Most people take freedom for granted, a license to do anything, to anyone, anyhow and anywhere. But it is mostly those who were deprived of it, cherish it and respect it - theirs and other's.
Below is one such life of Yeonmi Park:
Yeonmi Park was nine years old when she was invited to watch her best friend’s mother be shot.
But this killing lodged in her mind. Yeonmi watched in horror as the
woman she knew was lined up alongside eight other prisoners and her
sentence was read out. Her crime was having watched South Korean films
and lending the DVDs to friends. Her punishment in this most paranoid of
dictatorships was death by firing squad.
As the executioners raised their weapons, Yeonmi covered her face. But
she looked up again, just in time to see an explosion of blood and the
woman’s body crumple to the ground. ‘It was a shock,’ she remembers. ‘It
was the first time I felt terrified.’
Yeonmi is recounting the horrific incident over a milkshake in Seoul,
the ultra-modern capital of South Korea that is only 35 miles from the
North Korean border but, with its luxury cars and 10-lane motorways,
feels like another planet. Twelve years have passed since that day, and
Yeonmi, now 21, is one of tens of thousands of North Korean defectors
who have escaped one of the world’s most reclusive and repressive
regimes.
Yeonmi has become a globetrotting activist
intent on raising awareness about the plight of her people. She appears
on South Korean television and uses Facebook, Twitter, Skype and WeChat
to spread the word about the human rights abuses inside North Korea. She
has travelled the world to talk about her experiences. And next month
she will attend the annual One Young World Summit in Dublin, where she
will appear alongside figures including Kofi Annan, Sir Bob Geldof, the
former Mexican president Vicente Fox, and Dame Ellen MacArthur, the
world record-breaking sailor.
Yeonmi was born on
October 4 1993 in Hyesan, a notoriously cold river port along North
Korea’s 850-mile northern border with China. The following year, on July
8, Kim Il-sung, the country’s 82-year-old founder and ‘Great Leader’,
died of a heart attack. Hopes that he might have been ready to gradually
open North Korea to the world evaporated as his son Kim Jong-il took
power and set about transforming the hermit nation into a member of
George W Bush’s notorious ‘axis of evil’.
Meanwhile, the economy was collapsing and the Great Famine,
which would eventually claim up to 2.5 million lives, according to
Andrew Natsios, the former head of USAID, was beginning to take hold. As
Barbara Demick describes in Nothing to Envy, her definitive book on the
period, those too young, too poor or too honest to find food quickly
died. ‘The killer targets the most innocent, the people who would never
steal food, lie, cheat, break the law or betray a friend.’
Yeonmi’s father was a mid-ranking civil servant and Workers’ Party
member who worked at the Hyesan town hall. He kept his family afloat
through an illegal sideline in selling gold, silver and nickel (which he
had acquired through middle men in Pyongyang, the capital) to Chinese
over the border.
That income helped insulate his family
from the worst of the suffering as North Korea was plunged into famine.
But the bodies Yeonmi saw at the railway station: ragged, skeletal
waifs collapsed on the pavement and slumped against walls, told her
something was badly wrong. She caught a glimpse of corpses in the river,
too. ‘I think they were trying to escape,’ Yeonmi says
matter-of-factly. ‘But they didn’t succeed.’
Initially
shielded from the effects of the famine, Yeonmi’s world started to
disintegrate when, in 2002, her father was arrested for illegal trading.
‘Everything changed,’ she recalls. Yeonmi’s father was taken to a
prison near Pyongyang and given a 17-year sentence. Her mother visited
him once but that was enough to see the toll that the brutal torture had
taken on her husband.
He was beaten. Guards placed
sticks between his fingers and crunched them together. He was made to
sit in excruciating stress positions for interminable periods.
Prisoners were deprived of water and food. ‘The environment was crazy.
So many bugs and lice,’ Yeonmi says. ‘They treated them like animals. He
was a really brilliant man. He was my hero, and the country just beat
him. I couldn’t believe it.’
Yeonmi’s father was
luckier than many North Koreans who were spirited off to the country’s
Soviet-style gulags, never to return. According to a Human Rights Watch
report in January this year, up to 120,000 political prisoners, among
them children, are currently being held in secretive labour camps known
in Korean as the kwan-li-so.
Torture including ‘sleep
deprivation, beatings with iron rods or sticks, kicking and slapping,
and enforced sitting or standing for hours’, is routine, the group
found.
After three years Yeonmi’s father managed to
bribe his way out of jail. But by then he had been diagnosed with colon
cancer. When Yeonmi saw him on his release, the once strapping figure
had been transformed into a ghost of a man. ‘He had changed so much. He
was so small. He spoke differently. I couldn’t believe it was my
father,’ she says.
The Park family had been ruined by the imprisonment of
Yeonmi’s father. Shortly after his arrest they were forced to move from a
comfortable house in Hyesan to a minuscule apartment. After his release
they almost immediately began plotting their escape into China to start
a new life.
But before the family could put its plan
into action, Eunmi, Yeonmi’s 16-year-old sister, fled across the border
with a friend without telling them. Terrified about how she might fare
on her own, Yeonmi and her mother decided to follow her over the border
and bring her home. Once reunited, the family would attempt a second
escape altogether.
And so, on the night of March 30
2007, Yeonmi and her mother made their way towards the border with the
help of a people smuggler. Yeonmi’s father stayed behind, to minimise
the risks. They crossed three mountains and finally came to a frozen
river that separated the two countries.
It was
desperately cold, Yeonmi says, and she remembers feeling terrified that
the ice beneath them would give. But they eventually made it to the
other side. On dry land, they ran. ‘I ran so fast. The only thing I
could think was that I could get shot. I ran and ran and ran.’
When Yeonmi stopped she found herself in the Chinese province of Jilin.
Here, Yeonmi and her mother set about trying to find her sister. But
she was nowhere to be found and the local people smugglers refused to
help. One even threatened to turn them in to Chinese authorities unless
he was allowed to have sex with Yeonmi.
Yeonmi’s mother
implored the man to leave her daughter alone and offered herself
instead. ‘She had no choice,’ Yeonmi says. ‘Literally, in front of me,
he raped her.’
A few days later Yeonmi’s father, who
had become concerned about their lengthy absence, slipped across the
border and managed to join them. But the family’s slide continued.
Yeonmi and her parents still had not managed to track down Eunmi but
they decided to remain in China rather than attempt a potentially
dangerous return to North Korea.
A great-aunt who lived
on the Chinese side of the border found them shelter in a filthy,
cobweb-filled room in the countryside outside the city of Shenyang.
‘There was no electricity. We couldn’t pay for water,’ Yeonmi said. Her
parents would collect water from a dripping tap.
It was
an experience familiar to the tens of thousands of other North Korean
refugees who have escaped to China, one of the world’s fastest-growing
economies, only to discover a new world of poverty and exploitation.
‘Even in China we were hungry,’ Yeonmi says.
The year
2008 was an exciting time to be in China. A construction boom was under
way in Beijing as it geared up to host the summer Olympics. But for the
Park family the new year brought more misery. At 7.30 one cold January
morning, Yeonmi’s father died. Without documents and facing arrest and
deportation if they were caught by Chinese police, his family were
forced to bribe a local crematorium to destroy his body by night.
At three the following morning, Yeonmi and her mother took his remains to a nearby mountain and secretly buried them.
‘There was no funeral. Nothing,’ Yeonmi says. ‘I couldn’t even do that
for my father. I couldn’t call anyone to say my father had passed away.
He was 45 – really young. We couldn’t even give him painkillers.’
For Yeonmi and her mother, the death signalled an end to their time in
China. They took a bus south for two days and spent a short period at a
Christian shelter run by Chinese and South Korean missionaries in the
port city of Qingdao, which has a large Korean population. When a chance
to flee to South Korea via Mongolia arose they seized it, even though
they had still not been reunited with Eunmi.
In
February 2009 Yeonmi and her mother found themselves deep in the Gobi
desert, searching the night sky for the Plough to guide them over the
border into Mongolia and towards freedom.
Once there,
they could request help from South Korean diplomats who were known to
help refugees from the north escaping to Seoul.More than 1,500 North
Koreans fled their country in 2012, hoping to build a new life away from
the regime of Kim Jong-un, who became Supreme Leader after Kim Jong-il,
his father, died in 2011.
Their motives for fleeing
are understandable. Earlier this year a UN inquiry concluded that the
human rights abuses being committed by Kim Jong-un’s regime were
‘strikingly similar’ to those perpetrated by the Nazis during the Second
World War. Torture, mass starvation, rape, forced abortion and
execution were used as everyday weapons against its 24 million
inhabitants, the report claimed.
While a growing number of foreign tourists and
international celebrities including Dennis Rodman, the American
basketball star, and Pras Michel, the rapper, have recently visited the
country, the freedoms of movement, information and belief are still
almost non-existent for ordinary North Koreans.
‘The
gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a state that does
not have any parallel in the contemporary world,’ the UN report argued.
But escaping North Korea is far from easy. Refugees who make it to
China face discrimination, the constant threat of arrest and, in the
case of women, sexual violence, activist groups say. Those who attempt
to reach a third country from which to fly to South Korea face
deportation if caught, and the penalty for those forced to return is
execution or life imprisonment.
That appeared to be
Yeonmi’s destiny when Mongolian border guards surrounded her group as
it meandered through the Gobi desert. They told them they would be
immediately sent back to China. Yeonmi and her mother begged for their
lives. When that failed, they tried something altogether more radical.
They grabbed the small knives they had brought and thrust them to their
throats, threatening to commit suicide unless the guards let them stay
in Mongolia. ‘I thought it was the end of my life. We were saying
goodbye to one another,’ Yeonmi says.
Their actions,
though, proved effective. Yeonmi and her mother were taken into custody
and after 15 days were transferred to a detention centre in Ulan Bator,
the Mongolian capital.
Several weeks later they were
handed over to South Korean officials and on April 1 2009 – just over a
year after the death of her father – Yeonmi stood at Ulan Bator’s
Chinggis Khaan airport preparing to board a plane for Seoul. It was her
first time flying and her new-found freedom had not yet sunk in. ‘Oh my
God,’ she thought when Mongolian customs officials waved her through.
‘They didn’t stop me.’
A few hours later the plane
touched down at Incheon airport in Seoul. Yeonmi stepped off the
passenger jet wearing a shabby prison uniform. She remembers gasping at
the sight of the moving walkways – a contraption unimaginable in her
broken and impoverished homeland – and the immaculate lavatory
facilities. ‘It was the first time I had seen a fancy rest room. I
thought, “It’s so clean. Do I wash my hands in the [lavatory bowl]?’’ ’
she says. ‘Everything was shiny. I’d never seen anything like it.’
At least 20,000 North Korean refugees have sought shelter in South
Korea over the past two decades, and while adapting is far from easy,
Yeonmi has fared better than most. She and her mother both worked (as a
shop assistant and waitress) so Yeonmi would be able to pay to go back
to school. Five years after she arrived, Yeonmi is a third-year student
of criminal justice at Dongguk University, one of the city’s best, and
is a regular guest on South Korean television programmes.
She uses her fame to spread the word about the situation in North Korea
and in her spare time has learnt to speak fluent English, with the help
of YouTube and the Friends DVD box set. In April she was finally
reunited with the sister she had long feared was dead; Eunmi, now 23,
had reached South Korea via China and Thailand.
Still
Yeonmi feels she has not entirely escaped the clutches of Kim Jong-un’s
regime. South Korea allocates local detectives to keep an eye on all
newly arrived defectors, and in May Yeonmi received a call from the
official handling her case.
He warned her that her name
had been added to a ‘target list’ of outspoken defectors that the North
Korean regime wanted to eliminate. The revelation made her more angry
than scared, Yeonmi says. ‘I crossed the Gobi. I lost my father. But I
am still not free. They still have power over me. They still try to
control me. Until I can be really free, I will keep going.’
The detective and Yeonmi’s mother urged her to stop criticising Kim
Jong-un. But she ignored them, convinced that she, as someone who had
suffered the same fate, now had a moral obligation to draw attention to
the thousands of women risking sexual violence and murder as they tried
to escape North Korea.
‘I thought about quitting,’ she says, with a grin that
suggests she did not entertain the idea for very long at all. ‘When I
was crossing the Gobi desert I thought nobody really cared, you know?
'Even though I was dying there nobody was going to remember me. These
girls too. They are dying. They are being raped. But nobody is going to
remember them. Nobody is going to care for them. That is why I thought,
“I’m going to do this and there is no way I will stop doing this.’’ ’
The day we meet, Yeonmi is wearing a startling red dress and a near
permanent smile. But the anger she feels towards those who have
destroyed her country is clear. ‘Kim Jong-un and the regime don’t just
oppress,’ she says, ‘they play with human lives. Kim Jong-un should be
punished. He must be brought to justice. How many people did he kill?’
One day, she hopes to return home to rebury her father’s ashes in a
free North Korea. ‘It was his dream,’ she says. ‘It is hard to imagine
that day coming but maybe my daughter or my son will be able to do it.
Kim Jong-un thinks he can keep going on being a king there. But nothing
is for ever.’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/11138496/Escape-from-North-Korea-How-I-escaped-horrors-of-life-under-Kim-Jong-il.html
