Escape from hunger, fear in N. Korea

Jae Rok Lim's tidy apartment here is filled with books for an English degree, popular music tapes, and fresh fruit and fish from street vendors.

These were once unattainable luxuries for Mr. Lim, who a year ago was living in a small city in North Korea, 50 miles outside Pyongyang. But what this slender, solemn man prizes most about his new life is "thinking my own thoughts."

Lim is one of perhaps 200,000 North Koreans who, driven by hunger or fear, have been trying to escape one of the most repressive and controlling regimes on the planet. This week, about 10 North Korean asylum seekers slipped into the South Korean consulate in Beijing, defying Chinese security. They're the latest in a rash of North Koreans who have made their way to foreign embassies in China and, after elaborate negotiations, been allowed to go free.

As living conditions in the fortress regime of North Korea slowly deteriorate, such cases represent the tip of an iceberg of discontent and uncertainty inside the North, say defectors. Aside from eyewitness accounts like Lim's, the North remains a mystery. Travel outside Pyongyang, the capital city, is generally off-limits – except for highly scripted visits by a handful of diplomats and aid workers who must travel with native guides.

After hours of Monitor interviews with several defectors (whose names have been changed), a picture emerges of a grim and punishing world whose structures of police and military control remain very strong.

Lim, whose family was poor, says he grew up thinking North Korea was "the best country." He wanted to be a model citizen like his dad, a metal-factory technician who won a worker's prize from Kim Il Sung, the late father-figure of the North. "I was brainwashed for 20 years. Ideology was hammered into me from a child," he says.

It was while visiting relatives in China, who are part of a huge ethnic Korean population displaced by the Japanese in World War II, that Lim heard his first criticisms of the current leader Kim Jong Il. Lim argued with his kin for a month. But once home, things felt different: "China seemed more alive. I could watch TV. Going back to the North, I felt like I was going back to hell. It was so gray. The people were so sad. I was interrogated at college. There was little food; we students were issued corn powder once a day."

Yet beneath the official, Potemkin-like façade, defectors say, are signs of change driven by years of famine, a new black market economy, and a growing awareness that life outside is far better. Contrary to stereotypes of North Koreans as unthinking automatons, the overwhelming consensus of defectors, aid workers, and support groups consulted for this report points to a new culture of whispering, a people more cynical about leader Kim Jong Il, and more willing to leave.

"We all lived double lives," says Lim. "We hide our feelings inside and pretend to be happy on the outside." Lim visited his relatives a second time. On his third trip, however, he crossed the frozen border on foot and – with the help of a group of Koreans in China who were assisting refugees – left North Korea for good.

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