It can be hard listening to the stories of people who have escaped from North Korea -- or, to give its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). In February 2014, a United Nations commission of inquiry accused the Pyongyang regime of running camps where "starvation, forced labour, executions, torture, rape and infanticide" were a deliberate policy. The UN called these "crimes against humanity": crimes, it suggested, that were "strikingly similar" to those of Nazi Germany. These atrocities were said to "reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world".
Despite knowing this, WIRED isn't prepared for what Ji Seong-ho tells us in January 2015. In his mid-thirties but still boyishly slight after years of malnutrition, he sits beside an interpreter at a wide mahogany table in a boardroom high above Seoul's wealthy Yeongdeungpo-gu district, the location of the South Korean parliament and a crop of gleaming luxury high-rises that look down on the Han River. He rests his prosthetic left hand in his still intact right hand and begins. "When the North Korean state food distribution system failed in the 90s there was famine," he says quietly. "By 1996, when I was 15, we started to starve. I had to collect grass and tree bark to supplement the family's diet but it wasn't enough. My grandmother was the first to die. I joined the street kids who scavenged on coal trains leaving the collieries at Camp 22. "By the winter of 1996 I was malnourished and weak, but I had to continue or there would be no food for us. The night of March 7 was very cold and around 2am I passed out. I fell from a moving coal train and it ran over me. When I came to I was still on the track.
My left leg was almost detached; the bones were protruding. The flesh on my left hand had been stripped away and two fingers had gone. Blood pumped out of my wounds and it was freezing cold. I screamed but the other boys couldn't do anything. If they had got down to help me they wouldn't have enough coal to sell and their families would starve. Eventually, a railway worker found me and took me to hospital. The doctors told me there was no anaesthetic.
The operation to remove my limbs took four hours without any painkillers at all. I can still feel the saw on my bones."
He stops. The translator is crying. He wipes his eyes and apologises. "My family were outside the room during the operation," Ji continues. "My mother fainted repeatedly as I screamed. My father wanted to give blood so I could make it through the surgery but he was so weak from hunger that he would have collapsed if they had taken any. If he had died then my family would have starved. But I survived."
Ji is one of the few lucky ones. In 2006, he escaped North Korea and made his way successfully through China -- many escapees are caught by the Chinese authorities and then returned to North Korea where they are thrown into prison camps, or worse. He is now an influential member of the defector community in South Korea, one of several WIRED will meet while accompanying the New York-based Human Rights Foundation (HRF) on its Disrupt North Korea campaign, an initiative that unites activists in Korea with technologists and campaigners in the west.
This is not a new fight; North Koreans have lived under tyranny for as long as the DPRK, which was created in 1948 as the Cold War was beginning to take shape, has existed. But, increasingly, it is fought with technology and culture rather than guns, warships and planes. North Korea has been a closed society for seven decades but, as the internet makes information more universally available, it's becoming harder for the state to isolate its citizens. There can be no hermit kingdoms in the age of Wi-Fi, USBs and mass-produced smartphones. The defectors whom WIRED meets are pushing to ensure that their efforts, combined with technology, will ensure that North Korea's days in isolation are numbered.
Ji's story stands as a testament to the suffering of a nation and to the spirit and determination of those who have overcome unbearable circumstances to make a new life in South Korea. His accident left his family destitute, so poor that the first time he managed to slip across the border with China on crutches, in 2000, it wasn't to escape but to bring back a bag of rice so they could eat. When he was caught returning by North Korean border guards, Ji thought they would go easy on him because he was disabled. He was wrong. By limping into China he was accused of bringing "shame on the Motherland" and its Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il. He was beaten mercilessly. When Ji finally did get out of North Korea by fording the Tumen River with his younger brother, he lost his footing mid-stream and his sibling had to drag him to the Chinese side by his hair. Their mother and sister would also later escape. His father didn't make it across the border: he was tortured to death by North Korean security forces and his body dumped outside the family home.
Yet Ji was not broken by his ordeal nor thwarted by his disability. He has fulfilled his teenage ambition to walk again.
That he can do so with such dignity and bearing is thanks both to the expertly fitted prosthetic leg that would have been beyond his means in North Korea and his role as director of the charity Now, Action and Unity for Human Rights. "My duty is to be spokesperson for disabled people in North Korea. To let them know they have a right to live in dignity," he says. "We also help people who managed to escape. From 2011 to the present day we have rescued 76 North Korean refugees from China, bringing them to South Korea -- kids, disabled people, young women."
The refugees Ji Seong-ho assists are escaping a strange and terrible country. North Korea is a nuclear power with an intermittent electricity supply; a nominally Marxist state where the ruling Workers' Party of Korea worships at the feet of what is essentially a hereditary monarchy. "It's not just a dictatorship that controls how the country is run," says Jang Jin-sung, author of Dear Leader, perhaps the best-known book written by a defector. "It is also an emotional dictatorship; it wants to control everything about you. That's why I think it is the worst dictatorship in existence on this planet."
The fact that the DPRK still exists seems an aberration, a throwback to a distant age of totalitarian states and total war. When Korea was liberated from Japanese occupation in 1945, the southern half of the country came under American influence, the north under the control of the Soviet-backed Communist resistance.
With the coming of the Cold War this division was made solid and two separate states formed. They went to war between 1950 and 1953, the UK and US fighting alongside the South as part of a UN contingent. The conflict, which technically continues today, left North Korea ruled by Kim Il-sung. Still referred to as The Great Leader, Kim created a cult of personality around the family and a system of state terror and gulags that are thought to have claimed the lives of more than a million people during his lifetime. On his death in 1994 Kim Il-sung was followed by his son, Kim Jong-il, The Dear Leader -- who was, if this is even possible, even more tyrannical than his father. When Kim Jong-il died in 2011 his son Kim Jong-un was in turn declared The Great Successor. And so the cycle continues.
Although there is some doubt about the extent of Kim Jong-un's power, he oversees a country where there is no freedom of speech, thousands of people labour and perish unseen in camps and the punishment for disloyalty to the state is public execution by firing squad.
It would seem axiomatic that South Koreans would be committed to liberating their 24.9 million countrymen across the border, but the situation is confused by politics. South Korea's history of US-backed right-wing dictatorships and resistance to those authoritarian regimes has left a sizeable minority, known as leftists, who view the Seoul regime and the continuing presence of about 30,000 US troops as the real barrier to peace. Some would even like to see the peninsula unified under a Communist government.
Which is why some defector activists are unpopular. Kim Seong Min defected in 1997 and is now the executive director and founder of Free North Korea Radio. He has received death threats and bloodied axes and knives in the post, events that still have the power to shake him. Choi Jung-hoon is Free North Korea Radio's broadcasting director and a commander of the North Korean People's Liberation Front (NKPLF), an organisation made up of former North Korean soldiers. The pair are sitting together in the station's downtown office. One the wall is a picture of the assembled NKPLF.
There are fewer than a dozen of them; they look more like a football team than a match for the million-strong Korean People's Army, the fourth largest in the world. But they are very serious about their ambitions. "Our aim is to get as many people out of the camps as possible and to support the families of those who don't get out," Choi says. "We have contacts in the security apparatus, the army and polices."
Choi was born in 1971 and reached the South in 2007. He is one of the few defectors to have studied political science in a North Korean university. "In November 2000, my younger brother was executed for anti-regime activities," he says. "I am totally dedicated to bringing about the end of the regime. We have set up groups to foster dissent, we distribute leaflets, and last year we sent 6,000 PC notebooks into [North] Korea."
Kim suggests a possible path to revolution: "There are three to four million people supporting the regime," he explains. "They are all paid salaries in the military, the police -- they have access to phones, to radios and to colour televisions. These people can be the very ones that turn against the regime."
The regime takes Choi very seriously. Kim talks of a North Korean agent who last year posed as a defector and was arrested by the South Korean security services. "She was tasked with luring Choi Jung-hoon to China where he was to be killed by North Korean assassins," he says.
The Pyongyang regime has warned defectors to keep quiet if they know what's good for those left behind. Does Choi worry about the possible cost of his actions, the high price that others might one day pay? "If I don't do it, then who will?" he asks. "There are 27,000 defectors in South Korea. If every one of them is so worried about their family members in North Korea that nobody does any work then nothing will get done."
The 6.5-kilometre-wide Korean Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) that separates the Republic of Korea from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea runs 48km north of Seoul. It's past midnight and a bitter wind drives the snow in flurries as activists from the defector group Fighters for a Free North Korea rush to inflate five balloons loaded with anti-regime leaflets and dollar bills that, when the acid fuses burning beneath them fizzle out, will fall into North Korea.
The activists are led by Park Sang-hak, an intense, hyperactive defector in his early forties. Park is regarded as the most vociferous and determined of the campaigners against the North, so much so that in Pyongyang he is known as Enemy Zero, a sobriquet of which he is proud. Park escaped the dictatorship 14 years ago; three years later he discovered his uncle had been beaten to death in a reprisal attack. When asked about this, he blankly replies: "I feel hatred." Park calculates that in the last decade he has sent $30,000 (£20,000) in dollar bills across the border along with 80 million leaflets extolling North Koreans to rise up against the regime. He's been arrested many times. "Sending balloons is not illegal," he says. "But when the North Korean regime threatens to shoot artillery or the South Korean government deems it will bring danger to the residents in the border area they try and stop me."
Pyongyang has warned of "catastrophic" consequences if the launches continue. When activists sent balloons into the North in October 2014, artillery rounds were fired across the border. With this in mind, the small team works quickly. The balloons are filled with hydrogen, so smoking is strictly forbidden. A goateed figure in a fur hat busies himself alongside Park, overseeing the attachment of a large banner to one of the blimps. The puckish figure is Thor Halvorssen, the 39-year-old president of the Human Rights Foundation. The banner carries an image of Kim Jong-un that is strikingly similar to the one featured on promotional posters for Sony Pictures' 2014 film The Interview starring Seth Rogen. For all its frat-boy grossness, the film skewered the conceit at the heart of North Korea's cult of personality. The Interview also brought worldwide attention to a cause which had been largely forgotten since the last time Hollywood spoofed the North, 2004's Team America: World Police.
The son of a successful Venezuelan-Norwegian businessman and diplomat, Halvorssen went to an £11,000-a-term public school in England. Despite being born into wealth, he has experienced political oppression. His father was imprisoned without trial on charges of terrorism by the Venezuelan government before being freed without charge. His mother, a child psychologist, was shot and wounded by Venezuelan security forces while attending a protest march. "If that happens to both of your parents," he says, "then I guess the Universe is telling you it's time to start a Human Rights Foundation."
As well as balloon launches, HRF is here to support groups broadcasting into North Korea and smuggling loaded USB memory sticks across the rivers that form much of China and North Korea's border. Radios must be registered with the state and are fitted with a seal that limits them to official stations -- according to Freedom House, those who break the seal to pick up foreign broadcasts can be sent to camps or even face a firing squad. Some North Koreans get round this by having a sealed radio to show the security police and a second hacked one for foreign broadcasts.
Increasingly, they have access to foreign media via Chinese-made DVD players that are smuggled into the country. Most of these have a USB port; USBs, which are much easier to conceal than a DVD, can be loaded with movies, South Korean soap operas and pages from Wikipedia.
Halvorssen and Park Sang-hak plan to get 100,000 USB copies of The Interview over the border in March 2015. Halvorssen is convinced the film will have a dramatic effect on the nation. Jang Jin-sung agrees: "If The Interview gets into North Korea it will be like a nuclear bomb. It ridicules the leadership. You do that and the whole system is shaky." Halvorssen says he came close to bringing Seth Rogen out with him on this trip (he shows me the texts from Rogen's representatives over who would pay for his flights). In the end he decided against it as "there would have been a circus".
When the balloons are ready, Park Sang-hak begins to chant. "Down with Kim Jong-un! Freedom for the North Korean people!" Once released, the nine-metre-high sausages of highly inflammable gas immediately shoot up to 3,000 metres. The tubes disappear into the clear night sky. Six kilometres away, North Korean border guards will soon see new shapes appear among the pinpoint constellations.
The defectors are not all men. On the coach back, WIRED meets Hyeonseo Lee and Yeonmi Park. Hyeonseo escaped North Korea when she a was teenager and lived for nine years in China, waiting for her mother and brother to get across the border. The group then embarked on a harrowing 3,000-kilometre trek to Laos, where they intended to seek asylum at the South Korean embassy. However, the Laotian police arrested Hyeonseo's mother and brother. She was at the point of despair -- she didn't have resources to pay a bribe -- when an Australian backpacker heard of their predicament and offered to help, withdrawing the money out of a cashpoint machine.
She described the journey to South Korea in an acclaimed TED talk in 2013. She has since come to symbolise the well-adjusted, resourceful refugee who has overcome terrible odds. "My youth still affects me," she says. "I am still scared and depressed at times. It doesn't go away." At least she is no longer afflicted by the nightmare that woke her every night during years of exile in China. "I would be back across the border in North Korea, outside our apartment looking through the glass at my family. I would shout at them but they couldn't hear me. Then the army would come and they'd chase me back to the border. I had to run away but I also had to see my family. The nightmare stopped when they got out."
In October 2014, 21-year-old Yeonmi Park spoke at the Oslo Freedom Forum, a human-rights conference organised by Halvorssen. She needs no lessons in the advantages of USBs: when she was nine she saw a woman executed by firing squad for lending out and watching foreign DVDs. Tonight, she discovers that she went to the same school as Park Sang-hak. The revelation delights Park and his ferocious intensity abates for a while as they joke together.
Yeonmi remembers a song she sang as a schoolchild: "Without You There Is No Us." It sounds like a love song, romantic. "Romantic?" she says, a little shocked. "It is to our Dear Leader -- without him there is no us!" But you're free and he's dead -- he's not your Dear Leader any more. "Certain songs still affect my emotions at first. Then, after a second, I realise and think, Oh no!" She laughs, but says later: "It was terrible when I was young."
Back in Seoul WIRED asks Halvorssen about the people who pick up the leaflets dropped by the balloons. What if they are executed or imprisoned -- does he carry some of the blame? Halvorssen shoots the question down. "No one is going to be executed for picking up a leaflet," he says. "Someone who picks up a leaflet, reads it and then tells his neighbours about it is going to be executed."
Someone who can testify to the effectiveness of the balloon drops is Lim Young-sun. He runs Unification Broadcasting, an online television channel that shows North Korean programming to South Koreans to help them better understand the culture on the other side of the DMZ. A former North Korean army officer, Lim, 50, escaped to South Korea via China, arriving in 1993. In the late 80s he was stationed near the DMZ during a period when the South Korean government was sending hundreds of balloons over the border. "Leaflets were coming down like rain," he says. "We used to try and shoot the balloons. Some would contain candy and glamour shots of South Korean actresses. I had a huge mound of candy in my office. We kept the bikini pictures and traded them."
The camaraderie this engendered amongst Lim's fellow officers was amplified by the South Korean radio broadcasts. "They gave us information about the outside world, that's how we found out about the Seoul Olympics," Lim says. "Knowing stuff about the outside world made you popular in the army. We formed a club for sharing information -- and the club then turned into conspiracy." The conspiracy became the 9/24 incident, a 1990 plot to assassinate Kim Jong-il. (That it didn't succeed is confirmed by its name -- the plot was discovered on September 24.) Lim evaded the huge manhunt that followed the group's discovery and went on the run until he escaped North Korea in 1993. He too begins to cry. There is no need to ask whether the others in his club were so lucky.
Today, the Korean People's Army (KPA) still opens fire on the balloons, but it also has other weapons in its arsenal. In March 2013, South Korea accused the North of being behind cyber attacks on television broadcasters and banks. This was followed in the same year by attacks on South Korean government websites. Then, in November 2014, came North Korea's most high-profile attack to date: the takeover of Sony Corporation's online operations. To date, no organisations have claimed responsibility for the attack, but the cyber warfare command run by North Korea called Unit 121 -- the so-called Hackers Brigade -- is assumed to have played a role.
One of Seoul's most charmingly titled organisations, despite the seriousness of its intentions, can be found down an alley in one of the city's older districts. The North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity is a group of formerly high-ranking professors and military officers who have escaped the regime. Its director, Heung Kwang Kim, was instrumental in establishing computer training programmes for the North Korean military that would lead to the establishment of the Hacking Brigade. 'There are no more than 3,000 of them," he says. "There are at least two geniuses at work. I know these men. I taught some of them. The way they use code is different but I can recognise them."
Kwang Kim was one of the defectors who visited Hack North Korea, an HRF event held in Silicon Valley in August 2014. Now, with Halvorsson, he demonstrates one of his favourite devices -- a rubber catapult, a simple, improvised way of launching USBs into North Korea.
South Korea is the land of Daewoo, Samsung, Hyundai and K-Pop. Westernised, democratic, capitalist and essentially free, it wields enormous industrial, technological and -- increasingly -- soft power. The whole world listened to "Gangnam Style". The head of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, is a Korean-American born in Seoul. Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary General of the United Nations, is from South Korea. The country is an exuberant celebration of the rejuvenating powers of super-confident capitalism.
But North Korea has also accommodated capitalism. When the state distribution system broke down in the 90s people set up informal markets to survive. Once acquired, markets are a hard habit to give up. Now, the increasingly porous border with what is effectively a capitalist neighbour, China, is further feeding the demand for marketisation. "The markets are where North Koreans buy their DVDs like drug deals," says Sokeel Park, director of research and strategy at pressure group Liberty in North Korea. "Sellers will stand just outside the market so you can approach them."
When Yeonmi Park was young, her father was arrested for economic crimes and she was sent to stay with relatives in the interior. Three years later she returned to her city on the border and was amazed by what she discovered. "People were so different, they were wearing jeans and copying Chinese hairstyles," she says. "They weren't talking about loyalty to the regime or love for our leader, but about dating or boyfriends. The guys spoke with South Korean accents and asked girls out. The change wasn't permitted by the state, but they couldn't stop it."
The HRF visit ends with a press conference in front of Seoul's imposing War Memorial of Korea. Alongside the journalists and TV crews a small group of demonstrators carries "HRF out of Korea" signs. When Halvorssen stands to address the press, a two-man counter-demonstration arrives with a banner showing pictures of starving babies in the North. As a squad of policemen jogs to separate the groups, Halvorssen announces HRF's commitment to the struggle to free North Korea. Just as Halvorssen hands over to Park, the men with the banner break through the police line and fighting breaks out. Some of the press drift over to watch but Park continues to talk: passionate, angry, fighting on. Determined not to forget the millions left behind.
"We are North Korean defectors who were, until recently, just like you, living in North Korea under Kim Jong-il's tyranny and having all our human rights cruelly stolen, and living as slaves in torture and hunger, poverty and lack of rights; in protest at Kim Jong-il's dictatorship we crossed the Tumen and Yalu Rivers and after hardship came into the embrace of South Korea. "In the history of mankind there has been no other case such as Kim Jong-il's hereditary dictatorship and its total surveillance and propaganda, its blockade of information from the outside world, and its break from international society; as such our brothers and sisters in North Korea have lost their sight and hearing and to them we vow to deliver the truth and reality that we have learned in the free world. "Let us not be servile any longer; freedom is not given freely.
Let us stand firmly and fight our enemy of three generations who has stolen our freedom -- Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un. Let us fight and die rather than living without freedom as slaves!"
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
