It took some time, but the Chosun Ilbo has finally discovered what I and others have been posting for literally years about, North Korean sex slaves in China:

A Chosun Ilbo news team became the first in the world to see the scale of human trafficking in the China-North Korea border. The exodus in the famines of the latter half of the 1990s has degraded into blatant human trafficking. In the 10 months since May, 2007, the team witnessed the lives of North Korean refugees in five countries: China, Russia, Japan, the U.S. and Britain. In China, the refugees live day and night in fear of deportation to the North and poverty.  [Chosun Ilbo]

The Chosun Ilbo is not the "first in the world" to report on the North Korean sex slaves.  The Taipei Times reported prominently on the North Korean sex slaves back in 2005:

Thousands of North Korean refugees are working as sex slaves in China under threat of being returned should Chinese authorities catch them, the US ambassador for fighting international slavery said yesterday.

After two days of talks with Chinese officials, John Miller, director of the US State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, said many victims of the modern-day slave trade were women and girls forced into prostitution or marriage.  (…)

Chinese press reports on the cross-border trade have said North Korean women are sold to Chinese brokers for several hundred to a thousand dollars each.

The repatriated women can face prison sentences of five years or longer, or even execution. But most often they are held for several months in forced labor camps, London-based organization Anti-Slavery International said in a recent report.

"There are countless testimonies of beatings, torture, degrading treatment, and even forced abortions and infanticide from those who have escaped," the report said of these camps. [Taipei Times]

I guess the Chosun Ilbo can be forgiven for being late on this issue simply because they are finely focusing on the human rights situation of the North Korean refugees in China.  Now if only Korean society in general would focus as much attention and indignation at the practice of modern day sexual slavery in China of Korean women as they do on the sexual slavery of World War II "comfort women" for the Imperial Japanese Army which happened over 60 years ago. 

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