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North Korea refugee and human rights activist Shin Dong-hyuk speaks during a rally outside the White House in Washington, DC, on July 10, 2012. In 2005, Shin, 30, was the first person to have escaped from a 'total-control zone' grade internment camp, called Camp 14, in North Korea and live to tell about the experience. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Nearly 200,000 people are thought to live in North Korea’s forbidding labor camps.
The camps were modeled on the Soviet Gulag, though they have long outlasted it. The camps have several distinct divisions, with some reserved for prisoners serving life sentences and others for those who might be “rehabilitated” for reentry into society—if they survive. Large numbers of those incarcerated are criminals in the traditional sense, but most are political or “economic criminals”—i.e., people caught speaking ill of the regime or selling goods.
But operating beneath the state’s watchful internal and external security apparatus—and always in the shadow of these ghastly camps—is an informal network of enterprising smugglers who offer their services to North Korean defectors looking to escape and send help to the families they left behind.
The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea is a DC-based nonprofit that studies these issues in gripping detail. I spoke recently with David Hawk, a lead researcher for the Committee, about North Korean camps, defectors, and the networks of merchants and sympathizers who operate in the shadows.
Your organization’s report, Hidden Gulag, notes that in 2000 there were only 3,000 North Korean asylum seekers in the South. Now there are at least 23,000. What accounts for the huge jump in that time frame?
Part of it has to do with people essentially voting with their feet. There is a high level of dissatisfaction, particularly in the northeast provinces of North Korea, from which it’s easiest to cross the Tumen River to get into China. There had been larger numbers of North Koreans who fled to China during the late 1990s during the famine. But there were also a small number of people who wanted not just to go to China, but to go on to South Korea.
What happened is that the network—the “underground railroad”—essentially got widened. People figured out how to do it easier, better, faster, and cheaper.
And then you also have something of a pull factor: once you have a family member who’s in the South and is able to send money back to North Korea, they often try to get some of their other family members to join them in South Korea. The numbers have [actually] fallen off in the last six months because Kim Jong Un has very strongly tightened up the border. But there was a 10-year period [prior to 2012] when the rates were increasing.
How are North Korean defectors able to get money back into the country?
There’s a networking arrangement that’s essentially made through [contacts among] some 2 million ethnic Koreans living on the China side of the China-North Korea border. Those ethnic Koreans—who are Chinese citizens—are able to go back and forth into North Korea pretty freely. (And that’s also how virtually every city and village in North Korea now has consumer markets and food markets.)
There are businesses for people in South Korea to send money to their relatives in North Korea via Chinese brokers, who get a 30-percent cut. It’s illegal, and you have to pay some bribes to do this. Essentially, the ethnic Korean Chinese have bank accounts in China, get the money transfers, and go into North Korea with the money that will then be used to pay the guards to let them escape back to China and then to pay the transportation fees to South Korea. They also take Chinese mobile phones into North Korea, where the families who want to talk to their relatives in South Korea go up to the North Korean-China border where they are in range of the cell phone towers in China. So you have this networking for telephone communications and also for remittances. And it’s all technically illegal, and if people are found doing this they are punished.
