Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

by Bradley K. Martin

  “My son went to the judge and asked what I had done. The judge said, ‘I don’t know what she did. I was told by the party to give this sentence.’ I went to a prison at Kaechon in South Pyongan Province. I came to realize I’d been part of a national purge of all the people who had run distribution centers. They wanted to blame us for the failures of the policies. For the first seven months I thought I was the only one. But in the winter they would send us out for an hour in our underwear to freeze. I went out and there were twelve people there. There were twelve distribution centers in North Hamgyong Province, where I lived, and the chiefs of all of those were imprisoned there. Six men out of that group died of torture; one got twenty years; one, fifteen. Being a woman, I got only thirteen years.

  “While I was in prison I saw some people starve to death. By that time I had abscesses in my body that were full of fluid, because of torture. The organs on my left side were filled with water. After I left I couldn’t work for a year. I was puffy, swollen. My leg didn’t work.”

  Q. What was the food situation in your prison?

  A. “We got 300 grams of corn and would make it into a cookie-sized cake. That plus a small cup of salt soup three times a day.”

  Q. Prisoners had to work?

  A. “They had thirty-three factories in the prison where they made military goods, from helmets to shoes. There was a coal mine, too. I didn’t have to do physical labor but the men worked eighteen hours a day. There was a rubber factory, a gun holster factory, a uniform factory. The men who worked got the same 300 grams. There were more people dying than staying alive. We were all living together. Hundreds died during the seven years I was there. Six months is the turning point. After that, people’s bodies start adjusting to less food and hard labor. If you survive the first six months, you should be OK. Lots of people don’t. They think of how the food compares with what they got back home. Lots die of dehydration and hunger the first six months. We were working in an enclosed place, with nothing to pick from trees or fields. No food. Sometimes we’d use such things as wallpaper glue as food. Lots of people died that way. People who were dying of dehydration cried out for water, but the guards wouldn’t give it to them. They got none. Just the salt soup, three times a day. So, with the last breath of their lives they’d crawl across the room and suck on the mops—shit water—and they’d die drinking that. I worked in the office in charge of accounting for the factories. After work we’d be lined up to go back to the cells. I saw hungry dehydrated people who became delirious. The path from factory to cells wasn’t paved. Sometimes a small pebble or piece of dirt looked like food. I saw people pick such things up, swallow them and die on the spot.

  “There was an export factory. They’d get commissons from abroad to make goods to export for foreign exchange. For Russia, work uniforms, shirts, brassieres. For Japan they knitted sweaters. Prisoner labor. The Japanese sent the yarn and the patterns. My friends used to make roses for France, small roses, twelve to a box. For Poland they made doilies and embroidered chair covers.”

  Q. So this was a regular prison, not a political prison? What was the difference?

  A. “Right. Even political prisoners like me are sent to prisons, not camps, if their crimes are severe enough. In a regular prison we were worked more, and the treatment was harsher, than in a political prisoners’ camp. My son knew the camp situation and I compared notes with him. The treatment is so much worse once you’re put into such a prison. Your rights are taken away. They can work you eighteen to twenty hours a day. There are quotas. If you don’t meet them your food gets reduced to 240 grams a day. If you fail to meet the quota for five days, you get 60 grams per meal—180 grams a day. If you’re in isolation you get 30 grams per meal, 90 grams a day. Prisoners can go to the toilet only three times a day. You get up at 5:30 A.M., go to the toilet once in the morning, once in the afternoon, once in the evening and stop work at 12:30 A.M., with no rest period except the three toilet times and three meals that take one hour total.

  “I was a political prisoner because I supposedly messed up Kim Jong-il’s plan by unfairly distributing goods, not doing a good job. I wrote a letter to Kim Jong-il after I was paroled. I couldn’t write it while in jail or I’d get a double sentence for refusing to repent. I sent four letters to the central party. I wasn’t supposed to. I was being watched. But there was an official I’d been close to when I was at the distribution center. I asked him to post them when he went to Pyongyang. I think two of them got through. I know one arrived because one central party official came to talk to me. My husband, a school principal, had been sent to a farm, along with my son when I went to jail. The central party official acknowledged that things had been done unfairly. But what to do? Lift the punishments off my son and husband, let my son return to university, that’s what I wanted. The official’s initial response was, ‘I understand.’ He left. Then he came back from the party center and said, ‘If you ever petition like this again, you’ll be sent back to prison.’ I asked, ‘Why if you know that I was punished unlawfully?’ His answer was, ‘If your son and husband were reinstated, many layers of the officials who sent them off would have to be fired. We can’t do that. Please make a sacrifice for the revolution. What’s done is done.’ He also said, You should be thankful you got out of prison alive.’”

  Q. What was his name?

  A. “I never knew it. He was a high official. They don’t usually give you their names. He was chief of the central party Petitions Department.

  “The local authorities had taken all our material goods away, I didn’t know where, when they took my husband and son away. I went to the judge who had sentenced me. I found out from my friends that the people who had put me in prison—judge, policemen—divided my goods. The judge got my color TV; the prosecutor, my refrigerator; somebody else, my sewing machine and so on. The police chief got the bicycle. I took my son, with the help of a friend who still worked at the distribution center, to each of those houses and saw my things there. When I petitioned Kim Jong-il, I wrote all those points down as well. When the central party man came, he went to the houses and saw that it was true. ‘But if we take those things back and exonerate you, then all those involved will have to be punished,’ he said. He pointed out that I was already on the bottom while they were holding official posts. Therefore, he said, the central party was on their side. Although he acknowledged completely the wrongdoings, including my wrongful punishment, these were party members. For all those several members to be punished as thieves would undermine the party’s image and credibility. I just requested that they reinstate my son in school. But, no, we would have to live the rest of our lives in the place of banishment. We decided to leave, my son and I.

  “Our place of banishment was a large tract in Sansong-ri, Onsong County, North Hamgyong Province, where they formerly had a political prison. It’s in the far north-west of the county. We had lived in the county seat. I heard when I got out of prison and joined my husband and son that the political prison had been closed and the prisoners moved. It had been a huge prison holding about thirty thousand inmates. Some were sent to Hoeryong, some to Kaechon, some to Kyongbuk in North Pyongan. North Korea claims it has no political prisons. The reason they moved the prisoners is that the place is right on the Chinese border. They feared other people from outside would see it because border residents have contact with foreigners. I heard that from officials who used to work at the prison.

  “The place had been turned into a tobacco farm although it was on very difficult mountain terrain with not enough water. They called it 4/25 Tobacco Farm, after the founding date of the People’s Army, because it supplied all the military’s tobacco. The prison had used that land to grow corn before.

  “When I got up there from prison my son had no shoes. They’d never given him any. His one pair of pants weighed five kilos, he had patched it so often. The pants were all patches. Those were the pants he’d been wearing when he was kicked out of university. He wore them for five years. O
n his feet he had only soles, with rope wrapped around them and around his feet to keep them on.”

  Q. What was the food situation at the tobacco farm?

  A. “The rations didn’t come regularly. I couldn’t work and wasn’t given food. I had to share my son’s rations. On his way home from the farm each day he’d bring grasses and so on. We’d grind the corn we got into meal, add greens to make porridge or steam it to make corn cakes.”

  Q. Another woman who had been banished told me that there was less starvation in the banishment areas and maybe in prison camps than in cities, because prisoners and banishees grow their own food.

  A. “I only lived in the banishment area about a year but, yes, it’s a little better on the farms than in the cities regarding starvation. In the villages, if you plant, you have to do it secretly. People usually go into the mountains and make small plots there. I got there in December. I was only able to get food from my garden patch for a few months. We escaped before it yielded much produce. We lived on grasses and weeds from January to September. The grain harvest is October, November, December, so we lived on weeds until then.”

  Q. Do the prison camps and prisons have farmland?

  A. “The prison camps usually do a lot of outdoor work: farming, raising animals or mining. Just plain prisons are enclosed with electric wire fences and are mostly factories making things.”

  After meeting Lee I looked up her son, Choe, to talk with him again. His face had filled out and he had matured since our first meeting two years earlier, in 1996. I felt that he had turned into quite a fine young man. He was studying hard at Hangyang University, determined to finish although he told me it was sometimes tough. He had joined RENK (Rescue the North Korean People), a human rights lobbying organization that I knew well from having talked with one of its leading figures in Japan, Professor Lee Young-hwa. “It’s getting bigger,” Choe said. “It has a newsletter and publishes a monthly paper, Life and Human Rights. The organization helps defectors overseas and we help those in South Korea who get into difficult situations.”

  From talking with more recent defectors, Choe said he had learned that seven political prison camps still existed. Some had been closed. “Two in the north-west were too close to the border,” he said. “Many escaped, and people could find them easily from China. The authorities wanted to hide them. The camp that had been at Kyongsong in North Hamgyong Province moved because Kim Jong-il’s summer palace was built in that area. Sungho closed around 1990 because it was too near the capital. Prisoners were sent to other camps. The authorities expanded existing camps.”

  ***

  Joo Young-hee, a handsome woman of fifty with thin lips and slightly hooded eyes, her short hair permanently waved, her mature figure clothed in a black dress with white stripes, looked the typical middle-class Seoul matron except for her thick fingers and wrists. I thought those might reflect training in the martial arts, but learned she had been a basketball player in high school and a knitter afterward, had been imprisoned once at hard labor, farming, and eventually had been banished to a rural area.

  Her first husband, a Korean-Japanese, had died in 1982, she told me. “After that I worked in a house-wives’ cooperative as a knitter, but only nominally from 1984. That year I started my own business, trading with Chinese on the border—TVs, squid. Also, Chinese traders came to my town to trade with me. I was still getting money from my husband’s relatives in Japan so I could buy televisions in the stores in Pyongyang and Hamhung. A TV cost about 15,000 won, but we could sell it for 40,000 or 50,000 won to Chinese. I had been to China, with a proper passport. I had an invitation from a Chinese trading friend who I claimed was a sister-in-law. If you can afford it, it’s not hard to get a proper passport and go to China. To get the passport I bribed officials with Chinese medicine. In 1989, I was imprisoned for two years for violations related to my trading. I went to Prison Number 11, Chungsam County, South Pyongan Province.”

  Q. How was it?

  A. “I was in the country’s only women’s prison. You don’t lose your citizenship rights there. It’s more of a training camp than a prison. Inmates there were fortune-tellers, traders, thieves, people convicted of attempted murder. They didn’t give us enough food. The labor was hard. Young people learned how to be criminals. I farmed there for two years until 1992. My children stayed with my mother-in-law at home.

  “In 1993 my son defected to China. In January 1994, my other two children and I were banished to a village called Sangnam-ri in Hochon County, South Hamgyong Province.

  “My son worked for a trading company. When it closed he went to China alone sometimes, to try to do trading on his own account. He got caught during a state of emergency around March 1993. Four border guards who suspected him of spying stripped him down to his underwear and beat him from 9 A.M. to 4 A.M. Around 5 A.M. he asked if he could go to the toilet. They let him go alone and he escaped. He went to China. That was at Kanpyong-ri in Hoeryong County, right on the Tu-men River. He figured he would be punished, either banished or sent to a political prison camp. Calculating the pros and cons he decided to cross the river and escape.

  “In January 1994, not a year after his escape, they came after the family. Before our banishment I was taken to State Security and was a prisoner for about a month. They questioned me because they thought I must know something about my son’s escape. State Security people went to the house and packed up. The kids were at home. We were allowed to take one trunk and two sacks. I was released in time to catch the train.”

  Q. What was the charge?

  A. “There was no charge.”

  Q. I heard Kim Jong-il had come up with a new directive: “Make no internal enemies.”

  A. “Yes, in the early 1990s there was a new law—no reprisals against the families of defectors. In reality it didn’t help anyone.”

  Q. But you were banished, not sent to a political prison camp.

  A. “That’s true.

  “When the three of us went to Sangnam-ri we were sent to a cooperative farm but weren’t allowed to work for fifteen days. So they didn’t give us food or a house. We did have twenty kilograms of rice with us and one set of clothing. We had to carry in the trunk our portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. We moved in for one month with a family of four in a single room. Then we moved to the storage space of the same house. The roof leaked—we could see the sky. There were mice everywhere, even under the blankets when we slept. In August that year, we moved to a better storage room.

  “We were there two years and five months, constantly being watched secretly. They’d come at night and flash a light to see if we were sleeping. We had to be careful what we said. The only freedom we had was walking within the village. We couldn’t go even one step outside. Sangnam-ri traditionally has been a place of banishment. This is where families of political criminals were sent. There were a few normal people but not that many.

  “We didn’t see any rice. We only had corn, potatoes and beans. People living there originally, those not banished, had their own plots providing such things as vegetables, but people like us didn’t have land to grow them so we had to buy them. [Gets emotional.] When we lived there, because it’s a farm, we only got rations once a year at harvest share-out time in October or November. We had only brought 20 kilos of rice. Because we were watched, we couldn’t use money to buy food or the seller would get in trouble. There were times we had no food even though I’d brought money. Sometimes people would secretly throw corn cakes into our house because they knew we were starving.

  “Sometimes late at night I’d take the train to the county seat or to my mother’s home in Hamhung. When they realized I was missing they thought I would escape to China. They would call my mother’s house while I was on the train. She said no, I wasn’t there. I’d get found and taken back.

  “When I was banished I was told I wasn’t being watched. But I knew I was. Sometimes I’d stay ten or fifteen days at Mother’s before they’d come and take me back. I’d
say ‘You say you’re not guarding me. Why did you come to get me?’ They’d say ‘No, we’re not guarding you.’ After every trip I’d be put on the stand. Once I was taken to State Security because of so many trips. They said I could go—but I needed seven people to approve a trip. I used to fight with them. ‘I don’t need all this. All I need is food. The reason I go is I’m not being rationed food and can’t buy it here, so I go to buy it.’ They didn’t have much to say. I had to be put on the stand each time, but nobody would find anything criminal.

  “Everybody called me a madwoman because I wouldn’t submit. Toward the end I thought I needed to remarry. With a husband as a protector maybe life would be better. I married a train conductor. Everybody was opposed, including the party. The neighborhood people tried to discourage him because I was ‘anti-party’ They put a lot of pressure on him, but we married in June 1996. Because of his unyielding personality he died of a stroke after our marriage. He went through with the marriage because his daughters told him he needed someone to care for him in his old age.”

  Q. How about the food situation for other banishees who don’t have money?

  A. “Most of the people had been there a long time. Over the years they had carved out plots in the mountains to grow things. They also stole enough food by winter to last a year. Of course, you can get caught.”

  Q. Did you see people starving?

  A. Yes, by March or April they had run out of the harvest share-out rations. In two years and five months there I saw one child and an adult die of hunger, plus one of disease, and one by drowning. I left in 1997.”