Escape from Camp 14 (15 page)

The word Shin uses again and again to describe those first days is ‘shock’.

It was not meaningful to him that North Korea in the dead of winter is ugly, dirty and dark, or that it is poorer than Sudan, or that, taken as a whole, it is viewed by human rights groups as
the world’s largest prison.

His context had been twenty-three years in an open-air cage run by men who hanged his mother, shot his brother, crippled his father, murdered pregnant women, beat children to death, taught him
to betray his family and tortured him over a fire.

He felt wonderfully free and, as best he could determine, no one was looking for him.

He was also weak with hunger, and as he wandered the streets, he began searching for an empty house where he could eat and rest. He found one at the end of a small road. Tearing open a rear
window made of vinyl, he climbed inside.

In the kitchen, he found three bowls of cooked rice. He guessed that someone who would soon return had prepared it. Afraid to risk eating or sleeping in the house, he emptied the rice into a
plastic bag and spooned in some soybean paste he found on a shelf.

Searching the rest of the house, he found a pair of winter-weight trousers draped over a hanger and another pair of shoes. He also found a rucksack and a dark brown winter coat, which was
military in style and much warmer than any coat he had ever worn. He opened one last kitchen drawer and found a ten-pound bag of rice, which he stuffed in the rucksack and left.

Near the centre of Bukchang, a market lady shouted at him. She wanted to know what was in his rucksack and if he had anything to sell. Trying to keep calm, Shin said he had some rice. She
offered to buy it for four thousand North Korean won, which was worth about four dollars at blackmarket exchange rates.

Shin had first learned about the existence of money from Park. Before the market lady yelled at him, he had watched in wonder as people used small pieces of paper, which he guessed was money, to
buy food and other goods.

He had no idea if four thousand won was a fair price for his stolen rice, but he happily sold it and bought some crackers and cookies. He pocketed the remaining money and left town on foot. His
destination was China, but he still didn’t know where that might be.

On the road, Shin encountered several shabby-looking men and eavesdropped on their conversations. They were searching for work, scrounging for food, travelling among street markets and trying to
steer clear of the police. One or two of them asked Shin where he was from. He said he had grown up in the Bukchang area, which was true enough and seemed to satisfy their curiosity.

Shin soon figured out that most of these men were strangers to each other, but he was afraid to ask too many questions. He did not want to feel an obligation to talk about himself.

According to a survey of more than thirteen hundred North Korean refugees that was conducted in China in late 2004 and 2005,
¹
the people wandering
around North Korea at that time were mostly unemployed labourers and failed farmers, as well as students, soldiers, technicians and a few former government officials.

The survey suggested they were on the road primarily for economic reasons, hoping to find work or trade in China. Their lives had been exceedingly difficult and their relationship with the
government was strained: nearly a quarter of the men and thirty-seven per cent of the women said family members had died of hunger. More than a quarter of them had been arrested in North Korea, and
ten per cent said they had been sent to jails, where forced starvation, torture and executions were commonplace. To get out of North Korea, more than half of the refugees said they used cash to
bribe officials or buy help from professional smugglers.

Shin fell in with these wanderers, guessing he would be safer in their company than travelling by himself. He tried to copy the behaviour of the men he met on the road. It was not difficult.
Like him, they dressed shabbily, looked dirty, smelled bad and were desperate for food.

As a police state, North Korea does not tolerate intercity vagabonds. Laws strictly prohibit citizens from travelling between cities without proper authorization. But in the
aftermath of the famine – with the collapse of the state-run economy, the rise of private markets and the near ubiquity of traders hustling around the country with goods smuggled from China
– laws were often ignored. Police could be bribed; indeed, many lived off bribes. Vagabonds with a bit of cash could travel towards China without attracting attention.

There are no reliable numbers on defections to China, or on the movement of people drifting around inside North Korea. The odds of avoiding arrest and successfully crossing to China seem to
change from season to season. It depends on how recently the North Korean government has ordered a security crackdown, how vigilant Chinese authorities are in repatriating defectors, how willing
border guards are to take bribes and how desperate North Koreans are to cross the border. The North Korean government has created new labour camps to hold traders and travellers too poor or unlucky
to bribe their way north.

One trend, though, is clear. The number of North Koreans seeking asylum in South Korea has increased nearly every year since 1995. Forty-one arrived in 1995. By 2009, the number had jumped to
nearly three thousand. More defectors turned up in the South between 2005 and 2011 than fled North Korea over the entire period since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

When Shin began walking towards the border in January 2005, conditions for escape seem to have been relatively good. Numerical evidence can be found in the large number of North Koreans –
about forty-five hundred – who arrived in South Korea in 2006 and 2007. It usually takes a year or two for defectors to find their way from China to South Korea.

The permeability of North Korea’s border tends to improve when border guards and local officials can accept bribes without draconian punishment from higher-ups.

‘More than ever, money talks,’ said Chun Ki-won, a minister in Seoul who told me that between 2000 and 2008 he helped more than six hundred North Koreans cross into China and make
their way to South Korea.

By the time Shin crawled through the electric fence, there was a well-established human smuggling network with tentacles that reached deep inside North Korea. Chun and several other Seoul-based
operatives told me that given enough money they could get virtually any North Korean out of the country.

Using word of mouth, brokers in Seoul offered ‘planned escapes’. A low-budget version cost less than two thousand dollars. It involved months or years of travel through China, via
Thailand or Vietnam, to Seoul, and it could require treacherous river crossings, arduous travel on foot and weeks of waiting in an unsanitary Thai refugee camp.

A first-class planned escape, complete with a forged Chinese passport and an air ticket from Beijing to Seoul, sold for ten thousand dollars or more. From start to finish, brokers and defectors
said, going first class could take as little as three weeks.

Activist pastors from South Korean churches invented the escape trade in the late 1990s and early 2000s, hiring border operatives who greased the palms of North Korean guards with cash donated
by parishioners in Seoul. By the time Shin hit the road, defectors, many of them former North Korean military and police officers, had taken over the trade and were quietly running profitable
operations.

This new breed of brokers would often receive advance payment in cash from affluent or middle-income South Korean families seeking the release of a relative. They sometimes worked on an
instalment plan, taking little or no money up front from a defector or his family. When an instalment-plan defector arrived in Seoul, however, and had access to some of the forty thousand dollars
or more that the South Korean government gives to new arrivals from the North, brokers usually demanded far more money than their basic fee.

‘My boss is willing to put up all the money to pay bribes to get someone out,’ said a Seoul-based broker and former North Korean military officer who worked for a smuggling operation
based in China. ‘But when you get to Seoul, you have to pay double for this service.’

By 2008, many North Korean defectors were so deeply in debt to their smugglers that the South Korean government changed the way it distributed its cash support. Instead of offering lump-sum
payments, the money was paid out over time, with incentives for those who found and held jobs. About a quarter of the money also went directly on housing, eliminating any chance that it could be
paid to a broker.

Using their personal and institutional contacts in the North, brokers hired guides to escort people from their homes in North Korea to the Chinese border, where they were handed over to
Chinese-speaking guides, who drove them to Beijing Airport.

Outside Seoul, I talked to a North Korean defector who had paid twelve thousand dollars to a broker to smuggle out her eleven-year-old son in 2002.

‘I didn’t know it could happen so fast,’ said the mother, who did not want to disclose her name because she and her siblings were paying another broker to smuggle out their
mother at the time. ‘It took only five days for my son to be plucked out and taken across the river into China. I was dumbfounded when I got a call from officials at Seoul airport to tell me
my son was here.’

At the border and inside the country, the North Korean government has tried to crush these smuggling operations – and periodically it succeeds.

‘A lot of people get caught,’ Lee Jeong Yeon, a former North Korean border officer, told me. ‘The policy is for one hundred per cent execution of those caught helping people to
defect. I personally saw several such executions. The successful brokers are experienced people who have good contacts in the military, and they bribe the guards,’ he said. ‘Guards are
rotated often, and new people have to be bribed.’

Lee, whose identity was confirmed by South Korean intelligence officials, worked for three years along the China–North Korea border. He supervised undercover agents who pretended to be
brokers and guides in order to infiltrate and disrupt the smuggling trade. After his defection to the South, Lee told me he had used his contacts in the North to smuggle out thirty-four people to
freedom.

Shin did not have the awareness, the money, or the contacts to use smuggling networks, and he certainly did not have anyone outside the country to engage professionals on his
behalf.

But by keeping his mouth shut and his eyes open he entered the slipstream of smuggling, trading and petty bribery that had become North Korea’s post-famine economy.

Traders showed him haystacks where he could sleep, neighbourhoods where he could break into houses and markets where he could trade stolen goods for food. Shin often shared food with them in the
evening as they all huddled around roadside fires.

As he walked out of Bukchang that day, wearing his newly stolen coat and carrying a small cache of cookies, Shin joined a small group of traders that, by chance, was going north.

Unless he could get far away – and quickly – Shin feared he would soon be caught.

He walked nine miles to a small mountain town called Maengsan, where traders told him that a truck would show up near the central market. For a small fee, it hauled passengers to the train
station in Hamhung, the second largest city in North Korea.

Shin had not yet learned enough geography to know where Hamhung was. But he did not care. He was desperate to find a means of transportation other than his aching legs. It had been three days
since he crawled through the electric fence, and he was still only about fifteen miles from Camp 14.

After queuing up with traders waiting for the truck, he managed to pile into the back. The road was bad and the sixty-mile journey to Hamhung took all day and into the night. In the back of the
truck, a couple of men asked Shin where he had come from and where he was headed. Unsure who they were or why they were asking, Shin feigned confusion and said nothing. The men lost interest and
ignored him.

Unknown to him, the timing of Shin’s travel was excellent.

Intercity travel in North Korea had once been impossible without a travel permit, which would be stamped or folded into a ‘citizen’s certificate’, a passport-sized document
modelled after the old Soviet identification card. Camp-bred prisoners like Shin were never issued a citizen’s certificate.

For North Koreans who did not have them, travel permits were hard to come by. They were usually issued for work-related reasons or for a family event that could be confirmed by bureaucrats, such
as a wedding or a funeral. But systematic police checks of these documents had largely ended by 1997 – with the exception of travellers bound for Pyongyang and other restricted
areas
¹
– when the rules eased as famine drove people out on the roads in search of food. Since then, bribes from traders have kept police and
other security officials from enforcing the law. Put bluntly, the greed of North Korea’s cash-hungry cadre seemed to enable Shin’s trek.

In all probability, the truck he rode in was a military vehicle that had been illegally converted into a for-profit people mover. The system, known as
servi-cha
or service car, was
invented in the late 1990s by government and military elites to milk cash from traders who needed to move themselves and their goods around the country. It was part of an upstart transportation
system that the Daily NK, a Seoul-based website with informants in the North, describes as the country’s ‘core transportation tool’ and probably the ‘most decisive influence
on the growth’ of private markets.
²

In North Korea, vehicles are owned not by individuals but by the government, the party and the military. Savvy operators within these organizations diverted trucks and colluded with smugglers to
import fleets of secondhand cars, vans and buses from China. After the vehicles were registered in the name of state entities, private drivers were hired and wanderers like Shin were offered
low-cost, no-questions-asked transport around much of the country.