Somewhere to Run To

Sneaking out of North Korea involves the simple act of fording the narrow Tumen river into China. It's so shallow in some places a child can do it. Moving on to another country—that's a tough one. As many as a quarter million North Korean refugees have crossed the line but remain near the border, hiding from Chinese police. So when seven members of the Jang family blazed an audacious trail to freedom, China wasn't sure how to react. After a complex trek in which a South Korean businessman led them to Beijing, the Jangs gathered June 26 for what they feared would be their final breakfast together. When they finished, the family matriarch gave everybody, including her teenage grandkids, small tablets of rat poison: if the police were to grab them, they would commit collective suicide. They then marched into a United Nations office to demand sanctuary. "They preferred death to being taken back," says Moon Guk Han, the businessman who helped them.

The Jangs finally won their freedom after a tense three nights sleeping on the floor of a conference room in the Beijing office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The Chinese government agreed to let them fly to Seoul, via Singapore and Manila. The timing likely worked in their favor—the International Olympic Committee will vote on July 13 on whether to award Beijing the honor of hosting the 2008 Summer Games, which means China's human rights record is under intense scrutiny. Eighteen months ago, Beijing was roundly criticized after it repatriated seven North Koreans who had been granted refugee status in Russia. One recently resurfaced in Thailand with tales of being chain whipped and forced to clean toilets with his tongue. "Now is the time to make tough requests of China," says a Western diplomat.

The Jangs are part of a growing number of North Koreans who come to China not just to live but also to launch desperate attempts at reaching third countries. Few make it beyond China's borders, but there is evidence that more are succeeding. In the first five months of this year, around 60 North Koreans arrived in Mongolia, up from fewer than 10 in the whole of last year. Beijing's nightmare is that millions could start pouring across the border. As a result, Chinese police relentlessly hunt down North Koreans to send them back; they recently began house-to-house searches along the border. If the UNHCR office is suddenly seen as a haven, so much the worse for Beijing.

With the Jangs, Beijing initially acted tough, refusing for three days to let the family go. The government finally allowed them to leave with the excuse that they needed foreign medical care. It's the latest chapter in a dramatic ordeal for the family. Fifteen members had crossed the border to China by 1999. One boy, Jang Gil Su, then acquired anonymous fame through his crayon depictions of life in North Korea. The simple, cartoon-like pictures showed confessions from prisoners and a starving man cooking human body parts in a big pot. Smuggled into South Korea and published in a book, they generated tremendous sympathy. Jang's life since then has given him new and terrible story lines. His mother was among five relatives recaptured and sent back to North Korea, where she presumably suffers in a labor camp.

The businessman who aided the Jangs, 48-year-old Moon, comes across as the hero of the affair. The former textile salesman has worked with refugees in China for five years, and has helped the Jangs since they first crossed the border. He met several times with UNHCR officials who urged him to take the family to Mongolia, he says, but he deemed the trip too dangerous after he heard reports of refugees getting arrested on that route. So instead of a quiet escape, he arranged for the family to take a 24-hour bus trip to the capital. (They went in two buses, to increase the chances that at least some of them would make it.) In Beijing, he walked the family into the UNHCR office, beginning one of the highest-profile asylum cases China has seen. For the Jangs, it worked out. The UNHCR's chief representative in Beijing, Colin Mitchell, said it would have been "unthinkable" to repatriate the family. But if Moon's gambit forces China to post just a few soldiers outside the compound—or 100,000 at the border—the next family to arrive might have to eat its poison.