Escape from Camp 14

As word spread in Seoul of his birth in and escape from a no-exit labour camp, he began to meet many of the South’s leading human rights activists and heads of defector organizations. His story was vetted and scrutinized by former prisoners and guards from the camps, as well as by human rights lawyers, South Korean journalists and other experts with extensive knowledge of the camps. His understanding of how the camps operate, his scarred body and the haunted look in his eyes were persuasive, and he was widely acknowledged to be the first North Korean to come south after escaping from a political prison.

An Myeong Chul, a guard and driver at four camps in the North, told the International Herald Tribune that he had no doubt Shin had lived in a complete control zone. When they met, An said he noticed telltale signs: avoidance of eye contact and arms bowed by childhood labour.[39]

‘At first, I could not believe Shin because no one ever before succeeded in the escape,’ Kim Tae Jin told me in 2008.[40] He is president of the Democracy Network Against North Korean Gulag and a defector who spent a decade in Camp 15 before he was released.

But Kim, like others with first-hand knowledge of the camps, concluded after meeting Shin that his story was as solid as it was extraordinary.

Outside South Korea, specialists in human rights began to take note of Shin. In the spring of 2008 he was invited to tour Japan and the United States. He appeared at the University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University, and spoke to employees at Google.

As he made friends with people who understood and appreciated what he had endured, he gained confidence and began to fill the gaping holes in his understanding of his homeland. He devoured news about North Korea, on the Internet and in South Korean newspapers. He read about the history of the Korean Peninsula, the reputation of the Kim family dictatorship and his country’s status as an international pariah.

At the Database Center, where staff members had been working with North Koreans for years, Shin was viewed as a kind of rough-hewn prodigy.

‘Compared to other defectors, he was a fast learner and highly adaptable to culture shock,’ said Lee Yong- koo, a team leader there.

Tagging along with his new friends, Shin began going to church on Sunday mornings, though he did not understand the concept of a loving and forgiving God.

As a matter of instinct, Shin was reluctant to ask for anything. The teachers in the labour camp had punished children who asked questions. In Seoul, even when he was surrounded by solicitous and well-informed friends, Shin found it all but impossible to ask for help. He read voraciously, but would not use a dictionary to look up words he did not know or ask a friend to explain something he did not understand. Because he blinkered out what he could not immediately comprehend, his travels to Tokyo, New York and California did little to awake a sense of wonder and excitement. Shin knew he was undermining his ability to adapt to his new life, but he also knew that he could not force himself to change.

22

The only birthdays that mattered in Camp 14 were those of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung. They are national holidays in North Korea, and even in a no-exit labour camp, prisoners get the day off.

As for Shin’s birthday, no one paid any attention when he was growing up, including Shin.

That changed when he turned twenty-six in South Korea and four of his friends threw him a surprise party at T.G.I. Friday’s in downtown Seoul.

‘I was very moved,’ he told me when we met for the first time in December 2008, a few days after his birthday.

Such occasions were rare, though, and the birthday party notwithstanding, Shin was not happy in South Korea. He had recently quit a part-time job serving beer in a Seoul pub. He did not know how he would pay the rent on the tiny three-hundred-dollar-a-month room he occupied in a group apartment downtown and his monthly stipend of eight hundred dollars from the Ministry of Unification had run out. He had emptied his bank account. He worried out loud that he might have to join the homeless at the central train station in Seoul.

Nor was his social life in great shape. He shared the occasional meal with roommates in his group apartment, but he did not have a girlfriend or a best friend. He declined to socialize or work with other North Koreans who had been released from labour camps. In this respect, he was like many North Korean defectors. Studies have found that they are slow to socialize and often avoid contact with others for two to three years after arriving in the South.[41]

His memoir had flopped, about five hundred copies sold from a printing of three thousand. Shin said he made no money from the book.

‘People are not so interested,’ Kim Sang-hun, director of the Database Center, told the Christian Science Monitor after his organization published the book. ‘The indifference of South Korean society to the issue of North Korean rights is so awful.’[42]

Shin was by no means the first camp survivor from the North to be greeted with a collective yawn by the South Korean public. Kang Chol-hwan spent a decade with his family in Camp 15 before they were pronounced ‘redeemable’ and released in 1987. But his wrenching story, written with journalist Pierre Rigoulot and first published in French in 2000, also received scant attention in South Korea until after it had been translated into English as The Aquariums of Pyongyang and a copy found its way onto the desk of President George W. Bush. He invited Kang to the White House to discuss North Korea, and later described Aquariums as ‘one of the most influential books I read during my presidency’.[43]

‘I don’t want to be critical of this country,’ Shin told me on the day we met, ‘but I would say that out of the total population of South Korea, only .001 per cent has any real interest in North Korea. Their way of living does not allow them to think about things beyond their borders. There is nothing in it for them.’

Shin exaggerated the South’s lack of concern about the North, but he had a valid point. It’s a blind spot that baffles local and international human rights groups. Overwhelming evidence of continuing atrocities inside the North’s labour camps has done little to rouse the South Korean public. As the Korean Bar Association has noted, ‘South Koreans, who publicly cherish the virtue of brotherly love, have been inexplicably stuck in a deep quagmire of indifference.’[44]

When South Korean President Lee Myung-bak was elected in 2007, just three per cent of voters named North Korea as a primary concern. They told pollsters that their primary interest was in making higher salaries.

When it comes to making money, North Korea is an utter waste of time. South Korea’s economy is thirty- eight times larger than the North’s; its international trade volume is two hundred and twenty-four times larger.[45]

North Korea’s periodic belligerence, however, does trigger eruptions of anger in the South. This was especially true in 2010, when North Korea launched a sneak submarine attack that killed forty-six South Korean sailors and sank the Cheonan, a warship sailing in South Korean territorial waters. The North also rained artillery shells on a small South Korean island, killing four people. But the South’s taste for vengeance tends to fade quickly.

After international investigators confirmed that a North Korean torpedo sank the Cheonan, voters in the South refused to rally around President Lee, who had said the North Korean government should ‘pay a price’. There was no South Korean version of the ‘9/11’ effect that propelled the United States into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead, Lee’s party was routed in a midterm election that showed South Koreans were more interested in preserving peace and protecting living standards than in teaching the North a lesson.

‘There is no winner if war breaks out, hot or cold,’ Lim Seung-youl, a twenty-seven-year-old Seoul clothing distributor, told me. ‘Our nation is richer and smarter than North Korea. We have to use reason over confrontation.’

South Koreans have spent decades refining what this reason means in response to a next-door dictatorship