www.iht.com/articles/120603.htm
SLAVYANKA, Russia Here in Slavyanka, or Slavic village, a European outpost north of the North Korean border, the Slavic population implosion is as clear as roadside meadows where cows graze among the concrete shells of abandoned houses. But the demographic transformation of Russias Far East, local politicians say, could have a silver lining of global importance: providing new homes for refugees from North Korea. The human drama of the estimated 150,000 North Korean refugees living clandestinely in northern China has so moved the United States Congress that bills were introduced in late November in both houses to ease American visas for some refugees and to pay for the resettlement of others. On a tour of the Khasan district last week, Sergei Darkin, governor of Russias Primorye region, said that he would take the North Koreans. This district of Russian territory is squeezed between China and the Pacific Ocean until it stops at a strip of North Korea eight kilometers, or five miles, wide. The United States is moving in the right direction to solve the problem, and I support them, he said. Djambulat Tekiev, the districts representative in the regional legislature, agreed, waving to a vast, empty vista here that evoked eastern Montana. Although the governor said he would welcome as many as 200,000 refugees, it is unclear whether the government in Moscow, which controls immigration policy, will want to risk increasing regional tensions and racial insecurities among Russians here. In Russias nearly 150-year hold on this region, attitudes have waxed and waned on Asian immigration. But during the 1990s, the population of this area contracted by 17 percent, to 67 million people. Much of the decline was attributed to Russians moving west, seeking higher living standards. But now, the nations economy is growing, the unemployment rate has dropped to 3 percent, and labor shortages are spreading. Federal officials have set a target of adding a million new workers. President Vladimir Putin has said it is strategically important to get more people to move into the East, Pyotr Samoilenko, the federal governments regional spokesman, said in Vladivostok. Two months ago, Darkin traveled by train from Vladivostok to North Korea. What he saw there, he said in an interview this week, gave him little hope for economic revival. Noting that his train clanked along at 40 kilometers an hour, stopping frequently because of power shortages, he said, They lack everything - fuel, cement, fertilizer. As North Koreas poverty forces it to abandon its socialist supply system, malnutrition and economic desperation are spreading, Masood Hyder, the UN aid coordinator in North Korea, said last week in Seoul. A million people fall into this new category of underemployed beneficiaries, underemployed urban workers who need assistance, he said. He urged global donors to contribute to a UN appeal for $221 million in aid for North Korea. With China hostile to the refugees, the Russian Far East could offer an alternative, said Mark Palmer, who was an American ambassador to Hungary as communism collapsed. We should work hard on him to let refugees come out into Russia and to create the kind of flows that I personally saw coming through Hungary in 1989, which really is what led to the collapse of East Germany. On his return from North Korea, Darkin said he would double next years quota for North Koreans working here on official labor contracts, to around 5,000. He said that less than a third of the areas arable land was being cultivated and that North Koreans would be farming, working construction and picking up garbage. North Koreas leadership is acutely aware that during the first half of the 20th century, Russian territory around here served as a base for Korean guerrilla units that fought Japans colonial government in Korea. Kim Jong Il, North Koreas leader, was born in 1942 in Khabarovsk, a Russian city about 720 kilometers up the railroad from here, where his father, Kim Il Sung, trained a military unit under Soviet supervision. The arrival of North Korean refugees here would not be without tensions. North Korea maintains a consulate in the port city of Nakhodka to keep control over the estimated 10,000 North Koreans working on contracts in the Russian Far East, and refugees here could become targets for harassment by North Korean agents. In 1996, North Korea is believed to have ordered the assassination of the South Korean consul in Vladivostok. A North Korean diplomat who came to the door of the consulate in Nakhodka this week declined to answer any questions. Koreas modern presence in this region dates to the 1860s, when Korean emigration controls weakened and Korean farmers started moving into Russian lands. By 1917, 100,000 Koreans were in Primorye and were the largest non-Russian group, with their own schools, newspapers and churches. After the Soviet Union fought a brief border war here with Japan in 1938, though, Stalin deported most of the border regions Koreans to Central Asia. Today, 40,000 ethnic Korean Russians live in Primorye and another 40,000 on the neighboring island of Sakhalin.
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