North Koreans Toil in Slavelike Conditions Abroad, Rights Groups Say

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. The opportunity to work overseas, in a country where most people are not allowed to travel abroad, was a rare privilege.

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

Kim Yoon-tae, a Seoul-based researcher on North Korean human rights, said that the labor camps overseas offered the international community a better chance to intervene than those in North Korea. One option is to pressure countries that use North Korean labor to honor basic international standards for labor protection, including an end to the practice of giving workers’ salaries to the government.

Mr. Rim said he was given cash only once during the five months he worked in Kuwait before he escaped into the South Korean Embassy there in 1997. To celebrate the February birthday of Kim Jong-il, supervisors gave each worker about $65 to buy cigarettes.

The cult of the Kim family was a daily fixture in their lives overseas. Among the “voluntary” donations workers had to make were those to subscribe to the propaganda-filled party daily, Rodong Sinmun, to buy gifts for the Kim family, and for flowers to be laid at the monuments of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il on national holidays.

“Not content with our 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. workday, a supervisor exhorted us to do an overtime till midnight once every two or three days to show our loyalty to the leader,” Mr. Rim said. “He led the way, and everyone else had to stand up and go to work, no matter how exhausted we were. Our life was nothing but slavery.”

The New York Times