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North Korean refugees rarely tell their stories. They are too busy ducking, whispering, and running.

The wrong word finding its way to the wrong person could be disastrous. As a North Korean woman attending university in South Korea explained, "I fear my family will be harmed if I speak."

In July, more than 430 North Koreans were airlifted to Seoul from an undisclosed Southeast Asian nation, possibly Vietnam. News reports called it the largest-ever movement of refugees into South Korea. Seoul is normally wary of accepting North Korean defectors for political and economic reasons, but apparently officials helped pave the way for these refugees.

The number of defectors from North Korea to South Korea has been steadily growing, according to news reports. Last year, it reached 1,285. It was 1,140 in 2002 and 583 in 2001. As many as 30 Koreans sought asylum with the United States over the past decade.

No one knows with certainty, but an estimated 300,000 North Korean refugees may now be hiding in China. As a North Korean ally, however, the Chinese government pays informants 500 yuan (US$62) to track down these refugees.

China marches 5,000 North Korean defectors a month back to their country across the Tuen Bridge in the northwestern Jilin Province, sometimes with wire passed through wrist and nose, according to rights groups.

"The police beat us," a 2002 victim told Voice of the Martyrs. "Some had their heads cracked open, some had their teeth broken, and some could not walk again because their arms and legs were so injured."

To avoid political confrontation directly with North Korea, regional democratic countries like Japan receive defectors in their China-based embassies, then reroute them to a third country. Nearly 3,000 North Koreans have applied for asylum in Japan through its embassy in China since 1982, according to the European Council on Refugees and Exiles ledger. Last year alone, 353 applied; at last count, only 12 had been granted asylum.

Political tensions were on display in May 2002 when a group of North Korean defectors crashed the gates of the Japanese Embassy in Shenyang, China. Several men in the group made it through, but Chinese police violated the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by reaching inside the Japanese Embassy gate to drag two women and a child, kicking and screaming, into custody. Two others, both men, had 10 minutes of refuge inside the embassy before Chinese police forcibly removed them.

The entire episode was caught on videotape by South Korean media and paraded before the Asian world. A nongovernmental organization (NGO) that helped orchestrate the defection had tipped off the media. The images are included in the documentary film "Seoul Train," to be released this fall (see www.seoultrain.com).

Previously, three other North Korean men had entered the U.S. consulate in Shenyang, then departed for South Korea. Two more North Koreans had sought help at the Canadian Embassy in Beijing. In March, 25 North Koreans took refuge in the Spanish Embassy in Beijing, all assisted by NGOs.

Defectors rarely trek south directly to South Korea, where passage is more perilous. The three-mile wide, 150-mile long demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating the two countries has 1 million land mines, razor wire stretched between observation posts, and approximately 2 million troops on either side.

North Koreans take flight for some combination of three reasons.

Famine. Ten percent (2.2 million) of North Korea's population of 22 million people have died of starvation, according to the Seoul daily Korea Herald, although the Communist regime lops the figure to 220,000.

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October 2004, Vol. 48, No. 10