X Close

How to escape North Korea Defectors are often left traumatised

Life doesn't start when you get over the border. (Beyond Utopia/IMDB)

Life doesn't start when you get over the border. (Beyond Utopia/IMDB)


November 21, 2023   6 mins

When Kim Seungeun first visited North Korea, he saw a barren land devastated by famine, its trees stripped by people desperate to heat their homes. He can still picture the corpses floating down the Tumen River on its border with the South. “Sometimes there was just one body, sometimes two or three,” he told me. “They’d probably all starved to death.”

Kim watched in horror as people on both banks poked the corpses with poles until they burst and sank beneath its waters, rather than bother to retrieve them. Then came the pivotal event in his life. A stick-thin child — a boy of about seven, malnourished and driven by grinding hunger to cross the swirling river despite the bodies — begged him for help. “I fell to my knees, crying so many tears, and promised God to devote my life to helping these people,” said Kim.

The nightmare he witnessed on his volunteer church mission at the turn of the century could not be more different from the portrait painted by his grandfather. Growing up in a small South Korean fishing village, Kim was frequently regaled with tales of the beautiful mountains, rivers and women seen in the north before their country was sliced in half following the Second World War. Three decades later, this romantic image had been shattered.

After his epiphany, Kim became a Christian pastor and devoted himself and his Caleb Mission to saving North Korean citizens from the clutches of the Hermit Kingdom. When we met earlier this year, I asked how many people he has helped to flee using his clandestine routes that rely on bribery, smugglers, subterfuge and safe houses. “1,008,” he replied with a smile.

This, despite the fact that anyone caught escaping North Korea risks torture, public execution or being sent to a slave labour camp for life with their entire family. Now his work is being highlighted in Beyond Utopia, a gripping new documentary that features astonishing footage of one family’s flight to freedom shot on their mobile phones. At one point, the mother, hiding beside her weeping young daughters after crossing a border river, is shown on a video call pleading for salvation. “Please help us live,” she begs him. Later, this family of five, which includes a grandmother aged 83, are seen dodging officials and wearily scrambling through the mountains, rivers and jungles of four nations to safety in South Korea. They all carried suicide pills to swallow if caught.

During our conversation, Kim described the people he is still trying to save. These include one woman in her 20s who crossed the border five years ago, but was traded to a Chinese man who twice made her pregnant, then sold both the babies. He has also been told of bounty hunters murdering North Koreans hiding in China to harvest body parts, such as kidneys and hearts, for sale to hospitals. Six years ago, he rescued two teenage girls whos a broker was threatening to sell into the organ market, taking them into his own home to raise them alongside his own daughter. Other rescues include a teenage girl sold to a Chinese man in his sixties and a woman raped every night by a father and his two sons.  “I’ve heard so many horrible stories,” said Kim, 58. “When you hear such things your mind collapses.”

He started his underground railroad in 2000, after falling in love with Park Esther, an early defector who he met shortly after she crossed into China. A former army officer, she fled after her parents died from starvation. “It was through loving and talking to my wife that I discovered how hard life was for North Koreans and how difficult it was for them to find freedom,” said Kim.

He spent months seeking out possible escape routes, eventually marrying her after  buying identity papers from a dead Chinese woman. Now, both are pastors, their dedication to the cause boosted by the tragic death of their son. “He passed away when he was seven,” he said. “We were distraught, crying all the time and even questioning God. But then we realised that our son was in heaven and we should dedicate our lives to making him proud by giving more love to defectors.”

Kim, whose rescues have taken him deep into sweltering jungles and on daring boat missions on the seas, stopped travelling to China 14 years ago due to the dangers of detection as state surveillance systems improved and his reputation grew. Incredibly, Kim claims just two of his group’s escape attempts have failed. The first followed a tip-off to Chinese police following a domestic argument in a safe house as they were rescuing seven orphans. Fortunately, the children were young enough to avoid serious trouble when they returned to North Korea. The second involved two women defectors with children born in China who were captured by Chinese officials after being detected by facial recognition technology while travelling across the country in 2019. “We do not know exactly what happened. Probably the kids were sent back to their fathers and the women sent back to North Korea. They might well have been sent to the gulag as punishment.”

This is a grim fate. One former guard told me how both officials and prisoners in a gulag had to watch two brothers being beheaded after they were caught in China as a warning not to flee — then all inmates were ordered to throw stones at the decapitated corpses. Even a short sentence in the slave labour camps that holds an estimated 200,000 people can be fatal. During her seven years working in a camp, the same guard witnessed routine killings, torture and rape of political prisoners. Former inmates have told me injured people being dumped to die in snow and rotting corpses left in piles beside their huts over winter.

The pandemic staunched the flow of those managing to escape, as Beijing’s “Zero Covid” policies heavily restricted movement in the country. Then, six months ago, new anti-spying laws made it harder for groups to operate in border regions. Meanwhile, North Korea responded to the virus by ramping up security in border areas. As a result, only 67 defectors made it to South Korea last year, compared with 1,047 in 2019 — and many are thought to be hiding in China, where activists fear up to 30,000 defectors may be stuck.

Since the lifting of Beijing’s anti-Covid policies, Pastor Kim has restarted his underground railroad. Today, he is focusing his efforts on defectors trapped in China, such as one woman who had been sold aged 17 to a man nearly two decades her senior. “It is almost impossible to get people out of North Korea now,” he said. “We used to be able to bribe guards but now they put different departments there to watch over each other. On the Chinese side, there is military as well as police to keep guard.”

Hundreds of miles of new fortifications have also been built along the North Korean borders with China and Russia to stop smugglers, and guards have been ordered to shoot dead anyone entering security zones. Night-time bans have been imposed on road and rail travel near barbed-wire fencing or security facilities. One market trader told the BBC in June that even approaching the border river could now lead to harsh punishment, “so almost nobody is crossing”. Another man spoke of a spate of executions of people trying to defect. “We are stuck here waiting to die,” he said.

Beyond Utopia also shows the bid by another defector called Lee So-Yeon to help her son escape, an attempt that ends badly and leaves her looking broken. I found this deeply disturbing, having first met the same woman seven years ago in Seoul. She had shown me how she smuggled computer memory sticks into North Korea containing footage of female defectors accusing named high-ranking officials of sexual abuse and rape. This was her revenge for the widespread rape she witnessed while serving in the army — including by her own commander, who assaulted 30 women in her unit. “The videos tell them they will be subjected to punishment after reunification,” she told me. Although the government has cracked down on the illicit use of mobile phones, the pastor said they can still make contact with sources inside North Korea using Chinese smartphones close to the border. (I agreed not to disclose their methods.)

Despite the difficulties and surging costs of escape — which have risen almost tenfold since the pandemic — Kim recently dispatched an aide to the border region, who sent up a drone mounted with cameras to search for any weak spots along the fences on both sides of the river. This aide told me that he had spent 10 years hiding in China after leaving his home town near the border. “I looked out to the place where I grew up but cannot go there and they cannot leave. It is so hard. It is impossible to describe such feelings,” he said. He then described how he is motivated by the hope of one day finding his young sister. “She crossed the border into China but I can’t find her. She may have been sold. I know that she is hiding or suffering somewhere in China.”

I have met many North Korean defectors over the past decade. Most have similar tales of tragedy and torn families. One man told me how his fiancé was beaten so badly by government goons after his escape that she was left unrecognisable, two of his uncles were tortured to death, and his teenage cousins were reduced to street begging. Small wonder many defectors are left traumatised — yet such is the indoctrination that, even as she flees, that family’s grandmother in Beyond Utopia is heard praising the ruling dynasty that dominated her eight decades on earth.

The Hermit Kingdom is a country that crushes humanity. “In North Korea you have no dreams, no hopes, no life,” said Timmy Kang, a restaurant owner who escaped in 2005. “Everything is controlled — it is horrible. Then in China our mothers, our fathers, our sisters and our brothers are hunted down like animals. This is why Pastor Kim is a hero to us.”Or, as one British film reviewer was moved to call him after seeing his exploits on celluloid, “the greatest man who ever lived”.


Ian Birrell is an award-winning foreign reporter and columnist. He is also the founder, with Damon Albarn, of Africa Express.

ianbirrell

Join the discussion


Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber


To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.

Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.

Subscribe
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

16 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
1 year ago

When I read something like this, it makes me feel so grateful to be born and raised in a country like Canada. Every day is a blessing. Our freedom and prosperity is so precious and rare.

Julian Farrows
Julian Farrows
1 year ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

Yes, for all its problems we are lucky to be born in the West.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
1 year ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

Self praise is NO recommendation.

Mark Goodhand
Mark Goodhand
1 year ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

It’s not North Korea yet, to be sure, but year-on-year Canadians have less freedom.

The same is true for the rest of “CANZUK”, and the USA.

Aside from drug legalisation, which suits the ruling class to the extent that it keeps people quiet, what examples can you point to that show freedom increasing?

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
1 year ago
Reply to  Mark Goodhand

Freedom for the friends of the liberal government is sweet. Golden rice bowl and the government has their hands on the scales of justice in your favour.

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
1 year ago
Reply to  Mark Goodhand

I didn’t say freedom is increasing.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
1 year ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

Too bad the current federal government keeps on ignoring the constitution.

Mrs R
Mrs R
1 year ago

What truly extraordinary people. These are the real heroes. I am so grateful that this documentary has been made and I hope and pray that it gets a worldwide audience and people start to wake up. Keeping such horrific realities away from those in the West, a vast number of whom do not have the beginnings of a clue as to just how fortunate they are and how grateful they ought to be to live here, has been a huge error, an error so huge one can be forgiven for thinking it has been deliberately swept under the carpet.

Benedict Waterson
Benedict Waterson
1 year ago

These are real political ‘activists.’ People putting their neck on the line to battle real oppression and ease real suffering.

Michael Layman
Michael Layman
1 year ago

It’s sad that no western country cares about the plight of North Koreans. Kim Jong Un is nothing but a pesky gnat to the US. The US had an opportunity to punish them after the torture and death of Otto Warmbier, but Obama was a democratic wimp.
The West is beholden to China financially and we will never punish them for human rights violations.
If only politicians had the courage of this pastor.

Waffles
Waffles
1 year ago
Reply to  Michael Layman

NK has a huge military and nuclear weapons. The country is almost impregnable to ground forces. What exactly should the West do?

For the West to impose its values (freedom, tolerance, democracy, etc) on others, it needs to have sufficient superiority in military and economic strength. China has caught us up militarily and could soon surpass us economically. People who cheer on the West’s relative decline then turn around and say why doesn’t the West do something about this or that.

Waffles
Waffles
1 year ago

Someone should inform Wokes about the slavery happening TODAY in non-Western countries.

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
1 year ago

When I read “Life and Death in Shanghai”, Nien Cheng’s harrowing account of her arrest and tortuous imprisonment during China’s Cultural Revolution, I often wondered why no one had made a movie from it. Given how much influence that country has on American institutions, I no longer wonder.
Where did Mr. Birrell see Beyond Utopia? Will it be made available for public viewing? How will Pastor Kim’s rescue operation continue with this documentary exposing his methods, routes, and rescues? Cheng wrote her book while in exile in the US during the Reagan Administration. Her daughter had already been murdered by the government, so there was no one left in China for her to protect, nor had our country’s politicians yet been bought by China. How will the Xi regime react to this documentary, and who will pay the price for its existence?
Incidentally, the word for stopping the flow is stanched, not staunched.

Tony Price
Tony Price
1 year ago

In English, staunch as a verb has the same meaning as stanch. I suspect that this is yet another example of American English diverging from its roots (or perhaps vice-versa), as I (English and well educated) had never heard of ‘stanch’ until I just looked it up to check that.

Benedict Waterson
Benedict Waterson
1 year ago
Reply to  Tony Price

The American version of our language is simply incorrect

William Brand
William Brand
1 year ago

Now that America did nothing except talk and beg N Korea to stop its Nuclear program Kim has the bomb and can deter America he can take over S Korea any time he wants.He can even take Japan as well. The only question is wry he hasn’t walked into Seoul without firing a shot. Is it because he doesn’t want the effort of training a new group of slaves who remember wat it was like to be free.