Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  If he were really unlucky, despite the new policy young Hong might— like an estimated two hundred thousand of his countrymen1 —be sent to a prison camp. If his parents returned with him he might accompany them or not depending on whether the regime decided to just get it over with and gag the parents with stones—or bring the son forward in an arena, before a crowd screaming for justice, to accuse them of crimes—and then shoot them as he looked on.2 The alternative would be to let the Hongs rot in one of the camps housing political criminals who had seriously offended the regime and the accompanying families of some of those criminals. Forget about the quaint notion that high-ranking would-be defectors could simply admit their mistakes and be forgiven.

  Shin Myung-chul, a former State Security telecommunications staff member whose story features in chapter 22, told me the sad tale of a fellow defector named Yoo he met after arriving in South Korea. That man had defected to South Korea in 1987 while he was an officer on the DMZ, Shin said. “In March 1988, I witnessed the family of Mr. Yoo being sent to Aoji in North Hamgyong province. It’s one of the three main prisons where they send families of defectors. The procedure for sending them off takes three days. The first day a wire comes from district State Security to village State Security to watch the family. There are various communications back and forth. On the day for sending them away, the State Security officials arrive in a truck around 2 A.M., with no warning, and take the whole family quietly. It’s all over in forty minutes.

  “After I came to South Korea, Mr. Yoo kept visiting me. Finally, after the tenth visit, I told him what had happened to his family. He had expected it, but he was devastated all the same. They usually take the wife, children, parents and siblings of the defector—all the direct relations, except in the case of a sister who’s married off; her husband can be reprimanded or have his job taken away. I believe it’s to help the regime retain power. It shows people the consequences of defection so people will feel responsibility. It takes forty minutes because the law says people who are resettled are entitled to take about 500 won worth of property-with them. Anything over that the government takes.

  “There are two categories of people. One group would be sent to a provincial State Security evaluation department when they’re removed from their homes. They get evaluated for about a year: Are they spies for South Korea? Do they oppose Kim? But in cases like Yoo’s relatives they have no hope of ever returning from the camps.”

  Did young Hong know the bleak reality that most likely would await him if he should go back home? Maybe not. Maybe all he remembered of North Korea, from the time before his family had last moved abroad, was life among the elite of Pyongyang: enough to eat, in those days at least; schools where you grew up learning to worship the Kims, father and son, and to believe more or less wholeheartedly in the sort of sentiments the just-released hostage gave voice to so stirringly at his press conference. It would not be unusual for such a privileged young man to know little of the darkest side of his country—until his turn came to experience it.

  More likely, I thought, he did have some idea—but was really the nice, sincere kid his Bangkok college friends said he was. In which case it should not have been too hard for the team that worked on him for the two weeks of his captivity to use, as leverage, reminders of his remaining relatives and friends in North Korea—and hints of-what would happen to them in case he should defect.

  That kind of pressure could make it a tough call for anyone, but if he had asked me (I was in Bangkok at the time) I would have sat him down to go over the interviews that follow, several of them with members of families that had suffered together. Then I would have given him some unambiguous advice: “Don’t go back to Pyongyang. Stick with your parents. If the three of you get to the United States or Canada or South Korea, especially if your dad has even a few grand, not to speak of the $83 million he is accused of having ripped off from the regime, you will find that for a price a rescue expedition can be dispatched into North Korea via the China border to bribe authorities and bring out a whole family of internal exiles, even prisoners. Don’t go back, kid.”

  Hong, at twenty, was young but that would not win him special treatment. Ahn Hyuk was even younger, eighteen, when the junior table tennis champion was imprisoned. At age eleven, in 1979, Ahn entered and won a tournament for elementary school pupils. Thenceforth, he was groomed at a training center in Nampo to become national champion. (A woman star named Pak Yong-sun had won two world championships—although she didn’t make it into the finals for the 1979 tournament that I attended. It was Pak’s winnings that had been used to build the Nampo training center.)

  Q. How did a table tennis champion end up in a concentration camp?

  Ahn Hyuk. “I went to a ski resort used by sons and daughters of high officials. Skiing down Mount Paektu one day in February of 1986, a group of us came close to the Yalu River. Some ethnic Koreans living on the Chinese side started talking to us. They said, ‘You talk about Kim Il-sung’s paradise. You ought to come to China and see how we live.’ Six of us walked across the frozen river, just out of curiosity, and stayed in China for three months. Then we returned to North Korea. I was sent to the camp as the youngest political prisoner there.”

  Q. Why did you return?

  A. “Because of our families. They would be worried. I had $200 when I went skiiing. I used that to go around China for a month or so. We returned to the Yalu River to find the ice melting. It was still too cold to swim across, so we waited until May That’s when my destiny was overturned.

  “I had no idea what would happen. I was the only son, pampered, the son of a high official who had access to a lot of foreign currency for his work. I thought my father had enough power to fix it. The other guys when they got back went to their parents, who told them, ‘Don’t ever mention that you’ve crossed the Yalu.’ But I first went to see my relatives, not my parents, and my relatives said, You’re dead meat.’ I realized I’d done something wrong, and I was scared. So without seeing my parents I went on my own to State Security. I thought if I went and confessed it would be all right. I told the authorities I was the only one who crossed, so the others didn’t get caught. North Korean society works on criticism. I thought if I went to State Security they would criticize me and forgive me. But after my confession State Security sent me to its secret prison at Malamdong in the Yongsong area of Pyongyang. My Kim Il-sung portrait-badge was taken away, and I felt like the lowest thing on earth.

  “At the prison I was kept in a dungeon for about twenty months. The cell was 2 meters by 180 centimeters. From 6 A.M. to 11 P.M. I had to sit very straight, with my fists extended in front of me. I wasn’t allowed to utter a word without permission. I was supposed to raise my right fist when I needed to pee, raise my open right hand for a bowel movement. Raising the left fist meant, ‘I have something to ask you,’ and raising the open left hand meant ‘I’m very sick.’ We only got to leave the dungeon to see the sun once a month.

  “I was the youngest, so I ended up doing a lot of the cleaning. My fellow prisoners included Yang Sung-hyon, former ambassador to Libya, and Kwon Song-chol, former vice foreign minister, along with a student returned from Guangzhou in China and one of the chauffeurs who drove the Volvos and Mercedes Benzes around. Yang hadn’t done his job right, somehow. Kwon had been with Kim Jong-min when Kim defected from Russia, but hadn’t defected himself. He was being punished for not stopping Kim Jong-min’s defection. The chauffeur had merely noticed that Western passengers carried a lot of foreign currency and remarked, ‘Wow, the West must be really developed.’ That’s all he said.

  “The only food in the dungeon was cooked corn in a bowl. No side dishes. You can hardly get rice outside, so how could we get it in prison? They cut the handle off the spoon to help prevent suicide. They give you the bowl but you can’t eat right away. You have to say, ‘I’m ready to eat now.’ All six in your row of cells have to say that before the warder says, ‘OK, you may eat.’

  “When I wen
t out to get my monthly sunshine I had to strip first. I thought, ‘I can’t go on living this way. I must commit suicide.’ On my way out I would look for a nail, or even a toothpaste cap to put under my tongue. But there was no way. I did swallow a nail, trying to kill myself with internal bleeding. I cut the inside of my mouth with the nail, then swallowed it. I sat for about ten minutes and fainted. I was sent to the hospital. They treated me there and I lived.”

  Q. Did they ever explain why you were being punished?

  A. “They said I had acted against the people. Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il are the most dignified leaders of the world, and by going to China I had injured their dignity.”

  Q. How did you get out?

  A. “After twenty months I was sent to a camp at Yotokun in South Ham-gyong Province, a place surrounded by 1,800-meter mountains. I was lucky that I had connections, so I was able to get out of the dungeon. Others would never get out.”

  Q. Who else was at the camp?

  A. “There was a son ofthe ambassador to China who had said the Soviet Union was a good nation. State Security inferred that he meant Gorbachev’s rule was better than Kim Il-sung’s, so he was sent to the camp.

  “The camp was divided into two parts. Prisoners in one part never get out. Kim Hyon-hui’s family is there. In the other part are people who may get out some day. In the center of that part are individual political prisoners, and around them are the prisoners who have their families ?with them. The rations are the same in both parts of the camp.” Q. Tell me about conditions at the camp.

  A. “I got 120 grams of corn three times a day the same as in prison, plus salt and a weed called shiregi. That’s all. They worked us tremendously hard in the mines or timbering. I talked with some other defectors and even they don’t believe all I went through. Nowadays when I go to give speeches, I tell my audiences there is nothing on earth you can’t eat. You can eat any grass that grows, mice, snakes, anything crawling on the floor. Many people die from lack of vitamins. I’m 175 centimeters tall [5 feet 7 inches] and weighed 38 kilograms [84 pounds] when I came out of the camp in 1989. My parents had prepared two boxes of ginseng to help me recover. Now I weigh 68 kilograms [150 pounds].

  “It still hurts me to this day to talk about my life there. I was very lucky. Grandfather wrote letters and I got out after one year and four months.

  “I buried so many people there who died of malnutrition. The pitiful thing is that when someone died, everyone rushed to get the dead person’s clothes to wear them.

  “They hit you with an iron pole for talking without permission. My front teeth are all fake—the originals were smashed in prison. My lower teeth were broken, too, in camp. One day we were working and I was too hungry to go on. I looked on the ground and found the bone of a pig—someone had left it. So I crushed it and put it in a pot to make some soup. The guards saw it and said, ‘You aren’t supposed to eat food thrown away by regular people.’ I was tied to a stake and beaten. That’s when my lower jaw was smashed. I’ve invested so much in my teeth since I came to South Korea.

  “Once we were so hungry that about twenty of us went to the pigsty and started eating the pigs’ feed. When I think of it it’s so disgusting. The pig keeper reported us. He complained that the pigs would get thinner because we were eating their feed. They sent us to the river and made us put our heads in the water. The first to put his head up would be beaten brutally. We had to do this until we drank enough water to urinate in our pants.

  “The prison guards used to shoot birds that came into the camp. There were so many gunshots, the birds got to the point they weren’t frightened and wouldn’t move. So the guards sent prisoners to climb to the tops of the trees and shake them so the birds would fly out and the guards could shoot them.

  “One ofmy campmates died after a falling tree cracked his ribs. He got no medical treatment. When you bury someone in Korea, you make a mound ofdirt over the grave. I did that for him, but the prison guards said, ‘Why make a mound for someone as low as a dog?’ They beat me.

  “When Billy Graham visited North Korea, he returned and said Christianity is reviving. I’ll tell you the real story of religious life in North Korea. There’s absolutely no religion in North Korea. I saw so many people in camp who came in because of religious belief. Even secretly praying is enough to get you sent to camp. Probably everyone in North Korea who is a religious believer is sent to a camp. I want to write a letter to Billy Graham: ‘If you really want to know religion in North Korea, go to a prison camp.’ When Billy Graham went to a church service, he should have asked people in the congregation to recite Bible verses.”

  Q. You eventually got out of the camp, and later defected.

  A. “I left the camp on Kim Jong-il’s birthday [February 16], 1989. After I got out, I tried to lead an exemplary life since I had caused so much trouble for my relatives. But I was put under surveillance. To live in a society that closed, one that wouldn’t allow me freedoms—I had to defect.

  “I could have led an affluent life if I had wanted. Many who defect to South Korea do so out of greed and materialism. For me, since I had money in North Korea, I wouldn’t have thought of defecting if there had been a slight chance of individual freedom.

  “Before I was accused of political crimes, I didn’t even know the word politics. But after I got out of the prison camp I was really a political offender. I talked with my friends. I almost got caught again for listening to KBS Radio. My-whole family-would have gone to a camp. That would have been the end of everything. There were about ninety party members in my family. My parents were forced to divorce on account of me. Someone in State Security said I might be sent back, and then all ninety would have gone, too. So the head of State Security advised them to make me an orphan by divorcing.”

  Q. What-was your father’s job?

  A. “He headed a department of external management. Its role was to get investment and money to maintain the hotels around Pyongyang. He was working as a foreign trader, exporting mushrooms and so on, both bartering for goods and selling for money. He gave some of the money to Kim Jong-il and the rest went to the hotels.”

  Q. Were you still playing table tennis when you were arrested? And how did the regime feel about ruining the career of a future champion?

  A. “I was still at the table tennis institute when I was arrested. Even the vice-president’s son is sent to political prison. Why would they spare a mere Ping-Pong star?”

  Q. When Li Song-suk won the 1979 women’s singles world championship, the Pyongyang papers said she had been able to win thanks to the guidance of the Respected and Beloved Great Leader Kim Il-sung. Is he indeed such a renaissance man that, besides his other accomplishments, he ?was a top table tennis trainer as well?

  A. “Kim Il-sung didn’t know how to play. That’s just the usual North Korean formula.”

  Ahn Hyuk escaped from North Korea in January 1992 in company with Kang Chul-hwan, and they made it to South Korea the following August. As we saw in chapter 16, Kang Chul-hwan and his parents and grandmother, ?who had been Korean residents of Japan, spent ten years in a prison camp before relatives in Japan pressured and bribed officials to treat them better. Kang had been only nine when he was imprisoned. After his release he got in further trouble.

  When I met him Kang was in his mid-thirties but still boyish looking. With his hair in bangs over a thin face, he looked perhaps sixteen—an impression accentuated by his student garb: a jacket, like American high-school athletes wear to display their letters, over a turtleneck sweater. He ?was studying business at Hanyang University.

  “It’s such a shame a place like that [prison camp] still exists in this world and is not known to the outside world,” Kang told me. “Because of the nuclear issue, people are not focusing on human rights. That should come first. Along with inspections of nuclear sites, they should have inspections of the prison camps. Isn’t human life the most important value? Just for opposing the Kim Il-sung regime people are sent to such pl
aces. Does that make sense at all?”

  Q. What sort of-work did you do after you got out of the camp?

  A. “At first when we were sent to a farming district I was assigned to a farm group, but I didn’t farm. A little later when we moved to town I got a job in a factory for recycling shoes. I worked as a supplier of raw materials. It helped that I had access to foreign exchange from my relatives. I went to other factories and traded to get the raw materials my factory needed. I wanted to go to Kim Chaek University, so I tried to bribe and study my way in, but I wasn’t admitted. I applied then to Hamhung University, but it was such a poor university that I decided not to enroll.

  “While working for the shoe recycling factory I was feeling negative about things, so I started participating in anti-regime activities. I was listening to South Korean broadcasts and telling friends what I heard. I would sing South Korean popular songs to them. Because of my work as manager of supply, I had a pass to travel all around North Korea. And because I was young I wanted to travel. My friends were all members of the elite. I would propagandize to them against the Kim Il-sung regime. Most university students have anti-regime feelings.