One man's quirky fight for suffering N. Koreans

He insists he is an ordinary guy. But his life - lived half under,

half above ground - is like something from a movie. And Norbert Vollertsen feels he is riding the winds of history on the Korean peninsula.

Two years ago, the mop-headed German physician was kicked out of North Korea after using 16 months of nearly unlimited access to hospitals and orphanages to provide a rare picture of mass hunger and brutal abuse in the closed regime. Today, he champions the cause of North Korean refugees, and chides the West for caring about the North's nuclear program but not the daily misery of its people.

To many officials he is a loose cannon, a misguided headline grabber who may be harming the people he means to help. Dr. Vollertsen says he is simply bringing attention to a human tragedy that is inconvenient for politicians.

All told, it has been a wild ride for a country doctor who admits he can be as naïve as he is radical. Four years ago, Vollertsen couldn't find North Korea on the map; now, he says he is "working for the overthrow of the North Korean regime."

Last spring, Vollertsen, who has twice given testimony on Capitol Hill about repression in the North, scored a media coup when he helped stage a rush of 25 North Koreans into the Spanish Embassy in Beijing, to dramatize the plight of unwanted Northern escapees in China. Coming soon, he says: "a big event on the Russian border of North Korea."

Working with a network of activists in the Asia-Pacific region, he says he takes no special interest funding, but lives off royalties from his recent "Diary of a Mad Place," which has sold out several times in Japan.

He won't use a cellphone, and keeps quiet about his residence other than to say, "I live on the Internet. I move with the wind. I never plan what will happen next, but something always does. Tonight, I might be in Bangkok or Sydney."

Actually, he was in Washington D.C. yesterday at a refugee meeting opened by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas), and closed by Lorne Craner, the US State Department point man on human rights in Asia.

"We have a saying in Germany that the more enemies you have, the more courage you earn," Vollertsen says. "In my country, we let a Third Reich develop through silence. I'm not going to be part of that again."

Not only did Vollertsen literally offer the world an inside look at hunger and brutal abuse in the North, he accused aid agencies of silence on human rights and of allowing food to be siphoned off for elite cadres.

In Japan, Vollertsen is a hero. But his stunts put him near the top of Pyongyang's local public-enemy list. German intelligence has warned him of plots to silence him; he feels Chinese mafia or North Korean agents may be involved.

He is barred from China. In Beijing, where embassies are now all ringed with barbed wire to keep North Koreans out, Vollertsen is so hot that officials won't talk about him. The Germans are unofficially critical, saying Vollertsen's tactics put at risk some 300,000 escapees who live in China illegally.

The underlying disagreement is between those who say refugee relief must come slowly so the North doesn't collapse versus those who feel suffering in the North is so bad that it must be challenged more directly. "His methods and means are very strange to me. I don't know if these means are effective," one South Korean official says.

Yet in Seoul, many local refugee-aid workers, expatriates, and others close to the issue scoff at the image sometimes put forward that Vollertsen is "crazy."

"He is an easy target for the institutional diplomatic industry," one Beijing analyst says. "He gets on the nerves of everyone. But the thing is, he knows the truth about conditions in the North. Most of us do not know. We didn't get in."

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