Escape from North Korea (35 page)

Mrs. Choi would much prefer to talk about her dance troupe and her dumpling factory than about her experiences in North Korea and China, but as our conversation draws to an end, she agrees to discuss her past a bit. She says she arrived in China “by accident.” She was tricked to go there by the promise of a job, she says, and then unable to go home because she lacked money to bribe the border guards and pay the fines owed to her North Korean factory bosses for missing work without permission. It sounds as if there is more to her story than she is willing to tell.

Instead, she wants to talk about the good people and kind deeds she encountered in her flight to South Korea: the Chinese Christian who found a place where she could live and who introduced her to Pastor Buck; the Chinese policeman who raided her apartment and discovered her hiding in a closet but decided not to arrest her; and above all, Pastor Buck, who is at the top of her list of Good Samaritans. His first act of kindness was to give her a job while she was hiding in China. His second charitable act was even more profound: He personally led her out of China on the new underground railroad.

Mrs. Choi is an example of a North Korean refugee who is thriving in the South. She is a natural leader whose organizational and business talents have been liberated by the opportunities she enjoys in a free society. But the cost is dear. The smile disappears from her face when she mentions briefly the children she left behind in North Korea. “I had three daughters,” she says. “They were four, six, and eight back then.” She uses the past tense.

Later, the leader of the dance troupe attempts to explain the emotional pain that North Koreans carry with them to South Korea. Life is good in South Korea, she says, and North Koreans who make
it there are rewarded with an abundance of material success. If you work hard, you can find a well-paying job, make money, create a good life for yourself.

“But the reality is devastating,” she says. “You can't imagine how it is.” North Koreans who succeed in building new lives in South Korea can never forget the families they left behind in North Korea or China. It is a burden every North Korean carries with him to the South. “There's one sky,” she says, pointing to the dull, wintry sky outside the window. “We're all living under the same sky.” The gray outside is a reflection of her somber mood. “For people like us, with children and parents still in North Korea, not a single day goes by without aching.”

The dancer's concerns about her absent family are shared by virtually every North Korean who flees. Many of the North Koreans who make it to the South arrive alone, cut off from families still living in North Korea or China. They often see themselves as leading the way, blazing a trail for the spouses, siblings, parents, and children they have left behind. As they struggle to succeed in their new homes, the newcomers often share the same deep ambitions: Work hard, save money, obtain passage for their families on the new underground railroad.

LEFT BEHIND

T
he most effective means of control that the Kim family dictatorship exercises over the North Korean people is its policy of punishing the families of transgressors. Consider this North Korean joke that offers some black humor on the subject:

The joke's humor, such as it is, requires the listener to grasp the utterly brutal nature of the Kim regime's control over its citizens. The first thought of each bodyguard is the same: how to protect his wife and children. But unlike Ivan, it does not occur to the North Korean bodyguard to ask for mercy. Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, may yet have a heart; Kim Jong Il does not. The North Korean bodyguard knows that the only way to save his family is to show total and immediate obedience, even if it means leaping to his death out the window of a skyscraper.

A top priority of North Koreans who escape is protecting their families back home. When they leave their country illegally, they know they are putting their loved ones in jeopardy. Even after they have permanently resettled in South Korea or elsewhere, many North Koreans refuse to use their real names or have their pictures taken, citing concern for their families still in the North. A survey of refugees in China found that an astonishing 99 percent of respondents feared for the safety or survival of their families in North Korea.
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The range of punishments meted out to the families of escaped North Koreans varies widely. The punishment can depend on the importance of the person who left, the political climate in Pyongyang at the time, and the often capricious attitudes of the local authorities. Some families are left alone or, at worst, called in to their local police station for a reprimand that may include some roughing-up. In other cases, families lose their homes and are banished to remote villages as punishment for their relative's escape. In still other
instances, families simply disappear, taken away in the middle of the night to an unknown, presumably highly unpleasant, location. Families of political defectors have been known to end up in the gulag or suffer fatal “accidents.” In early 2012, reports from news organizations and humanitarian groups with sources in North Korea told of families who were forcibly relocated to rural locations in the interior of the country as punishment for a relative's escape.

After reaching safety in South Korea or elsewhere, refugees, like immigrants everywhere else in the world, send regular remittances to their relatives back home. The difference is that a North Korean cannot walk into a bank or a Western Union affiliate and arrange to do so. There are no official channels through which to send money to an individual in North Korea. Refugees instead must seek out informal means, usually brokers who specialize in transferring money into the country. The initial point of contact is often a North Korean resident of South Korea who has gone into the business of helping new arrivals reach out to their relatives; such a broker often works with a network of helpers in China. Many of the South Korea–based brokers are refugees from the North who rely on the knowledge and skills they acquired while on the run in China. They typically employ Chinese citizens of Korean heritage. The brokers provide communication and financial services. They set up illegal cellphone calls with refugees' relatives, and they carry in cash.

Making a phone call to a relative in North Korea isn't a matter of flipping open a cellphone and punching in a long series of numbers. First, a refugee or his broker must hire a courier in China. The courier will cross the river, go to the relative's house in North Korea, knock on his door, and deliver a Chinese cellphone with prepaid minutes on it. The North Korean resident will be instructed to travel to a border town at a specified time, turn on the phone, and wait for a call from his relative. The cellphone captures a signal from China, not North Korea. It is illegal to possess such phones, so the owner must bury it or otherwise hide it until he needs to use it.

Mobile phone service was introduced to North Korea in 2008, when the Egyptian telecommunications company Orascom formed a joint venture with a state-run North Korean firm.
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Service was limited to Pyongyang at first, then spread to other cities. By mid-2011, Orascom said that it had more than six hundred thousand subscribers. By early 2012, it was boasting that it had one million subscribers, or more than 4 percent of the North Korean market. Visitors to Pyongyang reported that their guides all seemed to be using mobile phones, and the government reportedly was encouraging cellphone use among officials.

The Orascom phones are useless, however, for communicating with the outside world. In keeping with Pyongyang's policy of closing off access to the rest of the world, phone service is limited to domestic calls. International calls are blocked. Nor can North Koreans make calls to foreigners inside North Korea. The phone numbers assigned to foreigners living in North Korea are different from the phone numbers assigned to North Koreans; it is impossible to make calls between them. In any case, the authorities can monitor phone calls and do so.
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The government confiscates the cellphones of foreign visitors when they enter the country and returns them upon departure.

The process for sending money home to North Korea is labor-intensive. If the refugee is living in China, he will give cash to a broker, who will in turn hire someone to deliver it by hand to the relative in North Korea. If the refugee is living in South Korea or elsewhere in the free world, the refugee will arrange for the money to be transferred electronically to the Chinese broker's bank account. Next, a middleman, usually a Chinese citizen, will cross the border and deliver the money, in cash, to the designated recipients. If the recipient doesn't live near the border, the broker might hire a local courier to deliver the money elsewhere in the country. North Koreans who have settled in the South secretly send some $10 million
a year to their families in the North, according to at least one estimate.
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The broker's service fee is usually 30 percent.
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A survey conducted by a South Korean nonprofit found that 71 percent of refugees settled in the South have tried to send money to family members in the North.
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“Tried” is the operative word. Many of the respondents said they believed the money did not reach their relatives. Sending cash through brokers is a risky business, and gullible North Korean refugees, often desperate to help their families, are easy prey for unscrupulous brokers. There are many stories of brokers who take a refugee's money and disappear.

If a remittance gets through, the recipients also receive something even more valuable than the money: information. A North Korean refugee identified only as “Kang” explained to a South Korean newspaper how the process works. “When we make remittances to our loved ones in the North, we talk to them over the phone to ensure the money was properly sent,” he told the
Korea Herald
. “Through such talks, a wave of news about the capitalist society flows in and spreads there.”
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Since the early 2000s, as an increasing number of North Koreans reached South Korea, the brokers' range of services has expanded beyond setting up phone calls and helping refugees transfer money to relatives. A new service has been added: people smuggling. One sub-specialty of brokers specializes in extracting North Koreans from their country and delivering them to China. Another sub-specialty focuses on getting North Koreans out of China on the underground railroad to a third country, from where they go on to South Korea. Many brokers work in tandem with Christians and other humanitarian workers.

Brokers are critical to the smooth operation of the new underground railroad. There are unscrupulous people in this business, to be sure, and nasty stories abound of brokers betraying their clients. But it would be wrong to tar all brokers as such. The best brokers
understand that if they want to stay in business, they have to deliver what they promise. As with legitimate service businesses, reputation is the key to success. They are in the business of smuggling people, which means that they take risks. It also means they expect to make a profit. If they fail, the émigré grapevine will ostracize them and their business won't succeed.

“Brokers are a necessary evil.” That statement is heard over and over again from refugees, humanitarian workers, and, off the record, from South Korean government officials. A Unification Ministry official concedes, “Without brokers, it would be almost impossible for North Koreans to bring their children here.”
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The majority of North Koreans who reach the South today are women. If they are mothers, getting their children out of North Korea or China is often their top priority. This was the case with one woman, now settled in the South, who asked me not to use her real name. Ten years after “Ms. Lee” escaped from North Korea, her dearest dream came true. Her daughter joined her in Seoul.
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The story of how Ms. Lee orchestrated her daughter's escape—first from North Korea and then from China—is typical of how such rescues work.

Ms. Lee is a businesswoman in her forties. She is well educated and possesses a generous share of street smarts. She approached her daughter's escape in the same way that she would approach an important business deal, giving it her full attention and checking and double-checking every detail. She was unlikely to be taken advantage of by any of the con men in the underground.

Before giving her daughter the green light to cross the river, Ms. Lee did her homework on the brokers and possible escape routes. The refugee network in Seoul helped her evaluate the reliability of various brokers and make decisions about whom to trust. So did her contacts among Christians who worked on the new underground railroad. An American who rescues trafficked women gave her an introduction to his network of helpers in China.