LONDON (Thomson
Reuters Foundation) - As a schoolgirl in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee was
forced to watch executions, denounce her friends for fabricated
transgressions and dig tunnels in case of a nuclear attack.
But Lee and her classmates grew up convinced they lived in
the "greatest nation on earth" run by a benevolent god-like leader whom
they loved in the way many children love Santa Claus.
It wasn't until she left North Korea at the age of 17 that
she began to discover the full horror of the government that had fed
her propaganda since birth.
In a memoir published in
London on Thursday, Lee gives a rare insight into the bizarre and
brutal reality of daily life in the world's most secretive state.
"Leaving North Korea is not like leaving any other
country. It is more like leaving another universe," she writes in The
Girl With Seven Names. "Nearly 70 years after its creation it remains as
closed and as cruel as ever."
Lee, now a human rights campaigner living in South Korea,
grew up in Hyesan next to the Chinese border. She had a close family
with an array of colorful relatives including "Uncle Opium" who smuggled
North Korean heroin into China.
All family life
took place beneath the obligatory portraits of North Korea's revered
founder Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il which hung in every home.
Failure to clean and look after them was a punishable offence.
At supper Lee had to thank "Respected Father Leader Kim
Il-sung" for her food before she could pick up her chopsticks.
Her family were well regarded and her father's job in the
military meant they were not short of food. But brutality and fear were
everywhere.
The faintest hint of political
disloyalty was enough to make an entire family - grandparents, parents
and children - disappear. "Their house would be roped off; they'd be
taken away in a truck at night, and not seen again," she says.
As Lee entered her teens her world was turned upside down
when her father was arrested by the secret police. He was later released
into a hospital. He had been badly beaten and died soon afterwards. The
circumstances remain unclear.
Lee says one of the tragedies of North Korea is that everyone wears a mask, which they let slip at their peril.
"Kindness towards strangers is rare in North Korea. There
is a risk to helping others," she writes. "The state made accusers and
informers of us all."
Public executions were used as a way to keep everyone in line.
Lee witnessed her first execution at seven. After Kim
Il-sung's death in 1994 she recalls a spate of executions of people who
had not mourned sufficiently.
FAMINE KILLS ONE MILLION
In the mid-1990s North Korea suffered a famine which killed an estimated one million people.
Lee's first inkling of the crisis came when her mother
showed her a letter from a colleague's sister living in a neighboring
province.
"By the time you read this the five of us
will no longer exist in this world," it read, explaining that the
family were lying on the floor waiting to die after not eating for
weeks.
Lee, who
still believed she lived in the world's most prosperous country, was
stunned. A few days later she came across a skeletal young mother lying
in the street with a baby in her arms. She was close to death, but no
one stopped.
Beggars and vagrant children began to appear in the town and corpses
turned up in the river. "The smell of decomposing bodies was
everywhere," Lee said, speaking at a book launch at Asia House in
London.
In her
book she describes taking a train through a "landscape of hell" to
visit a relative. She saw people roaming the countryside "like living
dead". In the city of Hamhung she recalled people "hallucinating from
hunger" and "falling dead in the street".
The
government blamed the famine on U.S. sanctions, but she later learnt it
had more to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union which had been
subsidizing North Korea with food and fuel.
Power
cuts became increasingly frequent. At night Lee would stare across the
river to the twinkling lights of China and wonder at the contrast with
the darkness that shrouded her own city.
Her fascination was fueled by the Chinese satellite TV she watched illegally after blacking out the windows.
One winter night in 1997 she slipped out of the house and
crossed the narrow stretch of frozen river by her home with the help of a
friendly guard. Lee's defection started off as a prank - she simply
wanted to see what China was like.
When her mother finally tracked down her daughter to a
distant relative's home in China, her first words on the phone were
"Don't come back."
SAFETY IN CHANGE OF NAME
But China was not safe either. Lee lived in fear of being
unmasked and deported back to North Korea, where she would have been
imprisoned or even killed.
To survive she changed her name numerous times - hence the book's title.
She had many close shaves: she narrowly escaped an
arranged marriage, almost became enslaved in a brothel, was kidnapped by
a gang of criminals and caught and interrogated by police.
Lee managed to persuade the officers she was Chinese, thanks to her mastery of the language and her quick wits.
After years on the run she reached South Korea where North
Koreans are given asylum. But she missed her family desperately.
In a daring mission she returned to the North Korean
border to rescue her mother and brother and guide them 2,000 miles
through China into Laos and from there to South Korea – a journey beset
by disaster from start to finish.
Since settling in South Korea, Lee has become an advocate
for North Korean human rights and refugee issues, addressing the United
Nations and the U.S. Committee on Human Rights. Her fans include U.S.
chat show host Oprah Winfrey.
The name Lee uses today is not the one she was given at birth, nor one of those forced on her by circumstance.
"It is the one I gave myself, once I'd reached freedom,"
she writes. "Hyeon means sunshine. Seo means good fortune. I chose it so
that I would live my life in light and warmth, and not return to the
shadow."
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