How exposure to truth led to a North Korean family’s escape

WASHINGTON — On the age of 29, Hyun-Seung Lee started to know that the world he knew in North Korea was not the entire reality.

After his 23-year-old pal was despatched to a jail camp and reviews emerged of executions focusing on colleagues and acquaintances, Lee and his household had been prepared to “give up everything” to now not should serve the regime. 

“Before we came to China, we really didn’t know about the differences between North Korea and the rest of the world,” Lee informed The Christian Put up. 

The North Korean escapee was one in all a number of individuals who spoke on the Cannon Home Workplace Constructing on Wednesday as a number of North Korea Freedom Week occasions passed off within the nation’s capital.  

The occasion —  titled “U.S. Policy for a Free & Unified Korea” and hosted by the Global Peace Foundation, Action for Korea United, Defense Forum Foundation and Alliance for Korea United, USA and One Korea Foundation — combined policy discussion with firsthand testimony from people like Lee who have fled the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

These discussions coincided with the findings of a report released this week by the Seoul-based NGO Transitional Justice Working Group.

The report, compiled by witness testimony from North Korean defectors and sources within the country, found that executions and death sentences in the DPRK have increased by 117% since the country closed its borders at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the report, which mapped 13 years of executions under Kim Jong-un, executions for religious and “superstitious folk” activities increased since the Anti-Reactionary and Thought Crime Law was enacted in 2020. The law criminalizes the viewing and dissemination of Western and South Korean content.

While death penalty cases for murder declined by 44.4% following the border closure, the report found that offenses related to foreign culture, religion, and “superstition” skilled the biggest development, rising by 250% (from 4 to 14), whereas the variety of condemned individuals elevated by 442.9% (from 7 to 38).

Prior to his family’s defection in 2014, Lee was a sergeant in the DPRK Army Special Force and was also involved in the North Korean shipping and mining sectors, facilitating trade between North Korea and China.

Growing up in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, the Lee family had certain privileges that other citizens didn’t have. Lee’s father was committed to the regime as a senior economic official, allowing the family to travel to China. 

When the family made the decision to defect from North Korea, Lee’s father was in China on business, and as a representative of the regime, while Lee was there to study abroad, the escapee told CP.

While in China, Lee was exposed to information, including reports that North Korea’s supreme leader and dictator, Kim Jong Un, executed his uncle Jang Song Thaek. One of Lee’s college friends was even sent back to a North Korean prison camp.  

As reports of purges and executions continued to spread, the Lee family realized that it could not continue to serve North Korea and its leader. The escapee told CP that the family came to the conclusion that the regime is “not for people,” and that they needed to defect from North Korea. 

Lee, his parents and his sister first fled to South Korea in 2014, then arrived in the United States in 2016. He now serves as the lead program strategist at the Global Peace Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes a values-based approach to peacebuilding guided by the vision of “One Household beneath God.”

The previous sergeant’s story was not the one testimony that highlighted how data can drive change in North Korea.

Talking with assistance from a translator, Ji-Younger Kim, one other North Korean escapee, recalled listening to an out of doors radio broadcast for the primary time on the age of 13. In North Korea, listening to exterior broadcasts is a “dangerous choice,” the escapee mentioned. 

“If you’re caught, the punishment does not end with one person; it can extend to whole families,” Kim defined. 

Regardless of the chance, Kim stored listening, and she or he discovered about “a world where human beings could live in dignity, a society where people could speak freely, and the possibility that a person could change their future through their own efforts.” 

Kim mentioned that publicity to exterior data modified her life, prompting questions concerning the narratives promoted by the North Korean authorities and ultimately main her to hunt freedom. 

After her escape, she joined Free North Korea Radio in 2016, a gaggle that broadcasts information and data into North Korea, and at the moment serves as its president. 

“One of the most powerful forces for changing North Korea is not military force but information,” the advocate mentioned. “Information changes people, and changed people eventually change society. I am living proof of that.” 

She famous that, for that reason, one in all North Korea’s main fears is exterior data, which it tries to dam from its folks via legal guidelines and extreme punishments. North Korean authorities additionally attempt to block exterior broadcasts via noise interference and repeated propaganda transmissions.

“For that reason, I view the South Korean government’s recent suspension of radio broadcasts into North Korea as a very serious matter,” the Free North Korea Radio president said. “It means closing, by our own decision, one of the few remaining channels through which North Koreans can access the truth.” 

Final yr, South Korea suspended its “Voice of Freedom” radio broadcasts to North Korea as a part of a bid to ease tensions with Pyongyang, in response to Seoul’s protection ministry. 

Kim asserted that the North Korean regime is “not a system that changes easily through dialogue,” and it has solely continued to strengthen management over its folks and block data.

“The idea that peace can be maintained simply by avoiding provocation does not reflect reality,” she argued. “In the end, it is the North Korean people who pay the price for silence and concessions.” 

“North Koreans live their entire lives surrounded by distorted information. They are continually taught that the United States is an aggressor and that the outside world is their enemy,” the advocate continued. “The most powerful tool to break through these lies is outside information. One radio, one small story device, or even one short story about the outside world can change a person’s life.”

Throughout a panel dialogue titled “US-ROK Alliance for a Free & Unified Korea,” Lee criticized worldwide coverage approaches towards North Korea, together with these of the US. 

He argued that a long time of what he described as “management” methods that concentrate on negotiation have didn’t curb the regime’s nuclear ambitions or deal with human rights considerations affecting roughly 26 million folks.

“These policies have operated under the hopeful assumption that negotiating with North Korea will lead to reform or freeze its nuclear program,” Lee mentioned. “But in reality, the threat has continued to grow.”

“We must stop treating the branches and start addressing the source of the problem,” he informed attendees, emphasizing the significance of accelerating data circulation into the nation in order that North Koreans can “realize the truth and become agents of their change.”

Lee additionally advocated for sanctions focusing on the monetary sources of chief Kim Jong Un, not the overall inhabitants. Finally, he argued, a “free and independent Korea” can be the one lasting resolution to each the nuclear risk and human rights situations in North Korea. 

A number of audio system referenced a broader imaginative and prescient usually described because the “Korean Dream,” which envisions the peaceable reunification of North and South Korea right into a single democratic nation. 

The Korean Peninsula has remained divided since 1945, when it was break up alongside the thirty eighth parallel following the top of World Warfare II — a boundary initially meant as a short lived measure. Korea is now separated by the Demilitarized Zone.