Bad to the Bone
A North Korean defector urges America to speak up for the victims of his country’s regime
LIKE millions of movie-mad children around the world, GimGyu-mindreamed of being a film star when he grew up. But when he huddled in the darkness of the cinema in the 1980s and ’90s, he was forced to watch propaganda praising the North Korean regime.
Now, after a harrowing escape from his country in 1999, he is a filmmaker dedicated to making movies that expose the human-rights abuses there. “I want to let the world know that more and more people are dying under the Kim family dictatorship,” he said.
His movies are based on events that he witnessed during the North Korean famine in the late 1990s, when, among other horrors, he watched a woman being arrested for cannibalism after she resorted to eating her own son. Her child’s head had been found in a cauldron.
“It was a common thing at the time. It was not surprising,” says Gim, whose 2015 movie “Winter Butterfly” was sparked by her story. “It was not her fault. I think it was the North Korean authorities’ fault for driving her to this.”
Today the 43-year-old father of two daughters isn’t just speaking through his films; he is openly decrying South Korea and the US for not publicly condemning North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s human-rights abuses. Just like his father and grandfather before him, Kim has inflicted murder, torture, rape and forced labor on his own people, often in the country’s notorious concentration camps.
“It is wrong not to make North Korean human-rights abuses an issue,” Gim e-mailed from his office in Seoul shortly after the June 12 summit. “Peace that excludes the human rights of North Koreans cannot be a genuine peace.”
Gim says the diplomatic measures have scared some former North Koreans living in the South, a community he is in constant touch with, having interviewed more than 100 defectors while preparing the scripts for his films, which have been shown in Europe and the US. As a result of the recent summits, he said, “many North Koreans are afraid that they will be sent [back] to North Korea.” (Although this hasn’t been publicly discussed as a bargaining chip, many defectors are distrustful of the authorities having lived under the repressive Kim family regime.)
Growing up in North Hwanghae Province, on the border with South Korea, from 1974 through 1999, Gim listened to banned radio broadcasts from the South that turned him against his own country.
“I was born in a normal worker family,” he said.“My father was a weapons technician, and my mother worked at the local state-owned market.” As a student, he turned to activism.
He destroyed several symbolic sites of the state, including a local polling station. “At the time, I could not afford to think about the danger that put my family in,” he said. “My only thought was to change the wrongs of society.”
In 1999, at age 25, he was arrested for vandalizing a polling site. While in prison awaiting trial, Gim realized he would be sentenced to a concentration camp. In order to be sent to a hospital instead, he swallowed a nail, causing enough injury to require surgery. After the operation, he took advantage of lax security during a public holiday to escape and flee across the border into China, where he was arrested and returned to North Korea.
This time he was imprisoned at the Chongjin Detention Center, a political prison in the mountainous northeast corner of North Korea, relatively near the Chinese border. From there, he escaped a second time, again taking advantage of the public confusion during a holiday. He slipped away as the country celebrated the birthday of Kim Ilsung, North Korea’s founding dictator and the grandfather of Kim Jong-un.
Crossing parts of China and Mongolia on foot, he was finally rescued by the South Korean government. Once defectors land in South Korea, the government provides them with rehabilitation training and money until they can get on their feet.
Gim had good reason to flee a North Korean concentration camp. Political prisoners in the camps have been ordered to dispose of corpses and women have been forced to kill their own babies, according to a 2014 UN report. Some escapees have described watching the mortal remains of prisoners being “burnt like rubbish” and their ashes used as fertilizer.
The UN estimates there are currently up to 120,000 prisoners in these camps and that hundreds of thousands of political prisoners have perished in them over the course of more than five decades. It is not unusual for entire families, including young children, to have been incarcerated as a form of collective punishment against a single malcontent who committed the same sort of anti-state activities as Gim.
After reaching South Korea, Gim worked with some of the brokers who try to facilitate the escape of family members left behind in North Korea — for a fee. “I sent several people to find my family,” he said. “But I could not find them.”
Although he doesn’t know exactly what happened to them, he has heard they’re all dead. “It may be nostalgia and revenge for my family that’s driving me to make films about human rights,” he said.
The country is no longer in the grips of the extreme famine of the 1990s, when experts believe that roughly one in 10 North Koreans — as many as 3 million people — died of hunger.
Yet even today, the United Nations estimates that 40 percent of the population in the provinces remains malnourished. Recent defectors continue to report deaths from starvation.
Gim feels that some South Koreans wish to avoid the topic of humanrights abuses in the North. “I don’t think they care about the human rights and the welfare of the North Korean people,” he said.
Despite all odds, the director remains optimistic. He even hopes to see the two Koreas reunited one day. “Unity based on liberal democracy is my dream,” he said.
Since the June 12 summit, we know the North’s propaganda machine has been working flat out to portray it as a success for their “Great Leader.” The harsh realism of Gim’s films contrasts sharply with the glitzy meeting in Singapore, where the dictator posed for selfies and was generally feted like a rock star. Is it any wonder that defectors are worried their concerns will be lost in the diplomatic shuffle? J. Alex Tarquinio is the incoming president of the Society of Professional Journalists