Defectors shed light on N. Korea, despite dangers

By Kim Young-jin

Kang Chol-hwan, like all respected journalists, believes his obligation is to the truth. This serves the newsman particularly well considering the focus of his work is the ultra-secretive North Korea.

As a man who escaped the totalitarian regime in 1992, he knows all too well about the harsh conditions north of the 38th parallel.

Kang has chosen the pen as his weapon to expose a country that, for 10 years of his childhood, imprisoned him and his family at a notoriously brutal labor camp. In doing so, he has become a leading voice among defectors here doing their utmost to deliver the truth about North Korea ― despite serious risks involved.

Their voices are especially relevant now as tensions on the peninsula continue to rise in the wake of a sunken South Korean warship and scrutiny intensifies on North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s regime.

In an interview with The Korea Times last week, the forty-one-year-old reporter said he worries about reprisals for his anti-North Korean regime work, waged on his loved ones back in the North, rather than the tension prompted by Cheonan attack. He said he receives regular threats from the regime via e-mail.

“It’s abhorrent what the North Korean government does to the family and friends of defectors,” he said. “The only way I can fight back is by standing up to the North Korean government by continuing to do and say whatever I have to, regardless.”

Kang’s placid face belies the steeliness that keeps him fighting, a quality he developed while struggling to survive in Yodok Prison, reportedly the worst among the North’s brutal gulags.

In his memoirs published in 2000, “The Aquariums of Pyongyang,” Kang described the bone-shattering torture, starvation and public executions that were commonplace at the camp, where his family remained for 10 years after his grandfather was accused of treason.

Kang had to eat rats, cockroaches, and salamanders to survive and witnessed children executed and worked to death.

The expose, the first account of North Korean prisons by a survivor, gave Kang his platform to protest against the North. But with the media attention, he noticed that his message, relayed through South Korean media, was often misrepresented.

Reports here, he said, focused too much on the minutiae of the regime’s moves without looking at the larger picture of its pattern of behavior amid crumbling conditions.

“That’s why I decided to become a reporter ― to deliver accurate news about North Korea. I saw that it was my destiny,” he recalled.

Pyongyang has kept tabs on the writer. Once, when he contributed to an article about a killed defector, officials made a show of producing the man to refute the claim. It has also characterized him as “riffraff devoid of human values.”

Constant surveillance

When Kim Heung-kwang defected six years ago, he figured on a quiet life to break away from his work in the North as a professor at a communist party university.

But, like Kang, he said the inaccurate information he saw in the media and on the Internet moved him to switch tracks.

In 2008, he started an organization called North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity, which has sent cell phones into the North so that people there can provide news of any developments within.

Citing his lines into the North, Kim said in an interview last week that while family members of defectors aren’t automatically taken away, they are kept under “constant surveillance.”

Those who don’t report contact with a defector, he said, along with repatriated defectors, are tortured or punished before being sent to a camp in an isolated region called Baekam.

“It’s not easy,” he said of the constant concern that his pro-democracy work could hurt his loved ones up north. “And staying afloat financially is difficult as well. But delivering accurate information is absolutely necessary to solve the problems that South Korea is going through in regards to the North.”

Perception gap

Both defectors suggested the lack of information about the North has caused great misperceptions about the Stalinist state; one of which is the Cheonan attack.

Blamed by Seoul and its allies for the March 26 torpedo attack that killed 46, the North has remained defiant, barking threats of war over the prospect of sanctions. Last week, it fired 130 artillery rounds near the sea border in apparent response to a South Korean naval exercise held in the area.

Kang said when it comes to the North, people here should look beyond its rhetoric and more deeply into how conditions there affect its moves.

“When North Korea voices its anger or makes belligerent statements, it just means Kim Jong-il doesn’t feel comfortable with a certain event,” he said. “South Koreans should not lose patience when they hear Pyongyang’s threats ― the regime enjoys that. The best way to handle such threats is to simply ignore them.”

Both suggested that the Cheonan attack aimed to send a message regarding the Northern Limit Line, the de facto maritime border the North has contested since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

But they also agreed it was meant to exert control over the country’s populace, which has shown increasing signs of unrest over the last year.

“Part of the reason North Korea waged the attack on the Cheonan was to regain control of its people after the failed currency reform,” Kang said.

The discontent began to manifest around November 2009 after a botched currency revaluation, intended to squelch a bourgeoning private sector, sent inflation soaring and the economy into disarray.

Said Kim of the intellectuals group, “After the sinking, the regime said the South was using the incident to start a war, putting the country on the defensive and giving it the chance to tighten its grip on the populace.”

The former professor said that, in contrast to the non-stop Cheonan coverage here, most Northerners cared little about who sank the ship.

The currency reform and the bare necessities of life remain the front burner issues, he said, underscoring a major perception gap between people on opposite sides of the border when it comes to viewing the tensions.

Fight goes on

Kang said a growing number of North Koreans are now listening to radio broadcasts from the South, causing them to think twice about what they are told about the Cheonan and other matters.

“They are closing their eyes and ears to the regime,” he said. “They’ve been lied to for a long time. But they know better now. They want the regime to be finished soon.”

To that end, the reporter vowed to fight on and hailed his compatriots joining him in the effort.

“Giving up in the face of the threats won’t do anything to improve the situation,” Kang said. “But the accumulated effort of us defectors, I believe, will ultimately make a difference.”

That difference, he hopes, will bring his dream of change closer to the truth.

Korea Times interns Lee Jung-in and Kim So-yang contributed to this article