Interviews with Ahn Myeong Chul

After working as a camp guard for eight years, I took my first leave – my vacation. When I returned home, I found that my father was gone and the rest of the family had also disappeared. Once I returned to the prison camp, someone was monitoring me.

[While Ahn Myeong Chul was working as a prison guard, his father committed suicide after making statements perceived as hostile to the regime. Under the regime’s policy of punishing the relatives of political criminals, his mother and siblings were imprisoned.]

I was warned that I too might be sent to a prison camp and I had a serious meltdown because I had done nothing wrong. I had always worked hard as a prison camp guard.

It was then that I realized what had happened to my family. Had I not understood the prison camp system, I probably would have joined my mother and younger siblings because I was the eldest son of the family.

This is why after I decided to escape [North Korea] after returning to the camp from my leave.

I needed to get rid of the guard who had me under surveillance, so I wrote a letter in my own blood pledging my loyalty to the leader, Kim Jong Il. They let their guard down after that.

[Kim Jong Il (1941 – 2011) succeeded his father, Kim Il Sung, and led North Korea from 1994 until his death in 2011.]

One night, after working the night shift, I armed myself with an AK-47 and several pistols, and left the prison camp. I drove the truck and carried two other prisoners with me.

These two prisoners were so scared that they just got off along the way. I drove to the Tumen River, and swam across the river to China, which eventually led me to South Korea.

When I was planning my escape, at first I was thinking about bringing with me a list of prisoners, but decided it was too risky. I decided then to take these two brothers with me.

They entered the camp when they were two and four years old. They had spent over 20 years at Camp 22. When I escaped they were 24 and 26 years old, respectively. They had entered the prison camp with their entire family, but their other family members had either starved or had been tortured to death.

Whenever I asked them to do something, they always worked hard, and I developed some amount of sympathy for these brothers. This is why I thought to myself, I really have to save them.

If I had shared my escape plan with anyone or If I showed any hint that I would escape, I probably wouldn’t be here today.

I did not share this with anyone, not even my friends. It was something I had to plan on my own.

These were desperate times for me. I had no time to really sense what China was like; what its economic development was like. The moment I had escaped and crossed Tumen River the search party from the camp was formed and the river became surrounded by guards looking for me. So I had to escape from them. One hundred fifty armed guards came all the way into Yanji in China, just to catch me. [Yanji is a Chinese city, just north of the border with North Korea.]

They tried to catch me in cooperation with Chinese soldiers. So, I wasn’t paying much attention to how things were different in China, because I was so desperate to escape.

Thanks to the assistance by the South Korean government, I was able to leave China. Otherwise I think I would have been shot to death.

I’m sorry that I cannot share with you the details of my path from China to South Korea, because there was a huge search effort from both China and North Korea to have me arrested. I was also armed at that time.

Even to this day, I think I am quoted whenever China talks about guarding and monitoring people, so it is difficult for me to share that information, but I can tell you that it didn’t take all that much time for me to make it to South Korea.

Ahn Myeong Chul was born in North Hamgyong Province in North Korea. As a teenager, he was the only person from his province selected to serve as a political prison camp guard. Ahn worked in several camps for a period of eight years where he was brainwashed into believing that political prisoners were enemies of the state unworthy of sympathy. As many as 130,000 men, women and children are imprisoned in North Korea’s vast system of gulags.

Although Ahn witnessed executions, starving children, and extreme torture, it was not until he became a prison truck driver that he questioned the system. Ahn would converse with prisoners he transported and was astonished to learn they knew nothing about the reasons for their imprisonment. It was his introduction to the country’s system of “guilt-by-association” punishment; in North Korea, whole families are incarcerated for the offenses of a single family member.

While on leave in 1994, Ahn learned that his father, a member of the ruling Workers’ Party, had committed suicide after questioning the regime’s rationing system. Ahn’s mother and siblings were imprisoned for his father’s offenses. Fearing that authorities would come for him, he fled to China and eventually reached safety in South Korea.

Since his escape, Ahn has become a North Korean human rights activist. He has provided testimony at the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and is now the secretary general of the organization Free NK Gulag.

North Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) is a country of 23 million people in northeast Asia, ruled by Communist dictator Kim Jong-Un. His deceased predecessors—father, Kim Jong-Il, and grandfather, Kim Il-Sung – respectively retain the titles of “Eternal President” and “The Great Leader.”

The Korean War began in 1950, when Kim Il-Sung, backed by the Soviet Union and China, attacked South Korea. The conflict ended in a cease-fire rather than a peace treaty, and the border between the two Koreas remains tense and heavily militarized.

Kim Il-Sung employed harsh tactics to consolidate his power and propagated an extreme personality cult that has been continued by his successors. A blend of communist doctrine, state terror, xenophobia and hyper-nationalism has given North Korea its unique ideology. Despite some recent openings, North Korea remains largely isolated from the rest of the world.

With the end of Soviet communism and withdrawal of economic support, North Korea’s economy collapsed in the 1990s. A massive famine, aggravated by the regime’s indifference, killed as many as 2 million people between 1994 and 1998. While conditions have improved, even today, North Korea faces problems of malnutrition and insufficient access to food.

Tensions between North and South Korea remain high. In 2010, North Korea sank a South Korean naval vessel, killing 46 sailors and attacked a South Korean island, killing four civilians. North Korea has developed and tested nuclear weapons in contravention of several international agreements. The country withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003 in order to test ballistic missiles and eventually a nuclear device. Multilateral negotiations have so far failed to constrain North Korea’s arms buildup and nuclear program.

North Korea is among the world’s most repressive states, engaging in widespread and systematic human rights violations, including extrajudicial executions, torture, forced abortion, arbitrary detention, and denial of the rights of expression, association, assembly, and religion. The government pervasively regulates all aspects of the lives of its citizens, each of whom is categorized as “core,” “wavering,” or “hostile,” according to the history of his or her family’s relationship with the regime. Access to housing, employment, education, and other social and economic goods depend heavily on these security classifications. The government determines where each citizen will live, and travel within the country is strictly limited.

Emigration is prohibited. Refugees who have escaped to China have frequently been forcibly returned to North Korea where they are imprisoned, subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, and sometimes executed. The government operates a network of forced labor camps for an estimated 120,000 political prisoners. While persons convicted of ordinary crimes serve fixed sentences, those convicted of political crimes are confined indefinitely. Punishment is extended to three generations – the offender’s parents, siblings, and children are also incarcerated, as a way to pressure North Koreans to conform. Political offenders are often denied food, clothing, and medical care, and many die in prison.

Freedom House’s Freedom in the World report classifies North Korea as “not free” and as one of nine nations whose lack of political rights and civil liberties are considered the “worst of the worst.”