[Kim Myong-sik] More empathy with escapees from the North

If Shin Dong-hyuk made up part of his life story, it must have been done by the taxidermied mind of this young man.

Shin Dong-hyuk has surprised us twice ― first with his gruesome accounts of life in North Korea’s worst concentration camp and then with his recanting of some key parts of his revelation. The escapee from the North ― the most celebrated one since Hwang Jang-yop ― may have told some lies here, but I cannot totally blame him. He fed the media and civic groups with the stuff they wanted, which they could have doubted with more caution. 

During the past week, I studied up a little on Shin, reviewing news stories about him, watching videos on his activities here and in the U.S. and reading “Escape from Camp 14” written by former Washington Post reporter Blaine Harden who had long interviews with Shin.

For reasons I could not wholly fathom, truth was compromised in the biography of the 32-year-old escapee who arrived in Seoul via China in 2006. And, as a result, we now have an international bestseller, which helped spur U.S. government and U.N. actions condemning Pyongyang for human rights violations, providing a mixture of facts and lies.

His story had as many dramatic ingredients as any spy thriller could have: executions of family members before his eyes, barbarous torture with charcoal fire in an underground chamber, and escape through an electrified barbed-wire fence over his colleague’s electrocuted body. These events took place at Camp 14 in Kaechon City north of Pyongyang. Two years after the book was published, Shin changed the place to Camp 18, known to be a more relaxed facility, corrected the timelines and admitted he invented part of the story.

Author Harden and Shin are now reported to be working on a revised edition of the book after Shin made his confession. Closing the last page of “One man’s remarkable odyssey from North Korea to freedom in the West,” as the Penguin Book paperback edition’s subtitle described it, I asked myself if I could have still found so many traces of bizarre dramatization by a soul seeking public attention, had I read it before the turnaround.

Most disturbing was Shin’s account of witnessing the execution of his own mother and brother after he snitched on their escape plan to a camp guard. The book then describes an officer with a four-star insignia directing the torture of the then 13-year-old Shin to uncover his family’s whole subversive plot. His passage through the electrified barbed-wire fence of Camp 14 was graphically rendered in the book with doctors vouching that the scars on his’s legs were the result of their contact with electric current. The reader is utterly confused about what to believe and what not to.

Then I watched a 2008 video on YouTube of Shin in a reporting session for media representatives and academics in the U.S., arranged by the Liberty in North Korea, a Torrance, California-based human rights organization. After Shin made his presentation with a Google map on the screen, he was asked by some participants to explain how he had survived outside the camp and managed to travel through the North’s harsh surveillance system without money, proper ID or geographical knowledge.

Speaking through an interpreter, he explained the ease with which guards were bribed and lack of social order under severe famine at that time but his short answers seemed unable to convince the questioners. Then I switched to another video, provided by the pro-North Korean website Uriminjokkiri, which they released to refute Shin’s disclosure. In the 10-minute video, his father and stepmother appeared and claimed that Shin had lived with them in an ordinary village, not in any “concentration camp,” for several years before he disappeared. They called him “a lazy good-for-nothing” who worked in a coal mine.

Through the hours of research, I arrived at my own conclusion from the Shin Dong-hyuk episode. Shin lived 23 years in the harshest conditions in North Korea whether at Camp 14, Camp 18 or any other place in a country which itself is a huge concentration camp. Truth, familial love or other noble concepts of human society must have much less meaning in the kind of place where Shin lived.

We can never imagine the circumstances in which one has to watch his mother being hanged and brother shot to death, but we are further dismayed that the witnessing son led a life as usual after the unbearable tragedy, according to the book. Perhaps the boy’s emotional functions were dried up under unceasing mental and physical sufferings. If Shin made up part of his life story, it must have been done by the taxidermied mind of this young man.

Despite its inadvertent inaccuracies, Harden’s book educates us on this pathetic effect of the society named North Korea, which we have to be prepared of finding in the hearts of the escapees from the North. Encouragingly, we see the possibility of their healing in the latter pages of “Escape from Camp 14.”

Shin is one of nearly 30,000 North Koreans who have come to South Korea via China or other third countries since the late 1990s. Some have moved to the United States but most have settled down here. After reaching the peak in 2009, the number of annual arrivals has declined in recent years. The reasons are, as concerned authorities analyze: tighter control by North Korea and its ally China; improved living conditions in the North; and difficulties in their resettlement in the South with increasingly chilly reception by the host society.

For a long time, refugees from the North stood for the supremacy of the South in the contest of systems between the two Koreas, and they continue to be the trophy of South Korea’s victory over the North even now. But, speaking of the social trend, they are much less welcome here than a decade or five years ago. Why?

The recent controversies over the leaflets balloon campaign by refugee activists, who are opposed by border area residents and some liberal groups, and episodes like Shin Dong-hyuk’s have changed their general definition from poor victims of extreme repression to adroit survivors with strong selfish pursuits.

Those 30,000 are all people who have had indescribably hard experiences while in the North and on their journeys to the South. They deserve social treatment here warm enough to heal their traumas that might have left them with certain mentalities that had little compunction about mixing truth with untruths. 

By Kim Myong-sik

Kim Myong-sik is a former editorial writer for The Korea Herald. ― Ed.

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