Escape from North Korea (37 page)

It took two more phone calls before Sun-mi was convinced. She finally agreed to go to China, and she promised her father that she would take her sister with her. Sun-mi knew that persuading Bo-mi to accompany her would take some doing. Bo-mi had a special terror of crossing the river, fearing she would be shot in the back by North Korean border guards. But Sun-mi calculated that the prospect of staying home alone without her older sister would be more terrifying
to Bo-mi than crossing the river. She was right. Bo-mi reluctantly agreed to go.

Sun-mi had one more phone call with her father before leaving North Korea. In the final conversation just before the girls' departure, their father gave Sun-mi some last-minute instructions: The broker will handle everything, he told her. Just do whatever you're told. And by the way, he had something to tell her that he hadn't mentioned before. He was in America. In a place called Florida. The sisters were going to join him there.

Sun-mi couldn't believe her ears. America was the evil country she had learned about at school. Americans wanted to kill North Koreans. She remembered a poster on the wall of her classroom that depicted an American soldier bayoneting a North Korean baby during the Korean War. When she told Bo-mi that they were going to join their father in America, her little sister freaked out. There was no way she was going to America. Sun-mi had to resort to a lie before she could get Bo-mi to go along. We'll stay in China for just a few months, she promised, and then we'll return home.

The girls obeyed their father and went to China, where they spent less than a week. When I met them, they were in Southeast Asia, waiting to go to America to join their father in the place called Florida.

South Korea accepted a total of 2,927 North Koreans in 2009, according to the annual tally by the Ministry of Unification. Using Youn Mi-rang's estimate that 30 percent of that year's arrivals came directly to the South from North Korea, we can estimate that nearly nine hundred of the arrivals were new-wave refugees. Of those, most were North Koreans reuniting with family members.

The recent reunions of North Korean family members hold special poignancy when set in the context of the postwar history of the two Koreas, when about ten million Koreans were separated from relatives. Today, newly arrived North Korean refugees, working through unofficial channels, are able to reunite with their families, a goal that mostly has eluded an older generation of refugees for more than half a century. Most of the Korean War generation of refugees from the North do not even know whether the relatives they left behind in the North are alive or dead. The South Korean government estimated in 2011 that between four and five thousand elderly South Koreans with family members in the North are dying every year without having received news from their loved ones.

Over the years, the governments in Seoul and Pyongyang have permitted a limited number of brief reunions of families divided by the Korean War to take place under tightly controlled conditions. The first reunions were held in 1985, after thirteen years of negotiations. In that year, the governments of the two Koreas arranged highly publicized family meetings in each other's capitals under the auspices of the Red Cross organization of each county. Fifty family members participated from each side. North Korea canceled the family reunions in 1986 in protest over joint U.S.–South Korean military exercises.

Fifteen years passed before the next reunions took place in 2000. These reunions were a by-product of the historic summit meeting in Pyongyang that June between Kim Jong Il and South Korean President Kim Dae-jung. This time, one hundred family members participated from each side. In Seoul, seventy thousand family members applied for the one hundred slots, which were decided by lottery. In the words of one disappointed man, “This was like giving steak to only one hundred selected people, while a million others can't even eat porridge.”
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In Pyongyang, the selection process was not left to chance. The regime selected the one hundred participants.

Between 2000 and early 2011, seventeen rounds of family reunions took place along with seven rounds of video reunions. A total of 28,848 Koreans from 4,130 families met with relatives on “the other side.” In 2008, the South Korean government completed construction of an expensive family reunion center at Mount Kumgang, a tourist site in North Korea developed with South Korean money for the use of South Korean tourists.

There is a special kind of cruelty in these family reunions, which are limited to a few days. South Koreans arrive with food and expensive gifts for their relatives, who may or may not be permitted to keep them. Watchers are always nearby and privacy is limited. The joy of seeing one's brother or sister or mother or father again is mitigated by the knowledge that the meeting is temporary and that this is probably the last time the family will be together. Lifetimes have to be recounted in hours, and at the end of the appointed time, the families must part again, with no assurance that Pyongyang will permit even an exchange of letters.

North Korea “fattened up” citizens selected for these reunions, according to a classified cable filed by the American Embassy in Seoul in 2009 and disclosed by Wikileaks.
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North Koreans are chosen to participate in the reunions based on their loyalty to the state, the cable said. They are “transported to Pyongyang and then fattened up with regular meals and vitamins to mask the extent of the food shortages and chronic malnutrition in the North.” The North Korean participants receive new clothing—suits for men, the traditional high-waisted Korean
hanbok
dresses for women—that they must return to the government after the reunions along with any cash they have received from their relatives.

For Pyongyang, separated family members are useful hostages in its dealings with Seoul. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the administration of President Kim Dae-jung reportedly gave large donations of food and fertilizer to facilitate the reunions. The Mount Kumgang
family-reunion center sits on twelve acres of land and consists of three buildings paid for by the South Korean government.

Pyongyang has also used separated family members to extract ransoms from wealthy South Koreans desperate to obtain information about their relatives. In 2000, South Korea's Unification Ministry reported that 525 South Koreans had succeeded in meeting their families in China after working with private agencies in that country. The middlemen for these private reunions were North Korean agents working in China or Japanese-Koreans with ties to Pyongyang. Family-reunion fees ranged from several thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars; a hefty chunk of these sums went to the North Korean government.

In 1998, a South Korean television network aired a documentary about a celebrity singer from the South, Hyon Mi, who was reunited with her sister from North Korea in the Chinese city of Changchung thanks to the services of one such private agency. The documentary was hugely popular, but it provoked bitter feelings from some viewers, such as a seventy-eight-year-old man quoted by the
Korea Herald
. His wife and children were lost in North Korea, he told the reporter. “Is is fair that only famous and well-to-do people are allowed to meet lost relatives?” he asked. “For many years, I have tried to find my family in the North. But now I wonder if a poor person like me can meet his family while still alive.”
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Over coffee in Seoul one afternoon, Kim Duk-hong, a prominent defector from North Korea, described to me how he had operated a profitable family-reunification business in China in the 1990s. Kim Duk-hong arrived in South Korea in 1997 along with his boss Hwang Jong-yap, the highest ranking defector ever to leave the North. Family reunification was a side business for Kim Duk-hong, whose real job in China was running an institute dedicated to spreading North Korea's
juche
ideology. Pyongyang had ordered him to raise money to fund his institute, and as he cast around for
ideas to carry out the orders, he saw a market opportunity in the family-reunification racket. South Korea and China had established diplomatic ties in 1992, making it easier for South Koreans to visit China. South Koreans would pay handsomely for the opportunity to meet long-lost relatives from North Korea, he reasoned.

Kim Duk-hong was a member of the powerful Central Committee of the Workers' Party. As such, as he delicately put it, “I could easily search the national registry” that contains information about every North Korean. “I would check the social security numbers and then find them,” he said.
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At the request of a South Korean family, Kim Duk-hong's business would track down a missing relative in North Korea, arrange for him to receive an exit permit to visit China, and set up a meeting with his relatives from the South. The relatives would spend a week together before returning to their separate homes in North Korea and South Korea. “At the end they would be separated,” Kim Duk-hong said, “but if the South Korean family wanted to send money, that could be arranged with my security office.”

For North Korea, enforcing family separation has been an essential tactic in its strategy of isolating its citizens and forcing its will on them. In 2000, on the eve of Kim Dae-jung's summit in Pyongyang with Kim Jong Il, the Far Eastern Economic Review published an emotional essay by Don'o Kim, a Korean-Australian novelist who had been born in North Korea.

In 1950, when war broke out between North and South Korea, Don'o Kim was visiting his uncle in Seoul. He was ten years old. Kim never saw or heard from his mother again. At the time of the publication of his essay, he still did not know whether she was alive or dead. It would be a miracle, he wrote, if the summit paved the way for family reunifications. No group will welcome this more jubilantly than what he called the “38 People,” Koreans like him who fled from North to South during the Korean War, crossing the 38th parallel.

The author criticized successive governments of South Korea for giving low priority to the issue of divided families, but he reserved his greatest scorn for the regime in Pyongyang. He wrote, “No government anywhere can claim to have incarcerated its people for so long and so successfully.”
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Don'o Kim's words still hold true. North Korea remains a prison for most of its people. But not for all. The North Koreans who escape are helping to liberate their countrymen by means of the most lethal weapon their jailers have encountered: information.

THE FUTURE

INVADING NORTH KOREA

A
n invasion of North Korea has already begun. No soldiers or tanks are involved, and not a single bullet will be fired. Rather, the weapons are cellphones, radios, flash drives, DVDs, and videotapes. It is an information invasion, not a military one, and the strategic objectives are far-reaching: Open the country to information from the outside world, nurture dissent, destroy the Kim family regime.

North Korea long has been the most closed nation on earth and its people the least informed about the world outside its borders. It is the world's worst media environment. As noted earlier, radio, television, cellphones, and the Internet are all tightly controlled by the state. Radios are fixed to state-run stations and must be registered with the government. Only government-approved shows are broadcast on television. Cellphones are configured so as to be limited to domestic calls, and a user would be safe to assume his line is tapped.
Computer users—about 15 percent of the population—may access only the government-run Intranet, and even then they must receive special clearance by the state. Access to the Web is reserved for a tiny super-elite.

The international media organization, Reporters Without Borders, routinely ranks North Korea at the bottom of its annual index of global press freedom, in the company of Sudan, Syria, Burma, Iran, Turkmenistan, and other totalitarian states. One report from Reporters Without Borders neatly describes the job of the North Korean journalist as “feeding the public mind-numbing propaganda.” It characterizes the journalist's job as publicizing the greatness of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, demonstrating the superiority of North Korean socialism, and criticizing the imperialist actions of the United States, South Korea, and Japan. At least forty North Korean journalists have been sent to prison for crimes such as misspelling a senior official's name or questioning the official version of Korea's history.
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