North Korean defector speaks out

Shin Dong Hyuk, who escaped a prison camp and made it to the South, has just published a book.

from the November 6, 2007 edition

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Activists say South Korea has no clear policy of its own on refugees. "It's like a band-aid policy," says Erika Kang, director of the Good Friends Center for Peace, Human Rights and Refugees in Seoul. "We need a mid- and long-term strategy, but the government is not gearing up for that."

South Korean officials counter that they are increasingly sensitive to the needs of refugees after accepting nearly 12,000 of them – at a rate that now averages about 2,000 a year.

"We consider North Korean defectors as our people," says Kim Hyun Du, an official in the Unification Ministry. "We provide assistance in resettling them," ranging from a short course to acquaint them with life in a capitalist environment to grants until they find work to incentives to remain on jobs they often don't like.

South Koreans have heard so many "terrible stories," says Ms. Kang, that many people are inured to persistent reports of the horrors in camps believed to be holding some 200,000 political prisoners and family members imprisoned for "crimes of relatives."

"Everything people heard ... was quite bad," she says. "There's nothing new or so shocking."

Most refugees fled to escape famine, disease, and harsh rule; virtually none before had escaped camps to which political prisoners are consigned until they die, often because of beatings and poor health, sometimes by executions. "We deal with hundreds of defectors," says Kim Sang Hun, "but Shin is unusual in that he was born in a camp we had never heard of before."

Shin says he had no knowledge of the outside world – or of North Korea. He did not know that Pyongyang was the capital.

The only prisoner ever to get out of Camp No. 14 and make it to South Korea, Shin pulls up the legs of his pants, exposing scars from powerful electric currents and shows that a finger was cut off as punishment for dropping a load he carried. He does not reveal scars from severe mistreatment while interrogators ordered him to say what he knew about what they claimed had been an escape attempt by his mother and older brother. The two were later executed.

Shin says his curiosity about life elsewhere was piqued by another prisoner who had traveled abroad. That prisoner, he says, was apparently electrocuted while attempting to escape with him, leaving Shin to wander alone for 20 days, living off stolen food, before finally wading across the shallow Tumen River into China.

Shin says his motive for writing his book was simple. "I want to know, if our parents committed crimes, why the innocent children? I want to inform the world about them. Now, for the children in the camp, I wish to speak for them."

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