BOOK
REVIEW Can
North Korea's agony find an
end? Reviewed by
Spengler
Escape from North Korea: The
Untold Story of Asia's Underground
Railroad by Melanie Kirkpatrick
Melanie Kirkpatrick tells one of the
saddest stories I have ever read, about a North
Korean family of four apprehended by the Chinese
authorities after they had fled to China. Before their
repatriation, a Chinese
policeman took pity and ordered a Korean meal for
them in jail.
The officer then said good night and
went home. When he arrived at work the next
morning and opened the door to the North
Koreans' cell, he found four corpses. The mother
and children had been strangled; the father had
hanged himself.
South Korean
journalist Koo Bum-hoe, one of the first to report
on starvation in North Korea and the refugee flood
it caused, wrote of the incident: "It seemed as if
the family had concluded that instead of going
back to North Korea where they could be punished
or even put to death for betraying their country
that it would be better to die with a full
stomach."
The amount of human misery
brought about by the Pyongyang regime challenges
the imagination. Kirkpatrick quotes a 2005 Chinese
police document estimating the number of North
Korean refugees in China at more than 400,000.
Many are caught and sent back to severe
punishment, which often means death by starvation
in a work camp. Female refugees routinely are sold
as brides in rural areas. Some fail to find work
or help and return to North Korea of their own
volition, which perhaps is the saddest gauge of
Chinese indifference.
George Orwell, who
portrayed a dystopia of nagging poverty and
perpetual war in Nineteen Eighty-Four,
could not have envisaged a totalitarian system in
which a significant portion of the people are
condemned to death by starvation pour
encourager les autres.
As a reporter
and later an editor at The Wall Street Journal,
Kirkpatrick has followed the plight of North
Korean refugees for years. Her new book is not a
litany of horrors, though, but rather a hopeful
report on the efforts of Chinese, South Korean and
American Christians to help the refugees. It is a
moving document, and intended as an inspirational
tale.
If there were a Chinese edition -
sadly, a remote prospect - it might serve as a
modern Uncle Tom's Cabin, the popular novel
on the ills of slavery that built sentiment for
abolition in the advent of America's Civil War.
Taken as a whole, I found Kirkpatrick's report
more frightening than uplifting. The difficulty of
uprooting the Pyongyang regime still seems
insuperably great.
For two reasons,
Kirkpatrick's book has important value to analysts
of East Asian politics.
First, it makes
clear how radical the impact of Christianity has
been in China. In the face of unspeakable horrors,
the only segment of Chinese society that has taken
action to help the hungry, frightened and
bewildered runaways is an informal Christian
network, often at risk of severe punishment from
China's governments. Dozens of energetic and
resourceful individuals have interrupted or even
devoted their lives to helping the North Korean
refugees.
Second, it shows indirectly how
marginal Christian influence remains, despite
official Chinese data suggesting that almost a
tenth of Chinese are professed Christians.
Evangelization of China is broad, but it does not
appear deep.
The involvement of Chinese
Christians in humanitarian aid to North Koreans
involves a few thousand individuals out of a
nominal Christian population well in excess of a
hundred million. Kirkpatrick's analogy to the
"underground railroad" that helped slaves escape
the south before the American Civil War refers to
another small network of devout Christians who
risked their liberty to help others reach freedom.
The difference is that America had a free
abolitionist press and an organized anti-slavery
party.
Kirkpatrick depicts a handful of
heroes who risked (and sometimes suffered)
imprisonment to help the North Koreans. One is the
resourceful Pastor John Yoon, raised in a South
Korean orphanage and educated in theology on a
Christian scholarship. He moved to Alaska to lead
a Korean-American Pentecostal church before his
denomination sent him to Siberia to minister to
South Korean business travelers. His mission soon
extended to North Koreans who escaped from
Siberian logging camps to which their government
had sent them as slave laborers.
After the
famines of the 1990s that killed an estimated 1.5
million people, Yoon returned to the US to raise
money from Korean-American Christians to relieve
hunger in the North:
In 1997, Pastor Yoon joined a
humanitarian mission to North Korea to visit a
noodle factory supported by the donations he had
raised ... The suffering was far worse than
anything he had seen as a child in war-torn
Korea. Children, in rags, were patrolling the
streets, begging for food or picking up crumbs
that had fallen to the street ... Worst of all,
he found evidence that the government was
stealing some of the international food
donations.
Yoon relocated to China
and "set up an underground network of assistance
for North Korean refugees", offering safe houses,
clothing, food, and eventually a cottage industry
to employ the refugees making religious artifacts
for sale in the US. For years he dodged the police
until he was barred from entry to China.
Undeterred, he changed his name to "Phillip Buck"
and returned, until his arrest and 15-month
imprisonment in 2005.
Pastor "Buck"
combines the intrepidity of a John Buchan hero and
the selflessness of a Christian martyr. It is
clear from Kirkpatrick's account of his adventures
that nothing less would thwart the vigilance of
the North Korean regime and the hostility of the
Chinese authorities. Movements that depend on
extraordinary courage and capabilities are
difficult to expand in scale.
Kirkpatrick
sees hope in these efforts for "one free Korea",
the title of her last chapter. "As Pastor Phillip
Buck likes to say, help one North Korean refugee
escape, and you are helping to save an entire
people. You are educating a network of North
Koreans about the reality of life outside their
borders." That is a daunting task in a country
where every radio is registered with the police
and limited to local stations (with severe
penalties for tampering to receive foreign
broadcasts).
The Korean underground
railroad has helped a few thousand, but
Kirkpatrick sees far broader consequences:
While the long-term effects of the
new Underground Railroad are not yet known, it's
already evident that it is having a profound
impact in North Korea itself. Those who escape
are transforming North Koreans' understanding of
their country and are helping to open their eyes
to the rest of the world.
I wonder.
One of the cruelest aspects of a totalitarian
system like North Korea's is the mass complicity
of the population in the crimes of the state,
something that the state does its best to
encourage.
Perhaps the closest parallel is
East Germany, the impoverished police state
abutting the prosperous and free half of the same
country. One in 160 East Germans worked for the
secret police and perhaps one in 60 citizens
collaborated; in North Korea, the ratio must be
even higher. When the crimes involve systematic
starvation, not just political repression, small
privileges take on a special meaning.
We
observe in North Korea a degree of cruelty and
determination that makes East Germany seem humane
by comparison. Confronted by more than 300,000
demonstrators led by evangelical pastors in
Leipzig in late 1989, East Germany's authorities
chose resignation over massacre. Pyongyang is
willing to kill its people, slowly and cruelly, by
starvation. East Germans lived worse than their
Western counterparts, but they didn't starve.
North Koreans are on average 8 centimeters shorter
than South Koreans, a South Korean study shows,
because of malnutrition. [1]
A regime that
organizes one part of its citizens to police the
other in return for a few more calories, and holds
the world at bay with atomic weapons, may not be
so easy to dislodge. As food shortages become more
frequent in a world market dominated by
price-insensitive grain buyers, we may see more
rather than less of this kind of political
control, as Pyongyang's political success is noted
by other prospective totalitarians.
Food
shortages helped trigger the upheaval in Egypt as
well as Syria, and are likely to shape Egypt's
political future. The new Muslim Brotherhood
government proposes to ration fuel and electricity
as well as food, making a government ration card
the ticket to daily survival, and concentrating
power of life and death in the hands of the
regime. Egypt might become a North Korea on the
Nile, as I suggested in this space last month (see
North
Korea on the Nile, Aug 28, '12). Che Guevara
called for "two, three, many Vietnams". I fear
two, three, many North Koreas.
Perhaps 2%
of North Korea's 24 million people have managed to
leave. Whether they are typical of those who
stayed behind, or a few brands plucked out of the
fire, remains to be seen. Whether or not the
reader shares Melanie Kirkpatrick's optimism, she
has written a compelling case study that is as
painful to read as it is hard to put down.
Escape from North Korea: The Untold
Story of Asia's Underground Railroad, by
Melanie Kirkpatrick. Encounter Books, 2012.
ISBN-10: 1594036330. Price US$25.99, 312 pages.
Spengler is channeled by David P
Goldman, president of Macrostrategy LLC. His book
How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying,
Too) was published by Regnery Press in
September 2011. A volume of his essays on culture,
religion and economics, It's Not the End of
the World - It's Just the End of You, also
appeared last autumn, from Van Praag Press.
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