Dear Leader (43 page)

More recently, I received an invitation to take part in Poetry Parnassus, hosted by the Southbank Centre as part of the London Olympic Games in the summer of 2012. One poet from each participating Olympic country was invited, and I had been chosen to represent North Korea in my exile among several other poets-in-exile. Such encounters with writers affirmed for me that a country could not truly be advanced in its human rights without also being advanced in its freedom of speech, and this strengthened my resolve to declare the truth about North Korea through the written word.

In 2010, I finally left my post and with it the world of institutions for good. I was able to spend more time writing and, with the entirety of my severance allowance, in 2011 I set up
New Focus
, the first news organisation run by North Korean exiles. I named it thus for two main reasons: in the hope that North Korea could pursue a new vision; and to show the outside world that there was a way of understanding North Korea beyond the way that existing frameworks of interpretation or government agendas allowed it. I wanted the knowledge and experience of North Koreans to be taken seriously into account. In April 2013, I wrote for a
New York Times
op-ed:

[Back home] there are two North Koreas: one real and the other a fiction created by the regime. It was after my defection … that I recognised the existence of a third North Korea: a theoretical one. This is the North Korea constructed by the outside world …

After crossing the Tumen River, I had fled from the Chinese and North Korean authorities for thirty-five days. It was little more than a month of my life, yet the pain of that experience was akin to giving birth. And why wouldn’t it be painful? Freedom is freely given to
anyone born in a free land, but others have to risk their lives for it. In a free nation, freedom is a word that may be all too common and hollow in meaning; but my friend Young-min jumped from a rock face dreaming of it.

Even today, the Party brainwashes its subjects, telling them that the essence of their identity is based on their living in ‘Kim Il-sung’s homeland’ and being ‘Kim Jong-il’s people’. My mentor Kim Sang-o replaced a country with a person by praising Kim Il-sung as ‘My Homeland’, but I, his student, could not follow in his footsteps. For me, my homeland was not the country I was born into, or the man I obeyed, but the world in which I wanted to be buried; so I escaped from a system where literature was permitted to serve only one man’s legacy.

Writing the account of my escape required me to cry from the heart,
Freedom is my homeland
. And I was not its only author, because it was with Young-min that I made the journey. Nor am I the sole protagonist of this book. This story is also about my friend who testified to the desperation that drives millions of North Koreans who have stood, and still stand, before a cliff edge with nowhere else to go but over the precipice. It is also a tribute to those who helped me on my journey, those who helped me pull through because their loyalty was not to those in power, but to our shared humanity.

Today, there are over 25,000 North Koreans who have made it to South Korea. Some of them have had to hide out in caves for years; others have been captured and sent back to North Korea, only to make another miraculous escape. If all their stories could be put into words, my life would barely fill one page of that book.

One North Korean diplomat, captured by North Korean agents abroad and in the process of being returned to North Korea, had the good misfortune of a car accident – and was thus able to escape from the wreckage and seek asylum from the local authorities. Another, in shackles, leapt from the train taking him back to Pyongyang, and crawled back over the frozen Tumen River to reclaim his life. Risking his life once was not enough to buy his freedom, and neither was it
for many others, who have been ‘repatriated’ three times and escaped three times. There are those who, innocent of any crime other than being the child of their parents, were sent to a prison camp, never given a name, yet managed to escape.

How many more North Koreans wandered through foreign lands and died namelessly? There is the tragedy of a couple who made it to South-East Asia after crossing China on foot; but in crossing the Mekong River, they entrusted the family’s fate to a floating tyre inner-tube, and only their child survived. On another occasion, a mother and daughter were separated on the threshold of a South Korean consulate as Chinese authorities seized one while the other managed to dash to a terrible freedom.

In this way, all of us exiles not only had to escape from the system, but also, by risking death, to let go of our sense of entitlement to life. This is why, like many others, I had years of nightmares after settling in South Korea. At night, our fears take hold of us, as we are returned to the oppressive surveillance, or find ourselves arrested by secret police and hauled away to a prison camp. We say among ourselves that only when our nightly dreams are set in the safety of our new country, have we truly made it out of North Korea. Even in our waking hours, especially on any occasion marking the passage of time such as New Year or an anniversary, we are seized by overwhelming emotions that paralyse us and that we cannot begin to untangle.

North Korean exiles are a living testament that there does exist a difference between freedom and tyranny. Their stories are not merely a vehicle to evoke pity. They cry for justice on behalf of all those who have died without a voice and who have been buried with the world as their dumb witness. Their insistent voices are the triumph of humanity having survived a brutal struggle with a despot.

Kim Jong-il said that the word ‘impossible’ did not exist in his dictionary. This is the dictator’s corruption of power, for whom a declaration that he wields a gun is as effective as his actually wielding it. For me, too, there is no ‘impossible’, but this is for me as an
individual. The price of my survival was being lost to loved ones, and their being lost to me; and I can feel no greater pain or desolation, whatever hardships may lie ahead of me. Above all, I now know and fiercely possess my right to freedom, and that gives me the strength to rise a thousand times for every hundred times that I fall.

The North Korean regime has not finished with its persecution of me. It not only makes secret attempts to find and harm me physically, but it also threatens me openly through its media. In June 2013, for example, the Ministry of People’s Security published an official statement through the North Korean state news organ, KCNA, saying it would ‘remove my existence from this universe’. The tyranny of Kim has now been inherited by a third generation.

This is why my peace lies in waging war against despotism, until our people are freed. Without that, my privilege of freedom would be no more than selfishness. But if the regime has murder, deception and nuclear bombs in its arsenal, the weapon I wield is truth.

In freedom I have also found personal happiness. I am always accompanied by police escorts because of the North’s continuing threats of assassination, but the woman who is now my wife did not begrudge the bulky chaperones who accompanied us on our dates for the three years of our courtship. When I said we should stop dating and, instead, offered her an engagement ring, I was grateful that she accepted it without hesitation. Last year, we had a healthy and handsome baby boy. The marriage of a man from Pyongyang with a woman from Seoul has given birth to a unified Korean child. Although Korea may be divided into North and South, our child was born into a union.

Whenever I do the dishes, my wife pats me on the back and says, ‘Honey, you’re settling nicely into a free and democratic world. If you continue like this, I know you’ll succeed.’ And I raise my hands in the air and confess, ‘This must be my servile fate. I was ruled over by a dictator in North Korea and now, in the South, I’m ruled over by my wife!’

THE OUTSIDE WORLD
views North Korea through an outsider’s lens. When Kim Jong-un began his rule following the death of his father, many interpreted the power hierarchy of the new regime according to the seven pall-bearers who were most visible at Kim Jong-il’s funeral. But, in reality, not a single one of those seven figures held any real power as sanctioned by the Party’s OGD.

Among the North Korean elite, real honour and power are conferred only through loyal obedience to the guidance of the Supreme Leader – with the OGD as its enforcer – and are not manifested through a formal post, but acquired through humility in the face of such guidance. As if in ironic confirmation, five of the seven pall-bearers whom the outside world saw as being North Korea’s power brokers, among them Jang Song-thaek, have since been dispensed with by the OGD. The two who remain, Chairman of the Supreme People’s Assembly Choe Tae-bok and Party Secretary for the Propaganda and Agitation Department Kim Ki-nam, are figureheads whose lives or deaths don’t matter as far as the Party is concerned.

In order to understand how the country works, the outside world must look beneath North Korea’s surface. Despite its civilian and diplomatic façades, the UFD is a highly focused operational entity specialising in counter-intelligence and psychological warfare; and the distorting influence of the OGD underpins many fundamental discrepancies between the apparent manifestations of power and its actual workings. Just as Jang Song-thaek’s bloody history caught
up with him with a vengeance in 2013, so Kim Jong-un has found himself slotted into a structure controlled by his father’s men in the OGD. Even the North Korean military is an arm of the Party, and has no powers whatsoever to appoint its own staff or issue orders.

Jang Song-thaek’s execution was the occasion through which the organisation that I founded,
New Focus International
, first revealed the reality and reach of the OGD to the world. Although there is still much more work to be done, our guiding principle from the start has been: Don’t worry about going faster than those who have had a head start; worry only about being more honest. It may take a long time for the truth to come to light, but it will remain long after the lies have faded.

The single most powerful entity in North Korea has not been recognised as such by the outside world, nor by ordinary North Koreans, because the reality of the OGD is intertwined with the secret history of Kim Jong-il’s rise to power. Kim Jong-il built up an entity whereby the OGD Party Secretary – himself – became more powerful than the Supreme Leader, leaving Kim Il-sung with only symbolic authority. The OGD must remain hidden because it is the entity that destroyed Kim Il-sung even as it upheld, on the surface, the most sacred legitimacy of the Supreme Leader.

The OGD is North Korea’s engine of power. That engine might be concealed, but it nevertheless moves the vehicle. Just as the OGD’s connection with Kim Jong-il’s secret rise to power remains obscured, so its absolute authority is veiled by its operational secrecy. The world believes Kim Jong-il’s succession was enabled by Kim Il-sung; but Kim Jong-il could not have obtained power without the OGD, and neither could Kim Jong-un remain in power without it. Through its meticulous and absolute control over personnel vetting and surveillance, not even the military – let alone any individual within the armed forces – can hold power away from the OGD. The situation is no different in the fields of authorised commerce or
diplomacy. Moreover, the OGD not only runs North Korea’s secret police and prison camps through the Ministry of State Security, it commands the ruling Kim’s bodyguards and, as discussed elsewhere in this book, all policy proposals are routed through it.

Many approaches to the regime focus on its being the agent of possible reform. They therefore pursue sanctions towards it on the one hand, or use diplomacy, official exchanges and investment on the other. Yet the unleashing of unregulated market forces from below, which have amplified the flow of unofficial exchanges, has weakened the OGD’s totalitarian grip more than anything else in history has done. North Korea might be ruled by a threatening regime as far as the outside world is concerned, but within the country itself, the regime no longer determines the price of a single egg. We must keep this reality in mind – along with the reality of power in North Korea – as we look to its future: while the OGD will not compromise on control of its own accord, its authority will diminish as long as livelihoods and opportunities lie in areas beyond its grasp. We must place our faith in the people of North Korea, not in the system that imprisons them.

Admitted, the

– the tiny circle of elite whose presence Kim Jong-il has personally requested and who have spent more than twenty minutes with him behind closed doors.

Arduous March, the

– the official North Korean term for the state of food emergency from 1995 to 1998.

Chosun

– North Korea’s name for itself.

Dear Leader

– Kim Jong-il.

DMZ

– Korean Demilitarised Zone: armistice line since 1953 that divides the Korean peninsula.

DPRK

– Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea).

General, the

– Kim Jong-il.

Great Leader

– Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il.

Gukgun

– South Korea’s National Army.

Jochongryon

– Association of Chosun People in Japan: organisation run by the UFD that represents people of Korean origin in Japan.

Juche

– state-ratified policy of North Korea based on the principle of self-reliance.

KPA

– Korean People’s Army (North Korean).

‘Localisation’

– UFD’s policy of adopting South Korean ways of thought in order to influence South Korea.

NLL

– Northern Limit Line: demarcation of territorial waters between North and South Korea in the Yellow Sea.

Office 101

– the policy-making section of the UFD.

OGD

– Organisation and Guidance Department: the executive chain of command of the Workers’ Party.

PAD

– Propaganda and Agitation Department.

PAF

– People’s Armed Forces (North Korean).

PDS

– Public Distribution System, which determines allocation of all necessities in North Korea.

Rodong Sinmun

– the official newspaper of the Workers’ Party.

Scrutiny, the

– the North Korean term is
shimhwajo
, which can be translated literally as ‘intensifying the scrutiny (of identification documents)’.

Section 5

– the section of the OGD responsible for the personal needs of Kim Jong-il.

Seed-bearing Strategy

– the North Korean strategy of kidnapping foreign, especially Japanese citizens.

side-branch

– a member of the Kim family to be ‘pruned’ for the tree to grow tall and strong.

Songun

– the Military-First policy of North Korea.

southern Chosun

– North Korean name for South Korea.

Sunshine Policy

– South Korea’s foreign policy towards North Korea, declared a failure by South Korea in 2010.

Supreme Leader

– Kim Il-sung.

Suryong

– Supreme Leader.

UFD

– United Front Department: key section in the Workers’ Party, which oversees inter-Korean espionage, policy-making and diplomacy.

Workers’ Party

– the official, ruling political party of North Korea.