Q. Why South Korea?
A. “I wanted 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.
“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.
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader Page 90
