Shin Dong-hyuk

For other people named Shin Dong-hyuk, see Shin Dong-hyuk (disambiguation).
This is a Korean name; the family name is Shin.
Shin Dong-hyuk
Born Shin In Geun
19 November 1982
Kwalliso No. 14, North Korea
Occupation Human rights campaigner,
Witness of Human rights in North Korea
Shin Dong-hyuk
Chosŏn'gŭl 신동혁
Hancha 申東赫
Revised Romanization Sin Dong-hyeok
McCune–Reischauer Sin Tonghyŏk

Shin Dong-hyuk (allegedly born 19 November 1982 as Shin In Geun) is reputed to be the only known prisoner to have successfully escaped from a "total-control zone" grade internment camp in North Korea. He was the subject of a biography, Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey From North Korea to Freedom in the West, by former Washington Post journalist Blaine Harden. Shin has given talks to audiences around the world about his life in Camp 14 and about the totalitarian North Korean regime to raise awareness of the situation in North Korean internment and concentration camps and North Korea. Shin has been described as the world's "single strongest voice" on the atrocities inside North Korean camps by a member of the United Nations' first commission of inquiry into human rights abuses of North Korea. In January 2015, he recanted aspects of his story but most experts continued to support his credibility as a victim of North Korean human rights abuses.[1]

Biography

Shin's official English language biography Escape from Camp 14 is based on interviews given to journalist Blaine Harden. In January 2015, Shin revised aspects of his account.[1] It was reported that Harden would be revising the book to reflect these changes.[1]

North Korea life

Early life

Shin Dong-hyuk was born Shin In Geun[2] at the Kaechon internment camp, commonly known as Camp 14. He was born to two prisoners who were allowed to marry as a reward for good work, although "neither bride nor groom had much say in deciding whom they would marry."[3][4] Shin's father, Shin Gyung Sub, told Shin that the guards gave him his mother, Jang Hye-gyung, as payment for his skill in operating a metal lathe in the camp's machine shop. Shin lived with his mother until he was 12. He rarely saw his father who lived elsewhere in the camp and was allowed to visit a few times a year. According to Shin, he saw his mother as a competitor for their insufficient food rations,[4] and consequently had no bonds of affection with his parents or his brother, Shin He Geun.[5][6] The North Korean government officials and camp guards told him he was imprisoned because his parents had committed crimes against the state, and that he had to work hard and always obey the guards; otherwise he would be punished or executed.[7]

According to Blaine Harden, Shin went to primary and secondary school while in the camp. The secondary school was "little more than slave quarters from which he was sent out as a rock picker, weed puller and dam labourer." At one point, a young girl was killed by the teacher, who always had a pistol with him. His education did not include propaganda or even basic information about North Korea. The personality cult around Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il was also absent; for example there were no portraits of the Kim leaders on display.[8] The camp was near a hydroelectric dam and mines in which the prisoners were forced to labour. In one of Shin's prison cells, where he was held during an interrogation, he said he had electricity and running water. Shin's mother lived in a house with multiple rooms in a "model village" in the camp, given to women who had children.[9]

Shin experienced considerable violence in the camp,[10] and witnessed dozens of executions every year.[7] Part of Shin's right middle finger was cut off by his supervisor as punishment for accidentally breaking a sewing machine.[11] He witnessed adult prisoners and children beaten every day,[12][13] and many prisoners dying of starvation, illness, torture and work accidents.[7] He learned to survive by any means, including eating rats, frogs, and insects, and reporting on fellow inmates for rewards.

Mother and brother plan to escape

When Shin was 13 years old, he overheard his mother and brother planning an escape attempt. Shin had just finished eating watery corn porridge, and was trying to sleep until he overheard that He Geun, his brother had run from the cement factory. Shin's mother, Jang was preparing rice, a symbol of wealth in North Korea for the escape from Camp 14. Shin was jealous his brother was getting rice. Shin's teacher was already in the gated Bowiwon village, so Shin told the night guard of his school with another boy, as informing was something he was taught to do from an early age, and he hoped to be rewarded.[4][14] However, the school night guard took full credit for discovering the plan, and rather than being rewarded, Shin was arrested and guards tortured him for four days to extract more information, believing him to be part of the plan to escape.[4][15] According to Shin, the guards lit a charcoal fire under his back and forced a hook into his skin so that he could not struggle which caused many large scars still visible on his body.[16][17] On 29 November 1996, after approximately seven months spent in a tiny concrete prison cell, he was released and joined by his father, who had also been imprisoned. They were driven back to the main camp wearing blindfolds and their hands tied behind their backs. Camp officials then forced Shin and his father to watch the public executions of Shin's mother and brother; he then understood he had been responsible for the executions.[4][18][19]

Shin stated that at the time of the executions of his brother and mother, in his teenaged mind he felt they "deserved" their fates for both breaking prison rules and, conversely, not including him in the escape plan.[4][20] Shin has since expressed remorse over his actions, saying in an interview with Anderson Cooper for the CBS television show 60 Minutes, "My mother and brother, if I could meet them through a time machine, I would like to go back and apologize".[21]

Escape with Park

While working at a textile factory, Shin became friends with a 40-year-old political prisoner from Pyongyang (surnamed Park), who was educated and had traveled outside North Korea. Park had been to East Germany, and China. Park said that he shook Kim Jong Il's hand. Park told him about the outside world, such as stories about food that Shin had not experienced before.[22] According to Shin, nearly every meal he had eaten up to that point had been a soupy gruel of cabbage, corn, and salt, with occasional wild-caught rats and insects. He was excited by the idea of being able to eat as much food as he wanted to, which Shin considered to be the essence of freedom. "I still think of freedom as roasted chicken," he later acknowledged.[23]

Shin decided to attempt to escape with Park.[24] They formed a plan in which Shin would provide local information about the camp, while Park would use his knowledge once outside the camp to escape the country. On 2 January 2005, the pair was assigned to a work detail near the camp's electric fence on the top of a 1,200-foot (370 m) mountain ridge to collect firewood. Noting the long interval between the guards' patrols, the two waited until the guards were out of sight, then made their attempt to escape.[7][25] Park attempted to go through first, but was fatally electrocuted climbing the high voltage fence. Shin managed to pass over the wire using Park's body as a shield to ground the current, but still suffered severe burns and permanent scars when his legs slipped onto the lowermost wire as he crawled over Park's body.[4][26]

After escaping

After escaping, Shin broke into a nearby farmer's barn and found an old military uniform.[27] Wearing the uniform, he was able to masquerade as a North Korean soldier at times. He survived by scrounging and stealing food.[7] Shin was unfamiliar with money, but within two days of his escape, he had sold a 10 lb (4.5 kg) bag of rice stolen from a house and used the money to buy cookies and cigarettes. Eventually, he reached the northern border with China along the Tumen River and bribed destitute North Korean border guards with food and cigarettes.[28] After spending some time working as a laborer in different parts of China, Shin was accidentally discovered by a journalist in a restaurant in Shanghai, and the reporter recognized the importance of his story. The journalist brought Shin to the South Korean embassy for asylum,[29] and from there he traveled to South Korea, where he underwent extensive questioning from authorities to determine if he was a North Korean assassin or spy. Afterwards, his story was broadcast by the press and he published a Korean language memoir.[30]

Post-North Korea life

Shin later moved to southern California, changing his name from Shin In Geun to Shin Dong-hyuk in "an attempt to reinvent himself as a free man,"[31] and worked for Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), a non-profit organization that raises awareness of human rights issues in North Korea and provides aid to North Korean refugees.[7] Shin moved back to South Korea to campaign for the eradication of the North Korean prison camps.[32]

In August 2013, Shin gave several hours of testimony to the United Nations' first commission of inquiry into human rights abuses of North Korea.[23][33] A member of the UN commission described Shin as the world's "single strongest voice" on the atrocities inside North Korean camps.[23]

Shin described some aspects of his personal life in South Korea in a Financial Times interview, on popular culture saying that "I don't really know anything about music. I can't sing and I don't feel any emotion from it. But I do watch lots of films and the one that moves me the most is Schindler's List".[23] On food he says "I know everything is delicious. I look at the colours and the way the food is presented on the plate but it's very difficult to choose. When I first came to South Korea, I was so greedy that I used to order too much food. Nowadays I try to order only as much as I can handle." Although Shin lives in South Korea, he was informally adopted by an American couple in Ohio during his time in the United States.[23] He says he maintains the relationship, "I have a good relationship with my US foster parents. I contact them often. Whenever I have a holiday, I visit them. I think of them as good parents and I try to be a good son."[23]

In December 2013, Shin wrote an open letter in the Washington Post to American basketball star Dennis Rodman who visited North Korea a number of times as a self-avowed "friend for life"[34] of Kim Jong-un.[35]

Books and film

In 2012, journalist Blaine Harden published Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey From North Korea to Freedom in the West, based on his interviews with Shin. The book states, among other things, that Shin was the one who had reported his mother and brother, a detail he had not included in earlier accounts.[36] Harden gave a one-hour interview about the book on the C-SPAN television program Q&A.[4]

Executive Director of the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, Greg Scarlatoiu, said the book played "an important role" in raising wider public awareness of the North Korean camps.[37] Dalhousie University issued a statement averring that Shin's story, as told through the book, "has shifted the global discourse about North Korea, shining a light on the human rights abuses so prevalent within the regime."[38]

A German documentary, Camp 14: Total Control Zone, directed by Marc Wiese, was released in 2012.[39][40] It includes interviews with Shin Dong-hyuk and two former North Korean officers: the first, Kwon Hyuk, was a guard in Camp 22 and brought out amateur film footage (the only known footage of Camp 22), and the second, Oh Yang-nam, was a secret policeman who arrested people who were sent to camps. Supplementing the film are animated sequences of the camp created by Ali Soozandeh.[40]

On 2 December 2012, Shin was featured on 60 Minutes during which he recounted to Anderson Cooper the story of his life in Camp 14 and escape. Shin said "when I see videos of the Holocaust it moves me to tears. I think I am still evolving—from an animal to a human."[21]

Reliability of story

Verification

Blaine Harden, who interviewed Shin extensively, commented that, "There was, of course, no way to confirm what he was saying. Shin was the only available source of information about his early life."[41] However, Harden said that "the story has been vetted and rang true to survivors of other labor camps, to scholars, to human rights advocates, and to the South Korean government."[41]

According to Blaine Harden, Shin said that part of his original story, told in interviews to South Korea's National Intelligence Service and others, and in his memoir, was not true: "Shin said he had been lying about his mother's escape. He invented the lie just before arriving in South Korea."[42] Shin had originally said he had no prior knowledge of the escape. In his revised version, he said that he informed on his mother and his brother which resulted in their executions. He acknowledged to Harden that this would "damage his credibility as a witness", however Shin said he made up the story because he was "terrified of a backlash, of people asking me, "Are you even human?".[42] Felix Abt, a businessman who has worked in North Korea, has argued that Shin's changing story is typical of the unreliability of North Korean defector stories.[43]

In 2012, when the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention asked the North Korean government about the status of Shin Dong-hyuk’s father, they responded that there was no such person.[44] Then in 2014, after identifying him as Shin In Geun, the North Korean government produced a video [45] which showed Shin's father and acquaintances criticizing him. In the video his father said that his son had never been in a labour camp.[46] The video alleged that Shin worked in a mine and fled North Korea after being accused of raping a 13 year-old girl. The video claimed he was now spreading "preposterous false information" about human rights. Shin confirmed the man was his father, but denied the allegations. Shin said that he believed the government was sending him a message to be quiet about human rights abuses or his father would be killed, in effect holding his father hostage.[47]

Recanting of story told to Blaine Harden

In January 2015, Shin recanted parts of the story told to Blaine Harden.[48] The new version contradicts his previous claim that he spent his entire North Korean life at Camp 14. He now says that he was born in Camp 14, but when he was young, his family was transferred to the less severe Camp 18, and spent several years there. He says that he twice escaped from Camp 18. The first time, in 1999, he was caught within days. The second time, in 2001, he says he crossed into China, but was caught after four months by Chinese police and sent back to North Korea. He says that he was tortured in Camp 14 in 2002, when he was 20 years old (not 13, as previously stated), as punishment for his escape. In the latest version, he was repeatedly burned and tortured in an underground prison for six months.[1][49] A Russian-born Korean specialist Andrei Lankov commented that "some suspicions had been confirmed when Shin suddenly admitted what many had hitherto suspected", described Harden's book as unreliable, and noted that defectors faced considerable psychological pressure to embroider their stories.[50]

Awards and honours

In June 2013, Shin received the Moral Courage Award given by UN Watch, a Geneva-based NGO (non-governmental organization).[51][52]

In May 2014, Shin was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Dalhousie University (Nova Scotia, Canada).[38] Students at the university "held a peace march and launched a social media campaign to raise awareness of human rights violations in North Korea. They then fundraised to bring Mr. Shin to Halifax, where his speech to an over-capacity crowd drew international attention."[38]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Fifield, Anna (17 January 2015). "Prominent N. Korean defector Shin Dong-hyuk admits parts of story are inaccurate". Washington Post. Retrieved 19 January 2015.
  2. ↑ Harden 2012, p. xiii.
  3. ↑ Harden 2012, p. 17.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 Blaine Harden discusses his historical narrative, Escape From Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, Q&A with Blaine Harden, C-SPAN video library, 11 April 2012.
  5. ↑ Harden 2012, pp. 49-51.
  6. ↑ "The Hidden Gulag – Exposing Crimes against Humanity in North Korea's Vast Prison System" (PDF). The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. pp. 48–51. Retrieved 20 September 2012.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 Harden, Blaine (16 March 2012). "How one man escaped from a North Korean prison camp". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 18 March 2012. Retrieved 19 May 2014.
  8. ↑ Harden 2012, p. 27.
  9. ↑ Harden 2012, pp. 17-18.
  10. ↑ NKDB 2011, p. 261.
  11. ↑ NKDB 2011, p. 289.
  12. ↑ NKDB 2011, p. 422.
  13. ↑ NKDB 2011, p. 425.
  14. ↑ Harden 2012, pp. 51-52.
  15. ↑ Harden 2012, pp. 54-59.
  16. ↑ Joohee Cho (30 October 2007). "Born and Raised in a North Korean Prison Camps". ABC News. Retrieved 26 March 2012.
  17. ↑ "Medical Report and History of Shin Dong-hyuk". Life Funds for North Korean Refugees. 9 July 2007. Retrieved 26 March 2012.
  18. ↑ Choe Sang-Hun (9 July 2007). "Born and raised in a North Korean gulag". The New York Times. Retrieved 29 March 2012.
  19. ↑ Blaine Harden (11 December 2008). "Escapee Tells of Horrors in North Korean Prison Camp". Washington Post. Retrieved 19 May 2014.
  20. ↑ Harden 2012, p. 66.
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 Staff (2 December 2012). "Becoming human: Shin's new life". CBS News. Retrieved 2 December 2012.
  22. ↑ Harden 2012, pp. 97-99.
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 23.2 23.3 23.4 23.5 David Pilling (30 August 2013). "Lunch with the FT: Shin Dong-hyuk". Financial Times. Retrieved 2 September 2013.
  24. ↑ Harden 2012, p. 104.
  25. ↑ Yang Jung A (11 May 2007). "Escape from 'Total Control Zone' - North Korea's Papillon". The Daily NK. Retrieved 19 May 2014.
  26. ↑ Harden 2012, pp. 115-116.
  27. ↑ Harden 2012, p. 118.
  28. ↑ Harden 2012, pp. 139-140.
  29. ↑ Harden 2012, pp. 157-158.
  30. ↑ "Don't Insult the Victims of North Korea". The Chosun Ilbo. 25 October 2007. Retrieved 4 November 2013.
  31. ↑ Harden 2012, p. 1.
  32. ↑ Hinson, Tamara (30 April 2012). "I thought the outside world was paradise, says the only North Korean to escape from prison camp". thisislondon.co.uk (London, UK). Retrieved 19 May 2014.
  33. ↑ Park Ju-min (20 August 2013). "Horror of North Korean prison camps exposed at UN panel hearing". Reuters. Retrieved 2 September 2013.
  34. ↑ Eric Talmadge (7 January 2014). "Ex-NBA player says NKorea game dwarfed by politics". Associated Press. Retrieved 18 May 2014.
  35. ↑ Shin Dong-hyuk (17 December 2013). "How Dennis Rodman can help the North Korean people". Washington Post. Retrieved 4 January 2014.
  36. ↑ Janet Maslin (12 April 2012). "Review of Escape from Camp 14". The New York Times. Retrieved 19 May 2014.
  37. ↑ Esther Felden (18 June 2013). "Tortured, beaten, starved: life in a North Korean gulag". DW.de. Retrieved 21 June 2013.
  38. ↑ 38.0 38.1 38.2 "Shin Dong-hyuk". Dalhousie University. Retrieved 15 April 2014.
  39. ↑ "Camp 14-Total Control Zone". Retrieved 18 October 2012.
  40. ↑ 40.0 40.1 Jay Weissberg (14 August 2012). "Camp 14-Total Control Zone". Variety. Retrieved 18 October 2012.
  41. ↑ 41.0 41.1 Harden 2012, p. 46.
  42. ↑ 42.0 42.1 Harden 2012, p. 47.
  43. ↑ Abt, Felix (2014). A Capitalist in North Korea: My Seven Years in the Hermit Kingdom. Tuttle Publishing. p. 118. ISBN 9780804844390.
  44. ↑ Kwon Eun Kyoung (17 November 2014). "COI Opens New Horizons for North Korean Human Rights Movement". The Daily NK. Retrieved 17 November 2014.
  45. ↑ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P82aad8QQW4
  46. ↑ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-30869472
  47. ↑ James Pearson and Sohee Kim (28 October 2014). "Prominent defector says North Korea has taken his father hostage". Reuters. Retrieved 1 November 2014.
  48. ↑ Choe Sang-Hun (January 18, 2015). "Prominent North Korean Defector Recants Parts of His Story of Captivity". New York Times. Retrieved January 19, 2015.
  49. ↑ Harden, Blaine (16 January 2015). "Shin changes key parts of his story". blaineharden.com. Retrieved 19 January 2015.
  50. ↑ Andrei Lankov (3 February 2015). "After the Shin Dong-hyuk affair: Separating fact, fiction". NK News.
  51. ↑ "Top Russian & North Korean Dissidents to Appear at UN Rights Council, Win Awards". UN Watch. 4 June 2013. Retrieved 21 June 2013.
  52. ↑ Stephanie Nebehay (5 June 2013). "North Korean defector's "impossible" dream of closing prison camps". Reuters. Retrieved 21 June 2013.

Further reading

External links