When everything seemed to be going right, it all went terribly wrong. Reverend John Yoon had crossed the Mekong River into Thailand with 32 North Korean refugees after a long and complicated journey from Yanji in China's northeast. They were settling in at a tourist hotel in Chiang Saen and looking forward to reaching Bangkok, where they would be processed by embassy officials and soon be on their way to Seoul and a new life in South Korea.
Escape From North Korea: The Untold Story Of Asia’s Underground Railroad Melanie Kirkpatrick Encounter Books 2012, hardcover, 350pp 850 baht at Asia Books
But then the phone rang. Another 19 refugees Pastor Yoon was trying to help had been discovered in his Yanji apartment and detained by Chinese authorities. By the time the call ended he knew they would be forcibly repatriated to North Korea where they would face jail terms, or worse. His own fate would be sealed at a later date: after changing his name and returning to China, he was arrested with another group of refugees he was assisting and jailed for 15 months.
This episode is described about halfway through Melanie Kirkpatrick's Escape From North Korea, an examination of the loose network of agencies and individuals helping refugees and defectors from the isolated Northeast Asian dictatorship. It's the newest of the crop of books about this nuclear-armed hermit kingdom, with the coverage appearing to multiply in the wake of Kim Jong-il's death in December 2011. This one, however, looks outside the well-documented eccentricities and atrocities of the regime in Pyongyang to provide a vivid picture of what happens once fleeing citizens make it across the border.
Kirkpatrick interviewed more than 200 refugees, rescuers, supporters and government sources, crossing several countries to do so. She focuses most heavily on the reality of life on the run and the strengths and weaknesses of those trying to help escapees, areas other books rarely touch on or mention only briefly.
About 24,000 North Koreans have made it to South Korea since the 1953 armistice, most of them in the aftermath of the devastating famine of the 1990s. Reliable numbers are hard to come by, but it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of runaways have crossed the Tumen River into Chinese territory in the past 20 years. Some returned home when conditions improved, some were caught and repatriated and others chose to stay put in China. Of the latter, most, perhaps 80%, are women, and many have been sold as brides to lonely Chinese farmers. All have experienced hardship, if not outright horror.
The idea that North Korea is a slave nation, effectively a prison where inmates are brainwashed into perpetuating the regime that oppresses them, is not a new one. Kirkpatrick takes the idea a few steps further, comparing the Christians and other concerned people currently aiding North Korean fugitives with the movement to free black slaves in the United States 150 years ago.
"Like the Underground Railroad of pre-Civil War America, the new underground railroad across China is an ever-shifting network of secret routes and safe houses," Kirkpatrick writes. As in the 19th century, those caught escaping are sent back, perhaps to face an even harsher life than before, while those found helping them also face severe punishment. The point is laboured at times, but the parallels are there.
Since the network is constantly changing and its members in China are, not surprisingly, very shy of publicity, "Asia's underground railroad" is often described in broad terms. Kirkpatrick makes exceptions when security won't be compromised, providing details of both people-trafficking operations that succeeded and others that went wrong.
A typical route is for refugees to hole up initially in the Chinese provinces bordering North Korea before eventually heading southwards to Laos or Vietnam, and often on to Thailand. Mongolia was another popular destination until China tightened security along its frontier.
Bribing police and officials is factored into the equation. The system is well enough established for Kirkpatrick to report that it costs about US$2,000 (60,000 baht) to spirit someone out of North Korea and into China, and another $3,000 or so to get that person from there to Southeast Asia.
Equally important as politics and money, in this account, is the role played by religion. The Korean peninsula has long had a sizeable Christian population, which flourishes south of the demilitarised zone but is suppressed north of it. The most brutal example of anti-religious violence cited by Kirkpatrick is an episode when "five secret Christians were bound, laid on a highway, and run over by a steamroller".
A little later she writes: "And yet many North Koreans who escape to China, although they've been warned about Christians all their lives, end up turning to Christians for help."
Korean Christians are active in China: North Korean refugees are told to "look for a building with a cross on it" and churches are often used as meeting places or safe houses.
This is not to say that South Korean citizens in general, or missionaries in particular, are tripping over themselves to visit northeast China and help their brethren from the North. Quite the reverse, in fact: South Koreans ignore (or are ignorant of) human rights violations across the border. Kirkpatrick is not the first to make that observation, nor the first to say that Seoul's so-called "sunshine policy" _ which amounted to a tacit placation of Kim Jong-il between 1998 and 2008 _ did more harm than good, but she does show how apathy in South Korea has had a deleterious effect on the rescue efforts.
Beijing attracts the most pointed criticism for its policy of repatriating refugees and interfering with, or jailing those, who help them. There is nothing novel or even particularly nuanced about Kirkpatrick's take on the "murderous Pyongyang regime" and her conclusion that the underground railroad foretells a happier future for North Korea is disappointingly simplistic.
The book provides only cursory information about the famine in North Korea in the 1990s, life in its detention centres and political prisons and the quirky cruelty of the Kim dynasty; just enough for background and context. Kirkpatrick judged, correctly, that other books had already dealt with those topics extensively and that there were more current stories that needed telling. In this, Escape From North Korea is a success.
Where the book excels is in detailing the experiences of women sold as brides, stateless children from unofficial marriages, men sent as slave labour to log in the forests of Siberia, and the individuals determined to help fugitives from North Korea make their way to freedom.
With that country back in the headlines again, this is a timely, if flawed, work that reminds us of the all-too-often forgotten people who continue to suffer under a most despotic regime.
Five other books...
The Aquariums Of Pyongyang
Kang Chol-hwan and Pierre Rigoulot 2001 The Perseus Press paperback, 238pp 539 baht at Kinokuniya
- Kang Chol-hwan was a child when three generations of his family were arrested and imprisoned for one man's supposed crimes against the regime. Among the early accounts of life in the North Korean prison system, and arguably the most influential, The Aquariums Of Pyongyang is a haunting tale of privation and suffering. Former US president George W. Bush called it one of the most important books he read during his time in office, affecting his attitude towards the regime, and it is frequently cited in other books about the country.
Kim Jong-il: North Korea's Dear Leader
Michael Breen 2012 Wiley paperback, 200pp 910 baht at Kinokuniya
- This fascinating character study of one of the world's most notorious and misunderstood dictators goes beyond the headlines and Team America caricature. Breen shows Kim to be more than a reclusive movie fan with a penchant for cognac, saying he cynically cultivated his father's cult of personality, ensured his succession with brutal force, and ran the regime's illegal activities to fund his lavish lifestyle. Originally written in 2004 and updated for a 2012 edition, the book was either printed or on its way to the presses as news of Kim Jong-il's death broke in December 2011.
Nothing To Envy
Barbara Demick 2010 Spiegel & Grau paperback, 336pp 450 baht at Asia Books
- Stands as the definitive account of the famine of the 1990s, what the North Korean regime calls the Arduous March, where somewhere between one and three million people died. Demick uses the stories of six survivors to stitch a broad tapestry of the suffering citizens endured, and the cruelty of those in power.
A Samuel Johnson Prize winner, it is a powerful and at times harrowing read; even the bittersweet love story is heartbreaking.
The Impossible State
Victor Cha 2012 Bodley Head paperback, 530pp 674 baht at Kinokuniya
- Cha dealt with the North Korean regime while working for the Bush administration, and this is both the book's strength and weakness. On the plus side, it's a solid insider's account of the failed six-party nuclear disarmament talks and an interesting examination of alternative futures for the Korean peninsula. On the negative, it too often reads like apologia for the Bush administration. Well-researched and loaded with policy and statistics, as someone of Cha's academic and political standing should deliver, it's not for the novice.
Escape From Camp 14
Blaine Harden 2012 Penguin Group paperback, 224pp 595 baht at Asia Books
- Shin Dong-hyuk's tale of imprisonment in and escape from the North Korean gulag differs from others. He is the only person known to have been born in a prison camp and escaped the country entirely, making it to the United States. The child of two inmates, Shin avoided the indoctrination and propaganda instilled in schoolchildren and was instead raised to distrust everyone, even family, in a place where death and violence was the norm.
