Must-see TV

For the human rights activist who organized last week's daring North Korean refugee escape, success hinged on having a worldwide audience.

By Flore de Préneuf

Mar 20, 2002 | When 25 North Korean refugees stormed into the Spanish embassy in Beijing last Thursday in a desperate bid for freedom, human rights activists knew that for the feat to be successful, it had to be shown around the world.

So several journalists were tipped off in advance and took positions behind trees on the sidewalk opposite the embassy. The North Koreans, refugees living in China, dressed up to look like tourists, wearing red and black "Beijing" baseball caps. And when they ran through the open gate of the Spanish embassy past stunned Chinese guards, their fate was sealed: CNN captured the dash and broadcast it worldwide. China, which normally deports North Korean defectors under a repatriation treaty with the North Korean government in Pyongyang, allowed the group to go through this time for "humanitarian reasons." Monday, the refugees arrived safely in Seoul, South Korea.

According to Norbert Vollertsen, the German physician and human rights activist who orchestrated last week's coup, it likely wouldn't have happened without intense media coverage. "The embassy scene was played over and over again on CNN and on the Internet," said Vollertsen. "When you create a big noise, then China can't do a thing. It doesn't want to be blamed in front of the whole world. A big noise will secure refugees."

"The problem," Vollertsen said, "is when there is only a small noise."

Human rights activists now hope last week's event created a big enough noise to inspire hundreds more to defect, and to eventually lead to the collapse of the Stalinist regime in Pyongyang in a scenario reminiscent of the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification. Vollertsen sees much in the comparison. "First there were dozens, then hundreds and eventually thousands of refugees piled into the West German embassy in Prague," he recalled. "The Czech guards tried to arrest them but there were too many. A train was arranged to take them to West Germany. The Hungarian border was opened and a new flood started."

He points out that the elite in Pyongyang do get CNN. "Some are not stupid and remember history," he says. "They would rather have a smooth ending like in East Germany rather than a bloody outcome like in Ceaucescu's Romania." And the potential for violent dissent is already strong; Vollertsen witnessed scenes of riotous anger in North Korea when he worked there between July 1999 and December 2000.

The coalition of South Korean, Japanese and Western human rights organizations that masterminded the assault on the Spanish embassy had initially targeted the German embassy to impress world opinion with the historical parallel, he said. In the end, the organizers chose the Spanish embassy because they thought several members of the North Korean group were too weak to scale even a short, unguarded wall at the southern corner of the German compound. In addition, security at the Spanish embassy was known to be lax on Thursdays.

Just as the choice of embassy was the result of much thought and deliberation, human rights activists took special care to select street-savvy, hardened and determined North Korean refugees for the special operation. The six families and two orphan teenage girls who made the memorable run had been living in China long enough to know how to use cellphones and computers, sit through traffic without panicking and move inconspicuously, said Vollertsen. "They were quite sophisticated. The action could never have been mounted with refugees fresh from Pyongyang," he said.

Anywhere between 100,000 and 300,000 North Koreans live illegally in China. Figures are fuzzy because China has systematically barred the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from conducting a population survey in the provinces close to North Korea. Every year the Chinese government sends thousands home under the repatriation treaty signed with North Korea in 1961. Although China has signed international conventions on refugees, it does not see North Koreans as political asylum-seekers but rather as illegal economic migrants lured by China's relative prosperity.

And forays into China became increasingly common during and after the 1997 famine when North Koreans left their villages in search of food. Analysts believe China's relative economic development and wealth of consumer goods opened the eyes of North Koreans to the backwardness of their own country -- just as trips to Europe and exposure to Western movies shook the confidence of people living in Communist Europe in the 1980s.

Next Page: For a short time, Vollertsen was beloved by Pyongyang

• View blog reactions