Channel 4 News International Editor Lindsey Hilsum blogs on the case of Shin Dong-hyuk, who escaped from a North Korean prison camp.
North Korea is probably the least mapped country on earth, but these days not everything can be hidden. Zooming in on Google-earth reveals a number of compounds with rectangular buildings and mines dug into the mountainside, surrounded by fences and walls. This is North Korea’s gulag, a network of prison camps where uncounted thousands have lost their lives, and others still live in conditions of unspeakable cruelty.
Now a young man who was born in one of the camps has escaped and told his story. Blaine Harden’s book, Escape from Camp 14, is the harrowing tale of Shin Dong-hyuk, who was born in Camp 14, the product of a “reward marriage” in which two prisoners were allowed to wed.
Malnourished and beaten, he was forced to do hard labour as a child. His main memory is hunger – foraging for grains of corn in the knowledge that if caught he would be punished. But the true horror is the camp’s moral universe. Inmates were told they must snitch on others, especially those who might think of escape.
When the 13 year old Shin heard his mother and brother plotting to escape he reported them. Far from being rewarded, he was tortured as an accomplice. His fate was nonetheless better than theirs – they were executed. The young Shin was in the crowd watching.
As Harden says, Shin didn’t know the meaning of the word “love”. Nor did he understand the concept of betrayal. Shin didn’t know what the outside world was like. He didn’t know there was an outside world.
Eventually a new prisoner he was tasked with shadowing told him about life beyond the electric fence, and even beyond North Korea. Shin eventually escaped – but the price for his freedom was another’s death.
Harden’s account is unflinching – we like our heros to be beyond reproach, but Shin was morally compromised from birth. Now living in America, the more he adapts to normal life, the more he understands the moral issues around his own actions.
One day, when the regime in Pyongyang falls, journalists will go into North Korea and tell the story of the millions of people born and brought up in a system the horror of which defies belief. In the outside world, people will ask “Why didn’t we know? Why did no-one tell us?”
Now someone has told us, and his account makes very difficult reading.