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North Korean Gulag Survivor Speaks

Charles Ganske - 1/4/2005

North Korea is the largest recipient of food aid in the world today, but an estimated four million North Koreans have starved to death since 1995. In one year, the regime of Kim Jong Il spent $20 million out of $80 million in humanitarian relief funds on Mercedes Benz automobiles. Additionally, forced labor camps dotting the countryside.

One of the inmates in these camps was Soon Ok Lee. Soon was placed in a labor camp with 6,000 other inmates, including 2,000 women. Many of the women were pregnant, and were not allowed to give birth in the camp. Soon witnessed female inmates begging for the lives of their unborn children, and knew women who were forced into abortions. Rape was also a common way for the guards to terrorize female inmates, and the typical ration for inmates was 100 grams a day. As punishment, the guards often reduced inmate rations to 50 grams a day - a handful of food to nourish inmates expected to work 18 hour days in freezing conditions. To supplement their rations some inmates ate rats.

The female inmates had been separated from their children, who were sent to other labor camps. When one member of the family is charged with some crime against the state, three generations - parents, grandparents, and children - are also incarcerated. Such "crimes" include listening to foreign radio broadcasts, or in Soon's case, being a Christian. Kim Jong Il and his embalmed father Kim Il Sung are jealous gods, and they will allow no other gods worshipped before them.

Soon was fortunate, compared to the other inmates. Soon's economic ministry work had placed her high enough in the regime's hierarchy to be aware of the outside world. Her son managed to produce a radio that could pick up foreign broadcasts, and they listened late at night. Finally, she escaped across the Yalu River into China. Once in China however, North Korean refugees are constantly at risk of being caught by the police and sent back, where they face execution. Soon made it from China to Vietnam, and then to South Korea, where she won political asylum.

But now is not an easy time to be a North Korean refugee speaking out in South Korea, noted Soon in her speech at the University of Texas chapter of Liberation in North Korea (LINK). [1] After the famines of the mid-1990s, Kim Jong Il opted for a new strategy. He would engage in a charm offensive. Views of defectors in South Korea began to change as the newly elected government of Kim Dae Jung began its "Sunshine Policy". Refugees who openly discussed the horrors of the North Korean gulags began to experience harassment, often from radical students who had been taught that their country was divided in a war instigated by America, and not Stalin's protégé Kim Il Sung. Defectors alleging that North Korea has tested chemical weapons on political prisoners were dismissed as propagandists hoping to scuttle a new era in intra-Korean relations. Recently even some American writers have gotten into this act, with Slate writer Fred Kaplan labeling the highest level North Korean defector ever, Hwang Jang Yop, as "the North Korean Ahmed Chalabi" in a November 2003 hit piece. [2]

Soon did not go into this in her speech at the Texas Union's Santa Rita room when she gave a speech there. Her speech was squarely focused on her own experiences and those other refugees who have experienced the horrors of Kim Jong Il's death camps. She mentioned her testimony and organizing on behalf of the bipartisan North Korea Freedom Act in the U.S. Congress. The North Korea Freedom Act was signed into law by President Bush this week. [3]

Asked her if she knew Norbert Vollertsen, a German human rights activist who wrote about the North Korean famine in his book Inside North Korea: Diary of a Mad Place, Soon said that she has worked with Mr. Vollertsen to help pass the human rights legislation.

Norbert Vollertsen's experiences in South Korea working with North Korean refugees compelled him to write a piece for the August 22, 2003 edition of the Wall Street Journal. The title, "South Korea's Spoilers", delivered ominous news to Americans largely unaware of the increasingly complicated nature of intra-Korean politics. He wrote: "For three years now I have been active in lobbying for human rights in North Korea…here in Seoul, I get around 1,400 hate emails a day. As a result of an email campaign organized by South Korean students, my e-mail account is often sabotaged. I am caught in the middle of an Internet campaign titled ominously 'how to get rid of Norbert Vollertsen'…my activities to help the enslaved people of the North…are sabotaged by South Korean intelligence. My phone is tapped, and I have minders following me the whole day. All in all, although I'm here in Seoul, I feel like I'm in Pyongyang!" [4]

Mr. Vollertsen told me this summer that he was beaten by South Korean police for showing a photograph of a starving North Korean child as the South Korean President's delegation passed by in a hotel in Seoul. During this author's time as an intern at the Hudson Institute, the director of the Institute's Project for International Religious Liberty, Michael Horowitz, repeated many of these allegations in a speech attended by members of South Korea's Washington delegation. In the question and answer session that followed the representative from South Korea's embassy denied that the present administration is hindering the work of human rights activists, insisting that with the transition to democracy over the last two decades South Korea has come to fully protect freedom of speech. The South Korean ambassador's representative also insisted that his government is doing everything possible to see that food aid is actually delivered to the famine victims in North Korea, and not to Kim Jong Il's military.

It would be a mistake to conclude based on such problems that South Korea is not a democracy, or that anti-Americanism and sympathy for the North Korean regime are widespread among the majority of South Koreans. Indeed, pro-American demonstrations honoring veterans of the Korean War attracted tens of thousands of people in Seoul last year, though these were not widely reported in the U.S. media. [5] The Korean government maintains at taxpayer expense a Minister of Unification and a National Institute for Reunification. Furthermore, some South Korean newspapers, such as the Chosun Ilbo, have served as excellent sources for news about the North's atrocities.

However, most reporting about South Korea in the U.S. media ignores these developments, and overlooks both the possibility of an implosion of the North Korean regime and South Korean fears of paying for reunification, the real motivation behind the "Sunshine Policy". The gap between standards of living in North Korea and South Korea is much greater than the differences between East and West Germans in 1989. A united Germany has spent over 1 trillion marks (approximately $400 billion dollars) [6] to bridge that gap in the last decade, with mixed results. A recent survey found that nearly a fifth of West Germans would prefer to see the Berlin Wall put back up. [7] South Koreans are thus not the first U.S. allies to have mixed emotions about the reunification of their country.

U.S. reporting, and hence the questions in this year's first presidential debate, have been entirely concerned with the North's nuclear programs, with little discussion as to why the regime desperately needs nuclear weapons to blackmail its neighbors. Opinion journalism on the North Korean crisis, as with Fred Kaplan's piece, is grossly oversimplified into a Washington tale of "administration hawks" - who do not want to negotiate with Pyongyang, vs. "doves", who are willing to make concessions. Such templates are the hangover from a debate that has nothing to do with Korea. In these pieces the "hawks" are cast as "ideologues", while the "doves" are portrayed as being more realistic about what can be done about Kim Jong Il's regime. This problem in U.S. commentary on Korea, sadly, is principally a function of Washington cliques. Mr. Horowitz and other sponsors of the North Korea Freedom Act are tagged as "neocons", in spite of Mr. Horowitz's criticism of the deployment of South Korean troops to Iraq. [8]

The heart of the matter is that the faith-based grassroots coalition backing Mr. Horowitz is intensely distrusted in Washington by the strange bedfellows of some secular "progressives", and old-fashioned, self-proclaimed "realists". Whether or not the belief that any agreement with the North on nukes is worth the paper it's printed on, and that the Kim Jong Il regime will survive this decade are "realistic" remain an open question. What these disparate D.C. circles have in common is the notion that regime change is simply not possible in North Korea, except through a devastating U.S.-launched second Korean War or some vague decades-long policy of "engagement". They dismiss the prospect for a swift peaceful regime change in North Korea as fantastic, forgetting the fact that the peaceful collapse of the Soviet empire once would have been regarded as fantasy as well. They argue that the influence of faith-based, and particularly Christian activists in Washington is dangerous, forgetting that Christian leaders successfully defied East Germany's Stasi in the late 1980s, paving the way for Germany's peaceful reunification.

Mr. Horowitz repeated the speech he delivered at the Hudson Institute a few days later in Los Angeles, before a group of Korean American civic and religious leaders. Soon Ok Lee was one of the North Korean refugees present. Korean American pastors attending joined her in praying for their persecuted fellow Christians in North Korea.

Editor's Note: The views expressed herein are the author's own, and do not necessarily represent those of LiNK's officers at UT or its national officers.