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Kim Sang Hun
One man against Kim Jong Il
The 25 North Korean refugees had been on the run in China for months. Now, in the middle of Beijing's heavily policed diplomatic enclave, they were about to attempt a desperate gamble for freedom. They walked toward the gate of the Spanish embassy, watching for a sign from a gray-haired man accompanying the group. Finally, the man gave them his signal: he fiddled with his shoelaces and the refugees dashed for the embassy gate. A Chinese guard grabbed one man and his son, but two of the other North Koreans helped them break loose. All 25 refugees made it into the neutral ground of the embassy. A day later they were flown by South Korean authorities to Manila, then to Seoul—and a free life.
That daring scramble 13 months ago was the first time North Koreans had attempted to flee China by seeking sanctuary in a foreign embassy. (Since then, more than 160 have done the same.) The mastermind of the plan—and the man who gave the signal from that Beijing sidewalk—was Kim Sang Hun, a courageous, devoutly Christian South Korean who has dedicated his retirement to helping North Koreans escape what he sees as a godforsaken land. In the past three years Kim has helped 100 such refugees reach Seoul through embassies in Beijing and over land via Southeast Asian countries and Mongolia. He has risked arrest by Beijing—and a worse fate if North Korean agents catch up with him. "He is a very rare person," says Lee Bong Chul, one of the North Koreans who made it into the Spanish embassy. "He risks his life to help us."
Born in North Korea, Kim, 70, moved to Seoul in 1946. His father, a Protestant minister, had been tortured for opposing Japanese colonial rule—a family ordeal that gave Kim strong sympathy for the abused and respect for defiance. He studied history at Seoul's Yonsei University, worked at the British embassy in Seoul, then joined the U.S. relief organization care in the 1960s. In 1975 he became a staff member at the United Nation's World Food Programme, which sent him to help refugees in Sudan and on the Thailand-Cambodia border, and a year later he became a volunteer for Amnesty International. When he retired in 1994, Kim turned his attention to North Korea. Dipping into his savings to finance trips to the border area of northeast China, he conducted lengthy interviews with defectors there, compiling detailed and chilling accounts of the horrors of North Korea's prison camps. He decided he had to get directly involved in helping these witnesses to the North Korean gulag reach safety in South Korea. The drain on his savings prompted complaints from his wife. But his eldest son, Kim Hyun Su, says the family can do little to stop him: "When it comes to principle, he is very stubborn."
The heart of the North Korean crisis, Kim insists, is Beijing's refusal to give refugee status to the tens of thousands of North Koreans living in northeastern China. Defying international conventions, Beijing has sent thousands back across the border in recent months, according to aid groups. That, Kim charges, only serves to prop up the rotting regime of Kim Jong Il. If China would grant refugee status to North Koreans, he argues, so many would immediately flee that the regime would disintegrate. "You don't need to bring an expensive aircraft carrier to solve the North Korea problem," Kim insists.
The idea of rushing embassies in Beijing was born in a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in downtown Seoul during a brainstorming session with Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor and aid worker. Vollertsen came to South Korea in 2001 after spending a year-and-a-half in the North and now dedicates his life to exposing the horrors of the regime. Kim interviewed refugees in China while Vollertsen scoped out embassies in the capital. Twenty-five defectors assembled in Beijing on the night of March 13 at a lamb-barbecue restaurant, where Kim disclosed the plan to storm the Spanish embassy the following day. He estimated there was only a 10% chance of success. One desperate North Korean told him that a 1% chance was good enough for him.
Kim is now barred from China, but from Seoul he continues planning more escapes. These days, his biggest concern is the fate of his 31-year-old South Korean assistant Kim Hee Tae, who was arrested last August while trying to bring a group of refugees from northeastern China to Beijing. He is in a Chinese jail, and is due to stand trial in May on charges of smuggling people across an international border. Kim has run out of money, but he's not giving up his lonely fight: "While my brothers and sisters remain in distress," he vows, "I will not commit the crime of silence."
—With reporting by Kim Yooseung/Seoul
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