Escape from Camp 14

by Blaine Harden

  ‘Hello, isn’t it cold?’ he said to an elderly man crouched on the steps of the Gomusan train station.

  Shin offered crackers.

  ‘Oh, thank you so much,’ the man said. ‘May I ask where you are from?’

  Shin had come up with a truthful but vague answer. He said he had run away from home in South Pyongan Province, where Camp 14 is located, because he was hungry and life was hard.

  The old man said his life had been much easier when he lived in China, where food and work were easy to find. Eight months earlier, the man said, Chinese police had arrested him and sent him back to North Korea, where he had served a few months in a labour camp. He asked if Shin had considered going there.

  ‘Can anyone cross over to China?’ Shin said, trying to control his curiosity and excitement.

  The old man needed little prompting. He talked about China for more than half a day, explaining where to cross the Tumen and how to behave at the checkpoints near the border. Most of the guards, he said, were eager for bribes. His other instructions were, when guards ask for identification, give them a few cigarettes and a package of crackers, along with small amounts of cash. Tell them you are a soldier. Tell them you are going to visit family members in China.

  Early the next morning, Shin hopped aboard a coal train bound for nearby Musan, a mining town on the border. He had been warned that the town was crawling with soldiers, so he jumped from the train as it slowed to enter Musan station and headed southwest on foot. He walked all day – about eighteen miles – looking for a stretch of the Tumen that was shallow and easy to cross.

  With no identification papers, Shin knew he would be arrested if border guards did their job. At the first checkpoint, a guard asked for his papers. Trying to hide his fear, Shin said he was a soldier returning home. It helped that his clothing and woollen hat, stolen back in Gilju, were the dark green of army uniforms.

  ‘Here, smoke this,’ Shin said, handing the guard two packs of cigarettes.

  The guard took the cigarettes and gestured for Shin to pass.

  At a second checkpoint, another guard asked Shin for identification. Again he proffered cigarettes and a bag of crackers. Walking on, he met a third border guard and a fourth. They were young, scrawny and hungry. Before Shin could say a word, they asked him for cigarettes and food but, crucially, not for any identification.

  Shin could not have escaped North Korea without an abundance of luck, especially at the border. As he bribed his way towards China in late January 2005, a window happened to be open, allowing relatively low-risk illegal passage across the border.

  The North Korean government had been forced – by catastrophic famine in the mid-1990s and the importance of Chinese foodstuffs in feeding the population – to tolerate a porous border with China. That tolerance became semi-official policy in 2000, when North Korea promised leniency to those who had fled the country in search of food. It was a belated admission that tens of thousands of famine-stricken North Koreans had already gone to China and that the country was increasingly dependent on their remittances. Also, by 2000, traders had begun to move back and forth across the border in their thousands, supplying food and goods for markets that had all but replaced the government’s public distribution system.

  Following Kim’s decree, arrested border crossers were released after a few days of questioning or, at most, a few months in a labour camp, unless interrogators determined that they’d had contact in China with South Koreans or missionaries.1 The North Korean government also began to recognize and enable the role of traders in feeding the population. After six months of paperwork and a background check, government officials – especially if they had received bribes – would sometimes issue certificates to traders that allowed them to cross back and forth into China legally.2

  A porous border changed lives. Regular travellers to rural parts of North Korea noticed that far more people seemed to be wearing warm winter coats and that private markets were selling used Chinese television sets and video players, along with pirate video tapes and video CDs. (Video CDs offer much lower resolution than DVDs, but CD players were cheaper than DVD players and more affordable to North Koreans.)

  North Korean defectors arriving in Seoul said that Chinese-made transistor radios had allowed them to listen to Chinese and South Korean stations, as well as to Radio Free Asia and Voice of America. Many told stories of how they had become addicted to Hollywood movies and South Korean soap operas.

  ‘We closed the drapes and turned the volume down low whenever we watched the James Bond videos,’ a forty-year-old housewife from North Korea told me in Seoul. She fled her fishing village in a boat with her husband and son. ‘Those movies were how I started to learn what is going on in the world, how people learned the government of Kim Jong Il is not really for their own good.’

  Her son told me he fell in love with the United States, where he hoped to live one day, by watching blurry videos of Charlie’s Angels.

  As the trickle of foreign videos turned into a flood, North Korean police became alarmed and came up with new tactics to arrest people who watched them. They cut electricity to specific apartment blocks and then raided every apartment to see what tapes and disks were stuck inside the players.

  Around the time that Shin and Park were formulating their escape plan, the North Korean government concluded that the border had become far too porous and posed a threat to internal security. Pyongyang was particularly enraged by South Korean and American initiatives that made it easier for North Korean defectors who’d crossed into China to travel even further and settle in the West. In the summer of 2004, in the largest single mass defection, South Korea flew four hundred and sixty-eight North Koreans from Vietnam to Seoul. North Korea’s news agency denounced the flight as ‘premeditated allurement, abduction and terrorism’. About the same time, Congress passed a law that accepted North Korean refugees for resettlement in the United States, which the North derided as an attempt to topple its government under the pretext of promoting democracy.

  For these reasons, border rules began to change in late 2004. North Korea announced a new policy of harsh punishment for illegal border crossings, with prison terms of up to five years. In 2006, Amnesty International interviewed sixteen border crossers who said that the new rules were in effect and that authorities in the North were circulating warnings that even first-time crossers would be sent to prison for at least a year. To enforce its rules, North Korea began a substantial buildup of electronic and photographic surveillance along the border. It extended barbed wire and built new concrete barriers.3 China, too, increased border security to discourage North Koreans from entering the country in the run-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics.

  At the end of January 2005, when Shin went walking towards China with cigarettes and snacks, the window on low-risk passage across the border was almost certainly beginning to close. But he was lucky: orders from on high had not yet changed the bribe-hungry behaviour of the four bedraggled soldiers Shin met at guard stations along the Tumen River.

  ‘I’m dying of hunger here,’ said the last soldier Shin bribed on his way out of North Korea. He looked to be about sixteen. ‘Don’t you have anything to eat?’

  His guard post was near a bridge that crossed into China. Shin gave him bean-curd sausage, cigarettes and a bag of candy.

  ‘Do a lot of people cross into China?’ Shin asked.

  ‘Of course,’ the guard replied. ‘They cross with the army’s blessing and return after making good money.’

  In Camp 14, Shin had often discussed with Park what they would do after they crossed the border. They had planned to stay with Park’s uncle, and that uncle now came into Shin’s mind.

  ‘Would it be possible for me to visit my uncle who lives in the village across the river?’ Shin asked, although he had no idea where Park’s uncle actually lived. ‘When I return, I’ll treat you.’

  ‘Sure, go ahead,’ the guard replied. ‘But I am only on duty until seven tonight, so com
e back before then, all right?’

  The guard led Shin through a forest to the river, where he said the crossing would be safe. It was late afternoon, but Shin promised to be back in plenty of time with food for the guard.

  ‘Is the river frozen?’ Shin asked. ‘Will I be OK?’

  The guard assured him that the river was frozen, and that even if he broke through, the water was only ankle-deep.

  ‘You should be fine,’ he said.

  The river was about a hundred yards wide. Shin walked slowly out onto the ice. Halfway across, he broke through and icy water soaked his shoes. He jumped backwards onto firm ice and crawled the rest of the way to China.

  19

  Shin scurried up the riverbank and hid briefly in the woods, where his wet feet began to freeze. It was getting dark and he was exhausted from a long day in the cold. Having reserved his limited cash for the cigarettes and snacks he gave to the border guards, he had eaten little in recent days.

  To warm up and get away from the river, he climbed a hill and followed a road through fields blanketed in snow. In the near distance, beyond the fields, he could see a cluster of houses.

  Between Shin and the houses, there were two men on the road. They had flashlights and wore vests with Chinese lettering printed across the back. He later learned they were Chinese border patrol soldiers. Since 2002, when hundreds of North Korean asylum seekers embarrassed China by rushing into foreign embassies, soldiers had begun rounding up illegal border crossers and forcibly repatriating tens of thousands of them.1 The soldiers Shin saw were gazing up at the sky. He guessed they were counting stars. In any case, Shin’s presence did not seem to interest them, so he hurried on towards the houses.

  His plan for surviving in China was as half-baked as his plan for escaping North Korea. He did not know where to go or whom to contact. He simply wanted to get as far from the border as possible. He had walked into a poor, mountainous and sparsely populated part of China’s Jilin Province. The nearest town of any size was Helong, which is about thirty miles north of where he had crossed the river. His one hope was the gossip he had picked up from itinerant traders in North Korea: that ethnic Koreans living in the Chinese border region might be willing to offer him shelter, food and maybe a job.

  Entering a yard outside one of the houses, Shin set off a mad eruption of barking dogs. He counted seven of them – an eyebrow-raising number by the standards of North Korea, where the pet population had been culled by scavengers, many of them orphans, who stole, skinned and barbecued dogs during the famine years.2

  When the front door opened Shin pleaded for something to eat and a place to sleep. A Korean Chinese man told him to go away. He said police had warned him that very morning not to help North Koreans. Shin moved on to a nearby brick house, where he asked another Korean Chinese man for help. Again, he was told to move on. This time rudely.

  Shin was desperately cold as he left the yard. He saw the remains of a fire in an outdoor cooking pit. After digging out three smouldering logs, he carried them into a nearby larch forest, scraped away the snow from the ground, found some kindling and managed to start a campfire. He took off his wet shoes and socks so they could dry near the fire, then without intending to, he fell asleep.

  At dawn, the fire was dead and Shin’s face was covered in frost. Cold to the bone, he put on his shoes and socks, which were still wet. He walked all morning, following back roads, which he hoped led away from the border. Around noon, he saw a police checkpoint in the distance, left the road, found another house and knocked on the door.

  ‘Could I get some help, please?’ he begged.

  A Korean Chinese man refused to let him in the house, saying his wife was mentally ill. But he gave Shin two apples.

  To avoid checkpoints and get further away from the border, Shin followed a winding footpath up into the mountains, where he walked for most of the day. (Shin is not sure where he walked that first day in China; Google Earth images of the region near the border show forested mountains and a few scattered houses.) At dusk, he tried another farmhouse, which was newly built of cinder blocks and surrounded by pigpens. Five dogs barked as Shin entered the yard.

  A middle-aged man poked his pudgy face out the front door.

  ‘Are you from North Korea?’ the man asked.

  Shin nodded wearily.

  The man, a Chinese farmer who spoke some Korean, invited Shin inside and ordered a young woman to cook rice. The farmer said he had once employed two North Korean defectors and that they had been useful workers. He offered Shin food, lodging and five yuan a day – about sixty cents – to tend the pigs.

  Before he had eaten his first hot meal in China, Shin had a job and a place to sleep. He had been a prisoner, a snitch, a fugitive and a thief, but never an employee. The job was a new beginning and a colossal relief, ending a fearful, freezing month on the run. A lifetime of slavery shifted suddenly into the past tense.

  In the pig farmer’s kitchen over the next month, Shin found plenty to eat. He filled his stomach three times a day with the roasted meat that he and Park had fantasized about in Camp 14. He bathed with soap and hot water. He got rid of the lice he had lived with since birth.

  The farmer bought Shin antibiotics for the burns on his legs, along with warm winter clothes and work boots. Shin soon threw away the stolen, ill-fitting clothes that identified him as a North Korean.

  He had a room of his own, where he slept on the floor with several blankets. He was able to sleep as much as ten hours a night, an unimaginable luxury. The young woman in the house – Shin found out she was the farmer’s mistress – cooked for him and taught him rudimentary Chinese.

  He worked from dawn until seven or eight at night for his sixty cents a day. Besides tending pigs, he hunted with the farmer for wild boar in the surrounding mountains. After the farmer shot them, Shin lugged their carcasses out of the woods for slaughter and commercial sale.

  While the work was often exhausting, no one slapped, kicked, punched or threatened Shin. Fear began to ebb away as abundant food and sleep made it possible for him to regain his strength. When police visited the farm, the farmer told Shin to pretend to be a mute. The farmer vouched for his good character, and the police went away.

  The capacity of the Chinese borderlands to absorb North Koreans is significant – and significantly underappreciated outside of Northeast Asia. The area is not all that foreign or unwelcoming to Korean-speaking migrants.

  When defectors cross into China, the first ‘foreigners’ they encounter are usually ethnic Koreans who speak the same language, eat similar food and share some of the same cultural values. With a bit of luck, they can, like Shin, find work, shelter and a measure of safety.

  This has been going on since the late 1860s, when famine struck North Korea and starving farmers fled across the Tumen and Yalu Rivers into northeast China. Later, China’s imperial government recruited Korean farmers to create a buffer against Russian expansion, and Korea’s Choson Dynasty allowed them to depart legally. Before World War II, the Japanese who occupied the Korean Peninsula and northeast China pushed tens of thousands of Korean farmers across the border to weaken China’s hold on the region.

  Nearly two million ethnic Koreans now live in China’s three northeast provinces, with the highest concentration in Jilin, which Shin entered when he crawled across the frozen river. Inside Jilin Province, China created the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, where forty per cent of the population is ethnic Korean and where the government subsidizes Korean-language schools and publications.

  Korean speakers living in northeast China have also been an unsung force for cultural change inside North Korea. They have affected this change by watching South Korean soap operas on home satellite dishes, recording low-quality video CDs and smuggling hundreds of thousands of them across the border into North Korea, where they sell for as little as fifteen cents, according to Rimjin-gang magazine.

  South Korean soaps, which display the fast cars, opulent houses
and surging confidence of South Korea, are classified as ‘impure recorded visual materials’ and are illegal to watch in North Korea. But they have developed a huge following in Pyongyang and other cities, where police officers assigned to confiscate the videos are reportedly watching them and where teenagers imitate the silky intonations of the Korean language as it’s spoken by upper-crust stars in Seoul.3

  These TV programmes have demolished decades of North Korean propaganda, which claims that the South is a poor, repressed and unhappy place, and that South Koreans long for unification under the fatherly hand of the Kim dynasty.

  However, in the past half century, the governments of China and North Korea have cooperatively used their security forces to make sure that the intermittent seepage of Koreans across the border never turns into a flood. A secret agreement on border security was signed between the two countries in the early 1960s, according to the South Korean government, and a second agreement in 1986 committed China to sending North Korean defectors back home, where they often face arrest, torture and months or years of forced labour.

  By imprisoning its citizens inside the country, North Korea defies an international agreement it has pledged to uphold. The 1966 agreement says, ‘Everyone shall be free to leave any country, including his own.’4

  By defining all North Korean defectors as ‘economic refugees’ and sending them home to be persecuted, China defies its obligations as a signatory to a 1951 international refugee convention. Beijing refuses to allow defectors to make claims for asylum and prevents the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees from working along the border with North Korea.

  International law, in effect, has been trumped by the strategic interests of North Korea and China. A mass exodus from North Korea could substantially depopulate the country, undermine its already inadequate capacity to grow food and weaken, or perhaps even topple, the government. The risk of such an exodus increases as China’s economy soars, North Korea’s sinks and word spreads that life is better in China.