Escape from North Korea (2 page)

North Koreans who reach South Korea go through a government-sponsored resettlement program at an institute outside Seoul called Hanawon.
Hanawon
is a hopeful name that translates into English as “house of unity” or, more poetically, “one country.” The director of Hanawon meets with each class that passes through the institute's three-month training program. “You are the winners,” she tells them. “You are the survivors. You are strong.”

If there is one story that is missed in the extensive media coverage of North Korea, it is the story of these winners. Sixty years of political oppression have not dulled North Koreans' appetite for freedom. The Christians and humanitarian workers devoted to this cause see their mission as the liberation of North Korea, one person at a time.

All the North Koreans I interviewed want to return to their home country one day. Their personal experiences of life in modern, free countries are preparing them for future leadership roles in the North. The bravery, enterprise, and persistence necessary for their perilous journey on the new underground railroad will serve them and their country well in years to come, when North Korea is finally free.

INTRODUCTION: “I AM A MAN AMONG MEN”

I
n the spring of 1857, the antislavery Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia copied into its confidential
Underground Railroad Record
an excerpt from a letter it had received from Abram Harris, a former slave who had escaped from his master in Charles County, Maryland.

Some weeks earlier, Harris had reached the Philadelphia station along the Underground Railroad that transported fugitive American slaves to safety in Canada. He traveled by night, barely eluding the slave catchers who were hot on his heels. The friend with whom he fled was not so lucky. He died along the journey, “the first instance of death on the Underground Rail Road in this region,” the
Record
states.

The Vigilance Committee kept meticulous notes on the slaves who passed through its territory and what happened to them after they departed Philadelphia. Harris, the
Record
notes, was “a man of
medium size, tall, dark chestnut color.” He “could read and write a little and was very intelligent.” The Committee recorded that it fed and housed Harris before handing him over to another conductor and dispatching him farther north to the next depot on the Underground Railroad.

The
Record
doesn't say how Harris reached his final destination in Canada. He could have hidden in a boat that sailed from the young metropolis of Buffalo, New York, across Lake Erie to a private dock on the Canadian shore. Or perhaps a New England abolitionist guided him at night over the sparsely guarded, wooded border in Vermont. However he achieved his freedom, Abram Harris expressed his relief and happiness. Written from the newfound safety of Canada, the former slave's letter sings with joy.

“Give my love to Mr. _____ and family,” he writes—the name of the Philadelphian who helped him was redacted in case the
Record
fell into the wrong hands
.
“And tell them I am in a land of liberty! I am a man among men!”
¹

Now, fast-forward 150 years and consider the story of a young woman who escaped from the slave-state of North Korea. “Hannah” is a modern-day Abram Harris. She rode the new underground railroad across China to temporary refuge in Southeast Asia and eventually to a permanent home in the United States. I interviewed her in 2006 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a few days after she arrived in her new country. She was among the first group of North Koreans to be granted political asylum in America. We spent an afternoon together, closeted in the windowless conference room of a New Jersey hotel not far from Newark Liberty International Airport.

Hannah used her English name—call it a
nom de liberté
—given to her by the Christian pastor who helped her get out of China.
Her escape route along the new underground railroad took her from a rural village in northeast China more than two thousand miles across the country to the southwestern city of Kunming. From there, she slipped into Laos and then Thailand before finally going on to the United States.

Hannah asked me to use her new first name. Her real name, she feared, might attract the notice of the regime in North Korea. According to a dictate laid down by the late Kim Il Sung, founding father of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and its Eternal President, the crimes of an individual are paid for by three generations of his family. It is against the law for a citizen to leave North Korea without government approval. The relatives of escaped North Koreans who come to the attention of Pyongyang have been known to disappear into the country's vast prison system or suffer unfortunate “accidents.” Hannah's husband and daughter still live in North Korea.

Like that of the former slave American slave Abram Harris, Hannah's mood was euphoric. We had reached the end of the interview; she had recounted some of the horrors she experienced in North Korea and then in China, where she had been sold as a bride to a farmer. Like every trafficked bride I've interviewed, Hannah remembered the price for which she was sold. She fetched 20,000 Chinese yuan, she recalled, roughly $2,400. Her new “husband” threatened to beat her to death if she didn't submit to him. “North Koreans like you are easier to kill than a chicken,” he told her.

My notebook closed, I asked Hannah how she felt about being in the United States. She smiled—the first time she'd done so in our four hours together. Her words echoed those of Abram Harris more than a century and a half earlier.

“My heart feels free,” she said.

More than twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, North Korea remains the world's last closed totalitarian state, intent on keeping foreigners out and its own citizens in. It is a modern-day Hermit Kingdom, a throwback to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the isolationist policies of the Chosun Dynasty, which sealed Korea's borders to every nation except China and decreed it a capital crime to leave the country. The rulers feared outside influence. Koreans who left the country and then dared to return were executed.

Today it is hard to overstate the isolation that North Koreans endure. Radios are fixed by law to government-run stations, and listening to foreign radio broadcasts is a crime. Cellphone use is limited to calls within the country. The Internet is forbidden to all but a chosen few, among them the late dictator Kim Jong Il, who in 2000 famously asked visiting American Secretary of State Madeleine Albright for her email address. Only twenty-three countries have embassies in Pyongyang.
²

The darkness in which the Kim family regime keeps the country is more than metaphorical. It is not only an information blackout. It is a literal blackout. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Chinese border city of Dandong, situated on the Yalu River directly across the water from the North Korean trading port of Sinuiju. The Chinese city's brightness stands in dramatic contrast to the North Korean side of the river. At night, Dandong's waterfront sparkles like a carnival. The high-rise apartment buildings that line the shoreline drive are outlined in neon. Downtown, signs for hotels, seafood restaurants, and trading companies flash brightly. The riverside park is studded every few yards with street lamps that cast a soft, golden glow. The most prominent feature of Dandong after dark is the Friendship Bridge that connects the two cities across the Yalu. The bridge's silhouette is traced in running lights that cycle from blue to red to green to yellow every few minutes.

And on the North Korean side of the river? If there is a moon and the night is clear, you might be able to see a dim light or two in a low building. On a moonless night, the opposite shore is black. No one standing in Dandong would be able to tell that there was a city of 360,000 people on the other side of the Friendship Bridge. North Korea is so short of electricity that much of the country is switched off in the early evening. Like medieval peasants, North Koreans go to bed with the sun. So accustomed are North Koreans to the lack of light that when I asked a North Korean who had settled in an American city if there was anything she missed from home, she replied, “the darkness.”
³

In October 2006, shortly after North Korea conducted a nuclear test, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld unveiled to the press a striking satellite image of the Korean Peninsula at night. The photograph showed the northern half of the peninsula completely in the dark except for a speck of light, which indicated the location of the capital, Pyongyang. South Korea's portion of the peninsula, in contrast, was aglow, its myriad cities alive with light.

South Korea's luminosity is a shining testimony to its advanced economy. In 2010, the World Bank reported that it was the world's fourteenth-largest economy, with a gross domestic product of $1.45 trillion and a per-capita income of nearly $20,000.
⁴
Reliable statistics from North Korea have proven so elusive that the World Bank refuses even to estimate the size of its paltry economy. The satellite photo “says it all,” Rumsfeld commented. “There's the South, the same people as the North, the same resources, North and South, and the big difference is in the South, it's a free political system and a free economic system.”
⁵

North Korea ranks at the bottom of every international measure of freedom. It is dead last, after Cuba and Zimbabwe, in the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal Index of Economic Freedom.
⁶
Freedom House's annual survey of political rights and civil liberties
categorizes it as “not free.”
⁷
North Korea is the world's worst persecutor of Christians, according to Open Doors International, which evaluates religious liberty worldwide.
⁸
North Korea is also the world's worst abuser of human rights. The United Nations' special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea has called the country's record “abysmal,” citing food shortages, public executions, and torture.
⁹

According to South Korea's National Human Rights Commission, two hundred thousand men, women, and children—almost 1 percent of the population—are locked up in gulag-style political prisons known as
kwan li so,
which are located in remote mountainous regions. The inmates' ideological crimes include offenses such as possessing a Bible or disrespecting photographs of Kim Il Sung, the late founder of the Democratic People's Republic, or Kim Jong Il, his son and, until his death in 2011, successor as the country's dictator. “The inmates are suffering starvation, torture, forced labor, rape, and executions out of [the eye of] global attention,” the report from Seoul said.
¹⁰
Some sections of the political prison camps are designated “total control zones.” They house “enemies of the people” who are deemed incorrigible and are serving life sentences with no possibility of release. Several hundred thousand North Koreans have died in the political prison camps from torture, starvation, disease, and execution, according to the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.
¹¹
The total number of dead may be as high as one million, according to the human-rights group Christian Solidarity Worldwide.
¹²