He walked through ice cold water to escape North Korea. Now living in Surrey, Song Ju Kim tells the story of his four attempts to leave imprisonment, hunger and famine behind in his homeland.
Song Ju Kim says he is from Surrey but his English is almost as broken as the country he left behind: North Korea. When I meet him, he is sipping a cappuccino from a paper cup. I notice this detail because I have just heard this softly-spoken man give evidence to a UN inquiry that he once survived inside a North Korean prison by drinking cups of corn-based gruel, full of stones and dirt.
Today, in front of a retired Australian judge, Mr Kim told the remarkable story of his four attempts to escape from the world’s most repressive state.
It was hunger and fear of famine which drove him to it. His father had died, his sisters had escaped earlier, and now it was his turn to walk through ice cold water to reach China, Then the Chinese deported him back to North Korea.
He was beaten by Korean prison guards, who searched every cavity in his body for money he might have hidden there. He was kept in a cell with forty other people, with no room to stand or move. The guards told him it was his job to check the faeces of the prisoners, in case they swallowed money and then excreted it.
Mr Kim told the inquiry inside Westminster’s Central Hall that the door of his prison cell was only fifty centimetres high. “The guards told us we were no longer humans but had to crawl like animals,” he explained.
Every time he escaped by bribing guards or jumping off moving prison trains, the Chinese eventually sent him home. They sent his mother home as well. She died handcuffed to a prison bed; the family wasn’t informed and nor was her body returned. Mr Kim assumes her corpse was used for scientific experiments.
The UN’s human rights enquiry is headed by Michael Kirby, a retired Australian High Court judge. He told me he is interviewing 150 witnesses in five countries and unearthing appalling evidence. Today his roadshow of horrors reached the UK.
“You showed a certain persistence,” the judge told Mr Kim upon hearing of his fourth and finally successful escape attempt in 2007. It was the only time Mr Kim smiled in his hour and a half of appalling testimony.
Amnesty International told me they hope these hearings will shine a spotlight like never before on North Korea’s human rights record. Too often, Amnesty say, North Korea is viewed through the prism of its nuclear weapons, not the suffering of its 24 million people.
Expecting the North Koreans to change would be expecting too much though the regime now knows it is being watched. The North Korean embassy was invited to participate in today’s hearings but never replied. Judge Kirby will deliver his report to the UN in six months’ time.
The testimonies will appear on the internet. And the theory is that the world will no longer be able to say it did not know the truth.
I believe I have to stand up and speak out for my people Song Ju Kim
Meeting Mr Kim with his cappuccino in autumn sunshine afterwards, I asked him if it was difficult to speak about his past; being beaten, interrogated and forced to carry rocks.
“It wasn’t difficult,” he said. “I believe I have to stand up and speak out for my people. When I first settled here, it was really hard. Now I am really enjoying my freedom and the democracy here in Britain.”