CZECH REPUBLIC:North Koreans are working as indentured servants in the EU, writes Daniel McLaughlinin Zelezna, Czech Republic
Behind the thick curtains and cardboard that cover the windows, there are sounds of movement in the old schoolhouse, but no one answers a knock at its locked front door.
The back door is open, and a cleaner is startled to see visitors to this place, a grey building in a tiny village called Zelezna, which features on only the most detailed maps of the Czech Republic.
Behind her, a pair of young North Korean women appear in the corridor.
Their faces show surprise, suspicion and perhaps a little fear, but the taller one steps forward and her expression hardens as she insists in clear Czech that she cannot speak the language, and then leads her silent companion away through a door marked with a sign in Korean.
They are two of several hundred North Koreans who labour in the Czech Republic for the benefit of Kim Jong-il, the dictator with nuclear ambitions for their impoverished homeland 5,000 miles away.
The workers are monitored day and night by North Korean officials, who limit their contact with local people and channel most of their meagre wages back to the authoritarian regime in Pyongyang.
In Zelezna's old schoolhouse, about 20 miles from Prague, the North Koreans sew uniforms for the Jiri Balaban company. In the nearby village of Zebrak, they make clothes for a firm called Kreata. In the neighbouring town of Horovice, they work at a bakery.
Officials at each company were unavailable or unwilling to comment on what rights groups have called a modern slave trade, involving more than 10,000 North Koreans dispatched around the world to earn hard currency for a nation targeted by UN sanctions.
Many toil in remote logging camps in Russia's far east, but more than 400 are currently employed in the Czech Republic, and others are believed to work in Poland and Bulgaria.
"It is unacceptable that, on European soil, workers live under such humiliating and degrading conditions," said Istvan Szent-Ivanyi, a Hungarian member of the European Parliament who is vice-chairman of its delegation for relations with North and South Korea. "We have a moral obligation to provide these people with the same civil liberties that European citizens enjoy."
In testimony to the European Parliament, Kim Tae San, who defected after helping run North Korean labour gangs in the Czech Republic, described how the workers were closely watched and received only about €25 a month, after the bulk of their pay was sent to Pyongyang and further deductions were made for food, accommodation and compulsory "gifts" for Kim Jong-il, their so-called "Dear Leader".
The workers understand that disobedience, and certainly any attempt to escape the labour gang, would result in them being sent back to North Korea in disgrace, where a term in a prison camp could await them and members of their family.
For Czech bosses, the North Koreans perform jobs that locals don't want, and replace Czechs who have gone west looking for work.
Labour officials say the firms are not breaking any law, pay at least the national minimum wage, and provide reasonable working conditions.
At the old schoolhouse in snowy Zelezna, the cleaner - a Ukrainian who declined to reveal how she came to work there - said the North Koreans were not badly treated.
"They seem fine - they are not beaten or anything," she said, before another woman came into the building and told her to keep quiet. "If there's any trouble now it's your problem," she told her colleague, who immediately refused to say any more.
In Zebrak, only the clatter of sewing machines and snatches of Korean drifting from an open second-floor window betray what goes on inside the Kreata factory.
"No one will talk to you about this," said a wary Czech employee in the company shop downstairs.
Blanka Jezkova, who works in the cake shop next to Kreata, says the North Koreans are always seen in groups - never alone and never mingling with locals in the village's cafes, pubs or disco.
About 30 North Koreans work at Kreata and live in the newly-built dormitory behind it, she said, judging by the group she sees jogging in orderly fashion around the village's main square every Sunday.
"There are no conflicts with local people and they seem fine," she said. "But they don't mix with the Czechs."
In response to international pressure, the Czech government has reportedly decided not to issue any new work visas to North Koreans.
A spokeswoman for the foreign ministry said visas should certainly not be given to anyone whose pay was helping prop up the dictatorship of Kim Jong-il.
"We don't want these people's wages to help support the North Korean regime, but we also don't want these people to be harmed and suffer by being sent home," said Szent-Ivanyi.
"Even living in very bad conditions in Europe, they are almost certainly better off than in North Korea."