Q. Did guards inflict violence on prisoners?
A. “That’s just a part of daily life. Not to be very aggressive would be seen as condoning the offenders.”
Q. How many times a day did you hit someone?
A. “I can’t say I did it once or a hundred times. But when a prisoner sees a guard he has to bow at a ninety-degree angle. Any less is reason to hit him with a stick or rock or whatever. If they don’t respond loudly ‘Here!’, you hit them.
“Inmates’ housing from the sky would look like an ordinary village, but the border is a 3,300-volt electrical fence. Guards usually call the dwellings pigpens. They look like traditional rural houses. There’s one very small room per family plus kitchen, regardless of the number in the family.
“As for food, they’re supposed to get 500 grams of corn. But the guards take a lot of it, so they can barely sustain life. They get corn alone only on holidays. Other times they mostly mix it with grass and pine bark. Before 1989, guards didn’t feel hunger. But as Kim Jong-il took over, we got hungry and had to steal rations from prisoners. The military people are the best fed in North Korea, but from August 1994, guards got pears instead of corn. For a month guards lived on pears, usually boiled, but then started having heavy diarrhea and couldn’t train. Afterward they started providing rations from the war reserves. I was a driver hauling foodstuffs by then, not a guard.
“Prison personnel are better nourished than other soldiers because the prisons grow food. As a driver I was able to steal more food. There’s a law Kim Jong-il passed. Anyone caught stealing food would be sent to prison camps. A military man caught stealing food would be demoted or prevented from entering the party. But it’s human nature. How can they not steal when they have the opportunity?
“I had a 700-gram ration. Anyone who was able to eat the full 700 grams would be considered well off. But they took out ‘patriotic rice’ and war-reserve rice’ and there were only 500 grams left. All together, including stolen food, I ate almost 800 grams a day. Yes, prison camp is the place to be to keep in good health—if you’re a guard. Prison camp guards are treated second only to fighter pilots. After finishing their terms they go to State Security, like the KCIA in South Korea. They are trusted by the regime. Three categories of people get the prison guard jobs: (1) kids of high officials; (2) kids of State Security members; (3) kids of camp workers. When I entered the army my mother paid a bribe to get me a good job. She worked in a dry goods store, so when they decided to make me a prison guard she gave officials some textiles, foreign liquor and so on. She just asked for a good job. She didn’t specifically ask for a prison guard assignment—in fact, she didn’t know prison camps existed. Now through the grapevine lots of people know, but when I entered in 1987 hardly anyone knew.” Q. [I mention the demonstration at the 1989 youth festival.]
A. “During the youth festival we were on alert. Kim Jong-il feared the inmates would escape and tell the world about the camps. I hardly got any sleep because we had to be constantly alert and heavily armed.
“The four camps I worked at were: No. 11, Kyongsong city in North Hamgyong province, where I trained; No. 13, in Jongsong district, On-song county, North Hamgyong; No. 22, Hoeryong City, North Hamgyong; and No. 26 in Hwachon, Pyongyang City. The numbers go up to 27, to my knowledge.
Q. What offenses landed people there?
A. “Calling the name of Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il without using the honorific prefixes, for example. One man went to the food ration department and they told him to come back again since there was no food that day. He said, ‘In a socialist country like ours, how can this happen?’ He was sent to a camp. Factionalists, people who opposed Kim Jong-il’s succeeding Kim Il-sung in power of course were sent to camp. It’s not just political attitudes that will get you there. Religious fanatics are imprisoned, too. The prisons where I worked were for dissidents and factionalists.”
Q. Did you agree they were bad people?
A. “In army training they taught us that those were serious offenders who should be punished; if they tried to escape we had the right to kill them. But after three years as a guard, when I switched to driving, I had more personal contact with prisoners and realized they were not what I had thought. Sometimes I had to deliver produce grown by prisoners, and I chatted with them when I picked it up. I had to distribute rations from the central distribution point in the center of the camp to the outlying areas.
“The first incident: I was still a guard but learning to drive a truck. I took the truck to prisoners and told them to repair it and clean it up. I was nineteen. One prisoner was about forty-five. He bo-wed to me ninety degrees and said, ‘I’m all finished, thank you, sir.’ I thought, considering his age, he could be my father. I felt sudden pity and decided to give him a cigarette. He cried. We talked and I realized he had been sent to prison because of his father’s offenses. Kim Chang-bong, who was head of the KPA in the 1970s, was ousted by Kim Jong-il and sent with his family to camp. Others under him were also sent to prison camps with their families. This man’s father probably-worked under Kim Chang-bong.”
Q. After that incident did you start treating prisoners nicely?
A. “At that time I was just learning what sort of people had come to the camps. I didn’t really change my behavior. It was 1992 when I started being kinder toward them. Even from the moment I entered the army I felt some pity for them. But 1992 was when I totally changed my mind and decided to do something active. I gave them my meat. Once in two weeks I got about this much [shows the final two joints of three fingers— maybe 50–100 grams or two to four ounces]. I had more access to meat, so I was able to give them some and still eat meat myself. Some other guards did the same and had to quit when they were discovered. I didn’t discuss this matter with any other guards. I did talk with my most intimate friend about how the dissidents were not so bad. He agreed.”
Q. Did you dislike Kim Jong-il then?
A. “I can honestly say I lean toward liking Kim Il-sung. As for Kim Jong-il, when I was in North Korea I was indifferent to him. That’s not to say I hated him. I sensed some discrepancies in the regime’s policies. They propagandize that North Korea is a very peaceful society but they say in all the orders to prison guards to be very aggressive, make sure you get rid of three generations of prisoners, root them out of society.”
Q. Why did you defect?
A. “I went to my hometown. My father had committed suicide but I hadn’t been told that. My father worked in a granary. One day a friend said, ‘My son is starving. Please get me some food for him.’ Father stole a bit for that man’s son. He didn’t get caught then. But the granary boss stole two tons of rice. He framed my father as the culprit. My father was to be sent to prison camp, but he committed suicide, in January 1994. They didn’t tell me. I knew my father had died, but the letter said it was a heart attack. I learned the truth in May when I visited my hometown. When I arrived, I found my house gone, totally demolished. In April, my mother had been sent to prison as a traitor. If any family member commits suicide, other family members including the spouse, are ‘traitors.’ Someone who worked under her wanted her job and said she had poisoned my father. So there were two charges against her—spouse of a traitor and murderess. He did die of poison—alkali. I found that my younger sister was by herself. My younger brother was working as a border guard and didn’t know about father’s death. [They were sent to prison after Ahn defected.] In Oriental society there’s a family head. If the head commits suicide the spouse is a traitor. If the children commit suicide the parents are criticized and banished from the village, not sent to prison camp. I stayed in my hometown for a week, then went back to Hoeryong. When I went back, they termed me the son of a traitor and had someone watch me. It meant they didn’t trust me any more. During my time at home I had already realized that if I stayed, in the end, I probably would be sent to a prison camp myself. So I had to defect to South Korea.”
Q. Why South Korea?
A. “I want
ed to tell the world about the reality of prison camps. The only country that came to mind as an enemy of North Korea was South Korea.”
Q. Did you know anything about South Korea?
A. “Only that it was better off economically than North Korea.”
Q. How did you know that?
A. “I heard rumors. When I watched televised demonstrations in South Korea I could see the buildings in the background—the South Koreans looked pretty well off. I heard rumors of vast numbers of cars. The big year was 1989. After Im Su-gyong’s visit, people’s thought changed. They figured North Korea couldn’t feed them, but South Korea was better off. It was seeing her appearance—she seemed “well off, acted free and confident.”
Q. How did you defect with someone watching?
A. “I thought I had to make the watchers believe in me. I worked really diligently to instill trust. Kim Il-sung’s death brought the perfect opportunity. After his death there was a mourning ceremony at Hoeryong. We didn’t tell the prisoners—this was for the guards and their families. Only women cried, not the guards. So that night they had rigorous training to make the guards cry at the next mourning ceremony. Still none of them cried. I cut my finger and wrote in blood: ‘Loyalty to Kim Jong-il.’ From that moment they really trusted me and didn’t watch me anymore.
“Initially I wanted to bring my brother and sister along but timing didn’t allow it. I did take a pair of prisoners from camp—a brother and a sister—in a truck. These were the people I’d given meat to. I was close to them. They got scared in mid-escape and decided not to defect. They got on the truck inside the camp. I said, ‘Let’s go to South Korea.’ They initially agreed, but then got scared before we got out of the camp. They weren’t confident we could get across the border. She was twenty-six. Her brother was twenty-four. She wasn’t my sweetheart. We were just friends. I took the truck to the border and swam across the Tumen River.”
Choe Dong-chul had been miscast as a North Korean prison guard, I thought. His build was too skinny, his facial features too sensitive for someone doing such brutal work. He neither walked the walk nor talked the talk. When I asked him what he thought of post-defection life in South Korea he replied with a nuanced critique: “I don’t like the consumerism of Seoul. It’s not good to spend so much on these fashions. I always tell people, ‘Our generation will experience reunification. You should save the money you’re spending now so you can use it after reunification to build some factories in North Korea.’”
Suitability aside, Choe entered the army after high school and was stationed for three years at political prisoners’ camp Number 11 in Kyongsong, North Hamgyong Province—the same camp where Ahn Myong-chol trained later. “The prerequisites were good family background, a university entrance-level exam and an interview—so they could see your appearance,” he told me. “I was lucky to get in. The benefits are good. In 1982, Kim Jong-il issued a new regulation: To be a member of State Security you had to have spent at least three years in the army and have a university education. So from 1983, they started selecting elite young men as future State Security officers. We would do our army hitch, get recommended to universities and, after university graduation, would become members of State Security.
“After I got into the army I found there were political prisons numbered from 11 to 22. At Number 11 there were about twenty thousand prisoners,” he said.
Q. What did you see and hear at the camp? A. “Very gruesome stories.” Q. We can handle them.
A. “The summer of 1985 a family of five tried to escape. They were caught after three days. After a week the grandmother and father were hanged in public and the three kids—none of them even ten years old—-were executed by gunfire.
“The camp was in a typhoon region. On April 5, 1986, heavy winds spread a forest fire. The prisoners were forced to fight the fire. Afterward we counted forty prisoners dead—no State Security or guards. State Security officers didn’t pity them. ‘It’s a good thing.’ ‘Serves them right.’
“Some families were sent there during the land reform period— mainly capitalists and moneyed people. Some others might have been families of people who were pro–South Korea in the Korean War or ‘fac-tionalists’ or families of defectors to South Korea. The prison camps were established when Kim Il-sung was vowing that factionalism would destroy three generations of a family. The factionalists themselves were sent into coal mines, separated from their wives and children, who went to prison camps. The separated people were not to know if the others were alive or dead.
“The houses at the camp were made of clay; the roofs, straw; the floors, clay or rocks, or straw on clay. Most prisoners were short—140 to 150 centimeters [4 feet 6 inches to 4 feet 9 inches]—probably because their jobs were burdensome. They always carried loads on their backs.
“Soldiers in a guard unit usually wear a uniform almost a year. The previous year’s uniforms are dyed another color and given to prisoners. It’s the same with shoes, which the soldiers had worn every day.
“Prison guards weren’t permitted to go in and see the inmates’ food situation but from appearances I could speculate they usually had potatoes or corn. They-were too skinny-when you looked at them. If someone lives on a diet of mainly potatoes, the face puffs up grotesquely.
“The guards treated them like slaves. We could beat them at will. Some guards or State Security officers would kill prisoners for fun.”
Q. Did you see it happen?
A. “No. I just heard a story that a guard asked a prisoner to pick up a very sharp farming tool. As the prisoner held it, the guard shot him. He explained: ‘I thought he’d kill me with that.’”
Q. You?
A. “As you can see from my face I’m not that cruel.”
Q. What was in your mind?
A. “I stayed three years, a short time. We were taught: ‘These were the people who exploited your parents. They are enemies.’ I heard that some who worked there for seven or eight years got to thinking this was too cruel even for a political prisoner. But I didn’t get to that stage. I have to admit that when I was in a favorable situation I was very devoted to the regime. Only my mother’s troubles later made me question the regime.”
After three years as a guard Choe entered Kim Il-sung University majoring in computer science. From June 1986 to April 1988 he lived in a dorm.
Q. How advanced is the computer science program?
A. “While I was at KISU the computer center had about fifty computers, half of them Bulgarian. We had Sharp N2-1200 and N2-800 models. The center was open to all in the university and it wasn’t adequate. You had to wait a couple of hours to use a computer once. You needed to hurry to make it available to others who were waiting. The soft-ware was in English: BASIC.”
Q. When I visited the campus they told me all twelve thousand students were in a meeting.
A. “It’s really true they have meetings of all twelve thousand on campus, but they don’t have a big enough room for them all to be physically present. The auditorium seats seven hundred. The rest sit in classrooms and listen via loudspeaker to the teachings of Kim Il-sung, lectures on new books, ideology and so on. Unfaithful students have to stand and confess their wrongdoings. Everyone is either in the auditorium or in a classroom. You can’t find anyone walking around the campus. It usually happens on Saturday. And even at other times students don’t stroll around on campus or have outdoor classes as South Koreans sometimes do. They’re outside only for coming and going. The rest of the time they stay in class. All students have lectures from 8:00 to 9:30 A.M., from 9:40 to 11:10 A.M. and from 11:30 A.M. to 1:00 P.M.
“Usually when foreigners come, they’re invited when all students are in class. I saw some foreigners myself-while at KISU, but the North Korean government is very cautious about American reporters like you. First, the police and military men don’t wear their uniforms while you’re visiting and all universities and schools keep their students on campus for the duration of the reporters’ stay
.
“I never heard of any demonstrations. Those rumors are unfounded, especially regarding People’s Economic University. All students there are current officials getting on-the-job education. Why would they demonstrate?”
(Choe’s elite status as a student at the country’s top university and a future State Security officer ended when his mother got in trouble.)
“My mother was in charge of a distribution center back home. The police chief and other authorities framed her and forced her to sign a confession to an alleged crime. In court, in November 1987, she got a thirteen-year prison sentence. After that, the authorities told me, ‘Your mother is in prison so you can’t stay in the university.’ My father and I were sent as farmhands to a tobacco field about 25 or 30 kilometers from our hometown. It was the 4/25 Tobacco Farm in Onsong, North Ham-gyong Province.”
It was two years after I first met Choe that I was able to interview his mother, Lee Soon-ok. She was grandmotherly-looking, with graying hair, wearing gold-rimmed glasses. I asked her how she had arranged travel permits for her trips to China. “Even if they can’t eat, people can find a way to get a bottle of liquor or some cigarettes to use as bribes for permits,” she said. “Often the food that’s supposed to go to ordinary citizens goes to officials instead.”
Q. What was the police chief’s scam?
A. “He used to come to the distribution center and demand things that were supposed to go to others. I had to comply at first. But he would take ten sets of underwear when some people got none. I started resisting toward the end. After I returned from China the last time, he wanted cloth as a bribe. I refused to give it to him. I thought that was what got me imprisoned. The real reason, I found out, was that since the early 1980s there had been economic difficulties due to Kim Jong-il’s policies.
“They tortured me because I refused to confess to sabotaging Kim Jong-il’s economic policies. I held out for one year and two months. I said, ‘How could I be responsible for something as big as that—Kim Jong-il’s policies?’ Finally they promised me that my husband and son would be permitted to keep status. I was just holding on to life then. I gave in and signed the confession.
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty Page 89
