Woman and sister escape Kim Jong-un's North Korea – then pain as one sent back

11 December 2023 , 16:45

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Kim Kyu-li (right) with her older sister. Their younger sister Cheol-ok is missing in North Korea (Image: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/12/10/kyu-li-sister-cheol-ok-escape-north-korea-china-de)

A woman is campaigning for the release of her younger sister who was sent back to dictator Kim Jong-un's repressive regime in North Korea.

Kim Cheol-ok was one of 600 people from the repressive state that were repatriated by China, and now her businesswoman older sister Kim Kyu-li has urged the UK Government and the United Nations to help. This week, she travelled to New York to appeal to the International Criminal Court.

Cheol-ok, 40, was two hours away from being repatriated to her homeland on October 9, where she faced a brutally abusive prison system and lifelong separation from her loved ones, including a newborn grandson, when she got out a message to her sister.

Escaping across the border from North Korea is fraught with danger (AFP via Getty Images)

The message Kyu-li, 46, received from Cheol-ok was a desperate plea for help from the Chinese jail she was being held in. She called to her 24-year-old Chinese daughter and told her: "Quickly tell your aunt in England to do something."

Kyu-li was devastated by the news, but from New Malden, London, she was powerless to intervene. Haunted by her sister’s fate, she is now campaigning for her release and she told The Telegraph: "My sister's only crime was being born in North Korea. All I want is for her to live in safety."

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Cheol-ok was one of many loaded onto heavily guarded buses and forcibly sent back to the oppressive state from China in October, despite international appeals for the detainees to be granted asylum.

She had been caught trying to escape her adopted home, where she had lived for 25 years with her Chinese husband and daughter. However, during that stay she had no identity papers and knew she could be picked up by the authorities at any moment. She had planned to go to Thailand and South Korea, before travelling to the UK to reunite with her sister.

Now, for the second time in Kyu-li's life, her sister has disappeared. On Thursday, the Transitional Justice Working Group (TJWG), a Seoul-based human rights group, said the deportees had "vanished", although based on the TJWG’s information, it is likely they were held initially and interrogated in one of three detention facilities.

The group believes they would be detained at holding centres in North Pyongan, Ryanggang, and North Hamgyong before being transferred to ministry of state security facilities in their cities of origin.

The TJWG warned: "Those forcibly returned face the prospect of torture, sexual and gender-based violence, imprisonment in concentration camps, forced abortions and execution as their authoritative regime brands them 'criminals' and 'traitors'."

Cheol-ok’s deportation came shortly after she'd found her sister, following a 23-year separation when neither knew if the other was still alive. The pair had been close growing up in the town of Musan-gun near the Chinese border. but their mother died in 1995 when Cheol-ok was 12 and her sister was 18. They had to forage for scraps to survive a brutal famine.

Kyu-li managed to get to China in 1997 and, like many North Korean female defectors, was forced to marry a Chinese man. She received an unexpected phone call a year later to be told Cheol-ok, now 14, had used a trafficker to follow her across the border.

But after that initial call, Kyu-li called the number again after two hours and found that the traffickers had already sold her sister and she wouldn't hear from her for another 23 years.

Kyu-li found it impossible to trace Cheol-ok, who lived in isolation and poverty in the countryside in the north-eastern Chinese province of Jilin with a husband 30 years her senior. The younger sister managed to move to a town with internet during the pandemic and get out a message to Kyu-li's niece in South Korea.

While the lockdowns meant they could only see each other by video chat, they shared some poignant tear-filled moments. Throughout the pandemic, Kyu-li urged her sister to escape China, promising to help. Cheol-ok had no papers and lived her life in hiding with no access to healthcare.

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But a bout of Covid-19 in early 2022 forced her hand and in April she attempted to leave with two friends. She was going to use a church group to get out, but after 15 days of hearing nothing, Kyu-li knew something was wrong and found that her sister had been arrested on April 5 and sent to Baishan city detention centre in Jilin. From there, it is thought she was deported to North Korea.

Kyu-li is desperate to get her sister out of the repressive regime's detention system and said: "My brother died in a North Korean jail. Nobody knows where his grave is. The jails are inhuman. They don’t care if you are sick, hungry, tired, they just say you are an animal. In North Korea there is nothing left, nobody to care for her. I want her to be safe, to be sent back to her family."

South Korea has lodged a protest with China over the deportation, while Beijing’s foreign ministry has denied there are “so-called defectors” in China but said North Koreans entered illegally for economic reasons.

Paul Donald