Home the Hard Way

Saturday, June 7, 2003
With hands scarred by hard labor and a face darkened by the sun, Kim Byong Do stands before the elderly woman and asks awkwardly: "Are you my mother Lee Ju Soon?"

"Yes," she answers. "Are you my Byong Do?" The man before her doesn't resemble the handsome 22-year-old Lee last saw 30 years ago, when he set out on a fishing boat and never returned. And Kim doesn't recognize the gray-haired 77-year-old in front of him. Only when Kim tells her the date of his father's death does the flood of emotion come and they embrace, bursting into tears. "I will tell you everything that has happened for the past 30 years," he sobs. "Yes, yes. Now we're okay," says his mother, holding him tight and crying. "Let's go back home." She hands him a photo of his daughter's wedding. Says Kim, gazing wide-eyed at the image of a woman he last saw when she was two months old: "My daughter has grown up so lonely."

The world may fear North Korea's outlaw nuclear weapons program, but it is the regime's predilection for cross-border crimes like drug trafficking and abduction that have cemented its sinister reputation closer to home. While his family for decades believed their son was lost at sea, Kim in fact had become one of at least 486 South Koreans kidnapped by the North since the end of the Korean War. In April, he became only the fourth abductee to escape, fleeing overland from his home in the northeastern mountains to cross the Chinese border. But instead of a hero's welcome, Kim has so far faced a chilly reception from a home country ambivalent about its lost citizens and unwilling to upset a delicate relationship with its dangerous neighbor.

While Pyongyang made the stunning admission last September that it had kidnapped 13 Japanese citizens over the years, the regime insists the South Koreans came voluntarily. The list of "volunteers" includes flight attendants snatched during a hijacking, high school students grabbed off a South Korean beach and a taxi driver who vanished near the demilitarized zone. Most were taken in the late 1960s and 70s, often to be trained as spies. The regime still hasn't kicked its kidnap habit: a minister who vanished in 2000 is believed to be the latest victim.

But when Kim showed up at the South Korean consulate in Shenyang, China on April 30, consular officials wanted nothing to do with him—try the embassy in Beijing, they said, even though traveling undocumented and unprotected meant risking arrest and deportation back to the north. even then, Kim waited another 9 hours in Beijing before the embassy agreed to let him in. The cold reception was emblematic of the South Korean government's indifference to the human rights catastrophe unfolding just north of the comforts and bright lights of Seoul. Fearful of undermining detente with Pyongyang and upsetting North Korean ally Beijing, Seoul has been reluctant to help North Korean refugees or even its own citizens fleeing the Dear Leader's oppressive regime. In April, South Korea declined to vote for a landmark United Nations resolution censuring North Korea for massive human rights violations, including torture and public executions. South Koreans are too self-absorbed, says Handong University human rights law professor Won Jae Chun: "It is time for South Korea to openly question North Korea on human rights."

Kim motored out of the southwestern port city of Tongyong on Nov. 24, 1973, headed towards the choice clamming grounds near North Korea. But the ship's engine broke down and the vessel drifted into the North's territorial waters. North Korean patrol boats forced Kim and five crewmen to land in hostile territory, where the six were imprisoned. After a year and a half of indoctrination, Kim's captors separated him from the other crew members and put him to work at an electric equipment factory in the northeastern city of Hamhung. They told him he could never go home again.

Thirty years ago, North Korea was still economically on par with the South, and the fisherman admits that the regime's vision of a workers' paradise on earth was seductive. He bought into it. Knowing he had to adapt to survive, Kim worked hard, winning praise for his industriousness and even becoming a party official in 1980. but by 1997, with the hermit state ravaged by famine, that vision was badly frayed. Kim ended up on a goat farm up in the mountains, where he survived by clearing a plot to farm and stealing bowls of goat's milk for his family. The milk was supposed to go to the residents of Hamhung, his adopted city—but Kim figures it all went to party officials. He also saw firsthand the arbitrary way Kim Jong Il ran his impoverished country. After the dear leader made a secret visit to the goat farm two years ago—during which everybody was shut indoors—the farm suddenly got new equipment, trucks and electricity. Some residents, including Kim, even got color TVs, while countless other farms untouched by Kim Jong Il's largesse remained mired in poverty.

Even after his escape, Kim betrays no bitterness. Beaming stiffly at the memory of the color TV, he says he still thinks highly of Kim Jong Il, and refers to him with the honorific title "general." The North Korean people are suffering because they are unlucky, he says: "It is not the General's fault." But you sense something behind the mask, the growing disillusionment of a former believer or the fear of a man not sure if he is really beyond the reach of the Dear Leader's minions. Sitting in a safe house in China, it is clear Kim doesn't quite grasp the enormity of his fate, the tragedy of a youth wasted fulfilling Kim Jong Il's mad will. The worst thing was the loneliness, Kim says. While he started a new family in the North, he always missed the one he left behind. Holidays were the hardest. On those days, he would drink to forget and fall asleep: "It was the only way to relieve the hard thing that was choking me inside."

Kim owes his escape to Choi Sung Young, a gruff fisheries co-op official with a salt-and-pepper crew cut and beefy hands whose father was kidnapped in the 1960s. Choi got the other three rescued South Koreans out after tracing them through contacts in China. On April 17, a messenger sent into North Korea by Choi found Kim deep in the mountains, gave him a letter from his family and a picture of his mother and guided him to the border with China. Choi had alerted the South Korean authorities in advance, but he says attitudes haven't changed much since he got Lee Jae Gun out of North Korea in 1998. The first South Korean abductee to escape, Lee had to spend two years in China because South Korean consular officials refused to help—one even asked if he been paying taxes during his 28 years in captivity. Choi and Lee are both suing the South Korean government.

Choi says South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun told him in 2000 that the abduction issue had to be raised "gradually" with the North. (Roh was fisheries minister at the time.) But Choi remains disgusted with Seoul's response so far, and traveled to Washington last week to publicize the cause of the remaining abductees. In Seoul, the message clearly has not filtered down yet. A South Korean foreign ministry official maintains that some of the "abductees" went to the North voluntarily. Seoul doesn't distinguish between South Korean citizens and North Korean refugees anyway, because under the constitution, North Koreans are considered to be South Korean nationals who just happen to be on the wrong side of the border. But the foreign ministry has come under criticism for turning away North Korean refugees for fear of upsetting China, which doesn't want to encourage an exodus of refugees from the North. It seems abductee Kim got the same short shrift. Concedes the foreign ministry official: "Sometimes the assistance given them is not so satisfactory because of the situation on the ground."

Today, waiting in the South Korean embassy in Beijing to return to Seoul, Kim is a modern-day Rip Van Winkle, awaking from a long sojourn in a place out of time. He is amazed by China's affluence and orders seafood at every meal—he hadn't eaten fish since the 1980s. Rubbing his belly after one meal, he laughs: "I feel like I'll be full for three days." He is surprised to learn about a relative who married on the other side of the Korean peninsula, a journey that took days 30 years ago, when there were few private cars, and now only takes a few hours if traffic is good. But like the hundreds of other South Koreans still lost in the hardscrabble villages of the North, most of all Kim just wants to get home. He has called the daughter he hasn't seen in 30 years and heard the good news—she is pregnant and she will soon give birth to a son.