Shin Dong-hyuk and Ahn Myeong-chul are unlikely collaborators. They are both North Koreans, defectors and sometime inhabitants of gulags, but the similarities end there. Shin was a political prisoner, while Ahn was one of the notoriously heavy-handed guards.
“I had the authority to kill prisoners like him if they tried to escape,” Ahn said. “We couldn’t have sat together like this in North Korea, but fortunately we’ve come to a free country where this is possible.”
The pair appeared together in Seoul at the weekend to speak about their life in North Korea and draw attention to the plight of prisoners in the country’s political camps.
Photo: EPA
Shin described his first meeting with Ahn in 2008 as having been fraught with tension, as memories of the psychological and physical torture he suffered at Camp 14 resurfaced.
“When we first met I couldn’t even look at him directly,” Shin said. “I kept my head down because I had images in my mind of guards pointing guns, yelling and treating prisoners really poorly.”
Prisoners in the camps address guards using a Korean honorific that translates roughly as “teacher.”
Shin said it arose from the idea that the prisoners, having committed a crime that had landed them in the gulag, had strayed from the path and needed to be educated.
The North Korean system extends punishment to three generations of a family. Shin was doomed to live his entire life in a prison camp for having an uncle who had escaped to South Korea in the 1950s. Camp 14, where he grew up, is referred to as a “total control zone,” meaning that prisoners there are never to be released.
Shin was born at the camp in 1982 and lived there until escaping in 2005 — becoming the only person known to have been born in, and escaped from, a North Korean political prison camp.
His story is told in Escape From Camp 14, a book published in 2012 by journalist Blaine Harden.
As a boy, Shin denounced his mother and brother, who were plotting to escape.
They were executed. Shin said he was so indoctrinated in the perverse culture of the camp that he felt that they deserved their fate. In the book he also says that he informed on his mother and brother to get more food from the guards.
Ahn, who was born in 1969, worked as a guard at four camps, including Camp 14. He said that in that role he regarded the prisoners as “vicious evils,” just as the government had taught him.
He said that all the guards, including himself, abused prisoners physically every day. Guards were rewarded for catching escapees and punished for showing them any kindness or favors.
“Often when I spoke to prisoners, they didn’t even know why they had been put in the camps. They weren’t given any chance to get out, they were just being treated as less than human,” Ahn said.
Ahn said his eyes were opened after his family was placed under surveillance because of a remark by his father during a famine. As one of the heads of a food distribution center, his father spoke of his anger towards then-North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s regime for the shortages.
His father, realizing his crime the next day, took his own life. The rest of the family were arrested and put under surveillance. It was this experience that led Ahn to develop sympathy with the prisoners.
“That was the moment when I decided to defect,” he said.
In 1994, Ahn fled North Korea and reached China. He went on to set up NK Watch, an organization dedicated to improving human rights in North Korea. He has spoken widely on the abuses, including talks at the UN.
A report released in February by a UN commission of inquiry found evidence of widespread abuses in North Korea, including “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds.”
Last year, the Korea Institute for National Unification estimated that the total number of political prisoners in the country was between 80,000 and 120,000. Estimates are based on analysis of satellite imagery and interviews with refugees.
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