A defector who was born and spent 22 years in a North Korean prison camp said on Monday his motive in writing a book is to speak out for the children who grow up behind barbed wire.
”My main concern, which was my main motivation, is with the children in the camp and I wanted to speak for them,” said Shin Dong-Hyuk, who said that at the age of 14 he was forced to watch the execution of his mother and brother.
Shin, at a press conference and in his book Escape to the Outside World, described a life of back-breaking labour, beatings, torture and executions at Camp Number 14 in South Pyongan province.
But Shin (24) said he accepted his hardships as a fact of life until a fellow inmate inspired him to escape with stories of the outside world.
His comments were translated by Kim Sang-Hun, chairperson of the Database Centre for North Korean Human Rights. Kim said he hoped the testimony would ”embarrass those who turn their eyes away from North Korean crimes against humanity”.
In a summary of his book and his comments to reporters, Shin said his father had been arrested in 1965 because two of his brothers had fled to South Korea.
As a reward for good work, his father was allowed to marry a female inmate but they were together for just five days before being separated, and rarely saw each other again.
Shin spent his first 12 years with his mother but she worked from 5am to 9.30pm before attending a daily ”struggle session,” at which prisoners were forced to accuse and beat other inmates who failed to achieve work quotas.
She ”was always so busy that she did not have time to show me her love,” he wrote.
In five years at primary school, he was taught to read, write, add and subtract and nothing else. He said one girl was beaten to death for stealing five grains of wheat.
At age 13, he wrote, he was sent to work building a power plant and saw many other children killed by accidents.
One morning in 1996, Shin wrote, he was taken to an underground torture chamber and told that his mother and brother had been arrested for trying to escape. He himself was hung over a fire till he fainted in an attempt to make him confess to an alleged family conspiracy.
After seven months in an underground cell, he wrote, he and his father were brought out to witness the execution of his mother and brother as ”enemies of the people” — his mother by hanging and his brother by firing squad.
Shin said he was then assigned to work in a garment factory, where part of his middle finger was cut off as punishment for dropping a sewing machine.
But after an entire childhood behind barbed wire, Shin told reporters he had no complaints. He was even angry at the time with his mother and brother because their apparent escape attempt attracted retribution for the family.
”All I hoped for was to be allowed to get married on the basis of work performance or become a team leader,” he said.
All that changed in 2004 when Shin made friends with a young man called Park who told him of the outside world.
On January 2 2005, he and Park were assigned to gather firewood near the camp’s perimeter fence. He pushed himself through the barbed wire, on which Park became entangled, and ran for his life.
Shin stole rice which he later sold and used the proceeds to bribe a border guard to let him into China. About one year ago, he finally made it to South Korea.
Shin said his motives in escaping were curiosity and a wish to escape hunger and hard work, not to expose the system. ”At that time I had no idea of justice.”
It was only on arriving in the South and comparing the lives of children there with those in the camps that ”I became more enlightened about human rights.”
The United States State Department estimates that 150 000 to 200 000 are held in camps for political prisoners and others. – AFP
