Kang Chol Hwan discovers the outside world through radio

When Kang Chol Hwan was 18, the guards announced one day without preamble that his family would be released from the Yodok concentration camp as a demonstration of leader Kim Il-sung’s generosity. Except Kang’s grandfather—he had been assigned to a different camp, his treason still unexplained. Kang never saw him again.

In his postprison life as a deliveryman in the western county of Pyungsung, Kang harbored few illusions about the corruption of the North Korean regime. But it wasn’t until around three years later that he accessed the information that crystallized his contempt. It came from a pirate radio.

A friend gave Kang two radio receivers. Kang paid a bribe to avoid registering one with police, and he learned how to disassemble its case and remove the filament that hardwired it to official regime frequencies. He and his closest confidants would huddle under a blanket—to muffle the sound from eavesdroppers—and listen to Voice of America, Christian stations, and the South’s Korean Broadcasting System. “At first I didn’t believe it,” he says. “Then I started to believe but felt guilty for listening. Eventually, I couldn’t stop.”

Under their blanket, they relearned all of North Korea’s history, including the fact that the North, not the South, had started the Korean War. Beginning in 1989, they followed the breakdown of Soviet Eastern Europe and the execution of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, a close friend of Kim Il-sung. They heard the music of Simon and Garfunkel and Michael Jackson, even learning the lyrics and softly singing along. “Listening to the radio gave us the words we needed to express our dissatisfaction,” Kang would later write. “Every program, each new discovery, helped us tear a little freer from the enveloping web of deception.”       Continued

Kang Chol Hwan and The Aquariums of Pyongyang

A contact in the local government warned [North Korean defector Kang Chol Hwan that one of his companions] had told the police about Kang’s secret radio sessions. He was under surveillance and faced potential arrest and reassignment to a labor camp. Posing as a businessman, he bribed border guards on the Yalu River and escaped to Dalian, China, and finally to Seoul.

After his escape Kang wrote a memoir, The Aquariums of Pyongyang, originally published in French in 2000 and a year later translated into English. It was a revelation: the most detailed account yet of life in North Korea’s gulags. Kang was asked to speak around the world, touring Ivy League schools and European conferences. President George W. Bush invited him to visit the White House, where they discussed his homeland’s growing human rights crisis.

Back in South Korea, Kang’s story had no such impact. President Kim Dae-jung had won a Nobel Prize for the South’s so-called Sunshine Policy of compromise with the North to reestablish diplomatic ties. Kang’s story was seen as unfashionably antagonistic to the Kim regime and largely ignored.

By 2005, Kang had given up hope that South Korea or the rest of the world would act against the North Korean government. Change, he decided, would have to come from within, through the same life-altering education he had received from his illegal radio. He flipped his strategy: Instead of working to tell the world about the horrors of North Korea, he would work to tell North Koreans about the world.

That year, a Christian radio station donated 5,000 portable windup radios to Kang’s newly formed organization NKSC. Through defector contacts in China, he smuggled them into houses along North Korea’s Tumen River border. With funding from private donors and governments it declines to name, NKSC has since grown to 15 paid staffers, including independent operators along the Chinese border, each with their own contacts in North Korea.

He’s looking at ways the American tech community could advance NKSC’s mission. And in conjunction with the Human Rights Foundation, it’s been talking to Silicon Valley types about building new tools—everything from a small concealable satellite dish to steganographic videogames that hide illegal data.

[Wired]

The night I helped my mother escape North Korea

Extracted from The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story by Hyeonseo Lee:

I set my phone to silent, dressed myself entirely in black and walked calmly and purposefully through the hotel lobby. Outside I hailed a cab and directed the driver to take me to the point where the town ended, about 200 yards from the river. There, at the end of a row of low buildings, was the derelict house among the trees where I was to meet my mother and brother. I crouched down behind an old garden wall and waited. … I peeped over the wall and saw North Korean border patrols passing on the opposite bank of the river.

‘I had not seen my mother in 11 years. In the half-light I saw a strained, old face and a body moving stiffly’

My phone was buzzing. Min-ho’s voice was fast and tense: “We’ve had a problem.” Quickly Min-ho explained that just as he and my mother had been about to cross they had walked straight into a border guard.

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A so-called normal childhood in North Korea

If such a thing as a normal childhood can be had in North Korea, Joseph Kim had it. He lived with his father, mother and older sister in Hoeryong. At the end of each day, the neighborhood children would gather around the television and gorge themselves on popcorn and candy.

When Kim was nearly 4-years-old, his father, a respected member of the Workers’ Party of Korea, was so successful that he was able to build a house for his young family. It was 1994.

As he writes in his new memoir, Under the Same Sky: From Starvation in North Korea to Salvation in America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Kim and his family believed that they wanted for nothing.

What Kim’s family did not know was that Hoeryong was, and remains, home to a maximum-security concentration camp, one of six the country is known to run.

Every North Korean was to have a framed picture of Kim Il-sung and his wife in their homes. “You could be sent to a prison camp for allowing dirt to gather on Kim Il-sung’s portrait, or for putting it behind cracked glass,” Kim writes.

The children learned about America, mainly through illustrations. Teachers showed their students drawings of American soldiers spearing pregnant North Korean women with bayonets and marching them into gas chambers.

“I held my breath,” Kim writes, “as the teachers explained that Americans had come to our country to massacre Koreans for no other reason than they liked to … the only people who stopped the Americans from coming to my country, our teachers said, were Kim Il-sung and the soldiers of North Korea.”

[News.com/au]