Speaking against 'Dear Father'

"People died trying to eat live snakes," Kim Young-soon says yesterday about life in North Korea's gulag. (Aaron Lynett, National Post)

Saturday, Jun. 12, 2010
Peter Goodspeed
National Post

"He was our Dear Father, our Great Leader and people used the titles of father and mother to refer to the government. But really, they were war criminals."

In her youth, Kim Youngsoon was a dancer and a member of the North Korean elite who lived a life of calculated caution, surrounded by privilege and propaganda in Pyongyang. Then a high-school and college friend, the actress Sung Hye-rim, who lived in an apartment just above hers, became Kim Jong-il's mistress and gave birth to his son.

Desperate to keep the affair secret from his disapproving father, North Korea's Great Leader, Kim Il-sung, the younger Kim had the security police arrest everyone who knew of his liaison.

Mrs. Kim, her husband, three children and her elderly parents were whisked away to the North Korean gulag. They wound up in the notorious Yodok concentration camp in the mountainous northeast, condemned without charge or trial to a life of hunger and hard labour.

Her parents died of starvation; she was separated from her husband and never saw him again; one of her sons died, aged nine, trying to cross a river outside the prison camp; and after she was released from prison, another boy was killed by North Korean border guards as he tried to escape into China.

In 2000, after 31 years of suspicion and punishment, famine and fear, Mrs. Kim fled to China with her remaining son. She bribed a border guard to look the other way as they walked across a frozen river.

Her goal was South Korea. It took her 2½ years, working illegally as a waitress, to save US$600 to pay a "broker" to smuggle herself and her son out of China. Then they spent more than five months travelling, mostly at night and on foot, through the jungles of Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand.

Now, a Seoul resident and one of nearly 16,000 North Korean defectors living in South Korea, Mrs. Kim is a political activist who calls for the destruction of North Korea's dictatorship and wants to see Kim Jong-il stand trial at the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

"Every day you cry in your soul and live with anxiety and fear," she said yesterday, as she prepared to be the guest speaker tonight at a fund-raising gala for Toronto's Korean human rights group, HanVoice.

"People around the world don't realize how scary the dictatorship is. Those who haven't experienced it can't believe it. But the whole world needs to know."

Small, slim, carefully coiffed and wearing a brown blouse decorated with flowers, Mrs. Kim looks like a friendly grandmother.

Sitting in the back of a University Avenue coffee shop, she displays little emotion at first as she describes the nine hellish years she spent in Yodok. The work camp, surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, houses up to 30,000 political prisoners in the mountains of South Hamgyong province.

"Yodok was filled with fear and hunger," she says. "People lost their teeth and their gums turned black. Their bones grew weak and they died in rags. I remember there used to be bodies of people lying all over the streets, too weak to walk."

People ate mostly corn and salt, but, two decades before the rest of North Korea endured a devastating famine, they never had enough.

"One of the few things we could eat was corn and, when we did eat it, it would just run right through us," she says.

"People died from diarrhea regularly. People died trying to eat live snakes or they would eat wild mushrooms and die. Anything that was green, they would eat it."

"People used to sort through pig dung, just looking for undigested corn and other seeds," she added. "This is the reality of the camps. Whatever flew or crawled, whatever they could catch, they ate ... They were dying slowly. This is the reality of the camps."

In the summer, prisoners worked from before dawn to after dark in the cornfields. In the winters, they harvested timber in the forests.

Some were sent to Yodok for eavesdropping on South Korean radio broadcasts. Others had been turned in by neighbours for complaining about the government. One man was jailed for accidentally dropping a bust of Kim Il-sung.

Mrs. Kim didn't know why she was imprisoned and her family destroyed until 10 years after she was released.

In 1989, while working as a seamstress in the North Korean city of Hamhung, she was hauled in for an interview by security officials. They insisted her old friend, Ms. Sung, was not Kim Jong-il's wife and she should forget anything she might have heard about them having a child.

At the time, Kim Il-sung was making preparations to establish the world's first communist dynasty and was getting ready to designate Kim Jong-il as his successor.

"We used to see Kim Il-sung as our saviour," Mrs. Kim says.

"He was our Dear Father, our Great Leader and people used the titles of father and mother to refer to the government. But really, they were war criminals."

pgoodspeed@nationalpost.com