Earlier this year, Kim pulled off a seemingly impossible escape from North Korea. He escaped by sea with his entire family: his pregnant wife, his mother, his brother’s family and an urn with his father’s ashes.
They were the first people to escape from the country this year and managed to reach the South.
When the Covid pandemic hit the planet, the North Korean government panicked and isolated the country from the rest of the world: closing its borders and cutting off trade.
Desertions, once quite common, practically ceased.
Kim explained to the BBC how he organized such an extraordinary escape in the first interview since the pandemic with a defector who has left the country.
Revealed new details about life in North Korea, including cases of people dying of hunger and increased repression.
Kim has asked us not to use his full name to protect his family here and in the North.
The BBC cannot independently verify Kim’s entire account, but many of the details coincide with what other sources have told us.
The night of the escape was turbulent. A strong wind was blowing from the south, bringing a storm in its wake. This was part of Kim’s plan. He hoped rough seas would force the patrol boats to retreat.
He dreamed about this night for years, planning it meticulously for months, but this did little to ease his fear.
His brother’s children were sleeping soundly under the effect of the sleeping pills he had given them. Now he and his brother They had to be carried through a minefield in the darkto where their escape ship was secretly moored.
They advanced, careful to avoid the rays of the guards’ searchlights.
Once on the boat, They hid the children in old grain sacks and camouflaged them to look like tool bags.
The family set sail for South Korea: the men armed with swords, the women with poison. Each carried a hollowed-out eggshell filled with hot chili powder and black sand, ready to smash in the coast guards’ faces if a confrontation occurred.
The boat’s engine roared, but Kim could only hear his heartbeat. One mistake and they would all be executed.
When I met Kim – on the outskirts of Seoul last month – he was accompanied by a plainclothes police officer, a typical security measure for recent defectors.
It had only been a few weeks since he and his family had been released. of the resettlement center to which North Koreans are sent after arriving in South Korea.
“There has been a lot of suffering,” he said, as he began to recount the last four years.
In the early days of the pandemic, people were “extremely scared,” he said.
The State spread images of people dying around the world and warned that if the rules were not followed, the entire country could disappear.
Some people even They were sent to work camps for failing to comply with specific regulations regarding covidhe claimed.
When a suspected case was reported, the guards quarantined the entire town. Everyone was locked in and the area was cordoned off, leaving those inside with little or nothing to eat.
“After starving people for a while, the government brought in truckloads of food. They claimed that they sold the food cheap so that people would praise them. Like you starve your baby and then give him a few crumbs to say thank you.”
Kim told me that people began to wonder if this was part of the state’s strategy to take advantage of the pandemic.
As more people survived covid, they began to think that the State had exaggerated the dangerss. “Now many believe that it was just an excuse to oppress us.”
It was the border closures that caused the most serious damage, he said.
Food supplies in North Korea have long been precarious, but with even fewer coming into the country, prices have skyrocketed making everyone’s lives “much more difficult.”
In spring 2022, he watched the situation deteriorate further.
“For seven or eight years there was hardly any talk of famine, but We are starting to hear about cases more and more frequently.. You’d wake up one day and hear: ‘oh, someone in this district has died of hunger.’ The next day, another one. And so”.
One day in February, a client from a neighboring county arrived late for a meeting and told Kim that the police had gathered everyone in town over the alleged murder of an elderly couple.
But after the autopsy, they announced that the couple had died of starvation and that the rats must have eaten their fingers and toes while they were dying. The gruesome scene had made investigators suspect a shady crime.
Then in April, he says two farmers he knew personally died of starvation. The peasants were the ones who had it worst, she says, because If the harvest was bad, the State forced them to compensate by giving more of their personal reserves. food.
We cannot independently confirm these deaths. The World Food Crisis Report 2023 stated that since North Korea’s borders were closed, it has been “difficult to obtain accurate information on food insecurity,” but there were “indications that the situation is worsening.”
In March 2023, North Korea asked the World Food Program for help.
Amnesty International’s North Korea specialist, Choi Jae-hoon, noted that there were heard about cases of starvation from fugitives in Seoul who had managed to speak to relatives back home.
“We have heard that the food situation worsened during the Covid period, and that in some areas farmers suffered the most,” he said.
But Choi noted that the situation was not as catastrophic as during the famine of the 1990s: “We heard that people have found ways to survive within their means.”
Kim himself found ways not only to survive, but to thrive. Like most North Koreans before the pandemic, he made a living selling items on the black market, in his case motorcycles and televisions smuggled from China.
But when the borders were closed and commerce practically came to a standstill, he dedicated himself to buying and selling vegetables because he imagined that, in the midst of the confinement, What everyone would need for sure was to eat.
He called himself a “grasshopper salesman.” He sold his products secretly, either at home or in alleys, and “if someone reported us, we would pick up the food and run away… Like a grasshopper,” he explained.
“People came to me, begging me to sell to them. “I could ask for whatever price I wanted.” Kim looked richer than ever. He and his wife could afford to have stew for dinner with whatever meat they wanted.
“That’s eating very well in North Korea.”
The life Kim describes is that of an exceptionally astute and sometimes unscrupulous businessman. At 30 years old, he worked and managed to save for more than a decade by circumventing the North Korean control system.
Partly it’s because, from a young age, he became disillusioned with the system.
For as long as he can remember, he and his father watched South Korean television secretly. They lived so close to the border that they could tune in to the channels of the neighboring country. Kim was captivated by a country where people were free.
As he grew up, the corruption and injustice he witnessed in the North began to affect him. He recalls an incident in which security officers raided his house.
“Everything you have belongs to the State. Do you think this oxygen is yours?” an agent mocked. “Well it’s not, bastard.”
Kim says that in 2021, powerful repression squads were formed to suppress what the State considered “antisocial behavior.”
They arbitrarily stopped people in the street and intimidated them. “People began to call these repressive officials “mosquitoes,” vampires who sucked our blood.”
The most serious violation was consuming and sharing information from abroadespecially that coming from South Korean culture.
According to Kim, the repression became “much more intense. If they catch you, they shoot you, kill you or send you to a work camp.”
In April of last year, Kim says he was forced to watch a 22-year-old man he knew being shot to death at a public execution. Authorities told attendees they wanted to punish the man harshly to set an appropriate precedent.
“They killed him for listening to 70 South Korean songs, watching about three movies and sharing them with his friends. They are ruthless. “Everyone is scared,” Kim told me.
We cannot independently verify this run, but in December 2020 North Korea passed a new law that could execute those who shared South Korean content.
Joanna Hosaniak of the Citizens Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea said Kim’s account of the execution “is not surprising at all.” Hosaniak has interviewed hundreds of defectors over two decades.
“North Korea has always used public executions as a means to control the population. Every time he introduces new laws, he introduces a wave of executions,” she explains.
As Kim recounted these memories, she became distressed. She said she was It was the suicide of a friend last year that finally broke him.
Desperate to divorce a woman he no longer loved and marry another, officials told this friend of Kim’s that the only way to get a divorce was to spend time in a labor camp. He sank into debt trying to find another way out before ending his life.
Kim visited his room after his death. The carnage he witnessed showed him the slow and agonizing end his friend must have suffered. He had scratched the walls until his nails came off.
Although Kim had fantasized hundreds of times about escaping, she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her family behind. In 2022 her life had become so desperate that she believed she could finally convince them to join her.
First he focused on his brother. He and his wife ran an illicit seafood business, but the government had recently cracked down on unofficial sellers. Despite having a boat, they could no longer fish. Counting on less and less money, It didn’t take much to convince him..
For the next seven months, the brothers meticulously planned their escape.
Over the course of the pandemic, many of the well-established escape routes across the country’s northern border with China were blocked. But the brothers lived in a small fishing village in the southwestern corner of the country, near the border with South Korea. This offered them an alternative, although risky, exit: by sea.
First of all, they needed permission to to access water. They had heard that at a nearby military base they put civilians fishing and then sold the fish and, with that money, purchased military equipment. Kim’s brother signed up to do it.
Meanwhile, Kim began to befriend the coast guard and security guards patrolling the area, discreetly extracting information from them about their movements, protocols, and work shifts, until he was sure that he and his brother could get the boat out. the night without being discovered.
Then came the most difficult of his tasks: convince his elderly mother and wife to join the escape. Both were opposed to leaving.
Ultimately, the brothers yelled at their mother into submission, threatened to cancel the trip if she did not join them, and held her responsible for their misery until the end of her days.
“She was distraught and cried a lot, but in the end she agreed,” Kim says.
His wife, however, remained immovable, until one day the couple found out that they were expecting a baby.
“You are no longer just your body. “You are a mother, do you want our son to live in this hell?” Kim told her.
It worked.
After talking for several hours, Kim and I headed to dinner and there he told me about the latest preparations for his escape.
afraid that The authorities desecrated his father’s grave after his departure, the brothers went to dig up his body. After replacing the earth so that the place looked intact, they took the body to the surrounding area and burned it.
They then surveyed the remote minefield that they would later have to cross in the dark. They pretended to collect medicinal herbs while plotting a clear route to pass through it.
Authorities planted land mines along the coast to prevent people from escaping, Kim said, but with fewer guards on duty in the area. It seemed like the safest way out.
Then you had to wait for the weather and tide to change.
At 10 pm on May 6 they set sail, moving with the current as best they could.. The low tide had exposed reefs and rocks along which they navigated very slowly in the hope of going unnoticed by radar, camouflaged as if they were rolling garbage.
Meanwhile, Kim’s heart was pounding and her clothes were soaked with sweat.
As soon as he felt safe, he put the boat at full speed with the currents. He looked back and He saw that a ship was following them, but he couldn’t reach them. In a few minutes they crossed the maritime border.
“In that moment, all my tension was released. I felt like I was collapsing,” she says.
They turned on their light as they approached the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong and The navy rescued them after almost two hours at sea.
Everything went as planned. “It was like heaven helped us,” she snorts.
Kim’s escape is exceptional for several reasons, according to Sokeel Park of Liberty in North Korea, an organization that helps refugees from the North resettle in the South.
Not only have desertions by sea always been extremely rare, he explained, but since the pandemic it is almost impossible to desert.
“These escapes by sea require meticulous planning, incredible bravery and everything going miraculously right. There must be many more North Koreans who have tried but have not succeeded,” says Park.
“The only ones who can defect now are the rich and well-connected,” adds Pastor Stephen Kim of JM Missionary, which helps North Koreans defect through China.
About 1,000 people used to cross the Chinese border each year, but as far as he knows In the last 4 years only 20 people have done it and four of them reached South Korea.
Last October, the pastor, along with Human Rights Watch, accused China of sending some defectors back to the North.
Pyongyang is strengthening ties with China and Russia, while turning its back on diplomacy with the West. This has made it increasingly difficult for the international community to address these reported human rights violations.
The South Korean government has made North Korean human rights one of its top priorities, but its Vice Minister of Unification, Moon Seong-hyun, said it has “limited tools at hand.”
“What we have tried to do is raise people’s awareness by continually raising these issues through the UN and other forums. “North Korea tends to listen to countries in Europe,” she said, citing the United Kingdom and Germany as examples.
But Seoul’s role is now largely reduced to helping the dwindling number of refugees who manage to reach the Southproviding them with advice, accommodation and education.
After their rescue, Kim and his family had to be interrogated by South Korean intelligence services to verify that they were not North Korean spies. They then received training on life in the South at a resettlement centre.
Despite being so physically close, their old home is far from their new space, they are two worlds apart. Defectors often have difficulty with the transition.
In October, the family moved from the resettlement center to an apartment, just as Kim’s wife gave birth. She is healthy, but has a hard time adjusting, although Kim’s mother is the one who is having it the worst.
Neither of them had ever ridden the subway before, and she keeps getting lost. Each mistake further undermines her confidence. “Now he regrets having come”he admits.
But Kim, who was already very familiar with South Korean culture, says he is adapting easily. “The world I imagined and the world I now physically navigate are very similar.”
As we talked, he curiously grabbed my AirPods case and turned it over in his hand. I opened it to show him the wireless headphones, but he still looked confused. It wasn’t until I put the headphones in my ears that a wave of understanding appeared on his face and she laughed.
There will be many more surprises and challenges of this type. This is just the beginning of your journey.
Additional reporting by Hosu Lee. Illustrations by Lilly Huynh.
Now you can receive notifications from BBC Mundo. Download the new version of our app and activate them so you don’t miss our best content.
- Do you already know our YouTube channel? Subscribe!