Escape from North Korea (40 page)

In contrast to the balloon drops, which reach North Koreans mostly at random, even when they are GPS-guided, a range of efforts involving new technologies and creative means of delivery is targeting information to a more elite segment of society. The aim is to reach what a free society might call the “opinion makers.” In North Korea, that means government officials, academics, and professionals.

One effort to reach the elites is led by North Korean Intellectuals Solidarity. NKIS was founded in 2008 in Seoul by so-called defector intellectuals. Members are North Koreans with college and professional degrees who have escaped to South Korea. NKIS estimated that of the fifteen thousand North Koreans living in in the South in 2008, about six hundred had such credentials. The president is Kim Heung-gwang, who was a professor of computer science in North Korea before he escaped to South Korea in 2004.

NKIS targets its peers in North Korea. It seeks to inform them about what is happening in their own country and also provide news about the rest of the world. The target audience consists of professors, students, and other highly educated North Koreans. Such
people are likely to have access to computers, although not to the Internet, whose use is reserved for a tiny minority of trusted super-elites. These educated North Koreans are intellectually curious and, it is hoped, likely to be receptive to new ideas.

Hyun In-ae, vice president of NKIS and a professor of philosophy when she lived in North Korea, explained the decision to focus on the professional classes: “In order to change North Korea, people should change. It's as simple as that. We want to trigger change in North Korea.” All the democratic revolutions worldwide have been led by educated, middle-class citizens, she noted. “We're not actually expecting something like civil uprising in North Korea, toppling the regime, and that kind of thing. But our expectation is that when there are changes, if we keep doing this, maybe there will be a foundation or awareness of these things so that the public can respond correctly. That's our goal.”
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NKIS uses a variety of delivery systems to send information to North Korea. One is USB drives, which have the advantage of being portable and easy to hide. On first use, the drives appear to be blank, but after the user opens them a certain number of times, they display material that the user did not know was there. That might be a slickly produced video biography of Kim Jong Il that counters the propaganda myths about his birth. Or it could be a copy of a South Korean news show. The same technique is employed for DVDs, which are doctored to play forbidden material partway through the movie or the TV show the owner thought he was buying. Sometimes a flash drive will also contain entertainment—a computer game or a music video of a popular North Korean folk song. The expectation is that North Koreans will find the material entertaining and will be motivated to share it with friends. NKIS wants it to get passed around. “Anything going into North Korea from the outside is illegal, but a lot of people are watching foreign movies and soap operas because it's fun,” Hyun In-ae said. “So long as the material is fun, it will work.”

NKIS avoids direct criticism of the Kim family, judging that people would be too afraid to watch it. Such criticism crosses a red line, NKIS believes, and would be counterproductive. Illegal material is widely available now, Hyun In-ae pointed out. Many North Koreans will take the risk of watching it so long as it doesn't attack their leaders.

NKIS is also trying to spread information about democracies. It has created what Hyun In-ae calls an eBook on democracy, containing information on the history and makeup of democracies around the world. The eBook presents the history of revolutions and the grassroots movements that gave birth to them. It discusses the institutions that sustain democracies, such as an impartial judicial system. “North Koreans' idea of democracy is just that you have the right to vote—that's all,” Hyun In-ae said. “But democracy is much more than that.”

NKIS uses several means to get its material into North Korea, most of which it won't discuss. Sometimes it relies on Chinese traders, who take in the USB drives or DVDs and sell them on the black market. The traders think the USB drives are blank, and they don't know that the DVDs carry extra material. Another technique is to pay a courier to drop off a stack of DVDs on a street corner, leaving them for curious passersby to pick up. NKIS is working on finding ways to get its material into colleges, universities, and “genius schools,” the special schools for gifted children that exist in every province. Students at genius schools have access to computers, and some have them at home.

The North Korean regime is taking increasingly strong measures to halt the information invasion. In the wake of the Arab Spring democratic uprisings in the Middle East in 2011, there were numerous reports of a new crackdown on the illegal Chinese cellphones smuggled into the country. People living in the border areas were warned to hand over unlicensed cellphones or face severe punishment. A refugee-run radio station in Seoul reported that a North
Korean was executed by firing squad after he was caught with an illegal cellphone and confessed to supplying information to someone in South Korea. There were also accounts that the North Korean government ordered institutions and households to report on how many computers, USB drives, and MP3 players they owned.

The crackdown on cellphone use was confirmed by the Venerable Pomnyun Sunim, a respected Buddhist monk and humanitarian activist in South Korea who closely follows events in North Korea. His publication
North Korea Today
provides detailed, up-to-date information about conditions on the ground in North Korea based on reports from a wide range of in-country sources.
North Korea Today
is published weekly by the organization Good Friends for Peace, Human Rights, and Refugee Issues, of which the Venerable Pomnyun serves as chairman.

The Venerable Pomnyun said the crackdown on illegal cellphones has accelerated since the death of Kim Jong Il in December 2011 and the accession of his son, Kim Jong Eun, to the supreme leadership of North Korea. Kim Jong Eun is so determined to keep information out of the country, the monk said, that he even ordered the reinvestigation of people arrested in the past for illegal cellphone use. Also according to the Venerable Pomnyun, people selling South Korean–made or Chinese goods in local markets have been arrested, and Kim Jong Eun is so fearful about the contamination of foreign ideas that he also wants to eliminate all foreign products from domestic markets. In another extreme move to keep information out of the country, the young dictator has uprooted the families of North Koreans who have fled and forcibly moved them to interior locations away from the Chinese border, making it impossible for them to receive phone calls from their relatives in China or South Korea.
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In June 2011, the regime announced that it was closing universities and colleges for ten months for the purpose of sending students to work in factories, farms, and construction projects throughout
the countryside. The regime presented the move as a way for students to help their country achieve its goal of becoming a “great, prosperous, and powerful nation” by April 15, 2012, which marked the one-hundredth anniversary of Kim Il Sung's birth. A more plausible explanation for dispersing the students was that then dictator Kim Jong Il wanted to staunch the flow of information about the Arab Spring. Revolutions can form intellectual roots on university campuses, and the regime wanted to eradicate the possibility that student demonstrators would demand freedoms.

The upheaval in Libya and the overthrow and death of dictator Moammar Gadhafi, a so-called Revolutionary Comrade of North Korea, were especially disturbing to the Kim family regime. In October 2011, American Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said that Pyongyang refused to let two hundred North Korean contract workers return home from Libya because it feared they would spread word about Gadhafi's fate. The regime believed that if the workers returned to North Korea, “word of Gadhafi's demise and news on what's happening throughout the Arab world might reach the North Korean people,” Panetta said. He called it “another example of North Korean extreme behavior.”
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According to the South Korean press, Pyongyang also refused to permit North Koreans in Egypt to return home.

The North Korean regime's response to the information invasion reflects the fundamental insecurity at the heart of every totalitarian state. Like his father and grandfather before him, Kim Jong Eun understands the subversive potential of information. He realizes how compelling liberal ideas would be if a large segment of North Korea's population were exposed to them. Even something as ordinary in the rest of the world as making a phone call to a friend or relative in another country is a threat to the regime. It exposes the caller to the truth about his own country and the world at large.

North Koreans' eyes are beginning to open. It may take a while for them to act on the information they are receiving, but in the
meantime, policy makers in Washington, D.C., Seoul, and the United Nations need to become more aggressive about ensuring that the liberating power of information is available to the North Korean people.

CONCLUSION: ONE FREE KOREA

N
ot long after I began the research for this book, I interviewed Kim Seong-min, the defector and former military propagandist for the Korean People's Army who now runs Free North Korea Radio in Seoul. We met on a gloomy February afternoon at his broadcasting studio in a nondescript, gray office block on the outskirts of the city. The building was situated off one of the sinuous, urban alleyways that Seoulites navigate with ease but that bewilder visitors to the city. You'll never be able to find this place, Kim Seong-min told me when I set up the appointment. He offered to send his bodyguard-driver, along with an English-speaking student intern, to pick me up at my hotel. It was a kind gesture, and I appreciated it.

In addition to being one of the most prominent North Korean defectors in South Korea, Kim Seong-min is also an outspoken and involved backer of the new underground railroad. His radio station counts many listeners among the North Korean émigré community
in China. Kim Seong-min knows that North Koreans hiding in China are usually desperate, and he believes that the radio's mission includes reaching out to them in tangible ways. Toward that end, the radio maintains a hotline that listeners can phone for assistance. Callers are linked up with people who will shelter them and, if they wish, help them get out of China on the new underground railroad. Four times every hour while on the air, Free North Korea Radio broadcasts the phone number of the hotline. When we met at his studio in Seoul, Kim Seung-min recited the number by heart: “02-2699-0977.” Since its start-up in 2005, Free North Korea Radio has helped a thousand North Koreans connect with the underground, he said.

As the interview came to a close, I asked Kim Seong-min if he had any advice as I pursued my research into the new underground railroad. He replied in a voice so soft that the interpreter and I had to lean forward in our chairs to hear him. “Remember those who did not make it,” he said.

Since its beginning in the late 1990s, the new underground railroad has carried thousands of North Koreans to safety in South Korea and a few other countries. The rescue operations that began in a small, haphazard way in the late 1990s have grown into the multifaceted, efficient underground railroad of today.

But for every North Korean who succeeds in exiting China on the new underground railroad, there are many who fail to reach their destinations. They do not make it, to use Kim Seong-min's formulation. No one keeps records of the names or numbers of North Koreans who perish trying to get out of China. Or of those who are arrested and repatriated and disappear back into North Korea. Or of those still hiding in China, too frightened of being arrested and forcibly returned to North Korea to attempt an escape.

In some sense, every one of the twenty-four million people still locked in North Korea belongs in the category of those who did not make it. But there is hope for them, too. While the long-term effects
of the new underground railroad are not yet known, it's already evident that it is having a profound impact in North Korea itself. Those who escape are beginning to transform North Koreans' understanding of their country and helping to open their eyes to the rest of the world. The transformative process works in reverse as well. The testimonies of the escapees are educating the world about the secretive country they fled.

As the stories in this book have demonstrated, the new underground railroad serves two important purposes. First, it delivers a measure of human decency and the prospect of freedom to people who otherwise are destitute and hopeless. North Koreans inside North Korea are mostly unreachable. Helping the North Koreans hiding in China and wherever else they flee is a concrete way of serving a small percentage of a captive people. It is a worthwhile endeavor as a purely humanitarian matter. For Americans, helping North Koreans achieve freedom, even the small number of them represented by the refugees in China, upholds our moral values as a nation.

Second, the new underground railroad is a wedge to pry open a nation that has been sealed from the outside world for more than half a century. The assistance that the new underground railroad provides one refugee is magnified many times over in the friends and family with whom he communicates back home. As Pastor Phillip Buck likes to say, help one North Korean refugee escape, and you are helping to save an entire people. You are educating a network of North Koreans about the reality of life outside their borders. For the Christians who operate in the underground in China, a well-known verse from the Gospel of John holds special meaning: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
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