N Korea Underground Railroad Pastor Is Freed

From Time Magazine:

Handout photo from the World Food Programme shows North Korean farmers collecting rice damaged by floods in a field in Wonsan city, Kangwon province, southeastern North Korea, in 2001.

An Activist for North Koreans Wins Release

Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2006

By BILL POWELL

For the last 15 months, Phillip Buck, 69, an evangelical pastor from Seattle, Washington sat in a small jail cell in northeastern China his health deteriorating, not knowing when — or even if — he would get out and see his family in the U.S. again. The only thing he knew, he wrote in a letter from the jailhouse earlier this year, is that his cause was just.

Now he is free. Buck had been a key member of the so-called underground railroad that moves refugees from North Korea through China to safety in South Korea. On Monday, Aug. 21, the Chinese government released him, having convicted him of transiting people illegally out of the country. His sentence—following more than a year of jail time in the city of Yanjie— was deportation and a fine…

Has anybody even heard anything about this "underground railroad" before? Wouldn’t it make a good news story? Even a series of them?

I guess our one party media isn’t interested in stories of about people standing up to repressive dictatorships.

Like most news that doesn’t fit the mainstream media’s agenda, this has been ignored by all but the local outlets.

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