One Free Korea links to this WSJ piece on the underground railroad helping to get North Korean refugees out of China.
In an interview with one activist, the Journal quickly gets to the point:
This being The Wall Street Journal, we went straight to the bottom line. How much, we asked our visitor at a recent editorial board meeting, does it cost to free one North Korean refugee hiding in China?
The Rev. Phillip Buck pauses a moment before replying, apparently making the yuan-to-dollar conversions on the abacus in his mind. “If I do it myself,” he says, “the cost is $800 per person. If I hire a broker to do it, it’s $1,500.”
While we are on the subject, if anyone is interesting in helping out here in Korea, you can contact the local chapter of Liberty in North Korea (email: linkseoul.now@gmail.com) or Helping Hands Korea. The former is a non religious group with about half Korean and half international membership. The later is a Christian organization that was about 70 percent international the last time I check about a year ago.
10 Comments
Don’t tell the price per head to South Korea. You’ll have hundreds of Oskar Schwindlers standing in line to buy as many North Korean maidens as they can afford.
I wonder how much it would cost to free Roh Moo Hyan from the Blue House?
R. Elgin, the question everybody’s minds right now is how much it will cost us if he tries to get Kim Jong Il to agree to an inter-Korea summit in advance of the next elections.
Hmmm, cheaper than your average Thai or Filipino Mail-order bride… interesting.
Bipolar Mindscrew
Actually the price range pretty much overlaps the price range of a NK woman who are sold into marraige and/or prostitution.
That’s US$34,368,265,500 to get everybody out, or 0.2% of the GDP for the US for 2006. It can be raised by collecting US$116.21 from every man, woman, and child in the country.
If we added in contributions from the citizens of Canada, South Korea, and Japan, the cost per person would only be US$68.10 per person. The payments can be averaged out in 12 easy monthly installments of US$5.60. I could have afforded this when I was 10 years old!
I assume that as more and more people leave the country, the cost will lower as there will be less people to stop those who are being smuggled out. So the final cost might very well be less than that.
Wow, with numbers like that, why isn’t North Korea gone yet?
mateo, interesting point. The 500 million dollars that Kim Dae Jung sent to North Korea would have been sent to this Rev. Phillip Buck, he could have reunited 625000 North Koreans with their South Korean family members for good instead of reuniting a few dozen North and South Koreans for no longer than the time it took for them to digest the dinner that they shared.
$800.00?! I’ll take two now and three later!
Not wanting to hijack this thread, but I couldn’t help but notice at the bottom of the linked article at OneFreeKorea the fact that the author praises Guantanamo Bay. I like OneFreeKorea mainly because I hate the NK regime. But to heap shit on the NK gulags while at the same time giving the thumbs up to “gitmo” is the height of hypocrasy. I’m not saying it is worse than the NK prisons, but surely the US can do better (as can our own “honorable” PM) particularly if it seeks to be a moral compass fopr the rest of the world. If anyone is interested, check this link about one guy who has been there for 5 years without trial:
http://radar.smh.com.au/archiv....._hick.html
Disgusting.
I was at a conference at Peking University last year which had a Nork delegation assisted by a female interpreter. I would gladly have forked over $800 for her, not even haggled about it.
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