Sketching North Korea’s Sadism

Earlier this month, North Korea publicly executed as many as 80 citizens for such “crimes” as owning a Bible and watching Western movies. According to the South Korean newspaper JoongAng Ilbo, the executioners covered many of the victims’ heads with bags, and then machine-gunned them to death in front of a stadium crowd.

These are the sort of hideous mass punishments that once were commonly perpetrated in China under Mao, and the USSR under Stalin, during the age when great swathes of Europe and Asia were controlled by genocidal variants of communism and fascism. With its gulag network and totalitarian creed, North Korea remains a freakish throwback to that dark period, even as its democratic southern Korean neighbor churns out pop stars and flat-screen televisions.

Since the North Korean famine of the mid-1990s, the West has been waiting for this outlier prison-state to collapse. Yet the country keeps grinding along. In part, this is because China, fearful of a wave of millions of starving Korean refugees flooding into southern China, continues to keep North Korea’s economy on life support. But it is also because hatching a national revolution is impossible in a country where the secret police permeate every part of society; and where many citizens still blindly venerate their Kim-dynasty overlords.

Of all the defectors who have escaped North Korea, few know more about Pyongyang’s methods for crushing human souls than Ahn Myong-Chol, who worked as a guard at four North Korean prison camps before fleeing to China, and then South Korea, in 1994. Last month, I met him in Toronto, and he told me his story.

During training, Ahn was taught to treat gulag prisoners as expendable subhumans: They were to be kept alive only insofar as their labour output justified the gulags’ cost of operation.

On rare occasions, conditions become so hideous that starving prisoners stage local revolts. This happened, Ahn says, in 1985, at Camp 12 (one of four camps where he worked). “A guard was berating a prisoner who has collapsed, and when one of the prisoner’s relatives went to attend the fallen man, a guard killed him,” Ahn tells me, through a translator. “There was a large crowd of prisoners watching. Many of them went into a sort of rage. They attacked the local security village where the guards lived, killing 200 family members of the guard corps. When word spread, all the guards from Camp 12 and neighbouring Camp 13 joined forces to slaughter all the prisoners. No one knows how many people died. Eventually, they dismantled both camps.”

Stories like this help explain why more North Koreans do not rise up against the regime, or flee into China: Collective punishment is the norm. When a citizen is convicted of a crime, his children, parents, and sometimes even grandparents can be thrown into the gulag with him. (In Ahn’s case, his eventual escape into China precipitated a manhunt on the Chinese side of the border that resulted in 140 North Koreans being rounded up and sent to North Korean gulags.) Almost every act of escape or defiance is guaranteed to end tragically, if not for the escapee then for someone he loves.

Ahn described the horrors he witnessed at the gulags in a 2007 book illustrated with his own drawings (some are visible here). Sadistic guards would use tied up prisoners as kicking and punching dummies for taekwondo practice. In other cases, guards would keep groups of prisoners in complete subterranean darkness for days at a time, then bring these starving specimens up into the daylight and watch them stumble around, blinded by the midday sun. Feeling grass under their feet, the famished prisoners would get down on all fours to snatch handfulls of the stuff to put in their mouths, at which point the guards would smash them with rifle butts.

Throughout it all, Ahn remained a faithful servant of the North Korean regime. His education had been a steady diet of regime propaganda. These days, North Koreans are slightly more cynical about their leaders, because smuggled cell phones and DVDs have broken the state’s information monopoly in the border regions. But in Ahn’s case, he believed every word of it.

Ahn’s attitude changed when he was reassigned to a new job as a driver, transferring supplies from one work detail to the next. Out of boredom, he began talking to the prisoners who loaded and unloaded the trucks. Many of them, he learned, never had seen the world outside the Gulag: They’d been born into the camp as infant prisoners. The plight of such specimens gradually convinced Ahn the system was rotten. He formulated an escape plan, and shared it with two prisoners with whom he’d become especially close.

“I already had access to the truck,” he told me. “I was known as a driver, so the guard at the gate would let me through. The two prisoners going with me were going to hide in the back. And I stole guns [from the guards’ cache] just in case.”

But when Ahn went to pick up his co-escapees, who were working in the camp’s coal-mining area at the time, they got scared. The two men, aged 24 and 26, had lived in the camp since they’d been toddlers. Now that the moment of escape was upon them, the idea of leaving suddenly became unthinkable. So Ahn continued alone, driving to the Chinese border, where he abandoned the truck and crossed over into China.

All this took place in 1994, almost 20 years ago. Ahn now lives in Seoul, where one would think he would live as a celebrity. Yet many South Koreans prefer not to think about the horrors that go on in the north. This is especially true of younger South Koreans, who prefer playing video games in internet cafés to hearing lectures about North Korean gulags. And because there are no photos or videos that show us what goes on in North Korean prisons, many Westerners still remain ignorant about the scale of the human-rights horrors in that country. From a visual perspective, Ahn’s drawings are all we have.

As for Ahn’s story of escape, the first thing I thought of when he related it to me was that it would make a fantastic basis for a first-person-shooter video game. If it became a hit in South Korea’s internet cafés, all the better.

— Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and a Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.