A Voice From North Korea Echoes in the White House
By JAMES BROOKE
Tokyo
AFTER years of lonely street demonstrations and little-noticed newspaper columns, Kang Chol Hwan, a North Korean defector, learned recently that his life had irrevocably changed.
"I was introduced as someone who wrote a book that was read by George Bush," he said in a recent interview at a museum cafe in Seoul, South Korea, only 150 miles south of the North Korean slave labor camp where he was imprisoned with his family in 1977. He was 9 years old.
Burning with memories of his family's 10-year imprisonment in the camp, which still functions hidden from outside eyes but not from satellite cameras, Mr. Kang teamed up with Pierre Rigoulot, a French journalist, to write a memoir, "The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag." Printed in five languages since 2000, including English, the book was well received just about everywhere but in South Korea, where it languished in obscurity, its harsh critique of the North out of step with South Korea's official policy of engagement.
Despite its considerable merits, the book seemed destined to fade from view, and Mr. Kang with it, until this spring when, at the urging of former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, President Bush picked it up. Pretty soon, with the president commending it to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other top aides, the book jumped to the top of the Bush administration's summer reading list.
On Monday, Mr. Kang, 37, received the ultimate book endorsement when he was ushered into the Oval Office for a 40-minute meeting with Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley. On June 10, Mr. Bush had allotted only a few more minutes for a meeting with South Korea's president, Roh Moo Hyun.
"He was more interested in the pains North Koreans are going through, more so than I had previously thought," Mr. Kang said in a telephone interview on Thursday, after returning to Seoul from Washington. "He kept on repeating how deeply sorry he was about the situation. To hear a president say these deep things made me feel that he cared."
THE White House stamp of approval has conferred on Mr. Kang a measure of celebrity that had eluded him when the book was published. Mr. Kang, who is taking a crash course in English, now travels monthly to Washington, where he will address a Freedom House conference on human rights in July. After that, he will give lectures at American churches and campuses, talking about North Korea's human rights abuses.
In August, he will visit Midland, Tex., President Bush's hometown, to speak at Rock the Desert, an evangelical concert devoted this year to North Korea. With orders spiking on Amazon.com, he has hopes for a new edition.
Mr. Bush has displayed similar enthusiasm for other books, notably "The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror," by Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident who is now an Israeli politician. Subsequently, it was widely noted, the theme of promoting democracy, especially in the Middle East, ran through the Inaugural and State of the Union addresses.
"I felt like his book just confirmed what I believe," Mr. Bush said of Mr. Sharansky's work in late January. "He writes it a heck of a lot better than I could write it, and he's certainly got more credibility than I have. After all, he spent time in a Soviet prison and he has a much better perspective than I've got."
In late April, the president's reading of "The Aquariums of Pyongyang" seemed to bolster his longstanding hostility toward North Korea. As American diplomats tried to revive stalled talks on North Korea's nuclear weapons program, Mr. Bush told reporters in Washington that Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, was a "dangerous person" who ran "huge concentration camps."
Since then, Bush administration officials have said that any package solution for North Korea's nuclear weapons program will have to include progress on human rights.
"I felt that he agreed with me in that the human rights issue was more important than the nuclear issue," said Mr. Kang, who directs a rights group in Seoul called the Democracy Network Against North Korean Gulag.
OVER tea at the fashionable museum cafe on a recent Sunday afternoon, Mr. Kang, with his new wife, Yoon Hae Ryon, and a finely tailored suit, seemed to be on the far side of the planet from Yodok, the labor camp in which he survived for a decade on a starvation diet fortified with salamanders, cockroaches and rats.
His book opens with his comfortable childhood in Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, where he raised tropical fish in an aquarium. But in 1977, he and his father, uncle, grandmother and 7-year-old sister were arrested and sent to Yodok. His grandfather, who had been a successful businessman in Japan, and who had his choice of moving to the South or the North, had been jailed for an unspecified offense.
Opened in 1959, the Yodok camp Mr. Kang describes was run as a business enterprise, with gold mines, cornfields and logging operations operating entirely on unpaid prison labor. Following the beliefs of the North Korean authorities that political deviance is hereditary, entire families were routinely incarcerated, and still are, recent defectors say.
Children studied in the mornings and worked in the afternoons, cultivating cornfields, excavating clay or carrying freshly cut timber. Mr. Kang wrote of walking 12 miles with a log on his shoulder. He described attending public executions where prisoners were forced to hurl rocks at corpses, yelling, "Down with the traitors of the people!"
To ward off protein deficiencies, inmates ate whatever meat they could find.
"The way to eat a salamander is to grab it by the tail and swallow it in one quick gulp before it can discharge a foul tasting liquid," he wrote. Stocks of salt-cured rat meat helped prison families get through the winter. Rat skins were used to patch the lone set of shoddy prison clothing issued each year.
In February 1987, Mr. Kang's family was unexpectedly released from the camp, part of a small release tied to Kim Jong Il's birthday.
NORTH KOREA has yet to react publicly to the literary and public relations success of its former prisoner. But in 1999, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reacted harshly to Mr. Kang's testimony in Washington before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, calling him "riffraff devoid of human dignity and values" who was engaging in a "smear campaign."
Now a celebrity in the defector community, Mr. Kang said he hoped he could get the United States to put more pressure on North Korea over the human rights issue.
Mr. Kang wrote of the power of listening to foreign radio programs in a country where state-supplied radios received only the official station. "If the U.S. can persuade people that concentration camps are destroying families," he said, "it could work against Kim Jong Il much more quickly than the nuclear issue."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Compan |
