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09-02-2024
PYANGYONG/ SEOUL: South Korea’s intelligence agency says poor conditions for North Koreans working overseas have led to “incidents and accidents”, while researchers report rare protests and unrest in China among workers from a North Korean military-linked trading company.
Fed up with unpaid wages and lingering pandemic lockdowns, as many as 3,000 North Korean workers in China staged protests last month, according to two South Korean government-affiliated researchers, including a former North Korean diplomat.
Media could not independently confirm the protests.
A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said they were “not aware” of the issue when asked about it at a daily briefing Thursday. The North Korean embassy in Beijing and its consular office in the Chinese border city of Dandong did not respond to calls from Reuters seeking comment.
Large-scale protests by North Koreans are virtually unheard of, and the researchers said it suggests these labourers are caught in a disagreement over their fate: China wants to send them home to comply with UN resolutions and avoid defections, but North Korea wants to maintain the number of labourers there.
Pyongyang exerts tight control over its overseas workers, including seizing as much as 90% of their wages for government funding, according to the 2023 U.S. State Department Trafficking in Persons Report, which said they often face “conditions amounting to forced labour”.
For some workers, wages are withheld until they return to North Korea, increasing their vulnerability to coercion and exploitation by authorities, the report said.
Recent moves appear to have worsened conditions, according to the researchers.
Cho Han-bum, a senior researcher at a South Korean government-run think tank, Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU), said in an interview that North Korean workers at more than 10 textile factories in Helong, a city in Jilin province near the border, staged violent protests over unpaid wages.
The wages totaled about $10 million over four to seven years, according to Cho, adding that North Korean government officials paid several months’ worth of salaries to the disgruntled workers to end the dispute.
Ko Young-hwan, a North Korean diplomat-turned-defector who now advises the South Korean unification minister, said in an interview that officials from the North Korean consulate in China had been sent to Jilin province and were trying to keep the situation under control after angry workers held some managers hostage.
“Various incidents and accidents have been happening due to poor living conditions of North Korean workers dispatched overseas, so we are checking on related movements,” South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) said in a statement responding to Reuters’ questions about unrest, without elaborating.
A 2017 U.N. Security Council resolution, which China backed, demanded that countries repatriate all North Korean workers by December 2019, on the grounds that their labour was exploited to earn foreign currency for North Korea’s banned nuclear and ballistic missile programs. (Int’l News Desk)
