At that time I was 9 years old, so I was in the 3rd grade of elementary school. Back then, raising goldfish in aquariums in your home was a very popular thing to do. I think on that particular day, I was playing around the Daedong river area with my friends.
I was always trying to get new fish and fill my aquarium with new kinds of fish. I had so many fish. This was something I was very proud of.
On that particular day, my friends came over to my house, and suddenly told me that you don’t need these fish anymore, so you should give them to us.
At first I didn’t understand what they meant, and later I found out that rumors had already spread around the neighborhood that my family had been labeled as anti-regime and that we could not live in Pyongyang anymore. When I had asked my parents whether this was true, they shed tears and told me it was.
What happens, is the day before you are sent to the prison, a member of the security bureau comes and visits us at our home and he just without any context tells our family that our grandfather is involved in a matter of treason and that we were supposed to kill all of you, but we are doing you the favor of saving your lives and having you live somewhere else instead. So if these people tell you that one of your family members is a traitor, then you have no other choice but to accept it and do as you’re told.
Back then, I was living with my parents, younger sister, uncle, and grandmother. But because my mother came from a family that was very close to the Workers’ Party,
if she gets arrested, then the Songbun status of her family would also be tarnished, so what happens often times is in situations like this, the authorities would force you to get a divorce.
That happened with my parents as well because my mother actually told us she would come to the prison camp with us, but in the end, she did not.
The authorities forced her to divorce my father so that her part of the family could be saved.
[The Workers’ Party of Korea is the communist party that has run North Korea since the state was established in 1948. Songbun is a system used by the North Korean regime to classify citizens’ attitudes toward the regime as core, wavering, or hostile. An individual’s songbun status is influenced by his family’s status and helps determine career prospects, housing and even access to food.]
Even when I heard that, I really didn’t have any idea how miserable life could get. I thought that we were moving to another place, so I selected about 30 of my fish from the aquarium to take with me to our new place. The rest of the fish I gave away to my friends.
We were supposed to travel very far. One of the regime’s security personnel told me that I was not allowed to take the aquarium with me. I really begged as a little child, and he said, “OK, just take it with you.” So I took the aquarium all the way to the prison camp.
I think I’m probably the only person to enter the prison camp with an aquarium. That is where the title of my book, The Aquariums of Pyongyang comes from.
[The Aquariums of Pyongyang is a book by Kang Chol Hwan and Pierre Rigoulot published in 2000. It describes Kang’s imprisonment in the North Korean gulag.]
When I reached the prison camp with the aquarium, half of my fish were dead. When I replaced the water of the aquarium, another half died so I was left with about 10 fish.
Because I was forced to do labor, I couldn’t really give my attention to the fish after that.
I couldn’t feed them enough. So in the end, I was left with 3 fish alive. Then winter came and the room temperature fell below 0 degrees Celsius, so my remaining 3 fish also froze to death.
That kind of symbolized that my connection with the outside world had been severed completely.
Kang Chol-Hwan escaped from North Korea in 1992 and has dedicated his life to bringing attention to the horrifying conditions in North Korea.
When Kang was 9 years old, the North Korean government accused his grandfather of treason and sent the family to one of its most notorious concentration camps, Yodok. Kang lived in the camp for 10 years, surviving on meager corn rations along with rats and earthworms. He and his family were forced to work in fields and mines and to witness public executions of their fellow prisoners.
Following his release from the camp, Kang bought an illegal radio receiver and began listening secretly to broadcasts from South Korea. These broadcasts allowed Kang to understand the differences between totalitarian societies, like North Korea, and free societies. Kang and a friend escaped North Korea by sneaking across the border to China and went from there to South Korea, where he lives today.
Kang described his experiences in his powerful memoir, “The Aquariums of Pyongyang.” President Bush welcomed Kang to the White House in 2005 .
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.”
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