Escape from Camp 14

by Blaine Harden

  Since Shin had been taught next to nothing in Camp 14, a radically revised history of the Korean Peninsula was not meaningful to him. He was far more interested in classes that taught him how to use a computer and find information on the Internet.

  But towards the end of his first month at Hanawon, just as he had begun to feel comfortable there, Shin started to experience disturbing dreams. He saw his mother hanged and Park’s body on the fence, and visualized the torture he believed his father had been subjected to after his escape. As the nightmares continued, he dropped out of a course in automobile repair. He did not take his driving test. He stopped eating. He struggled to sleep. He was all but paralysed by guilt.

  Nearly all defectors arrive at Hanawon showing clinical symptoms of paranoia. They whisper and get in fistfights. They are afraid to disclose their names, ages or places of birth. Their manners often offend South Koreans. They tend not to say ‘thank you’ or ‘sorry’.

  Questions from South Korean bank tellers, whom they meet on field trips to open bank accounts, often terrify defectors. They doubt the motives of nearly all people in positions of authority. They feel guilty about those they left behind. They fret, sometimes to the point of panic, about their educational and financial inferiority to South Koreans. They are ashamed of the way they dress, talk and even wear their hair.

  ‘In North Korea, paranoia was a rational response to real conditions and it helped these people survive,’ said Kim Heekyung, a clinical psychologist who spoke to me in her office at Hanawon. ‘But it keeps them from understanding what is going on in South Korea. It is a real obstacle to assimilation.’

  Teenagers from the North spend two months to two years at Hangyoreh Middle-High School, a government-funded remedial boarding school affiliated with Hanawon. It was built in 2006 to help newly arrived youngsters from the North, most of whom are not fit to attend public school in South Korea.

  Nearly all of them struggle with basic reading and maths. Some are cognitively impaired, apparently from acute malnourishment as infants. Even among the brightest youngsters, their knowledge of world history essentially comprises the mythical personal stories of their Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, and his Dear Son, Kim Jong Il.

  ‘Education in North Korea is useless for life in South Korea,’ Gwak Jong-moon, principal of Hangyoreh, told me. ‘When you are too hungry, you don’t go to learn and teachers don’t go to teach. Many of our students have been hiding in China for years with no access to schools. As young children in North Korea, they grew up eating bark off trees and thinking it was normal.’

  During field trips to the movies, young defectors often panic when the lights go down, afraid that someone might kidnap them. They are bewildered by the Korean spoken in South Korea, where the language has been infected with Americanisms such as syop’ing (shopping) and k’akt’eil (cocktail). They find it incredible that money is stored in plastic k’uredit k’adus.

  Pizza, hot dogs and hamburgers – staples of South Korean teen cuisine – give them indigestion. So does too much rice, a one-time staple that has become a food for the rich in post-famine North Korea.

  One teenage girl at Hangyoreh School gargled with liquid fabric softener, mistaking it for mouthwash. Another used laundry detergent as baking flour. Many are terrified when they first hear the noise of an electric washing machine.

  In addition to being paranoid, confused and intermittently technophobic, defectors tend to suffer from preventable diseases and conditions that are all but nonexistent in South Korea. The head nurse at Hanawon for the past decade, Chun Jung-hee, told me that a high percentage of women from the North have chronic gynecological infections and cysts. She said many defectors arrive infected with tuberculosis that has never been treated with antibiotics. They also commonly arrive with chronic indigestion and hepatitis B.

  Routine medical ailments are often difficult to diagnose, the nurse said, because defectors are unaccustomed to and suspicious of doctors who ask personal questions and prescribe medications. Men, women and children have serious dental problems resulting from malnutrition and a lack of calcium in their diets. Half the money spent annually on medical care at Hanawon goes on prosthetic dental treatment.

  Many, if not most, defectors arriving at Hanawon escaped North Korea with the help of brokers based in South Korea. The brokers wait eagerly for defectors to graduate from the settlement centre and begin receiving monthly stipends from the government. Then they demand their money. Anxiety about debt torments defectors inside Hanawon, the head nurse told me.

  Shin did not have to worry about brokers, and his physical health was relatively good after half a year of rest and regular meals in the consulate in Shanghai.

  But his nightmares would not go away.

  They became more frequent and more upsetting. He found his comfortable, well-nourished life impossible to reconcile with the grisly images from Camp 14 that played inside his head.

  As his mental health deteriorated, Hanawon’s medical staff realized he needed special care and transferred him to the psychiatric ward of a nearby hospital, where he spent two and a half months, some of it in isolation and most of it on medication that allowed him to sleep and eat.

  He had started keeping a diary in the South Korean Consulate in Shanghai, and doctors in the hospital’s psychiatric ward encouraged him to keep writing it as part of his treatment for what they diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder.

  Shin remembers little of his time in the hospital, except that the nightmares slowly diminished.

  After his discharge, he moved into a small apartment purchased for him by the Ministry of Unification. It was located in Hwaseong, a city of about five hundred thousand people in the low plains of the central Korean Peninsula, near the Yellow Sea and about thirty miles south of Seoul.

  For the first month, Shin rarely went outdoors, watching South Korean life unfold from the windows of his apartment. Eventually, he ventured out onto the streets. Shin compares his emergence to the slow growth of a fingernail. He cannot explain how it happened or why. It just did.

  After he began to venture into the city, he took driving lessons. Owing to his limited vocabulary, he twice flunked the written driver’s licence test. Shin found it difficult to find a job that interested him or to keep a job he was offered. He collected scrap metal, made clay pots and worked in a convenience store.

  Career counsellors at Hanawon say most North Koreans have similar experiences of exile. They often depend on the South Korean government to solve their problems and fail to take personal responsibility for poor work habits or for showing up late on the job. Defectors frequently quit jobs found for them by the government and start businesses that fail. Some newcomers are disgusted by what they see as the decadence and inequality of life in the South. So to find employers who will put up with the prickliness of newcomers from the North, the Ministry of Unification pays companies up to eighteen hundred dollars a year if they risk hiring a defector.

  Shin spent long hours by himself, feeling desperately lonely in his one-room apartment. He tried to locate his oldest uncle, Shin Tae Sub, whose flight to South Korea after the Korean War was the crime for which Shin’s father and his entire family had been sent to Camp 14. But Shin had only a name, and the South Korean government told him it had no information on that name. The Unification Ministry said it could search only for people who had registered to be reunited with lost family members, so Shin gave up the search.

  One of the psychiatrists who had treated Shin in the hospital put him in touch with a counsellor from the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, a non-government organization in Seoul that gathers, analyses and publishes information about abuses in the North.

  The counsellor encouraged Shin to turn his therapeutic diary into a memoir, which the Database Center published in Korean in 2007. While working on the book, Shin began spending nearly all his time at the office of the Database Center in Seoul, where he was given a place to sleep and made friends with his
editors and other staff.

  As word spread in Seoul of his birth in and escape from a no-exit labour camp, he began to meet many of the South’s leading human rights activists and heads of defector organizations. His story was vetted and scrutinized by former prisoners and guards from the camps, as well as by human rights lawyers, South Korean journalists and other experts with extensive knowledge of the camps. His understanding of how the camps operate, his scarred body and the haunted look in his eyes were persuasive, and he was widely acknowledged to be the first North Korean to come south after escaping from a political prison.

  An Myeong Chul, a guard and driver at four camps in the North, told the International Herald Tribune that he had no doubt Shin had lived in a complete control zone. When they met, An said he noticed telltale signs: avoidance of eye contact and arms bowed by childhood labour.1

  ‘At first, I could not believe Shin because no one ever before succeeded in the escape,’ Kim Tae Jin told me in 2008.2 He is president of the Democracy Network Against North Korean Gulag and a defector who spent a decade in Camp 15 before he was released.

  But Kim, like others with first-hand knowledge of the camps, concluded after meeting Shin that his story was as solid as it was extraordinary.

  Outside South Korea, specialists in human rights began to take note of Shin. In the spring of 2008 he was invited to tour Japan and the United States. He appeared at the University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University, and spoke to employees at Google.

  As he made friends with people who understood and appreciated what he had endured, he gained confidence and began to fill the gaping holes in his understanding of his homeland. He devoured news about North Korea, on the Internet and in South Korean newspapers. He read about the history of the Korean Peninsula, the reputation of the Kim family dictatorship and his country’s status as an international pariah.

  At the Database Center, where staff members had been working with North Koreans for years, Shin was viewed as a kind of rough-hewn prodigy.

  ‘Compared to other defectors, he was a fast learner and highly adaptable to culture shock,’ said Lee Yong-koo, a team leader there.

  Tagging along with his new friends, Shin began going to church on Sunday mornings, though he did not understand the concept of a loving and forgiving God.

  As a matter of instinct, Shin was reluctant to ask for anything. The teachers in the labour camp had punished children who asked questions. In Seoul, even when he was surrounded by solicitous and well-informed friends, Shin found it all but impossible to ask for help. He read voraciously, but would not use a dictionary to look up words he did not know or ask a friend to explain something he did not understand. Because he blinkered out what he could not immediately comprehend, his travels to Tokyo, New York and California did little to awake a sense of wonder and excitement. Shin knew he was undermining his ability to adapt to his new life, but he also knew that he could not force himself to change.

  22

  The only birthdays that mattered in Camp 14 were those of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung. They are national holidays in North Korea, and even in a no-exit labour camp, prisoners get the day off.

  As for Shin’s birthday, no one paid any attention when he was growing up, including Shin.

  That changed when he turned twenty-six in South Korea and four of his friends threw him a surprise party at T.G.I. Friday’s in downtown Seoul.

  ‘I was very moved,’ he told me when we met for the first time in December 2008, a few days after his birthday.

  Such occasions were rare, though, and the birthday party notwithstanding, Shin was not happy in South Korea. He had recently quit a part-time job serving beer in a Seoul pub. He did not know how he would pay the rent on the tiny three-hundred-dollar-a-month room he occupied in a group apartment downtown and his monthly stipend of eight hundred dollars from the Ministry of Unification had run out. He had emptied his bank account. He worried out loud that he might have to join the homeless at the central train station in Seoul.

  Nor was his social life in great shape. He shared the occasional meal with roommates in his group apartment, but he did not have a girlfriend or a best friend. He declined to socialize or work with other North Koreans who had been released from labour camps. In this respect, he was like many North Korean defectors. Studies have found that they are slow to socialize and often avoid contact with others for two to three years after arriving in the South.1

  His memoir had flopped, about five hundred copies sold from a printing of three thousand. Shin said he made no money from the book.

  ‘People are not so interested,’ Kim Sang-hun, director of the Database Center, told the Christian Science Monitor after his organization published the book. ‘The indifference of South Korean society to the issue of North Korean rights is so awful.’2

  Shin was by no means the first camp survivor from the North to be greeted with a collective yawn by the South Korean public. Kang Chol-hwan spent a decade with his family in Camp 15 before they were pronounced ‘redeemable’ and released in 1987. But his wrenching story, written with journalist Pierre Rigoulot and first published in French in 2000, also received scant attention in South Korea until after it had been translated into English as The Aquariums of Pyongyang and a copy found its way onto the desk of President George W. Bush. He invited Kang to the White House to discuss North Korea, and later described Aquariums as ‘one of the most influential books I read during my presidency’.3

  ‘I don’t want to be critical of this country,’ Shin told me on the day we met, ‘but I would say that out of the total population of South Korea, only .001 per cent has any real interest in North Korea. Their way of living does not allow them to think about things beyond their borders. There is nothing in it for them.’

  Shin exaggerated the South’s lack of concern about the North, but he had a valid point. It’s a blind spot that baffles local and international human rights groups. Overwhelming evidence of continuing atrocities inside the North’s labour camps has done little to rouse the South Korean public. As the Korean Bar Association has noted, ‘South Koreans, who publicly cherish the virtue of brotherly love, have been inexplicably stuck in a deep quagmire of indifference.’4

  When South Korean President Lee Myung-bak was elected in 2007, just three per cent of voters named North Korea as a primary concern. They told pollsters that their primary interest was in making higher salaries.

  When it comes to making money, North Korea is an utter waste of time. South Korea’s economy is thirty-eight times larger than the North’s; its international trade volume is two hundred and twenty-four times larger.5

  North Korea’s periodic belligerence, however, does trigger eruptions of anger in the South. This was especially true in 2010, when North Korea launched a sneak submarine attack that killed forty-six South Korean sailors and sank the Cheonan, a warship sailing in South Korean territorial waters. The North also rained artillery shells on a small South Korean island, killing four people. But the South’s taste for vengeance tends to fade quickly.

  After international investigators confirmed that a North Korean torpedo sank the Cheonan, voters in the South refused to rally around President Lee, who had said the North Korean government should ‘pay a price’. There was no South Korean version of the ‘9/11’ effect that propelled the United States into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead, Lee’s party was routed in a midterm election that showed South Koreans were more interested in preserving peace and protecting living standards than in teaching the North a lesson.

  ‘There is no winner if war breaks out, hot or cold,’ Lim Seung-youl, a twenty-seven-year-old Seoul clothing distributor, told me. ‘Our nation is richer and smarter than North Korea. We have to use reason over confrontation.’

  South Koreans have spent decades refining what this reason means in response to a next-door dictatorship that has moved about eighty per cent of its total military firepower to within sixty miles of the Demilitarized Zone, the heavily guarde
d border strip that separates the two Koreas, and has repeatedly threatened to turn Seoul (located just thirty-five miles from the border) into a ‘sea of fire’. Bloody surprise attacks from the North have a way of recurring every ten to fifteen years, from the 1968 raid by a hit squad that tried to assassinate a South Korean president, to the 1987 bombing of a Korean Air passenger jet and the failed 1996 submarine infiltration by special forces commandos, to the 2010 sinking of the warship and the shelling of the island.

  The attacks have killed hundreds of South Koreans, but they have yet to provoke the electorate into demanding that their government launch a major counterattack. Nor have they stopped the average South Korean from getting richer, better educated and better housed in what has become the fourth largest economy in Asia and the eleventh largest in the world.

  South Koreans have paid close attention to the price tag of German unification. The proportional burden on South Korea, some studies have found, would be two and a half times greater than on West Germany after it absorbed the former East Germany. Studies have found that it could cost more than two trillion dollars over thirty years, raise taxes for six decades and require that ten per cent of the South’s gross domestic product be spent in the North for the foreseeable future.

  South Koreans want reunification with the North, but they do not want it right away. Many do not want it during their lifetimes, largely because the cost would be unacceptably high.

  Shin and many other North Korean defectors complain, with considerable justification, that South Koreans view them as ill-educated, badly spoken and poorly dressed bumpkins whose mess of a country is more trouble than it’s worth.

  There is ample evidence that South Korean society makes it hard for defectors to fit in. The unemployment rate of North Koreans in the South is four times the national average, while the suicide rate for defectors is more than two and a half times as high as the rate for South Koreans.