Escape from North Korea (11 page)

At the time of his defection, Hwang Jang-yop was one of the most powerful men in Pyongyang. He was a man “with no intellectual rival,” according to two scholars who have studied his background and influence.
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He was the consummate insider, an intimate of the late Great Leader Kim Il Sung, who died in 1994, and a mentor to his son, Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, whom he had known for nearly forty years.

Hwang Jang-yop held three high-level government appointments. He was secretary of the ruling Korean Workers' Party, chairman of the Supreme People's Assembly, and president of Kim Il Sung University, which is the Harvard, Princeton, and Yale of North Korea. His most notable accomplishment, though, was authorship of the regime's guiding
juche
philosophy of self-reliance. In 1972,
juche
replaced Marxism-Leninism as the official state ideology.
Juche
thought infuses every aspect of North Korean life. Even dates are
given in
juche
years.
Juche
Year 1 is 1912, the year of Kim Il Sung's birth.

Hwang Jang-yop's official responsibilities took him abroad frequently and gave him access to South Koreans perceived as friendly to the North—including the businessman who played a key role in his defection. Hwang Jang-yop plotted his defection for months. On January 30, 1997, he departed Pyongyang for an international seminar in Tokyo on
juche
ideology. After Tokyo, his itinerary called for him to visit the Japanese cities of Kyoto and Nagano before going on to Beijing. His plan was to defect in Japan or China, or if that proved impossible, in India or Thailand in April, when he was to attend a meeting of nonaligned nations in New Delhi. Accompanying him was a close aide, Kim Duk-hong, who planned to defect with him.

In Japan, Hwang Jang-yop found it impossible to break away from his minders. Japanese-Koreans who sympathized with Pyongyang “protected” him round the clock. Later, Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto observed that during Hwang Jang-yop's stay in Japan, “North Korean guards were tightly huddled all around Hwang as if they knew he intended to defect.”
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So Hwang Jang-yop kept to his itinerary and went on to China as scheduled. He arrived in Beijing on February 11; he was to spend the night there before boarding a train for Pyongyang the following afternoon. The next morning, he and Kim Duk-hong left the North Korean Embassy compound, ostensibly to do some shopping at the Great Wall Hotel. Upon arriving at the hotel, the two men sent their embassy handlers on made-up errands and met up by prearrangement in one of the hotel shops with their South Korean–business-man contact. The businessman phoned the South Korean Embassy and asked for a car to pick them up at the hotel.

The embassy refused, arguing that if Hwang Jang-yop and his aide arrived at the facility in an embassy car, it would look as if they'd been kidnapped. Instead, embassy officials told the trio to take a taxi.
So Hwang Jang-yop, Kim Duk-hong, and the South Korean businessman hailed a cab and drove to the embassy's consular section. It all happened quickly. Hwang Jang-yop and Kim Duk-hong left for their shopping expedition at 10 a.m. By 11:30 a.m., the South Korean ambassador had informed the Chinese Foreign Minister of their defection.

Immediately upon his arrival at the South Korea consular section, Hwang Jang-yop sat down at a desk and handwrote a statement that the embassy distributed later. Introspective and personal, the statement was the only human touch in what was quickly turning into high political drama.

His statement began: “Starting with my family, all the people [in North Korea] will judge that I have gone mad when they learn that I have decided to go to the South, abandoning everything. I actually feel—on not a few occasions—that I have gone mad myself.”

As he wrote, Hwang Jang-yop was perhaps thinking about the relatives he had left behind in Pyongyang. They included his wife, a son, and three daughters. He went on to say that he did not expect to live much longer. He was a few days short of his seventy-fourth birthday. His statement concluded: “I hope that my family will consider me dead as of today. If possible, I only wish to help promote reconciliation between the South and the North until the last possible moment.” In this and later public comments, Hwang Jang-yop emphasized that he defected for patriotic reasons. He said that his duty to his country transcended political considerations and his responsibility to his family.

In the weeks, months, and years that followed his defection, Hwang Jang-yop adhered to a constant message: Don't underestimate Kim Jong Il. As he put it in a press conference in Seoul at the time of his arrival in South Korea: “I have come to the Republic of Korea in order to warn about the danger of an armed invasion of the South by the North and to contribute to the peaceful unification of our country.” He spoke repeatedly of the “warlike intention” of
North Korea's ruler and said, “I could not help but agonize in pain at the thought of the tragedy that might befall all Koreans if war were started again.” He presented himself as a patriot loyal to the Korean people on both sides of the DMZ. At first he even denied that he was defecting. The word, with its connotation of betrayal, seemed to repel him. Rather, he said he wanted to move from one part of Korea to another.

Factors other than patriotism might have played a role in Hwang Jang-yop's decision to defect. He was angry at what he saw as the regime's misappropriation of
juche
ideology to create personality cults around Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. It's also possible he feared that his personal political future was in jeopardy. A few months before his defection, he had been forced to write a self-criticism about three ideological mistakes he supposedly had made: He had publicly renounced war with the South whereas Pyongyang's policy was to prepare for war; he had stated that
juche
ideology was an offshoot of Marxism-Leninism, not the sole, glorious creation of the late Kim Il Sung; and he had praised Deng Xiaoping's market reforms in China, which Kim Jong Il had rejected for North Korea. Given this experience, he may have seen what he believed to be the handwriting on the wall: He was about to be purged.

Hwang Jang-yop's defection posed a diplomatic challenge for Beijing, which by 1997 was jockeying to maintain good ties with both Koreas. Despite Pyongyang's urgings, China decided not to apply the two countries' 1986 extradition agreement. Hwang Jang-yop had entered China legally on a diplomatic passport, and Beijing found it convenient to argue that the extradition agreement applied only to North Koreans who had entered the country illegally. Beijing took care not to set a precedent that other North Koreans could cite if they wanted to transit China to South Korea.

This was a high-profile case, and Beijing knew it would face international condemnation if it sent Hwang Jang-yop back to North Korea against his will, as Kim Jong Il initially demanded. It was no
secret what would happen to Hwang Jang-yop if he were repatriated. But just in case anyone had lingering doubts, North Korea provided a well-timed reminder: Three days after Hwang Jang-yop requested political asylum in Beijing, an earlier defector was murdered in Seoul by unknown assailants believed to be North Korean agents. South Korea's prime minister described the murder as retaliation for Hwang Jang-yop's defection.

Pyongyang had initially responded to the defection by accusing South Korean spies of kidnapping Hwang Jang-yop. When the regime realized that China would not buckle to its wishes and repatriate Hwang, Pyongyang dropped these accusations and instead declared, “A coward may leave.” This opened the door for China to work with South Korea in devising a plan for the defectors' transfer to Seoul. The two countries crafted a plan intended to lessen North Korea's public humiliation. Rather than sending Hwang Jang-yop directly to Seoul, they would first transfer him and his aide to a third country. So arrangements were made for Hwang and Kim Duk-hong to visit the Philippines for a month, after which they would travel on to Seoul.
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More significant, and an early hint of how it would treat the coming wave of North Korean refugees in China, Beijing decided not to recognize Hwang Jang-yop as a “refugee” as defined in the Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees, which Beijing had signed but not yet ratified. It was careful to avoid setting a precedent that could pave the way for other North Koreans seeking refugee status. It chose to “expel” Hwang Jang-yop rather than classify him as a refugee or grant him political asylum. On March 18, 1997, five weeks after they defected, Hwang Jang-yop and Kim Duk-hong boarded a Chinese military plane and flew to the Philippines, where they stayed one month. On April 20, they arrived in South Korea.

Contrary to the dire prediction he made in his defection note, Hwang Jang-yop did not die soon after his arrival in South Korea. Rather, his fate was to be a Korean Cassandra, delivering his warnings
about Kim Jong Il to successive South Korean governments that mostly chose to ignore him. In December 1997, eight months after Hwang Jang-yop reached Seoul, Kim Dae-jung was elected president of the country on a platform of outreach to North Korea, and Hwang Jang-yop was effectively silenced. The defector's warnings about the Kim regime in the North were an embarrassment to adherents of Kim Dae-jung's Sunshine Policy.

In Seoul, Hwang Jang-yop survived numerous assassination attempts, including one by North Korean agents several weeks before his death. The defector died of a heart attack in his bathtub at home in Seoul in October 2010 at the age of eighty-seven. He was given a hero's burial in a national cemetery in a ceremony attended by many dignitaries, including the Unification Minister, a former president, and members of Parliament. One attendee called him a “great teacher.” His coffin was covered with the flag of the Republic of Korea. The government of President Lee Myung-bak presented him posthumously with a medal.

Hwang Jang-yop's death reignited the debate over his motives for calling attention to North Korea's human rights abuses. Some believed him to be sincere. They cited the many attempts made on his life as a measure of his bravery. And as proof that he was dedicated to regime change and democracy, they pointed to his fiery radio broadcasts to North Korea on the refugee-run Free North Korea Radio. Others countered that he was merely seeking publicity.

Still others suggested that the old defector was driven by guilt over what happened after he left Pyongyang. Information does not readily make its way out of North Korea, but when it's useful to regime purposes, the authorities make sure that certain news is delivered. And so, not long after Hwang Jong-yop's arrival in Seoul in 1997, word filtered back about the fate of the family and colleagues he had left behind. More than three thousand of his family members, friends, and associates were arrested, including distant relatives who had no idea they were even related to the defector.
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Hwang's
wife was said to have committed suicide. So, too, the reports said, did one of his daughters. She was said to have jumped off a bridge to her death while being transported to a prison camp. Two other daughters, his son, and his grandchildren were lost in the gulag.

This is the reality of life in North Korea—and the truth that Hwang Jang-yop told again and again after his defection.

IN HIDING

BRIDES FOR SALE

H
ow much does a North Korean bride cost?

Steven Kim, an American businessman from Long Island, New York, may be the world's leading expert on the market for North Korean brides. He acquired this expertise accidentally. He likes to say it was God's plan.
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In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Kim lived in China, where he oversaw the manufacture of chairs that he sold to Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and other retail clients in the United States. He was based in an industrial area near the southern boomtown of Guangzhou. On Sundays he would get up early, pack his passport, and drive across the border to Hong Kong to attend a church in Kowloon that had a Korean-language worship service. The round-trip took most of the day, but the inconvenience was worth it. As a Christian living in China, he had few opportunities for worship. The former British colony of Hong Kong, although formally part of China since 1997,
was an enclave of freedom. Under the terms of its return to Beijing, Hong Kong guarantees freedom of religion.

Then one day a more convenient alternative presented itself. Kim happened to hear about a secret church not far from his apartment. The church catered to the South Korean businessmen who worked in the Shenzhen industrial zone. It wasn't registered with the Chinese government, as required by law, so it operated underground, billing itself as a cultural association. There was no sign on the door and no cross on the roof. The hundred or so congregants learned about the church by word of mouth.

Kim was soon a regular attendee. One Sunday he noticed two shabbily dressed men seated in a corner of the room. After worship, he went up to them, said hello, and learned to his astonishment that they were from North Korea. They had escaped across the Tumen River to northeast China and then traveled two thousand miles south to Guangdong Province. It took them two months. They hoped to find a way to slip across the border into Hong Kong.

“They came to church asking for help,” he said. “But the church would only feed them, give them a few dollars, and let them go.”

Kim was outraged. “I asked the pastor, ‘Why do you let them go?' ”