Escape from North Korea (38 page)

So controlled are the media that when the state-run television network broadcast the British-made soccer film
Bend It Like Beckham
, in December 2010, the event made international headlines. According to the British government, which arranged for the film to air in honor of the tenth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between London and Pyongyang, this was the first time that a Western movie had been shown on television in North Korea. Even so, the North Korean censors did not permit viewers to see the film in its entirety. The network broadcast a bowdlerized version, minus the bits on religion, interracial marriage, and homosexuality. These subjects are taboo in North Korea.

Much has been written about the liberating power of information technology. The world saw its effect in Beijing in 1989, when democracy activists used facsimile machines to tell the outside world what was happening in Tiananmen Square, an event that prompted the late American strategic thinker Albert Wohlstetter to quip, “the fax shall
make you free.” The Buddhist monks who led a push for freedom in Burma in 2007 communicated with each other and the outside world through text messaging. A few years later, the Tunisian, Egyptian, and Libyan rebels who overthrew their country's long-standing authoritarian leaders became friends on Facebook, micro-blogged on Twitter, and posted video and photographs on YouTube.

None of that could happen North Korea—yet. In information-technology terms, North Korea is locked in a time warp. It is Ground Hog's Day 1953 over and over again. Founder Kim Il Sung understood the power of information, and after the Korean War ended, he made sure that his regime had a monopoly on it. It was a lesson that the late Kim Jong Il also learned and that he appears to have handed down to his son and heir, Kim Jong Eun, who has taken steps to seal off the border with China. None of the modern technologies that connect us to each other and the world at large are available in North Korea. There is no text messaging, no email, no photo sharing, no social networking.

Even a low-tech form of information technology—the mail service—is highly restricted. North Korea is a member of the Universal Postal Union, but it has direct postal service with a limited number of countries. South Korea is not among them. Contrast this with East and West Germany. Throughout the Cold War, Germans in one part of the divided country could send letters to their relatives in the other part of the country. Koreans have not been able to do so for sixty years. If a South Korean wants to communicate with a North Korean, there are no institutional channels by which to do so.

But all this is changing, made possible by the North Koreans who have fled to China and, especially, by those who have gone on to South Korea or the West. North Koreans may be in exile, but they are determined to find ways to communicate with their families and friends at home. The leaders of the information invasion are North Koreans now in exile and intent on getting information into and out of their country.

In South Korea, the North Korean diaspora has established an array of nonprofit organizations aimed at prying open North Korea by providing its citizens with information banned there. Four independent radio stations, founded and staffed by refugees, broadcast from Seoul to North Korea. A Web magazine run by exiles is publishing information gathered by a stable of covert reporters operating in North Korea. A think tank is developing back-channel lines of communications with intellectuals and military officers in North Korea. These efforts are funded by private sources from South Korea and, in the United States, by the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit, bipartisan organization created by Congress in 1983 to strengthen democratic institutions around the world through nongovernmental efforts. In 2011, the National Endowment for Democracy spent $1.3 million on programs supporting human rights, development, and democracy in North Korea.

North Korean exiles perform three essential functions in opening up their homeland. Above all, they are conduits of information. Through calls on illegal Chinese cellphones, remittances, and other interactions, the refugees provide a window on the wider world to family members still locked inside North Korea. Word of mouth may be a pre-technology way of spreading information, but it is effective. When North Koreans hear a trusted relative describe his life in South Korea, his conversion to Christianity, or his new understanding of North Korea's history, they are likely to believe what he says, even when it contradicts Pyongyang's propaganda.

Second, North Koreans who settle in South Korea serve as a “bridge population,” in the words of the president of the National Endowment of Democracy, Carl Gershman. The exiled North Koreans link their homeland with South Korea and the world at large. These people, Gershman said, are “giving voice to the voiceless society left behind.”
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In this respect, the information invasion works two ways. First, it ferrries information about the outside world into North Korea. Second, it enables exiles to get information out of North Korea. In addition to educating their fellow citizens left behind in North Korea, the exiles are also finding success in interpreting their secretive country to the larger world. In recent years, a mini-surge of books, articles, documentaries, TV shows, and websites has presented refugees' stories about life in North Korea. These have given the world an unprecedented window on life in North Korea. It is harder than it ever was for anyone—especially South Koreans—to hide their heads in the sand and pretend they do not know the brutal realities of life in that country.

Third, as a population acculturated to the South but with roots in the North, the refugees are preparing for the eventual integration of North Korea into a united Korea. They will be a vital resource when that occurs. This is especially true of the under-thirty generation. As was the case in Eastern Europe after the collapse of Communism, young North Koreans are more intellectually malleable, more open to new ideas than their elders are. Gershman calls them the 1.5 generation. He says these young exiles are sucking up information about the Western world: “how people in South Korea and other countries respect and defend human rights and democracy, how political parties organize and campaign, how workers fight for their rights and entrepreneurs compete in the marketplace, how journalists report the news and NGOs educate, defend, and give voice to society.”

Young North Korean exiles are also more receptive than their elders are to South Korea's culture of education and hard work. When the time comes for rebuilding North Korea, the corps of educated and highly motivated North Koreans in exile will be a valuable resource.

One of the generals in the information war is Kim Seong-min, a former propaganda officer in the Korean People's Army. He now runs Free North Korea Radio, a shortwave radio station in Seoul that broadcasts news into North Korea. Free North Korea Radio went on the air in December 2005 with the goal of breaking the regime's lock on information. It is one of four independent, refugee-run radio stations in Seoul that broadcast information into North Korea.

Kim Seong-min arrived in Seoul in 1999. His decision to leave North Korea was heavily influenced by what he had learned from illegally listening to Voice of America and the Korean Broadcasting System. He came to realize that much of what his government was telling him was a lie.
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He credits a song with opening his eyes. One day he paid a visit to a friend who played the guitar. The friend played a song he had heard on a forbidden radio broadcast from South Korea. The song began with the words, “Do you know how high I can fly?” Kim could not get the uplifting lyrics out of his head. What did they mean? What kind of society would encourage such personal aspirations? The next day he bought a radio.

He soon became addicted to the foreign broadcasts. Shows about news and history were his favorites. He especially liked a program called “True History,” which debunked the false information taught in North Korean schoolbooks. He recalls his initial disbelief at hearing that Kim Jong Il was born in a village in the Soviet Union, not under a double rainbow on the sacred Mount Paektu, as North Korean propaganda taught. Or that the Korean War began when Kim Il Sung's forces invaded the South on June 25, 1950, not with an invasion of the North by American and South Korean forces. At first he didn't believe what he was hearing, but the more he listened, and the more evidence the show presented, the more he began to doubt the truthfulness of the North Korean textbooks.

He recalls, too, his astonishment at hearing a radio interview with a North Korean defector who had escaped to the South. Kim
Seong-min had believed the regime's propaganda that Seoul would execute any North Korean who fled to South Korea. Yet there was the defector, telling radio listeners about his job, his apartment, his new life in Seoul, courtesy of the South Korean government. The experience gave Kim Seong-min the courage to dream about going to South Korea. It also taught him about the power of information to change minds.

Kim Seong-min was risking his livelihood and perhaps his life by listening to foreign radio broadcasts. As a mechanical matter, it's relatively easy to unscrew the back of a radio and adjust the set so it can receive frequencies other than those of state-run stations. But tampering with a radio is a serious crime. Kim Seong-min knew people who had disappeared into the gulag for doing so. Radio owners are required to register the serial number of their set with the police, and refugees recount stories of officials conducting snap inspections of owners' homes to make sure the radios had not been adjusted. Police periodically searched Kim Song-min's military barracks, looking for radios that had been tampered with. He prepared an explanation in case police questioned him: Listening to the enemy was important in his work as a propaganda officer. In the event, he was never caught.

The South Korean broadcasts on KBS, the Korean Broadcasting System, stopped airing criticism of the North in the early 2000s, when President Kim Dae-jung deemed it unnecessarily provocative. Kim Seong-min, by then in Seoul, started Free North Korea Radio to fill that void. In a repressive society, he said, people need more than food aid. They need food that can stir their minds.

Walk into Free North Korea Radio's office in downtown Seoul, and its mission is immediately evident. A huge framed sign presides like a guardian angel over the newsroom. The cursive Korean letters, painted in a bold, black script, read:
“Toward freedom! Toward democracy! Toward reunification!”
These same words begin every broadcast.

Kim Seong-min is a fiery speaker with a vision of a free and unified Korea. In 2006, he met at the White House with President
George W. Bush. When the world's most powerful man asked him what he would do to help North Korea if he were president of the United States, Kim Seong-min's reply was unhesitating: “Accept the refugees in China, all of them.” Welcoming North Korean refugees to the United States would send an important message to Kim Jong Il as well as to the people of North Korea, he told Bush. It would demonstrate to North Koreans that the government's anti-American propaganda was false. By doing to, it would help to destroy the regime from within. If the United States accepted more refugees fleeing North Korea, word would filter back, more people would leave, and the regime would eventually implode.

Like Kim Seong-min, most of the reporters and editors at Free North Korea Radio have escaped from North Korea. For security reasons, no one except Kim Seong-min uses his real name on the air. The other journalists keep their identities secret. While they are afraid that Pyongyang will seek retribution against family members still living in North Korea, they also are also concerned about their own personal safety in Seoul. Free North Korea Radio lost its lease on its first office when the landlord was spooked by the number of threats against it. It no longer publishes its address. Kim Seong-min, whose work has made him one of the most prominent North Koreans in South Korea, has received numerous death threats.

Free North Korea Radio hopes to play the same role in prying open North Korea as Western radio stations played in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Lech Walesa, the first democratically elected leader of Poland, has said that “without Western broadcasting, totalitarian regimes would have survived much longer.” In Russia, as Korea scholar Peter Beck has noted, at the height of the Cold War, one-quarter of the public was listening to jammed and banned broadcasts by the Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Europe. The radios knew this based on interviews at that time with Russian émigrés and travelers. Recently opened Soviet archives confirm this information.
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A survey of North Korean exiles confirms the impact of radio broadcasts to North Korea. It is impossible to conduct social research in North Korea. Refugees in China are, however, accessible. So in 2008, the National Endowment for Democracy commissioned a survey of refugees in China to try to learn more about their radio-listening habits when they lived in North Korea. The National Endowment for Democracy has funded émigré radio stations that broadcast to North Korea and northeast China, including Free North Korea Radio, and wanted to know more about its listeners.