Running Out of the Darkness

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That's getting riskier by the day. Two governments--North Korea and China--seek to put the Seoul Train out of business. For the past two years, the Chinese have conducted a strike-hard operation to round up and repatriate North Koreans who are in China illegally. It's working. The number of refugees making it out of China to South Korea fell to 1,217 last year, according to the South Korean government, down from a record 1,894 in 2004. Meanwhile, more and more activists running the railroad are getting caught in the sweeps. Underground-railroad activists told TIME that late last summer, Chinese authorities arrested an American who aids North Korean refugees in China. He remains jailed not far from the North Korean border in the northeastern city of Yanji, where he is awaiting sentencing, according to activists. A South Korean man involved in extricating Kim Myong Suk from China--who asked to be identified only by his nom de guerre, Hite--spent almost two years in a Chinese prison for helping North Koreans trying to escape.

The U.S. is taking notice. In a meeting with China's President Hu Jintao at the White House last week, President George W. Bush raised the case of Kim Chun-Hee, a woman recently deported to North Korea by the Chinese. "He said he felt that China needed to think about its obligations to these people ... and that the plight of the North Korean people is very important," says Dennis Wilder of the National Security Council. Activists like Peters view Bush as one of their own, a conservative Christian who is unafraid to speak the truth about North Korea and its dictator. ("I loathe Kim Jong Il," the President famously said in 2002.) Bush appointed former domestic-policy adviser Jay Lefkowitz last summer as a special envoy to deal with North Korean human-rights issues. A senior Administration official told TIME that a federal interagency group is developing procedures for how and whether to begin accepting North Korean refugees.

But the idea of opening doors to North Koreans is likely to face skepticism in Congress and from some diplomats in the State Department, who argue that the move will only further anger North Korea and sabotage the chances of a deal on its nuclear-weapons program. Legislation passed by Congress in 2004 calls for $24 million a year to help with accepting refugees from North Korea and to broadcast news and information there, but there has yet to be any funding appropriated to carry out the policies. So for the foreseeable future, at least, the best hope for desperate North Koreans is not politicians in Washington but a quiet American standing on a Thai street corner, waiting to greet one of the hundreds he has guided to freedom.