Escape from Camp 14 Read Free Page A

months, human rights activists in South Korea, Japan and the United States urged him to cooperate,
telling him that a book in English would raise world awareness, increase international pressure on North Korea and perhaps put some much needed money in his pocket. After Shin said yes, he made
himself available for seven rounds of interviews, first in Seoul, then in Torrance, California, and finally in Seattle, Washington. Shin and I agreed to a fifty-fifty split of whatever the book
might earn. Our agreement, though, gave me control over the contents.
    Shin began keeping a diary in early 2006, about a year after his escape from North Korea. In Seoul, after he was hospitalized for depression, he continued writing in it. The diary became the
basis for his Korean-language memoir, Escape to the Outside World , which was published in Seoul in 2007 by the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights.
    The memoir was a starting point for our interviews. It was also the source for many of the direct quotations that are attributed in this book to Shin, his family, friends and prison keepers
during the time he was in North Korea and China. But every thought and action attributed to Shin in these pages is based on multiple interviews with him, during which he expanded upon and, in many
crucial instances, corrected his Korean memoir.
    Even as he cooperated, Shin seemed to dread talking to me. I often felt like a dentist drilling without anaesthetic. The drilling went on intermittently for more than two years. Some of our
sessions were cathartic for him, but many made him depressed.
    He struggled to trust me. As he readily admits, he struggles to trust anyone. It is an inescapable part of how he was raised. Guards taught him to sell out his parents and friends, and he
assumes everyone he meets will, in turn, sell him out.
    While Shin remained wary of me, he responded to every question about his past that I could think of. His life can seem incredible, but it echoes the experiences of other former prisoners in the
camps, as well as the accounts of former camp guards.
    ‘Everything Shin has said is consistent with what I have heard about the camps,’ said David Hawk, a human rights specialist who has interviewed Shin and more than two dozen other
former labour camp prisoners for ‘The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps’, a report that links survivor accounts with annotated satellite images. It was first
published in 2003 by the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and has been updated as more testimony and higher-resolution satellite images became available. Hawk told me that because Shin
was born and raised in a camp, he knows things that other camp survivors do not. Shin’s story has also been vetted by the authors of the Korean Bar Association’s ‘White Paper on
Human Rights in North Korea’. They conducted extensive interviews with Shin, as well as with other known camp survivors who were willing to talk. As Hawk has written, the only way for North
Korea to ‘refute, contradict, or invalidate’ the testimony of Shin and other camp survivors would be to permit outside experts to visit the camps. Otherwise, Hawk declares, their
testimony stands.
    If North Korea does collapse, Shin may be correct in predicting that its leaders, fearing war crimes trials, will demolish the camps before investigators can get to them. As Kim Jong Il
explained, ‘We must envelope our environment in a dense fog to prevent our enemies from learning anything about us.’ 6
    To try to piece together what I could not see, I spent the better part of three years reporting about North Korea’s military, leadership, economy, food shortages and human rights abuses. I
interviewed scores of North Korean defectors, including three former inmates of Camp 15 and a former camp guard and driver who worked at four labour camps. I spoke to South Korean scholars and
technocrats who travel regularly inside North Korea, and I