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| China-Japan-Koreas |
| A defector and a missionary, sharing tragedy |
| 2005-07-29 |
| By Choe Sang-Hun International Herald Tribune SEOUL When the two Koreans met in China in 1999, it was a bonding at first sight: one was a missionary from South Korea who saw God's work in helping North Korean refugees, and the other was a fugitive from North Korea who was tortured so badly he could hardly walk more than 10 minutes at a time. Today the North Korean, Pack Kwang Il, strides along Seoul's streets wearing polished leather shoes and toting a cellphone. Speaking with vigor and humor, he shows no sign of the torture that almost killed him. But inside, Pack, 31, still has to live with his nightmares of guilt and horror. "It breaks my heart," the missionary, Kim Sung Ho, 49, said, fighting back tears. "Maybe if I didn't help him come to South Korea, he might not be suffering the pain he suffers now." The story of the two Koreans is a chronicle of those who escape one of the world's most brutal dictatorships and those who help them. As they put it, the psychological burden they share is a "Korean tragedy," a pain that will haunt numerous North Korean defectors as long as the regime in the North considers them the enemy and has no qualms about punishing their families - as it did with Pack's family in the North. "I don't blame Reverend Kim for anything. I did what I chose to do," Pack said. In North Korea, Pack's family belonged to a privileged class in Hamheung, a city near the country's central eastern coast. A graduate of an elite college, Pack worked as a high school teacher, inculcating pupils with a version of Korean history heavy with Communist propaganda. After school, however, he had a secret and illegal hobby: listening to South Korean radio and watching Hong Kong movies - even Rambo and James Bond films, which the North Korean authorities blame for spreading "abnormality, degeneration, violence and corrupt sex culture." "At night I listened to the South Korean radio under two layers of blanket and often fell asleep with the earphones still on," Pack said. "I liked South Korean pop songs." In North Korea, all radio sets came with fixed channels that received only government broadcasts, but as the food crisis in the mid-1990s forced North Korea to relax its border controls, radio sets and videotapes were smuggled from China. Pack's uncles living in Japan brought cash, videotapes and outside news. "Unlike other North Koreans, our family didn't worry about food," Pack said. "I was rich enough to develop a curiosity about the outside world." In September 1998, Pack paid $120 for a set of videocassettes that contained a popular South Korean TV drama. He lent it to a friend, who circulated the tapes. The secret police soon were on the case, which had all the elements of a grave political crime. Pack fled to China in October, but within nine days, he was arrested by the Chinese police and repatriated. He ended up in an internment camp where North Korean authorities interrogated and tortured those who escaped to China, an act considered a betrayal of the "socialist paradise." "They tied me down and forced me to drink dirty water until my belly swelled like a tadpole," Pack said. "They placed a wooden plank on my belly and stood on it to make me vomit." The torturers had a name for the exercise: "deflating" an enemy of the state. Women who got raped while in China and became pregnant were accused of bringing in "foreign seeds" - another crime in a country ruled with a nationalistic fervor bordering on xenophobia. "The soldiers made the women bend over, raced and jumped on their backs, as if jumping on horseback, to force abortions," Pack said. "After a while, they threw me in a shed for people who could no longer move. I defecated where I was lying or sitting," he said. "Everyday, one or two dead bodies were hauled out of that shed." A day after Christmas in 1998, Pack was being transferred to a political prisoner camp when he jumped from the train. It took him 13 days to "walk and crawl" back across the frozen river border into China. On a freezing January night, he was found lying semiconscious on a country road by a Korean-American missionary, identified only as Reverend Cho, who was traveling in the area. "When I saw the lights of Reverend Cho's jeep approaching, I thought it was a Chinese police car and tried to move but couldn't," Pack said. "I thought it was the end, and gave up." While Pack was discovering the outside world on shortwave radio broadcasts and was paying heavily for it, South Korean churches, which have one of the largest and most aggressive armies of missionaries in the world, began infiltrating the tens of thousands of North Korean refugees in China. In June 1999, Kim, who had focused his seminary studies on the persecution of Christians in North Korea, went to Hunchun, a Chinese town near the northeastern tip of North Korea, and visited a house where a missionary fed North Koreans and preached the Gospel. "I was a sorry sight to look at," Pack said, describing his first encounter with Kim. When he sat holding a Bible, Pack tilted to the left because of a back injury from the torture. "Call me if you need me," Kim told Pack, giving him his South Korean cellphone number, and returned to Seoul. Ten days later, Pack called - the Chinese police had broken into the safe house where he was staying. Pack managed to run away but had nowhere to go. In the following months, Kim made several trips to China, taking food and cash to Pack. Pack and other refugees were constantly on the run from the Chinese police. They lived in huts and caves in the hills that were hours from the nearest road. Missionaries brought food and Gospel literature. Some missionaries believe that bringing the Gospel to North Korea is the quickest way to topple the regime. By 2000, Chinese authorities had stepped up crackdowns on North Korean refugees, whom they consider illegal migrants. "One day in October 2000, Pack called me and said he could no longer go on in China," Kim said. "Until then, we didn't talk about bringing him to South Korea. It was too dangerous." In a smuggling operation financed by Kim, Pack reached South Korea in March 2001 after crossing into Vietnam and Cambodia. "I remember the early morning of January 26, 2001, when he called me and said he was safely in Hanoi. I was praying at the time, and how happy I was!" Kim said. In Seoul, Pack worked as a parking lot attendant and did two things that would irritate the North Korean authorities: He became a missionary himself after attending a theological school and went to rallies condemning North Korea. Meanwhile, Kim brought more than 80 North Korean refugees to the South. Last December, Pack traveled to China and met a hometown friend who was invited to China by a go-between. The friend brought shocking news: The North Korean authorities had learned what Pack was doing in South Korea and sent his parents into internal exile in a remote village of the North last October. In conditions like that of a labor camp, his mother soon died, Pack confirmed from other sources from the North this year. His father, at last report, was still in the village. His three sisters were divorced by their husbands, who were desperate to protect their families from political stigma. "It all began with a videotape," Pack recalled. "Compared to what I have done, its consequences are too severe." Pack, who married a church pianist in April, added, "Even my wife will not completely understand my pain when I think about my family." |
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