‘People Don’t Know What’s Happening’

A chronic food crisis has descended upon North Korea again, but those living a privileged life in the capital city of Pyongyang are ignorant to the situation in the rest of the country, said defector Hyun-Seung “Arthur” Lee.

According to the recent report by the BBC, based on testimonies of three North Korean residents, the totalitarian state is experiencing what could be an even more severe famine than the one in the 1990s, which is believed to have wiped out about a million people, or five percent of the pre-famine population.

This new round of starvation follows the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted the communist regime to seal off its northern borders with China and Russia, shutting down the flow of goods vital to feeding the country’s 26 million citizens, including grain, fertilizer, and agricultural machinery, from China.

“I think the BBC documentary uses very reliable sources,” Mr. Lee said in an interview with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program. “Most people in Pyongyang don’t realize what happened in rural areas. But the general public are suffering from starvation.”

“Many people, especially the top people in Pyongyang, don’t know what’s happening outside of the city because of the isolation of the information,” he told host Jan Jekielek. “The regime strictly controls the information distribution, even from people to people, especially if it says something bad about the society. If the regime thinks it should be destroyed, those who want to share or distribute it will be punished very severely.”

Raised in an elite family in Pyongyang and educated in China, Mr. Lee escaped North Korea alongside his family in 2014, a year after the downfall of Jang Song Thaek, the second most powerful man in the country.

Mr. Jang, the uncle of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, was said to be the only leadership figure in favor of an economic reform that would eventually open up North Korea to the world. “His execution turned down everything the North Korean elite group were envisioning for the society,” Mr. Lee said.

Jang’s execution was followed by a mass killing and imprisonment of his associates and aides. Mr. Lee and his sister Seohyun, both attending university in China at that time, witnessed in horror as the brutal purge unfolded.

“My close friend at the Chinese university and his entire family were sent to the political prisoner camp. [My sister’s] roommate was arrested in front of her and then sent the political prisoner camp from China to North Korea,” he recalled.

“The instance gave us an unbelievable impression about the regime,” he continued. “Before that, we were thinking that we can still change the society, that we can make the society better. But this whole belief collapsed. Then my family decided to defect.”

A decade after the purge of the pro-reform faction, North Korea is more isolated than ever. Citing COVID-19, the regime even refused to allow North Koreans working in China to return home.

In December 2019, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution that included economic sanctions demanding that North Korean workers abroad be sent home. This was meant to cut off funds used by North Korea to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. But Pyongyang’s decision to close the Chinese border effectively trapped those workers in China.

“The workers are all officially dispatched from the North Korean regime,” Mr. Lee explained. “Kim Jong-Un only gets [foreign] money from those people, whom we call slave workers. Because of the visa status, they are all illegally working in in China.”

The workers are promised that they will receive all the money earned in China when they return to North Korea, but in the end they may only keep a very small portion of it. They have been stuck in China for the past three years, during which they’ve had no choice but to work, usually in horrible conditions, to secure a stream of foreign cash for the North Korean regime.

“Many workers inside of China now are very frustrated and they want to defect,” Mr. Lee told Mr. Jekielek. But the price of defection is very high, even for high-ranking officials.

“The most notorious system in North Korea is the guilty-by-association system, which means that three generations of your family have to be punished; if your grandfather becomes a traitor of the nation, your son and your grandson must live in the political prisoner camp,” he said. “Even babies born in the political prisoner camp have to spend their whole life there.”

According to Mr. Lee, the family of his neighbor, a diplomat to Beijing, was sent to political prisoner camp in 2010, because he met with Kim Jong Nam, Kim Jong Un’s estranged half brother who was eventually assassinated. “Later we found out that entire family vanished, even their third son, a three-year-old child,” Mr. Lee said.

When asked about the overall state of North Korea’s economy, Mr. Lee said it could hardly be called an economy anymore.

“Its economy is already broken,” he said. “The people made their own life through [illegal] market activities at the local level. But when it comes to top level, the regime keeps all the money made from resources like labor workers, IT workers, and, nowadays, gold-smuggling.”

“So we couldn’t even call it an economy. It’s more like one gang leader making his money and sharing some money with his own clan.”

Interview by Jan Jekielek