SEOUL, South Korea — At a recent meeting of the “Mapo Wine Club,” an invitation-only group of retired South Korean and U.S. officers and policy wonks, raucous conversation assaulted the ear and a bouquet of grilled pork infiltrated the nose.
But the backroom of a Seoul barbecue restaurant suddenly grew quiet as a man at the end of the table answered his cellphone, speaking briefly, quietly, intently. Ending the call, he told the gathering simply, “They’re out.”
The room exploded into cheers.
“They” are a family of North Korean defectors who reached sanctuary. The man with the phone was Tim Peters, a Seoul-based American pastor who helps defectors escape the poverty and oppression of Kim Jong-un‘s regime to safety and freedom in South Korea. For many, it’s the Korean Peninsula equivalent of the “Underground Railroad” that transported enslaved Africans to freedom in the north in the decades before the Civil War.
In a land of megachurches and politically affiliated clergy, Mr. Peters’ Seoul church, “Catacombs,” stands out for its modesty. Named after the hiding places used by persecuted Christians under the Roman Empire, the church operates out of a converted art gallery in a courtyard surrounded by high-rise buildings.
It’s tiny, offering room for perhaps 12 worshippers. The pastor, a 73-year-old Michigan native and nondenominational evangelical, does not wear a clerical collar and calls himself a Christian activist. Two objects make tangible the nature of that activism.
The first is an Asian map. A route from the North Korean border, running through China and into Southeast Asia, is marked out on it — the underground railroad to freedom for defectors.
The other object is a stack of plastic sachets containing seeds: buckwheat, snow pea, spinach, cabbage, pumpkin and corn. Dipped in fertilizer to encourage growth in degraded soil, the seeds are smuggled into North Korea’s undercover churches for planting in a country where malnourishment rates are high and the food production system is unreliable.
Mr. Peters does not help defectors flee directly south from Mr. Kim‘s totalitarian state. Instead, he works networks to get defectors to Seoul after they have crossed North Korea’s more accessible border with China. In 23 years, he says, he has helped about 2,000 make the roundabout passage to freedom.
North Korea’s direct route to South Korea — the fortified DMZ — is near-impenetrable. And now activists say the trans-China routes are increasingly constricted as well.
“The Chinese got wise to the Mongolian land route,” Mr. Peters said in an interview. “They built layers of fences, increased guards, notified residents to report anyone coming through. It is sparsely populated, so it is difficult to hide.”
A handful of those daring to flee North Korea escape via Russia.
“That is a rare bird, but sometimes workers on government labor brigades decide that they are going to defect,” Mr. Peters said. “It has been possible on a handful of occasions to bring them into the South Korean consulate in Vladivostok.”
Currently, the underground railway’s main line winds from northeastern China to southwestern Yunnan province and into Southeast Asia. A key route is through Laos, over the Mekong River, and into democratic Thailand.
It’s a journey that bristles with risk.
Inside China’s high-tech surveillance state, defectors lack official documentation. Many labor, sometimes as slaves, in farms, factories and businesses. Unknown numbers of women and girls have been trafficked. Anyone captured faces repatriation to North Korea.
Meeting the “desperate needs” of these unfortunates, Mr. Peters says, “is a demonstration of Christian love.”
A Christian in action
Mr. Peters converted to evangelical Christianity at college and undertook missionary work in Latin America before arriving in South Korea as “a wild-eyed convert” handing out Biblical tracts in 1975.
He traveled, returned to the U.S., taught, married and had five children. Then, in 1994, Japan’s Kobe earthquake rekindled his interest in missionary activity — albeit with a focus on practical relief work.
In 1996, terrible rumors from North Korea — of a ruinous famine, mass starvation, bodies littering streets, even cannibalism — drew him back to Seoul.
He focused on nutrition supply. “Billy Graham said, ‘You can’t preach the Gospel to someone on an empty stomach,’” he recalled.
Suspicious of Pyongyang’s Red Cross, he worked with contacts in global media and in Cambodia, which had close relations with North Korea. He began dispatching relief supplies and founded the “Ton a Month Club,” now known as Helping Hands Korea, to raise funds and buy goods.
Region-wide travels expanded his contacts. In 2000, after the North Korean famine had eased, he adopted a new role — extracting defectors.
Informants in safe houses and churches run by ethnic Koreans in northeast China send “SOS signals” about defectors’ presence. Then, Mr. Peters’ network swings into action. The network includes “brokers” — professional people smugglers — as well as daring South Korean Christians and Korean-Chinese supporters.
“It’s miraculous how it’s working,” Mr. Peters said. “It is an indication that God is interested and is using all kinds of characters to make these kinds of freedoms happen.”
Currently, he says, brokers charge between $10,000 and $15,000 to extract one North Korean from China to Thailand, but he says his organization operates at a lower cost. His main benefactors are Scandinavians, though Japanese Christians also give generously.
Mr. Peters’ focus is fundraising and logistics. But — unusually for a Caucasian in this country — he has operated the railroad itself.
Motivated by tragedy
A 2001 tragedy steeled his resolve. That year, he met defectors sheltering in a Chinese church. Among them was Yoo Chul-min, 10, who said he was hoping to meet his father, who had already defected, if he reached Seoul.
Mr. Peters remembered seeing the boy, in a red baseball cap (“though he did not know what baseball was”), depart on a train headed to the Mongolian border.
Weeks later, back in Seoul, Mr. Peters got a call. Chul-min, he heard, was dead. The group had become lost in the Gobi; Chul-min, long weakened by malnutrition, died in the desert.
“It hit me like a thunderbolt: This innocent little guy was a victim of circumstance,” he recalled. “That set in steel this determination that these people really do need help.”
A 2008 South Korean film, “Crossing,” was made based on the incident. The filmmakers did not consult Chul-min’s distraught father, Yoo Sang-joon, who never watched the film.
Mr. Yoo later joined the work of extracting defectors and was twice arrested in China. Mr. Peters, too, has had some close calls with China‘s security apparatus.
In 2010, detained by police suspicious of his presence near the North Korean border, he was saved by the humanity of the station chief, a Chinese-Korean.
“When I told him, ‘Every day I pray for those on the other side of the border,’ he said, ‘Thank you,’” Mr. Peters recalled. He was released without charge.
On another China trip, he learned that a contact who approached him was a North Korean agent trying to infiltrate his organization. “That could have developed into a nasty situation,” he said.
In 2013, in Vietnam, he reconnoitered the Danish embassy and distracted staffers as nine defectors, posing as South Korean tourists, entered and claimed asylum. A South Korean colleague was briefly jailed by Vietnamese authorities for his role in the episode.
The COVID-19 pandemic that disrupted the world starting in late 2019 in China also brought new challenges and headaches for Mr. Peters and his colleagues.
“Some of our escape groups were coming into contact with checkpoints in China doing health checks,” he said. “Something big was afoot and was interfering with our ordinary operations. … They had to take workaround routes.”
In 2020, North Korea locked its borders in its bid to keep the deadly virus out. For defectors in China, the year was terrifying.
“There were health inspectors at the doors of the factories or restaurants where they were working, any hiding place was like an ant colony being overturned,” he said. “We were receiving lots of desperate SOS calls.”
Even so, extractions accelerated. In 2020, he and partners helped 203 people. His previous highest annual total had been 156 in 2019. “I consider that miraculous,” he said.
Seeds of hope
Mr. Peters is deliberately vague about another aspect of his operation — the covert smuggling of seed sachets to believers inside North Korea. His contacts are undercover North Korean pastors with Chinese links.
It took him 14 years to find an entry point. Of his contacts’ methodologies, he said: “I am not privy to all of it and I don’t want to be, but it is well established in a way that I am satisfied.”
Beyond Pyongyang’s “Potemkin churches,” Mr. Peters estimates some 150,000 to 300,000 Christians secretly worship in North Korea.
Given Pyongyang’s harsh limitations on freedom of worship, expression, association and movement, he is angry with the liberal Seoul governments that engaged the Kim regime over the decades while ignoring its human rights abuses. He praises the government of current conservative President Yoon Suk-yeol for taking a tougher stand.
“It drove me crazy that they ignored this human rights catastrophe” across the border in North Korea, he said. “I am happy that the current administration is making clear statements about North Korean rights violations.”
With hundreds of North Koreans believed to have recently been forcibly repatriated from China to North Korea after the latter reopened its borders, he rues the current state of relations between Beijing, Seoul and Washington.
“Because of geopolitical headwinds, travel to China by South Koreans is strictly controlled and China is a staging area for us,” he said. “This situation complicates the linkages.”
But he is uninterested in politics — or the glitzy approaches to Christianity taken by some high-profile South Korean and U.S. pastors.
“In so many cases, it seems the size, location and beauty of your sanctuary are the major priorities,” he said, “but our focus is on the suffering brothers and sisters just 35 miles north of here. My reading of the Bible is that we are to care for the widows and the orphans. That’s pure religion.”
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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