Once dubbed the ‘godfather’ of the Juche
student movement in South Korea in the 1980s, activist Kim Young Hwan is now
better known for leading the human rights campaign for North Koreans. He spent
13 years working covertly in China to plant the seeds of democracy in the
North, facing death threats and torture, and for the first time, Kim has shed
light on those experiences in a recently published book.
The book entitled “Living again as Gang
Cheol” was introduced on December 1 at an event co-hosted by publishing house
Zeitgeist and Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights at which Kim
is a senior researcher.
“It is true that the democratization of North Korea is
to be attained by the people of North Korea, but just like Argentina’s Che
Guevara, people from outside can still campaign for it,” Kim said at the event, adding that
he and his friends started this work in China due to the obvious impediments in
trying to do so from within North Korea.
The number of activists for North Korea’s
democratization working in China at the time was at around 20 to 30 people
including Kim’s family. For safety purposes, they pretended to be strangers and
carried out their respective tasks, always keeping in mind the fact that they
could face arrest by China’s security agents or assassination by North Korea’s
agents, according to Kim’s book.
“For 13 years in China, I met North Koreans
from all ranks, ranging from soldiers, university students, teachers, to public
servants. I told them about the real world outside and the hypocrisy behind
North Korean society. Out of those people, some were determined to fight for
democracy in the North, and they returned home to carry out that fight,” Kim
said.
“These activities all took place in China with no source of protection.
We had to overcome the threat of being tracked down by Chinese intelligence
agents or abduction agents dispatched by the North.”
Kim said he cannot disclose how many
defectors he had sent back to fight for democracy, but every time he hears they
are facing grave threats, he said it breaks his heart. “Whenever I heard that
one of them had died from torture in the North after returning, I could not
even close my eyes. That’s because anytime I did, I could envision so vividly
what kind of torture the person would have gone through and what pain that
would have entailed,” he explained.
However, this chapter of Kim’s work came to
an end on March 28, 2012, when he and three other activists were arrested by the Liaoning Province arm of the Chinese Ministry
of State Security and detained for 114 days before being deported back to the South and banned from China for life.
During the time of their imprisonment, the
activists faced continual beatings and torture. “I could smell my own flesh
burn while they used electric torture; I thought it would kill me,” Kim
recalled.
“Sometimes they would completely drain the life
out of me by keeping me up without sleep for seven days, and I felt like I was
at the doorstep of death. But they still couldn’t quash my drive for democracy
in the North.”
Back in the 1980s, however, Kim was one of
the strongest supporters for a very different cause. He was better known for
being the evangelist for North Korea’s Juche ideology. Becoming famous among
underground circles for his writings about Juche at age 23, Kim worked under
the moniker ‘Gang Cheol’ (hard steel). Having lived under the military
dictatorship in the South, he was certain socialism was the path that should be
taken and even led the largest underground student activist organization at the
time.
What started to erode his belief in
socialism was the gradual collapse of the Eastern Bloc. “I felt everything from
state-ownership, the planned economy, and existing social class theories from
Marxism had to be thrown out and rethought from the very fundamentals,” Kim
said. “And that’s when I came to think of creating a new ideology based on Juche.”
That thought led to an eventual illicit
journey to Pyongyang in 1991 on a submarine dispatched by the North. There, he
met with Kim Il Sung twice, but only came to realize the leader was not only the
actual creator of Juche as had been touted, he failed to comprehend the fundamentals of the ideology. Skepticism grew, and Kim slowly came to understand Juche was simply a guise to embellish Kim Il Sung’s dictatorship.
What truly acted as a transformative
trigger for Kim was the devastating famine that ravaged North Korea in the mid
1990s. The number of deaths wrought by the famine is disputed, but Hwang
Jang Yop, a former Korean Workers’ Party secretary – and highest
ranking official ever to defect to the South – stated that according
to internal North Korean documents, around 3 million people died as a result of
starvation.
“When I heard about the egregious human
rights violations in the North from defectors in the late 90s, I simply
couldn’t believe it. But having heard about it twice, three times, and then
four times over, I knew it was the truth,” Kim explained.
“I had lived for nearly a decade as a
so-called activist and revolutionist, and I told myself if there was any truth
to that existence, I cannot turn a blind eye on the North Korean people who are
suffering from these brutal violations.”
Kim has since then been at the forefront of
the human rights movement for North Koreans and works on multiple campaigns
both home and abroad to raise awareness about the situation across the border.
The event for his book, which highlights
some of his most audacious activities and struggles on the ground, brought
together some 200 people including human rights activists, politicians, and
members of the public.
*The content of this article was broadcast to the North Korean people via Unification Media Group.
