Hunger, Fear, and Firing Squads: North Korean Defectors Expose the Brutal Reality of Life Under Kim Jong-un

On a frozen February morning in 2019, a 34-year-old woman named Jang Hye-jin crawled through a gap in the chain-link fence separating North Korea from China near the town of Hoeryong, North Hamgyong Province. She had bribed a border guard with the equivalent of $200 — money she had saved for three years by secretly selling homemade tofu in an illegal street market. Behind her, she left two children, a husband she feared would inform on her, and a country she describes as 'a prison without walls.' Today, speaking from a modest apartment in Seoul's Nowon district, Jang is one of roughly 33,000 North Korean defectors living in South Korea — and her testimony, along with dozens of others gathered by North Korea Untold, paints a picture of life under Kim Jong-un that is as horrifying as it is meticulously documented.

North Korea
North Korea Untold

The Surveillance State: Neighbors Watching Neighbors

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of daily life described by defectors is not the poverty or the hunger — it is the omnipresent culture of surveillance that turns every neighbor, colleague, and family member into a potential informant. 'You cannot say anything negative about the Marshal, not even inside your own home,' says Park Chul-min, 41, who fled North Korea via the Tumen River crossing in October 2021 from the border town of Musan. 'The walls have ears. Children are taught in school to report what their parents say at the dinner table.' Park describes the inminban system — neighborhood watch units of approximately 20 to 25 households, each led by a designated informant who reports directly to the local People's Safety Ministry. 'Our inminban leader, a woman named Mrs. Kim, came to our apartment unannounced at least twice a week,' he recalls. 'She would check if we had unauthorized goods, foreign currency, or South Korean DVDs.' According to the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights in Seoul, over 70 percent of defectors surveyed between 2020 and 2023 reported personally witnessing someone being arrested for political reasons, with most cases originating from neighbor denunciations.

Starvation as Policy: The Markets That Kept People Alive

Kim Jong-un inherited a famine-scarred nation from his father Kim Jong-il, but defectors reveal that hunger has remained a defining feature of civilian life throughout his rule, particularly outside Pyongyang. Lee Sung-hee, 29, who escaped through a broker network via China and Laos, arriving in Bangkok in March 2022 before being processed at the South Korean embassy, grew up in Chongjin, North Korea's third-largest city. 'There were months when we had nothing but corn porridge once a day,' she says, her voice barely above a whisper. 'My younger brother had a swollen belly from malnutrition when he was seven. We were told on state television that the Dear Respected Leader was ensuring our prosperity.' The government's Public Distribution System, which theoretically provides food rations to citizens, has been described by virtually every defector interviewed as either non-functional or hopelessly inadequate for those outside the capital. What kept millions alive, according to Lee and others, were the jangmadang — informal markets that Kim Jong-un initially cracked down on before pragmatically tolerating their existence. 'The market was illegal, then tolerated, then taxed, then raided, then tolerated again,' explains Kwon Young-tae, a former market trader from Sinuiju who defected in 2020. 'The government could not feed us, but they also did not want us to find another way to survive. It was control through confusion.'

Public Executions and the Theater of Terror

Multiple defectors independently corroborate accounts of public executions used as tools of social control — a practice that human rights organizations say has intensified rather than diminished under Kim Jong-un. 'I was made to watch an execution when I was fifteen years old,' says Oh Hye-won, now 26, who defected through China in 2018 and underwent resettlement processing at the Hanawon facility in Anseong, South Korea. 'A man from our neighborhood was executed in the sports field of our school in Hoeryong. They said he had watched South Korean dramas and distributed them. There were maybe 400 people there — students, teachers, workers. We were told we had to watch. Soldiers with rifles. It was very fast.' Oh's account is consistent with testimony compiled by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea, whose landmark 2014 report documented systematic, widespread, and gross human rights violations amounting to crimes against humanity — conclusions that remain equally relevant a decade later. Former North Korean official-turned-defector Thae Yong-ho, who served as Deputy Ambassador at the North Korean embassy in London before dramatically defecting in August 2016, has publicly stated that executions are used strategically by Kim Jong-un to eliminate perceived threats and instill fear throughout the administrative class. 'Kim Jong-un executed his own uncle, Jang Song-thaek, in December 2013,' Thae told a parliamentary hearing in Seoul in 2017. 'When the leadership does that publicly, it sends a message to every single official in the country: no one is safe.'

The Elite Bubble: Pyongyang's Carefully Constructed Illusion

Not all defectors emerged from rural poverty. A small number offer a window into the carefully constructed illusion of prosperity that defines life for the privileged class in Pyongyang — and how even that privilege is conditional and fragile. Kim Ryu-jin, 38, a former mid-level official in the Korean Workers' Party who defected via a diplomatic contact in Beijing in 2017, describes a Pyongyang of new apartment towers, coffee shops, and water parks — all built by Kim Jong-un to project an image of a modernizing nation. 'The Ryomyong Street development, the Masikryong ski resort — these were not for the people,' he says. 'They were propaganda installations. The apartments on Ryomyong Street were given to scientists who worked on the nuclear and missile programs. It was payment for weapons.' Kim describes a social system in which loyalty is constantly tested through ideological study sessions, party meetings, and the ever-present threat of songbun — the hereditary loyalty classification system that determines every North Korean's access to education, employment, food, and housing based on the perceived political reliability of their family going back three generations. 'My own grandfather had a cousin who collaborated with Americans during the Korean War,' he says. 'I spent my entire career trying to erase that stain. One denunciation, one wrong word, and everything would have been gone.'

Kim Jong-un's New Laws: Cutting Off the Outside World

Defectors who left after 2020 describe a North Korea dramatically more sealed and paranoid than the one that existed even five years earlier. Kim Jong-un's government enacted the Reactionary Thought and Culture Rejection Act in December 2020, imposing the death penalty for distributing South Korean films, music, or media — a law defectors say is being enforced with terrifying consistency. 'Before 2020, you could get a USB stick with South Korean dramas for a few hundred won in any market,' says Choi Min-seok, 31, who crossed the Tumen River in January 2023 in what he describes as a 'near-suicidal' winter crossing. 'After the law, people were genuinely afraid. I knew two young men in their twenties who were arrested for watching BTS videos. I do not know what happened to them.' Choi also describes the dramatic militarization of the border under Kim Jong-un's COVID-19 lockdown orders beginning in early 2020, which effectively sealed North Korea more tightly than at any point in its history. Shoot-to-kill orders at the border were reportedly issued, with soldiers given permission to fire on anyone approaching the boundary without authorization. The number of defectors reaching South Korea collapsed from over 1,000 per year pre-pandemic to fewer than 70 in 2021, according to South Korean government statistics.

A People Longing for Something They Cannot Name

Despite everything — the surveillance, the hunger, the executions, the suffocating isolation — what strikes a listener most in conversations with defectors is not rage, but grief. A grief for ordinary life. 'I miss my mother every day,' says Jang Hye-jin, the woman who crawled through the fence in Hoeryong on that February morning. 'I miss the smell of the market in the morning. I miss things that were terrible even while I was living them, because they were mine.' She pauses, looking out the window of her Seoul apartment at the glittering, chaotic, overwhelming city below. 'People in the outside world think North Korea is just Kim Jong-un and missiles. But there are 25 million people there who get up every morning and try to survive and love their families and hope for something better, even if they don't have a word for what that something is.' Their stories, smuggled out at enormous personal risk, are not merely testimony. They are an indictment — specific, human, and impossible to ignore.

댓글

댓글 쓰기

이 블로그의 인기 게시물

North Korea's Secret Rich Class: How the Donju Merchants Are Reshaping the Hermit Kingdom From Within

The Man With the Mercedes In the spring of 2016, a black Mercedes-Benz S-Class edged through the potholed streets of Pyongyang's Moranbong district, past the grey concrete apartment blocks and the billboards praising the Supreme Leader. Behind the wheel sat a man in his fifties wearing a tailored suit — not a party uniform, not a military jacket, but the kind of Italian cut that would not look out of place in Seoul or Shanghai. His name, according to two defectors who separately described the same figure to this reporter, was Choe Yong-nam. He was not a general. He was not a senior party official. He was a coal trader. And he was, by any measure, extraordinarily wealthy. Choe Yong-nam represents a phenomenon that has quietly redefined the social and economic fabric of North Korea over the past two decades: the donju . The word translates roughly as "masters of money," and it refers to a class of private merchants and entrepreneurs who have accumulated significant capital...
자세한 내용 보기

Signal in the Dark: How North Koreans Risk Everything to Hold a Smuggled Phone

이미지
{"title": "Signal in the Dark: How North Koreans Risk Everything to Hold a Smuggled Phone", "content": " On a freezing night in January 2019, a 24-year-old factory worker in Hyesan — a border city hugging the Yalu River that separates North Korea from China — pressed a smuggled Chinese smartphone against her chest and held her breath. She had climbed to the rooftop of her dormitory building, wrapped in a military-surplus coat, waiting for a single bar of Chinese mobile signal to bleed across the frozen river. Her name was Park Soonja. She was not calling a lover. She was not ordering food. She was, in the eyes of the North Korean state, committing an act of treason. She was trying to call her mother, who had escaped to Seoul three years earlier and whom she had not heard from since. What happened next — and what is happening across the northern border regions of the most hermetically sealed nation on earth — constitutes one of the most remarkable and ...
자세한 내용 보기

Jangmadang Nation: How North Korea's Black Market Became the Only Thing Keeping People Alive

이미지
The Market That Wasn't Supposed to Exist The first time I spoke to someone who'd actually run a stall in a North Korean jangmadang — that's the informal market, the black market, depending on who you ask and how afraid they are — I was sitting in a cramped apartment in Shenyang, China, in February 2019. The woman across from me, I'll call her Minju, was 41 years old, originally from Chongjin, and she kept glancing at the door even though we were four floors up and nobody knew we were there. Old habits. She'd been selling salt, then dried fish, then eventually Chinese-made electronics for nearly a decade before she got out. She told me the market wasn't just her income. It was her entire life. Her identity. Her survival mechanism. And the state, officially, pretended it barely existed — even as state officials took their cut of every single transaction. North Korea Untold That's the paradox at the heart of this story. North Korea's leadership has spent de...
자세한 내용 보기