Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  “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. On 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.”

  Q. Not an epidemic of starvation?

  A. “No, because it was a farming community. But in one family the mother and child died of hunger and the father was so weak that he drowned while crossing a shallow river. The one who died of disease was relatively well off but had acute dysentery.

  “One couple were not all there in the head. They boiled their child and ate it, took the buttocks meat to sell it in the village. The man got caught. He was imprisoned but she was released.”

  Q. What do you think of the reported estimate of two to three million dead of starvation?

  A. “It’s probably true. Before I left, near Hamhung Station, I saw lots of people dead on the streets. On the train I would see dead bodies beside the tracks. Mostly those were city people, I think. Starving people would hang around the station because it’s warmer, but the guards didn’t want to deal with their bodies so they kicked them out of the station.”

  Q. So it’s better to be banished to a rural village than to stay in the city?

  A. “It was a little better in the farm village. But for families like ours, with money it would have been better to live in the city. Now all the material goods from the cities are going to the farm villages, traded for food. People from the city come to the farm villages to trade for food. In the past, after sundown the village people would let them spend the night in their houses, but the city people started stealing during the night and running away so the farmers stopped letting them in. People had to go into sheds or barns to sleep. I heard of one young man who had a bag of rice and slept in a barn. He froze to death, holding tightly to the rice.

  “On the farm, if you’re hungry you don’t have the strength to work. So people recently started grinding corn cobs and mixing them with other stuff to make noodles. It comes out the color of cow dung and tastes horrible. It’s not really edible. People in my community started eating tree bark.”

  Q. Did you ever see donated food?

  A. “I never saw it in the village. But in Hamhung once I got a bit of South Korean rice rationed to me. Donated goods including rice are being sold in stores. You have to use foreign exchange to buy it. The government rations it to foreign currency stores, which sell it. Only people with foreign exchange could buy it. I didn’t buy that but I’ve been to those stores in Hamhung and heard the goods there were donated.”

  Q. What sort of person is starving to death?

  A. “In Hamhung, usually it’s people with no money, no goods to sell, no gumption or trading skill. So a lot of elderly people and children die first.”

  Q. How do the authorities react to the hunger?

  A. “What the central government tells each province is, ‘Take care of the food shortages locally’ But if the officials locally can maintain their posts they’re happy. They’re not sacrificing, or running around finding food for citizens.”

  Q. How did you get out?

  A. “The son who had defected got me out. He was responsible for getting relatives in China to put together our escape. The authorities in South Korea told me not to give details. I left North Korea February 16, 1997, and got to South Korea May 29.”

  Q. Now?

  A. “I didn’t know anything about South Korea. I had just heard rumors. I found that it’s free. But it’s not easy to live with all the freedom. I got a bounty from the government and opened a small shop selling North Korean–style sausage.”

  ***

  The day after I had met Joo I interviewed her younger son, Hon Jin-myung. His freckled face resembled hers but at twenty-one he lacked her savvy. He was still a youth, speaking in a husky high-pitched voice. His haircut looked as if it had been done with a bowl, bangs combed forward in front as seemed to be the fashion. He wore a T-shirt with a collar, jeans and sneakers.

  Q. Tell me about the place of banishment.

  A. “Sangnam-ri is a well-known place where people with anti-regime thoughts including anti-communists were banished as early as the 1960s. Ex-landlords and their children were there when I got there. There were no cars. It was a mountainous rural area. We had no house at first, lived with a family that used to work for the local party. They reported every move we made. After a month we asked for a house and got to move into the shed full of mice at the same family’s house. We weren’t given work for three months. But then my mother went to work in a cornfield. I was in my last year of school. My sister was married but still she was forced to come with us. After a while she left to go back to her in-laws. Just my mother and I were left. The place had terraced plots but no flat land.

  “After two months I wanted to join the military. But when they held the physical exam my name wasn’t on the list. That’s how I found out I couldn’t enlist. The local party people had been telling me, ‘We won’t look at your past. Everything depends on your behavior.’ I had believed them until then. I went to work in the cornfields like my mother. After giving up the idea of joining the military, I got to know the local people and found that nobody was allowed to leave, so we might as well come to terms with it. I talked with people in their forties and fifties who had been there since they were
children. They couldn’t join the party or hold important posts.

  “Mother felt sorry for me when I started working in the cornfield. That’s when she thought of marrying, as a way out. But they told us that even if she married, her husband would have to come live in that village. That’s when she started thinking of escaping. Trading in Hamhung, she knew lots of security people. She kept asking around whether there wasn’t some way out of the village. She was told there were certain people who could help get her out, people who used to be involved in the independence movement, pilots, train conductors, coal miners. She was advised to marry one of those and maybe she could get out. She wasn’t supposed to leave, but she left for Tanchong City for two months and found a suitable groom. They registered the marriage and she brought back the certificate, but the authorities told her she couldn’t leave even with that. The man she married had been a conductor since he was nineteen years old, back in colonial times. He had lost all his family during the Korean War. They investigated him but couldn’t touch him so they stamped the certificate and we left the village.”