The Aquariums of Pyongyang_ Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag - Chol-hwan Kang [1]
The simple truth about Kim Jong Il and his astounding brutality is constantly distorted. In South Korea today, if you are opposed to Kim Jong Il, you are automatically branded a “reactionary”; if you support this despot you are thought to be a “progressive intellectual.” Witnessing this bizarre inversion of reality, those who have struggled to escape Kim Jong Il’s iron grip quickly begin to lose their optimism.
But at the end of the 1990s, the ember of hope was suddenly rekindled as huge numbers of North Koreans streamed across the borders into neighboring countries. Almost overnight, the international community came around to give its ear to the testimonies of freed North Koreans. Foreign media outlets competed with each other to interview North Korean refugees in China and hear their stories of the human rights atrocities inside North Korea. The United Nations Human Rights Commission has issued resolutions three years in a row since 2003, each time with increased conviction, condemning Pyongyang for its violations of international human rights. And yet amazingly, despite the international outrage, multitudes of Koreans in the South have never awakened from their moral slumber.
The South Korean government chose either not to show up for the UN vote (in 2003) or to abstain (in 2004 and 2005) from its resolution on North Korea’s human rights situation. In order to rationalize this disregard for its own citizens, the South Korean government claimed that doing otherwise could disturb the peaceful coexistence achieved through dialogue with Pyongyang. Such reasoning makes a mockery of an irrefutable fact: according to the constitution of the Republic of Korea, Koreans on both sides of the DMZ fall under the sovereignty of its government.
In neighboring Japan, North Korea-related news items in general are being rated higher than any other news on TV and memoirs by various North Korean defectors are hitting the bestseller lists at bookstores across the nation. In contrast, such books continue to collect dust on bookshelves here in Korea, and it no longer comes as a surprise that South Korean publishers shun manuscripts by North Koreans.
I have often wondered if our dream of delivering our kinsmen in the North from bondage was destined to sink into oblivion.
I found God in South Korea, but He seemed determined to not respond to my prayers. I asked the Lord: “Why do they have to go through all the pain they suffer? What are the sins they’ve committed to deserve such enormous suffering?” My heart broke anew each night as I contemplated their misery. “If you are a living God, why are you allowing all those precious souls to perish under an evil power? How much longer do my people have to endure this agony?”
And then one day out of a clear blue sky, the seemingly impossible happened. I call it a miracle for a nine-year-old boy-slave in a North Korean gulag to end up defecting to South Korea. But I did not know what to call it when I heard that the president of the world’s most powerful nation wanted to meet the author of a gulag memoir he had just finished reading. That was me!
On June 13, 2005, I met with President George W. Bush in the Oval Office for forty long minutes. I told the president about the plight of North Korean people, and we shared sincere opinions on how to save them.
Throughout the meeting with President Bush, it dawned on me that my God was, after all, a living God. I now realize that the Lord wanted to use President Bush to let the blind world see what is happening to His people in North Korea. With one simple stroke of God’s finger, the bleak reality, in which nearly no one cared about the ghosts of three million famished souls and hundreds of thousands more in the concentration camps in my home country, was instantly changed.
Since that meeting at the White House, I have received many emails from North Koreans hiding in China, all encouraging me and