Inoue went on to explain) to conceal these motives and to avoid antagonizing the South Korean government, the Japanese government decided to pursue its objectives through the intermediary of a supposedly apolitical and humanitarian NGO – the International Red Cross. They wished, in other words, to carry out a kind of “repatriation by remote control”, so that mass return to North Korea would be achieved without it appearing as though the Japanese authorities were instigators of the project Exactly how the government intended to “provoke individual demands” for repatriation to the North was not explained. However, it should be noted that, precisely when Inoue’s conversation with Michel was taking place, the Ministry of Health and Welfare was conducting an energetic campaign to slash the very limited welfare benefits available to Koreans in Japan. Some 70,000 Zainichi Koreans had their welfare payments either reduced or cancelled: a move which undoubtedly made the prospect of life in North Korea look more attractive than it would otherwise have seemed.[13]
Japanese pressure on the ICRC resulted in a memorandum, issued on 26 February 1957 by the Leopold Boissier, President of the International Committee of the Red Cross on the prompting of the Japan Red Cross Society’s Shimazu Tadatsugu. The memorandum set out the ICRC’s agreement in principle that, if the Japanese and North Korean governments and Red Cross Societies could reach a satisfactory agreement about repatriation, the ICRC was willing to send a mission to Japan to “verify the freely expressed will” of returnees.[14] The South Korean government, which was aware that moves were afoot to carry out repatriation to North Korea, reacted with intense anger, insisting that all Koreans in Japan were citizens of the Republic of Korea and threatening reprisals. As a result, the Japanese government’s moves on the repatriation issue were cautious.
In September 1957, Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke suggested to the Japanese Red Cross that it should encourage the ICRC to counteract South Korean objections to repatriation by “insisting on the humanitarian character of the problem”.[15] In response to Kishi’s suggestion, the Japanese Red Cross drew up a resolution on the “reunion of displaced persons” which was put to the International Conference of the Red Cross in New Delhi, and passed unanimously as the Conference’s Resolution 20 on 29 October 1957. From then on, Resolution 20 was repeatedly invoked to generate international support in persuading South Korea to acknowledge the “humanitarian” nature of mass repatriation to North Korea. This may seem a little curious, since over 97% of Zainichi Koreans originated from the southern half of the Korean Peninsula and hardly any actually had families living in North Korea. However, as Inoue Masutarô explained in a message to other national Red Cross Societies, “the whole Korean Peninsula is the ‘home’ of the Koreans residing in Japan in the meaning of Resolution No. 20 of the New Delhi Conference.”[16]
Of course, the Japanese authorities alone could not have created a mass repatriation movement. The enthusiastic participation of others was needed. Within Japanese society itself, these included the Japanese media and North Korean affiliated General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Sôren). Externally, they included above all the North Korean and Soviet governments.
Sôren embarked on a mass campaign to promote repatriation some two-and-a-half years after the first moves by the Japanese government, in August 1958. Rallies and marches were held across the country; education campaigns on repatriation were held in Sôren affiliated schools; the Association’s newspaper Chôsen Sôren, which until then had focused mainly on news from North Korea and on the welfare problems of Koreans in Japan, began to run front page stories in almost every issue highlighting the wonderful prospects which awaited returnees in the Fatherland. This campaign clearly had the blessing of the North Korean government, which issued a series of statements on repatriation, including an announcement by Foreign Minister Nam Il on 8 September 1958 that the Democratic People’s Republic would provide the means necessary for returnees to settle into new lives in the Fatherland.

The Soviet Intervention

Before looking more closely at the North Korean government’s reasons for supporting mass repatriation, I should like to consider another crucial, but so far relatively neglected, part of the story: the involvement of the Soviet Union.
According to the Soviet Ambassador in Pyongyang, soon after the arrival of the first repatriation ship North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung expressed his personal gratitude to the USSR, stating that “The Soviet sailors worked magnificently. As far as he [Kim] was aware, the [repatriation] vessels had been protected by Japanese naval forces while in Japanese waters and by Soviet naval forces in neutral waters. The government of the DPRK heartily thanks the government of the Soviet Union for the immense support and help, provided both during negotiations with the Japanese and in carrying out the repatriation”.[17]
The Soviet connection in fact went back to 1956, when the Japan Red Cross Society had approached the Soviet Union about the possibility of using one of its ships for repatriation. At that time, the USSR turned down the request, because normal commercial relations with Japanese had not yet been established and there were no regular shipping links between the two countries. However, as Inoue Masutarô later noted, the approach did result in an important commitment from the USSR: “the Soviet representative promised me to carry North Koreans if the lines be established.[18]
Because of gaps in the Russian archival material, it is not possible to be certain exactly when the Soviet government agreed to support the repatriation process, but it seems likely that some sort of unofficial agreement at leats had been reached before Nam Il’s public announcement of 8 September 1958. One indication of the Soviet Union’s support became evident the following month, when an interesting change of personnel took place at the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo: the former Ambassador to Beijing was appointed to head the embassy in Japan, while the prominent Soviet North Korea expert and former Chargé d’Affairs in Pyongyang S. P. Suzdalev became Counsellor in the Tokyo Embassy. On his arrival, Suzdalev promptly approached to Japanese government to urge it to accept North Korea’s offer to receive Korean repatriates from Japan. Reporting these developments to the ICRC, Inoue Masutarô observed, “This incident proves that the North Korean government has already made contact with the USSR government and, therefore, I think, if the matter should be brought up officially, the Soviet government would accept the repatriation of Koreans by Soviet ships.”[19]
The Soviet Union indeed provided not only the ships and other crucial material assistance for repatriation, but also vital input into the negotiation process. In February 1959, Japan’s cabinet announced its willingness to approve and assist a mass repatriation scheme. Since the Japanese government had kept its earlier repatriation moves confidential, it was able to present this announcement as a purely “humanitarian” response to the upsurge of demands from within the Zainichi Korean community. From this point on, both Japanese and North Korean sides publicly supported repatriation.
Nevertheless, misunderstanding and mistrust between the Japanese and North Korean sides remained profound, and the North Korean Red Cross failed to respond to a request from Inoue Masutarö that it should send a delegation to Geneva for negotiations on repatriation. It was the Soviet Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies that stepped in to break the deadlock. On 5 March 1959, Inoue Masutarô of the Japan Red Cross Society met the Soviet Red Cross Director General Tchikalenko in Geneva to work out some possible ground rules for a repatriation accord. Inoue and Tchikalenko reached general consensus on the proposition that the ICRC should supervise the repatriation program within the frontiers of Japan, but would have no involvement in the transport of returnees or their processing and settlement in North Korea.[20]
The North Korean side, however, remained unconvinced. They were mistrustful both of the Japanese government and of the Japanese Red Cross, and there were clearly deep divisions within the DPRK political establishment about the best response to the situation. At this point, the USSR began to pressure North Korea for a swift and positive decision on repatriation. On March 14, Ambassador Puzanov held discussions with the North Korean Foreign Minister in which he “insistently tried to show to Nam Il that a delay in sending a letter [of reply to the Japan Red Cross Society] and a delegation for negotiations would be exploited by forces inimical to the DPRK”.[21]
Why was the Soviet Union so eager to promote the repatriation of Koreans from Japan to North Korea: a project which had no obvious connection to its own national interests? The answer lies deeply embedded in the Cold War politics of the late 1950s. The years from 1956 to 1958 were a time of profound instability and change within the Communist bloc. Following the advent of the Khrushchev regime and the start of de-Stalinization, signs were emerging of an impending Sino-Soviet split. Meanwhile, Khrushchev was embarking on major new international relations initiatives, including fresh approaches towards the US and the United Nations, and was eager to obtain the support of North Korea and other communist countries.
At the same time, Soviet influence within North Korea itself faced a crisis. In August 1956, inspired by Soviet de-Stalinization, a group of would-be reformers within the ruling Korean Workers’ Party attempted to challenge Kim Il-Sung’s authority and his growing personality cult. Most of the key figures in the group were members of the pro-Chinese Yan’an Faction, but some were Soviet-Korean returnees. Kim Il-Sung, forewarned of the challenge, succeeded in defeating his opponents, several of whom fled across the border to China or Russia. At first it seemed as though major purges had been avoided. However, Kim Il-Sung had merely chosen to bide his time. From the middle of 1957 purges of those seen as being associated with the “August Group” began, directed first at the Yan’an Faction and then, from the end of 1957, increasingly at the Soviet Koreans.[22] In response to this political climate, many prominent Soviet Koreans sought asylum in the USSR and some students receiving training in the USSR expressed reluctance to return home. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union began a significant reduction in the number of advisors and technical experts whom it sent to North Korea as part of its aid program.[23]
In the unstable political climate of the late 1950s, the USSR was extremely anxious to shore up its damaged relationship with North Korea. Providing help with the repatriation program was (from the Soviet perspective) an ideal way to do this. Loaning ships for the repatriation was a relatively cheap and simple way to provide a fresh inflow of technical experts, and involvement in the repatriation program could also help the USSR to strengthen ties with Japan at a time when it was eager to promote trade between the resource-rich Soviet Far East and the expanding Japanese economy. Most crucially of all (as we shall see) the scheme fitted perfectly with the new role which the USSR was seeking to carve out for itself in the international community and particularly the United Nations.

The North Korean Initiative

There has long been debate as to why the DPRK agreed, not only to welcome such a large and sudden inflow of people, but also to provide them with housing, jobs, education and welfare. Of course, North Korea had shown an interest in repatriation from Japan well before 1958. Nam Il himself had raised the matter in a long message on the subject of Zainichi Koreans, which had been forwarded to the Japanese Red Cross by its North Korean counterpart as early as December 1955, and a small number of Zainichi Koreans (about 50) had in fact been repatriated in 1956-1957.[24] At that stage, however, it is clear that the interest of the North Korean government was focused on two quite small groups of people: first, Zainichi Korean students who had studied at Sôren affiliated schools and now wanted to continue their education at colleges in the DPRK; and second, internees held in Ômura Migrant Detention Centre. This second group consisted of people awaiting deportation to Korea. At that time, all deportees were sent to the South, regardless of their political views or personal wishes, a policy which was passionately contested both by Sôren and by the North Korean government.[25]
Nam Il’s December 1955 message discussed these small groups of returnees in the context of a wider North Korean initiative to improve the education and living conditions of the Korean community within Japan itself. Interestingly enough, one reason for this initiative was the fact that Foreign Minister Nam saw the Zainichi Korean community as a potential channel of communication to South Korea.[26] I have found no evidence that the North Korean government was seriously considering a mass repatriation from Japan at that point.
But from late 1957 onward, several events occurred which made repatriation seem particularly attractive. The first, as we have seen, was the problem of the Soviet-Korean faction, the crisis in relations with the USSR and the reduction in the scale of Soviet technical assistance. A second important issue was the phased withdrawal of some 300,000 Chinese “volunteers” who had come to North Korea to support its military effort during the Korean War, and stayed on to assist in reconstruction. A mass repatriation of Koreans from Japan would obviously have helped to relieve the shortage of labour and military manpower caused by this withdrawal.
But the repatriation plan was not motivated purely by economic concerns. From the point of view of the North Korean government, the withdrawal of Chinese “volunteers” created, not only problems of labour shortage but also, more importantly, strategic problems. Since US troops remained in South Korea, there were grave fears in the North about a drastic shift in the military balance on the Peninsula when the Chinese withdrew. To counter this, the North Korea and the USSR attempted to take a major new initiative on Korean re-unification which, they hoped, would win support for the DPRK in the international community. On 5 February 1958, the Kim Il-Sung regime put forward a proposal for a complete withdrawal of foreign troops from the Korean Peninsula, to be followed by internationally supervised elections in both North and South. At the same time, the DPRK intensified its lobbying efforts to win international support, particularly within the General Assembly of the United Nations.
Repatriation was a key element in this campaign for international understanding and sympathy. The mass “voluntary” return of Koreans, most of whom originated in the South of the Peninsula, was a huge propaganda coup for the DPRK. This point was made plain by Foreign Minister Nam Il and by Kim Il-Sung himself. At a meeting with Soviet Deputy Prime Minister Mikoyan in Moscow in 1959, Nam Il reported, with obvious satisfaction, that “the emergence of the repatriation issue had brought political gains to the DPRK, while Syngman Rhee had lost out. He is not only unable to accept [returnees] to South Korea, but on the contrary is prepared to export unemployed people from South Korea to Latin America.”[27] The following year, as the Japanese and North Korean Red Cross Societies were debating the extension of the repatriation agreement, Kim Il-Sung remarked that whether or not the agreement was continued “the fact of the repatriation of more than 30,000 Koreans from Japan to the DPRK had given us a major victory in international politics”.[28] To reinforce the benefits, North Korea prepared special information on the repatriation which it sent to the Soviet mission to the UN for distribution to delegates to the 1960 General Assembly meeting.[29]
Nam’s discussion with Mikoyan suggests a further reason for North Korea’s growing enthusiasn for repatriation from Japan. During their meeting, Nam observed “we want to develop trade with Japan, but the Japanese government hinders this, whereas Japanese firms display interest in trade with the DPRK and often visit the DPRK via China”.[30] After returning from the negotiations in Geneva, Yi Il-Gwon (the head of the North Korean Red Cross delegation at the talks) reported that “a broad section of the Japanese population and even some members of the Liberal Democratic Party and Governors of prefectures support the efforts of the Koreans for repatriation”.[31] This impression of strong Japanese support was reinforced when Yi travelled to Niigata in the first repatriation ship in December 1959. The conclusion he drew from the enthusiastic welcome he had received in Japan was that “the Japanese population, and even the Japanese police, are on the side of the DPRK. All steps were taken by the Japanese authorities to prevent provocation on the part of pro-Syngman Rhee elements. The repatriation has the support of Japanese society”.[32]
Repatriation would have seemed to the North Korean government a promising way of influencing Japanese opinion, both public and official, and thus of opening up the possibility of closer economic and political ties with Japan. This was of particular importance at a time when the DPRK was not only engaged in an unceasing battle with the ROK for international support and sympathy, but was also in the process of developing a more independent stance in relation to China and the Soviet Union.

Conclusion

It is clear that, at the time of the repatriation movement, many thousands of people genuinely chose to “return” to North Korea. Some were motivated by powerful political beliefs; some hoped for a bright future in the DPRK; others were less optimistic, but left out of fears that they and their children and grandchildren would never find real acceptance in Japan; some were driven by poverty and joblessness; others rather reluctantly followed husbands or parents to this unfamiliar “homeland”. The questions which must be posed are these: in making their “free choice”, what alternatives did they have to choose between? What information were they given about these choices, and how did others seek to manipulate the decisions which were made?
The repatriation story which we have traced has major implications for the present. For one thing, it had a decisive and often tragic influence on the lives of tens of thousands of people. For another, it has significant implications for the contemporary issue of the exodus of refugees from North Korea. Today too there can be no doubt that many thousands of people wish to leave North Korea for political, economic and other reasons. The cross-border movement of people from North Korea is a crucial issue for the governments of the region. However, just as in the case of the repatriation movement, so too contemporary responses of governments to the North Korean refugees' issue, genuinely humanitarian problems are being utilized for political ends.
On example of this process is the US North Korea Human Rights Act of October 2004. Japanese North Korea researcher Shigemura Toshimitsu, observes that the US aim in introducing the North Korea Human Rights Act is to ensure that “several thousand defectors leave [North Korea] every month. If defections increase to that level, the North Korean government will have no option but to deploy the People’s Army along the frontier to prevent them. But if the People’s Army is deployed, it can be anticipated that it will repeatedly open fire on defectors. If this develops into incidents involving bloodshed, it is possible that the people of the frontier area will revolt. America’s real aim is that such a revolt should spread to Pyongyang and bring about the collapse of the Kim Jong-Il regime.”[33]
Reading those words, I could not help being reminded of the Japanese government’s desire, in the mid-1950s, to “provoke individual demands” for repatriation. Now as then, the genuine human suffering is being subordinated to ulterior political interests.
The plight of North Korean refugees is a pressing human rights issue. Thousands of refugees (including a number of people who themselves first went to North Korea as part of the repatriation movement) are now living precarious existences in Northeast China; many of the 6000 or so who have been resettled in South Korea face large problems of social adjustment. Those who leave the DPRK do so for a wide range of reasons: in search of political freedom; to earn a little money to feed their families; to trade; to seek better opportunities for their children. The sufferings which many face stir genuine humanitarian feelings. The question is how to address the humanitarian issues while remaining clear-headed about the complex politics which are often at work behind the rhetoric of “human rights”.
Against this background, it is particularly important for those who are deeply alarmed by the ideological underpinnings of the US North Korea Human Right Act to put forward alternative approaches to addressing the human needs of refugees and other emigrants. These alternatives need to be truly regional in scope, to address the long-term interests of migrants, and to take into account the complex interconnection of many sorts of migratory movement within and from the Korean Peninsula, including the very large contemporary internal migration of people within North Korea. They need to recognise the diversity and individuality of those who cross the border, without trying to impose on them the simple homogenising label of “economic migrants”, “political defectors” etc. Alternative approaches are essential to prevent humanitarian emotions from becoming the tool of belligerent politics. But they are also, and above all, essential to ensure that the people who cross frontiers are not, yet again, treated as the disposable pawns of strategic power-plays this, the final painful chapter of the Cold War. [The Quarterly Changbi, Autumn 2005]


* A version of this paper was presented to the conference Coexistence on the Korean Peninsula and Cooperation in the Northeast Asia Region, University of Tokyo, 24 May 2005.