Shin Dong-hyuk
Shin Dong-hyuk is a North Korean-born human rights activist. He claims to be the only prisoner to have successfully escaped from a "total-control zone" grade internment camp in North Korea. His biography, Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, was written with the assistance of former Washington Post journalist Blaine Harden.
Shin has given talks to audiences around the world about his life in North Korea's Camp 14 to raise awareness of the situation in North Korean internment and concentration camps and North Korea. Shin has been described as the world's "single strongest voice" on the atrocities inside North Korean camps by a member of the United Nations' first commission of inquiry into human rights abuses of North Korea. However, many experts on North Korean politics and fellow defectors, have expressed scepticism for Shin's stories of life in North Korea.
In January 2015, he recanted many aspects of his story of life in North Korea after a video was released showing Shin's father alive, despite Shin having previously claimed he was dead. He also admitted that he lied about being in Camp 14 for his whole life until he escaped in his early 20s, saying that he was actually transferred to a different prison when he was aged 6.
Biography
The following is Shin's biography as told by him prior to 2015 which he later partially recanted.Early life
Shin Dong-hyuk was born Shin In Geun at the Kaechon internment camp, commonly known as Camp 14. He was born to two prisoners who were allowed to marry as a reward for good work, although "neither bride nor groom had much say in deciding whom they would marry." Shin's father, Shin Gyung Sub, told Shin that the guards gave him his mother, Jang Hye-gyung, as payment for his skill in operating a metal lathe in the camp's machine shop. Shin lived with his mother until he was 12. He rarely saw his father who lived elsewhere in the camp and was allowed to visit a few times a year. According to Shin, he saw his mother as a competitor for their insufficient food rations, and consequently had no bonds of affection with his parents or his brother, Shin He Geun. The North Korean government officials and camp guards told him he was imprisoned because his parents had committed crimes against the state, and that he had to work hard and always obey the guards; otherwise he would be punished or executed.Shin went to primary and secondary school while in the camp. The secondary school was "little more than slave quarters from which he was sent out as a rock picker, weed puller and dam laborer." At one point, a young girl was beaten to death by the teacher for hoarding a few kernels of corn. His education did not include propaganda or even basic information about North Korea. The personality cult around Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il was also absent; for example there were no portraits of the Kim leaders on display. The camp was near a hydroelectric dam and mines in which the prisoners were forced to labour. In one of Shin's prison cells, where he was held during an interrogation, he said he had electricity and running water. Shin's mother lived in a house with multiple rooms in a "model village" in the camp, given to women who had children.
Shin experienced considerable violence in the camp, and witnessed dozens of executions every year. Part of Shin's right middle finger was cut off by his supervisor as punishment for accidentally breaking a sewing machine. He witnessed adult prisoners and children beaten every day, and many prisoners dying of starvation, illness, torture and work accidents. He learned to survive by any means, including eating rats, frogs, and insects, and reporting fellow inmates for rewards.
Mother and brother plan to escape
When Shin was 13 years old, he overheard his mother and brother planning an escape attempt. Shin had just finished eating watery corn porridge, and was trying to sleep until he overheard that He Geun, his brother, had run from the cement factory. Shin's mother Jang was preparing rice, a symbol of wealth in North Korea, for the escape from Camp 14. Shin was jealous his brother was getting rice. Shin's teacher was already in the gated Bowiwon village, so Shin told the night guard of his school with another boy, as informing was something he was taught to do from an early age, and he hoped to be rewarded. However, the school night guard took full credit for discovering the plan, and rather than being rewarded, Shin was arrested and guards tortured him for four days to extract more information, believing him to be part of the plan to escape.According to Shin, the guards lit a charcoal fire under his back and forced a hook into his skin so that he could not struggle which caused many large scars still visible on his body. On 29 November 1996, after approximately seven months spent in a tiny concrete prison cell, he was released and joined by his father, who had also been imprisoned. They were driven back to the main camp wearing blindfolds and their hands tied behind their backs. Camp officials then forced Shin and his father to watch the public executions of Shin's mother and brother; he then understood he had been responsible for the executions. Shin’s mother was executed by hanging while Shin’s brother was executed by firing squad.
Shin stated that at the time of the executions of his brother and mother, in his teenaged mind he felt they "deserved" their fates for both breaking prison rules and, conversely, not including him in the escape plan. Shin has since expressed remorse over his actions, saying in an interview with Anderson Cooper for the CBS television show 60 Minutes, "My mother and brother, if I could meet them through a time machine, I would like to go back and apologize".
In interviews to South Korea's National Intelligence Service and others, and in his Korean language memoir, Shin had said that he had no prior knowledge of the escape. It was only when talking to Harden that he revised his story and said that he had informed on his mother and brother.
Escape with Park
While working at a textile factory, Shin became friends with a 40-year-old political prisoner from Pyongyang, who was educated and had traveled outside North Korea. Park had been to East Germany and China. Park said that he shook Kim Jong Il's hand. Park told him about the outside world, such as stories about food that Shin had not experienced before. According to Shin, nearly every meal he had eaten up to that point had been a soupy gruel of cabbage, corn, and salt, with occasional wild-caught rats and insects. He was excited by the idea of being able to eat as much food as he wanted to, which Shin considered to be the essence of freedom. "I still think of freedom as roasted chicken," he later acknowledged.Shin decided to attempt to escape with Park. They formed a plan in which Shin would provide local information about the camp, while Park would use his knowledge once outside the camp to escape the country. On 2 January 2005, the pair was assigned to a work detail near the camp's electric fence on the top of a mountain ridge to collect firewood. Noting the long interval between the guards' patrols, the two waited until the guards were out of sight, then made their attempt to escape. Park attempted to go through first, but was fatally electrocuted climbing the high voltage fence. Shin managed to pass over the wire using Park's body as a shield to ground the current, but still suffered severe burns and permanent scars when his legs slipped onto the lowermost wire as he crawled over Park's body.
After escaping, Shin broke into a nearby farmer's barn and found an old military uniform. Wearing the uniform, he was able to masquerade as a North Korean soldier at times. He survived by scrounging and stealing food. Shin was unfamiliar with money, but within two days of his escape, he had sold a bag of rice stolen from a house and used the money to buy cookies and cigarettes. Eventually, he reached the northern border with China along the Tumen River and bribed destitute North Korean border guards with food and cigarettes.
Revision in 2015
In January 2015, Shin contacted Blaine Harden and recanted parts of his story. Harden outlined the changes to Shin's account in a new foreword to his book, Escape from Camp 14, but did not revise every detail. He said a complete revision of the book would have taken months and he wanted to publish the new version as soon as possible.Shin told Harden that he had changed some dates and locations and incorporated some "fictive elements" into the story. Shin said that he did not spend his entire North Korean life at Camp 14. He said that he was born there, but when he was young, his family was transferred to the less severe Camp 18, and spent several years there. He said that not only did he inform on the escape plan of his mother and brother, but also falsely implicated them in murder. He said that he twice escaped from Camp 18. The first time, in 1999, he was caught within days. The second time, in 2001, he said he crossed into China, but was caught after four months by Chinese police and sent back to North Korea. He said that he was tortured in Camp 14 in 2002, when he was 20 years old, as punishment for his escape. He said he was repeatedly burned and tortured in an underground prison for six months. As a result of education in Camp 18, and his previous escapes, he said he wasn't as naive about the outside world when he made his final escape from Camp 14 as he had previously described.
In Escape from Camp 14 Blaine Harden commented that, "Shin was the only available source of information about his early life." In his new foreword for the book in 2015, he described Shin as an "unreliable narrator" and commented that, "It seems prudent to expect new revisions", but also clarifying "I don’t know if that's true ". Harden theorized that "Shin appears to have been exposed to prolonged and repeated torture. We can expect that this would have a major impact on every aspect of who he is, on his memory, his emotional regulation, his ability to relate to others, his willingness to trust, his sense of place in the world, and the way he gives his testimony."
Korean specialist Andrei Lankov commented that "some suspicions had been confirmed when Shin suddenly admitted what many had hitherto suspected", described Harden's book as unreliable, and noted that defectors faced considerable psychological pressure to embroider their stories. Some defectors said his testimony is "completely lies". Kim Young-soon, another defector incarcerated at another camp, states that many defectors "embellish their stories, making things up and lying to make themselves more valuable." A former member of South Korea's National Intelligence Service said Shin had never lived in a "prison camp". The writer Simon Winchester commented that the "authority" of the UN Commission of Inquiry report was "somewhat challenged" by this revelation.
Shin explained he did not tell the full story because he wished to hide "that my mother and brother were executed because of my report," saying "the most important reason why I could not reveal all of the truth was because of my family." He went on to say "All I did until last September was discuss the camps as they were, but once the video was released , the nastiness of North Korea infuriated me. Then I realized I should not hold anything back."