Escape from North Korea
Table of Contents
Praise
Title Page
Dedication
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Introduction
PART I - ESCAPE
Chapter 1 - CROSSING THE RIVER
Chapter 2 - LOOK FOR A BUILDING WITH A CROSS ON IT
Chapter 3 - DEFECTORS
PART II - IN HIDING
Chapter 4 - BRIDES FOR SALE
Chapter 5 - HALF-AND-HALF CHILDREN
Chapter 6 - SIBERIA’S LAST GULAG
Chapter 7 - OLD SOLDIERS
PART III - ON THE RUN
Chapter 8 - HUNTED
Chapter 9 - JESUS ON THE BORDER
Chapter 10 - THE JOURNEY OUT OF CHINA
PART IV - STOCKHOLDERS
Chapter 11 - LET MY PEOPLE GO
Chapter 12 - BE THE VOICE
PART V - LEARNING TO BE FREE
Chapter 13 - ALMOST SAFE
Chapter 14 - UNIFICATION DUMPLINGS
Chapter 15 - LEFT BEHIND
PART VI - THE FUTURE
Chapter 16 - INVADING NORTH KOREA
Chapter 17 - CONCLUSION: ONE FREE KOREA
Acknowledgments
HOW TO HELP
NOTES
INDEX
Copyright Page
Praise for Escape from North Korea
“Melanie Kirkpatrick is one of the finest newspaperwomen of her generation, and she has, in Escape from North Korea, brought in an astonishing scoop—a story that illuminates how America’s own abolitionists, across the centuries and oceans, are inspiring a new underground railroad. Her account reminds us all of why Communist regimes so fear religion.”
—Seth Lipsky, editor of the New York Sun
“Escape from North Korea is a troubling and inspiring story of both man’s inhumanity to his fellow man and a testimony to the indomitable human spirit in the midst of horrific torture and privation. Melanie Kirkpatrick has done us all a great service by telling this compelling story.”
—Richard Land, president of the
Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission
“Kirkpatrick puts the spotlight on one of the greatest tragedies of the postwar world: the transformation of an entire nation into a gulag. But despite the many horrors of North Korea, courage and the human spirit endure. Kirkpatrick’s timely book should convince Koreans and Americans of the immediate need to end North Korea’s totalitarian dictatorship and unify the peninsula under a free and democratic government.”
—John Yoo, professor of law at the
University of California at Berkeley
FOR JACK
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a book about personal courage and the quest for liberty. These qualities are embodied in the North Koreans who dare to escape from their slave-state of a nation to the neighboring, but unwelcoming, country of China. They are embodied, too, in Christian missionaries and other humanitarian workers who help the North Korean runaways flee China and reach sanctuary in free countries. They travel along a secret route known as the new underground railroad.
This is also a book about North Korea’s future. Through the stories recounted in these pages, the reader will catch a glimpse of the potential of the North Korean people, what they and their country could become if they were liberated. The twenty-four thousand North Koreans who have fled to safety in South Korea (or, in a few cases, North America or Europe) constitute a tiny minority of the country’s twenty-four million people. Yet they are the change-makers. They are a bridge to a free and unified Korea. Through their efforts to reach family and friends they have left behind, the fugitives are opening up their information-starved homeland, exposing their countrymen to liberal ideas, and helping to lay the intellectual groundwork for dissent. The escapees already are beginning to transform their country, and they may eventually replace the totalitarian regime that keeps their fellow citizens in chains.
Supreme Leader Kim Jong Eun, North Korea’s young new dictator, understands the threat that the escapees pose to his rule. One of his first acts after succeeding his late father, Kim Jong Il, in December 2011, was to issue a shoot-to-kill order to guards along the Sino-Korean border. Anyone observed fleeing across the Tumen or Yalu River to China was to be stopped, he commanded. Kim Jong Eun reportedly also issued orders for the on-the-spot execution of any North Korean arrested in flight.
Through the North Korean escape stories, I also illustrate the effects that policy decisions made in Beijing, Washington, Seoul, and other world capitals have on the men, women, and children who flee North Korea. I pay particular attention to China, whose forced repatriation of the North Koreans living in China is both morally wrong and illegal under international agreements to which China is a party. Beijing deems the North Koreans “economic migrants,” a status that conveniently ignores Pyongyang’s savagery against its own people, including the use of economic repression, especially the withholding of essential food supplies, as a tool of political control. China’s inhumane repatriation policy also ignores the harsh punishment inflicted upon the North Koreans it sends back against their will.
The principal characters of this narrative are the passengers and conductors on the new underground railroad—the secret network of safe houses and transit routes that crisscrosses China and transports North Koreans to refuge in bordering countries. The new underground railroad is operated by humanitarian workers, largely Christian, from the United States and South Korea, and it is supported by thousands of ordinary men and women in China, Christian and not, who are willing to break their country’s laws and risk imprisonment to assist the North Koreans. Helping a North Korean—even so much as giving him a meal—is a crime in China, punishable by fines, jail sentences, and, in the case of foreigners, deportation after they have served their time in prison. The men and women who rescue North Koreans are acting on the dictum of the eighteenth-century British philosopher Edmund Burke, who warned, “Evil flourishes when good men do nothing.” Enterprising business people—both honest and dishonest in their dealings—also are increasingly active along the new underground railroad, where North Koreans can purchase passage with cash or on credit.
My admiration for the North Koreans who escape and for those who help them is my motivation for writing their untold story, but I also cover areas where both groups fall short. In their zeal to spread their faith, religious workers are sometimes too quick to jeopardize their own lives and those of vulnerable North Koreans. In the United States, too many people in the Korean-American community avert their eyes from the depredations of the regime in Pyongyang and the plight of the North Koreans in China; they fail to use their political clout in Washington on behalf of their fellow Koreans. South Koreans too often treat the North Koreans who settle in their country as strangers rather than brothers.
As for the fugitives themselves, when North Koreans finally reach safety in a third country after surmounting great odds, they can have a difficult time learning to be free. The survival skills that characterize the refugee’s life on the run do not necessarily translate into coping skills in an open, modern society. Even though many North Koreans succeed in their new homes, and some do so spectacularly, others are not up to the task.
I first came to this subject when I was a journalist at the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper whose editorial philosophy is summed up by its unofficial credo: free markets and free people. At the Journal, I had the opportunity to interview many of the heroes of freedom in our time. They were men and women who fought the evils of totalitarianism at great personal risk. Among them were Natan Sharansky and Vladimir Bukovsky of the Soviet Union, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, Lech Walesa of Poland, Fang Lizhi of China, Mart Laar of Estonia, and Martin Lee of Hon
g Kong. These are figures of international prominence, people whose deeds have been in the headlines, who have written books, and, in a few cases, who became leaders of the countries they helped liberate.
In researching this book, I interviewed many North Koreans who fled their country, including, in 2006, members of the first tiny group of refugees to arrive in the United States. In contrast to the internationally prominent heroes of freedom mentioned above, the North Korean freedom-seekers and their rescuers are mostly invisible. This book is an effort to make their stories known and, in some cases, their names as well. I say “some” because many of the North Koreans I spoke to asked that their names and other identifying information be kept secret in order to protect loved ones back home. The regime in Pyongyang practices collective punishment. Fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, sons and daughters are punished for the supposed crime of a relative.
Many of the Christians and humanitarian workers prefer anonymity, too, out of a concern that publicity would jeopardize their rescue work. A number of the government officials with whom I spoke also asked for confidentiality, in the belief that public statements could hamper their country’s diplomatic efforts on behalf of the North Korean refugees. If anyone I interviewed asked me to keep his name confidential, I have honored that request. In the course of researching this book, I have interviewed more than two hundred people in South Korea, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and the United States. They include dozens of North Koreans, as well as Christian missionaries, humanitarian workers, community leaders, military officers, government officials, and scholars.
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”
In 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 famil
y 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.