Il semble que la Coree du Nord n'envoye des esclaves pas que vers la
Russie.
Il semble egalement que la charmante serveuse du restaurant nord-coreen de
Shangai tombe dans cette categorie.--
This article was sent to you by someone who found it on SFGate.
The original article can be found on SFGate.com here:
www.sfgate.com/...1/01/MNGKIGE6O81.DTL
--
Sunday, January 1, 2006 (SF Chronicle)
North Korean women work as near slaves in Czech Republic
Barbara Demick,
Los Angeles Times
(01-01) 04:00 PDT Zelezna, Czech Republic -- The old schoolhouse stands
alone at the end of a quiet country road flanked by snow-flecked wheat
fields. From behind the locked door, opaque with smoked glass, comes the
clatter of sewing machines and, improbably enough, the babble of young
female voices speaking Korean.
The elementary school closed long ago for lack of students. The entire
village 20 miles west of
Prague has only about 200 people.
The schoolhouse is now a factory producing uniforms. Almost all the
workers are North Korean, and the women initially looked delighted to see
visitors. It gets lonely working out here, thousands of miles from home.
They crowded around to chat.
"I'm not so happy here. There is nobody who speaks my language. I'm so far
from home, " volunteered a tentative young woman in a T-shirt and
sweatpants who said she was from Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.
But as she spoke, an older woman with stern posture and an expressionless
face -- a North Korean security official -- passed by in the corridor. The
young women scattered wordlessly and disappeared into another room,
closing and bolting the door behind them.
Hundreds of young North Korean women are working in garment and leather
factories like this one, easing a labor shortage in small Czech towns.
Their presence in this new member of the European Union is something of a
throwback to before the revolution of 1989, when
Prague, like Pyongyang,
was a partner in the Communist bloc.
The North Korean government keeps most of the earnings, apparently one of
the few legal sources of hard currency for an isolated and impoverished
regime living off counterfeiting, drug trading and weapons sales. Experts
estimate 10, 000 to 15, 000 North Koreans work abroad on behalf of their
government in jobs ranging from nursing to construction work. In addition
to the Czech Republic, North Korea has sent workers to
Russia, Libya,
Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia and Angola, defectors say.
Almost the entire monthly salaries of the women here, about $260, the
Czech minimum wage, are deposited directly in an account controlled by the
North Korean government, which gives them only a fraction of the money.
To the extent that they are allowed outside, they go only in groups. Often
they are accompanied by a guard from the North Korean Embassy who is
referred to as their interpreter. They live under strict surveillance in
dormitories with photographs of North Korea's late founder Kim Il Sung and
current leader Kim Jong Il on the walls. Their only entertainment is
propaganda films and newspapers sent from North Korea, and occasional
exercise in the yard outside.
"This is 21st century slave labor, " said Kim Tae San, a former official of
the North Korean Embassy in
Prague. He helped set up the factories in 1998
and served as president of one of the shoe factories until he defected to
South Korea in 2002.
It also was Kim's job to collect the salaries and distribute the money to
workers. He said 55 percent was taken off the top as a "voluntary"
contribution to the socialist revolution. The women had to buy and cook
their own food. Additional sums were deducted for accommodation,
transportation and extras such as flowers for the birthdays of Kim Il Sung
and Kim Jong Il.
The women even had to pay for the propaganda films they were forced to
watch. By the time all the deductions were made, they received between $20
and $30 a month. They spent less than $10 of it on food, buying only the
cheapest local macaroni.
Kim says that Czechs often mistook the North Korean women for convict
laborers because of the harsh conditions. "They would ask the girls, 'What
terrible thing did you do to be sent here to work like this?' "
In fact, the women usually come from families deemed sufficiently loyal to
the regime that their daughters will not defect. With salaries at
state-owned companies in North Korea as low as $1 per month, the chance to
work abroad for a three-year stint is a privilege.
Having shed its own communist dictatorship, the Czech Republic is
sensitive to human rights. But the country has to employ about 200, 000
guest workers, largely to replace Czechs who have left to seek higher
wages in Western Europe.
Czech officials say the North Koreans are model workers.
"They are so quiet you would hardly know they are here, " said Zdenek
Belohlavek, labor division director for the district of Beroun, which
encompasses Zelezna and Zebrak, a larger town where about 75 North Korean
seamstresses stitch underwear.
Belohlavek displayed a thick dossier of photos and vital statistics of the
women, most of whom were born between 1979 and 1981. All their paperwork
is in perfect order and the factories appear to fully comply with the law,
he said.
Belohlavek acknowledged labor investigators had communicated with the
workers only through an interpreter from the North Korean Embassy. He said
they were troubled by the women's apparent lack of freedom.
"They have guards. I don't know why. It's not like anybody would steal
them, " Belohlavek said.
Another labor investigator, Jirina Novakova, who has visited the
factories, also complained that the women's salaries were deposited into a
single bank account in the name of one of the North Korean Embassy
interpreters.
"Frankly, we have some difficulty with that, " she said. "But if they do it
voluntarily, there is not much we can do about it."
Jiri Balaban, owner of the Zelezna factory, said it was none of his
business what they did in the free time or how they spent their money. "My
business is that they work, " he said.
In theory, the women could escape. Although the doors are locked from the
inside in Zelezna, the windows are not barred. But where would they go?
Few speak any language other than Korean. Zelezna has one pay phone, a
mayor's office that is open once a week for two hours and a general store
so small that you have to order bread a day in advance.
In Zebrak, the North Koreans go downtown to the supermarket in groups only
on Fridays between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. They live in a pleasant-looking,
lemon-yellow dormitory that recently was constructed across the parking
lot from their factory. Blinds are kept drawn and the doors locked.
Deliverymen must leave supplies on the front stoop.
The Baroque town square in Nachod, its Christmas lights, Chinese
restaurant and movie theater showing "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire"
and "March of the Penguins" was off-limits for the 40 North Korean women
who stitch leather suitcases and belts along with guest workers from
Vietnam, Mongolia and
Ukraine.
"They can't go anywhere. You can't talk to them, " said guard Antonin
Janicek. "The other women go to the pub and the cinema. Some get married
here. But not the Koreans."
Last year, when a Czech television crew tried to film a shoe factory in
Skutec, a group of irate North Koreans broke their camera. After the
incident, the factory decided it would no longer employ North Koreans
because of bad publicity and human rights concerns.
"They often times do not even have enough (money) for food, " Vaclav
Kosner, financial director of the factory, was quoted as telling the CTK
news agency. "They are sometimes truly hungry."
The seamstresses were first sent abroad at the height of North Korea's
famine to raise money to buy raw materials for North Korean shoes and
clothing. North Korea officially was a partner in the factories through
two trading companies, but diplomat Kim said this was a front to cover the
government's embarrassment about having to send workers abroad. The
factories are mostly Czech-owned, but the underwear factory in Zebrak is
owned by an Italian company.
By far the largest number of North Koreans working outside their country
are in
Russia, where they do mostly logging and construction in
military-style camps run by the North Korean government. When the camps
were first set up in the early 1970s, the workers were North Korean
prisoners. But as the North Korean economy disintegrated in the late
1980s, doing hard labor in Siberia came to be seen as a reward because at
least it meant getting adequate food.
Kim Yong Il, who got a job doing mine construction in the 1990s because of
his brother's political connections, said he and a dozen other men were
kept in a house with bars on the windows and a padlock on the door. He
received no money, but his family in North Korea received extra food
rations. He defected in 1996 and now lives in
Seoul,
South Korea. He is
one of about 50 North Koreans who escaped the camps in
Russia and are
living in the South, according to the Christian North Korean Association,
a defector group in
Seoul.
There have been no such incidents with the seamstresses in the Czech
Republic. The fact that they come from Pyongyang, home only to the most
loyal North Koreans, means that their families have privileges that could
be taken away in an instant if a relative were to defect.
In 2002, Kim the former diplomat and his wife defected in
Prague and
sought asylum from
South Korea. Soon afterward, their adult son and
daughter were taken away. He believes they were sent to a prison camp.
Kim, 53, recently asked a contact in North Korea to gather some
information about relatives. "Even my wife's relatives, down to the second
cousins, have disappeared, " he said. "We couldn't find a trace of them." --
Copyright 2006 SF Chronicle
