Escape from North Korea (3 page)

Food might be scarce in North Korea, but if there is one thing the country has an abundance of, it is jails. In addition to those being held in political prison camps, thousands of North Koreans are imprisoned in another type of prison called labor-through-reeducation camps. The sentences at the labor camps are usually shorter than those in the
kwan li so
—that is, there is a chance that the authorities will eventually permit an inmate to go home—but the living
conditions are equally bad. In both types of prisons, the inmates are overworked, underfed, and subjected to extraordinary degrees of violence. Many don't survive the experience. Pyongyang bars the International Red Cross from inspecting any of the prison camps.

Beyond the
kwan li so
and the labor camps is a hierarchy of well-used local detention centers. Economist Marcus Noland reported that an astonishing 100 percent of the North Korean refugees he interviewed in China said they had had the experience of being detained by police in North Korea. “They could be walking down the street and hauled off to the police station to be interviewed for four or five hours,” he said. In many cases, a well-placed bribe secured their release. Only 12.5 percent of the refugees Noland interviewed enjoyed any legal process. His most striking finding, however, had to do with the treatment of people while in custody. “While detained, they were subjected to an extraordinary degree of brutality,” Noland said. “The political prisons [
kwan li so
] are only a mild escalation in brutality.”
¹³

In short, North Korea is hell on earth. Refugees' stories of life in North Korea's prisons recall
The Triumph of Death
, the sixteenth-century painting by Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder. In Bruegel's images, armies of skeletons kill men, women, and children in a variety of gruesome ways—slitting throats, drowning, hanging, beheading, slaughtering with scythes. A starving dog nibbles on the face of a child.

From North Koreans who have fled, I have heard accounts of tortures that rival Bruegel's images. They speak of beatings, public hangings, firing squads, and forced abortions. At a press conference in Washington, D.C., I listened to a young man describe an episode he had witnessed at the prison camp where he had been incarcerated after being captured in China and repatriated to North Korea. One morning at roll call, he recounted, an inmate who had been badly beaten during the night was too sick to get out of bed. The guards
ordered his fellow prisoners to carry the injured man into the woods and bury him alive. “I keep thinking, maybe he would still be alive if we hadn't buried him,” the young man told the reporters in Washington. He didn't want his name used, for fear of retribution against his family in North Korea. But he told us the name of the man he buried, and I record it here: Kim Young-jin.

“I am very glad to be here and tell the people in America how life in North Korea really is,”
¹⁴
the man who escaped told reporters.

For North Koreans who flee to China, there is another circle of hell: life on the run. North Koreans hiding in China eke out a precarious and secretive existence, forced underground by China's policy of repatriation. The policy, in contravention of international law, is to send the refugees back to North Korea, where they face savage treatment for the crime of leaving the country without permission. China refuses to let the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees or any other international aid group help the North Koreans. The plight of the North Koreans hiding in China is a humanitarian disaster. Yet most of the world has never heard about it.

I have interviewed dozens of North Koreans who have reached freedom in South Korea, the United States, or elsewhere and heard what most prefer to call their “testimonies.” It is an apt word. In speaking out, the North Koreans are presenting evidence against the immoral regime they fled. They are putting their stories on the record for the day when the Kim family regime and the vicious elite who run the country are gone. Their stories are also an indictment of China.

The majority of North Koreans in China are women, many of whom are victims of human trafficking. Some work in brothels or in the online pornography business. A high percentage are sold, or sell themselves, as brides to Chinese men, especially in rural areas, where men are desperate for wives. North Korean men who flee to China work as loggers or laborers. They routinely are exploited by
employers who threaten to turn them over to the Chinese authorities. North Korean children who have become separated from their parents in China roam the streets or take refuge in train stations until they are noticed by the police, rounded up, and sent back to the North. The children of Chinese men and North Korean women also fare badly, effectively denied citizenship by the governments of both countries, neither of which wants to acknowledge the children of “impure” blood. Providing shelters for these half-Chinese, half-Korean children is a growth industry for Christian missionaries in northeast China.

This book is the story of the new underground railroad that a few courageous North Koreans ride across China to freedom in South Korea or the West. It is the story of the small number of North Koreans who dare to flee. It records how they do so and describes the challenges they face in learning to be free in their new homes. It records, too, what happens to those who fail.

The new underground railroad begins in northeast China, near the 880-mile border that China shares with North Korea. This is the region that used to be known as Manchuria after the Manchu invaders, who ruled China during the 1644–1911 Qing Dynasty. Today it is called
Dongbei
in Chinese, which translates into English as “the Northeast.” The vast region stretches from just north of Beijing to the border of Siberia and the Russian Far East. Dongbei encompasses the provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning and is home to approximately two million Chinese of Korean descent. The Korean-Chinese in northeast China constitute one of China's fifty-five official ethnic minorities. Most are bilingual, fluent in both Mandarin Chinese and Korean. Many have relatives in the northern reaches of North Korea. The Tumen and Yalu Rivers define the border separating the two countries.

The route of the new underground railroad varies. Sometimes it goes north to Mongolia or Russia. Most often it passes through the Golden Triangle area of Southeast Asia. After traveling thousands of miles across China, the passengers on the new underground railroad cross clandestinely into a third country, where they wait for months or occasionally even years for permission to settle in South Korea or the West. Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Burma all provide sanctuaries for the North Koreans, although none wishes to advertise it out of concern for antagonizing their muscular neighbor, China.

Like the Underground Railroad of pre–Civil War America, the new underground railroad across China is an ever-shifting network of secret routes and safe houses. It is run by small groups of rescuers, both humanitarians and brokers, who work mostly independently. Even within a single cell, it is rare for an individual rescuer to know every detail of every escape route. There is safety in limiting operational knowledge. If one person is arrested and interrogated, he won't endanger the entire network.

Some of the rescuers staff the shelters where North Koreans are fed, housed, and prepared for their journey if they decide to flee. To get out of China without being caught, the fugitives need new clothes to help them blend in. Depending on what role they are playing—South Korean businessman? Korean-American tourist? Chinese citizen?—they also need instruction in how to behave on their journey so they won't call attention to themselves. North Koreans stick out in China, even in the northeast region that is home to so many ethnic Koreans. One giveaway is their physical condition. Chronic malnutrition has made North Koreans shorter and thinner than the average Chinese person. “You can tell by their hair,” one North Korean woman who settled in South Korea told me. “A North Korean's hair is dull and full of split ends. Chinese are well fed, and their hair is shiny.”
¹⁵

Still other rescuers do the dangerous work of guiding, accompanying the refugees along a portion of their journey or throughout the entire route. The rescuers' presence provides camouflage, and their Chinese-language skills can be critical in interacting with the public. Other rescuers act as liaisons. The humanitarians often work with brokers, for whom the transportation of people on the new underground railroad is a growing business. Or rescuers interact with the local Chinese Christian community; the activities of these Christians are closely monitored by the government, so they can provide only minimal support to the refugees.

Like the fugitive slaves of the American South, North Koreans must begin their journey unaided. Escaping the slave master—getting out of North Korea—is the dangerous first step. A failed attempt brings dire consequences. If a runaway is spotted by border guards on the Korean side of the frontier, he can be shot on the spot. If he is taken alive, he is hauled off to one of the North's detention centers or prison camps. Incarceration is also the fate of those who are captured on the Chinese side of the border and returned to the North. Runaways in China who are forced to return and whom North Korea suspects of having come into contact with Americans, South Koreans, or Christians fare worst of all. They are treated as traitors and dispatched to the
kwan li so
.

In early 2012, news organizations with sources in North Korea reported a sharp crackdown on border crossings, following the personal orders of the country's new leader, Kim Jong Eun. Free North Korea Radio, run by North Korean defectors in Seoul, said that North Korea was planting landmines on its side of the border to deter would-be crossers. The Daily NK, a defector-run Web journal, reported that North Korea had placed nail-studded boards on the banks of the rivers that separated North Korea from China. According to the South Korean
JoongAng Daily
, Kim Jong Eun issued shoot-to-kill orders to the border guards and also ordered the immediate
executions of North Koreans arrested trying to cross the border. The U.S.-based Radio Free Asia reported that North Korean security guards shot three North Koreans who were trying to cross the Yalu River on New Year's Eve, 2011.

In the decades prior to the American Civil War, the Underground Railroad helped speed an estimated one hundred thousand fugitive slaves to liberty in a free state or in Canada. Upper Canada (the modern-day province of Ontario) had abolished slavery in 1793—the first overseas territory of the British Empire to do so. In 1833, the British Parliament abolished slavery in most of the British Empire.

The word “railroad” was a useful metaphor for the rescue operations run by antislavery activists, with its connotations of moving people quickly, efficiently, and anonymously. The rescuers used railroad nomenclature to describe what they did. The guides were known as “conductors,” and the escaped slaves were “passengers” with “tickets.” Safe houses were “depots” run by “station masters.” In public, runaways were sometimes referred to as “freight” or “baggage” or “packages” in order to deflect attention from the rescue operations. The “branch lines” of the Underground Railroad zigzagged deliberately in order to confuse bounty hunters who were pursuing the fugitive slaves.

It was dangerous work for both passenger and conductor. Captured slaves faced harsh treatment when they were returned to their owners. To discourage others from taking flight, returnees might be whipped in front of their fellow slaves or sometimes even killed. If they had worked at light labor, their masters might sell them as field hands into the Deep South, where they had less chance of escaping again. Owners sometimes took retribution on the escaped slave's family.

Rescuers who were caught also faced retribution—financial and worse. In the South, anyone caught helping slaves escape could expect to lose his life. If he wasn't strung up by locals practicing vigilante justice, he could be hanged after being convicted in a court of law. William Still's
Underground Railroad Record
records the fate of one rescuer, a white man who was arrested while helping a family of five slaves escape. He was last seen alive near the Cumberland River in Kentucky. He was later found “drowned, with his hands and feet in chains and his skull fractured.”
¹⁶