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[NYT] North Korea exports 100,000 forced laborers for profit, rights groups say

February 20, 2015

Rim-il, a North Korean who says he was sent to work in Kuwait before he defected to South Korea, in Seoul, the South’s capital. (Courtesy of Jean Chung/The New York Times)

[THE NEW YORK TIMES]

SEOUL, South Korea — When the North Korean carpenter was offered a job in Kuwait in 1996, he leapt at the chance.

He was promised $120 a month, an unimaginable wage for most workers in his famine-stricken country, where most people are not allowed to travel abroad.

But for Rim-il, the deal soured from the start: Under a moonlit night, the bus carrying him and a score of other fresh arrivals pulled into a desert camp cordoned off with barbed-wire fences.

There, 1,800 workers, sent by North Korea to earn badly needed foreign currency, were living together under the watchful eyes of North Korean government supervisors, Mr. Rim said. They worked from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. or, often, midnight, seven days a week, doing menial jobs at construction sites.

“We only took a Friday afternoon off twice a month but had to spend the time studying books or watching videos about the greatness of our leader back home,” Mr. Rim said at a recent news conference in Seoul, the South Korean capital. “We were never paid our wages, and when we asked our superiors about them, they said we should think of starving people back home and thank the leader for giving us this opportunity of eating three meals a day.”

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