Pastor Lee Chan-woo, whose church provided volunteer assistance to North Korean refugees in northeastern China, has confirmed that a videotape containing footage of refugee women and children whose mothers were sent back to North Korea was confiscated from Mitch Koss by the Chinese PSB, and that the police are using the tape to track down the women after closing five orphanages sheltering children fathered by Chinese men.
According to Pastor Lee, he met with Koss, Ling, and Lee at a hotel in Yanji on March 14 and agreed to allow them to talk to refugee women and visit an orphanage provided the children’s faces were not filmed. At the orphanage, Euna Lee asked the children to give a videotaped greeting to their mothers, and Pastor Lee interrupted the filming. The day after the orphanage visit, the Current TV crew inteviewed the refugee women, who had been sold to Chinese businesses providing adult online video chatting (음란화상채팅).
The tape with images of the women and children was confiscated by the Chinese police after they apprehended Mitch Koss on the Chinese side of the border. Pastor Lee’s home was raided on March 19; police hauled away a computer, a camera, and other items. Lee was fined and deported from China. Of the 21 orphans in the closed orphanages, 17 were put in the care of Chinese relatives while the four remaining children are in a safe location.
Hat tip to commenter JW.
{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
Woooohooo! I feel all special now.
WOW, just wow. I wonder if those bitches even care that they’ve ruined (all over) the lives of so many?
Are you sure that’s ruining someone’s life? I mean, the refugee women had been SOLD. Sold to Chinese businesses providing adult online video chatting. A life of rural poverty might be a step up from slavery.
You obviously skipped straight over the closing of five orphanages to the sex part.
조선족 공안 ….jeezus, it’s like revisiting the ghosts of korean jailguards during colonial times.
adult online video chatting (음란화상채팅)
Thanks, Sonagi. I would like to know if there are any other discrepancies between Chosun Ilbo’s English version and the original Korean article. Please let us know any other small details in the Korean article that the English version does not have.
For example, I am trying to detemine if Current TV’s crew was supposed to conduct an interview at the border village of Mapai on March 16 or 17. The Chosun Ilbo English article’s timeline is as follows:
March 14: Met Current TV crew at hotel in Yanji.
Following day: (March 15) Visited an orphanage
Next day: (March 16) Filmed NK women at the border
March 17: Crossed border and arrested by NK soldiers
In a previous article in the Chinese press, Pastor Chun Ki-won says he talked to Euna Lee around 3 a.m. on March 17 and they were still conducting interviews in Yanji. Around 6 a.m. he suggested they go to the border area, which I assume is Mapai village:
负责安排此行的美国基督教牧师千基元宣称：“3月17日凌晨3时左右，3名记者和当地导游说要开始继续采访。早晨6时左右，我和她们进行最后一次通话时，她们已经结束采访，所以我建议她们到图们江边边境地区采访。不过，我曾提醒她们，这一地区非常危险，所以要和我商量后再行动，但她们后来并没跟我商量且失去了联系。中国边防军19日下午通知说扣留了两名男子。我才知道出事了。”
Next time someone runs across Mitch Koss, please, smack him upside the head.
Euna Lee, you are responsible for ruining the lives of these women and children for the advancement of your career.
Stupid liberal piece of shit.
We must stop these morons in the US of Korean heritage who are so enamored about their own self proclaimed, unqualified expertise with North Korea.
What happened to the other post? I swear I saw a post from Koehler about this subject about 2-3 hrs ago, now it’s gone.
It went to Posts Heaven, where selfless posts who realize that there is another manifestation of itself already pre-existing go to.
As Yuna suggests, I took it down after I saw this post.
Every time I think of this story, I see the image of Euna Lee tearfully embracing her husband and daughter on the tarmac. I wonder if she reflects how her actions have endangered the women and children she met.
I hope so. I hope she does not get dragged around by the attention-whoring Ling sisters who might want to speak for her as well with a “united voice”. She does seem more reluctant to talk about stuff, so far, and not just because English is not her first language, like some readers suggest. I hope she has enough guts to apologize.
Just kind of curious, but why were the children in orphanages in the first place? If their mother’s were deported back to North Korea, wouldn’t they be placed with the father first before being sent to an orphanage?
It really doesn’t make sense unless you assume that the women were actually prostitutes and that the children are illegitimate and who’s fathers are unknown or unwilling to recognize them. Then how did the police manage to track down 17 of their paternal relatives?
According to one of the stories I’ve read, the Chinese families chose to place the children in orphanages after the mother was sent back. This isn’t so unusual. Unless there’s a retired grandma at home, then there’s no one to care for the young child. Moreover, a child by another woman further hinders a man’s chances of remarriage in an area where men outnumber women. I believe Chinese couples in a second marriage are permitted to have a child without penalty if one of spouses has no children from a previous relationship.
If you want something done right, sometimes you just have to do it yourself. After Google translating the Korean version of Chosun Ilbo’s article into English, I found this small discrepancy at the end:
Mitch Koss in a telephone interview with Chosun Ilbo reporter, “I can not say anything yet,” he said.
Contrast this with what appears on Chosun’s English version:
Koss declined to comment.
The key word “yet” in the Korean version leaves open the possibility that Mitch might be getting ready to say something, while the English version simply offers us the standard “no comment” line.
I still can’t find this article on Chosun Ilbo’s Chinese language website. I wonder why there is no Chinese version. Wouldn’t Chinese people be interested in an article about their own government? Hmmmm….
As any MH regular knows, quotes appearing in the Korean media are often loose paraphrases and sometimes completely fictitious. You translated back into English a Korean translation of something Mitch said.
No surprise that the story wasn’t translated into Chinese. A few years ago, there was a Chosun Ilbo cartoon that depicted racial caricatures of a Japanese and a Chinese to make some historical point. The cartoon appeared in the Japanese version but not the Chinese version. Draw your own conclusion.
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