North Korea, evil as usual

Movies and television teach us that evil comes draped in drama, set to a sinister sound track, often with lots of visible gore. But all too often, especially in matters of tyranny, evil appears in banal ways that blend into the accepted landscape.

For years I have remembered a scene of this kind. It involves a thin Asian man in a shabby coat, standing by a gate in the snow of eastern Russia, wearing sneakers with no laces or socks.

But I am getting ahead of my tale.

What brought this scene again to mind were news reports this week that in Russia’s eastern port city of Vladivostok, two North Korean defectors climbed over a wall to enter the South Korean consulate, asking for asylum. South Korean authorities have been refusing to comment. But both South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency and China’s People’s Daily describe these defectors as lumberjacks.

I’ve seen those North Korean lumberjacks–or at least their predecessors. In 1994 I was working as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Moscow when a story turned up in the Russian press, saying that North Korea was running lumber camps in remote areas of Russia.

In Moscow, Russian officials confirmed to me that they had two big logging operations manned and policed by North Koreans. Both were in the Russian Far East, in areas once part of Stalin’s old gulag. One was based in a place called Tynda. The other was headquartered in a town called Chegdomyn, straddling a rail spur that ran a few hundred miles north from the major city of Khabarovsk, one of the main stops on the Trans-Siberian railroad.

These camps were the legacy of a 1967 Brezhnev-era deal between the Soviet Union and the North Korean regime of Kim Il Sung. The Soviets supplied the equipment and the forests, in rough terrain where during the long winters the temperature dives far below zero. North Korea supplied–and supervised–the lumberjacks. The two governments sold the lumber abroad and divvied up the profits.

In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. Surrounded by a freer Russia, these logging sites carried on as de facto slave labor camps, totalitarian outposts of North Korea. For the Russian foreign ministry at the time, this was a human-rights embarrassment. One Russian official told me there was "harsh treatment" in the camps, including "torture, beatings" and even "controversial" deaths. But the Russian Ministry of Agriculture, which was raking in money from the lumber sales, saw it as an excellent deal worth continuing. One of their spokesmen explained that Russians would not be willing to log such hostile turf for the pittance the North Koreans were paid.

Having heard this tale, I recruited the help of a young intern and interpreter in our bureau. We flew to Khabarovsk and hopped a plane to Chegdomyn–where the local authorities told us we would not be allowed into the North Korean camps. But Chegdomyn was full of Russian coal miners, their ethnic-German families deported by Stalin from the western front during World War II. They knew plenty about the North Korean loggers. They knew, for instance, that these loggers were hungry–in some cases starving–because they turned up sometimes in town, selling bootleg firewood or begging for food.

One of the Russian locals rented out his services to us as a guide, offering a ride in his old white Zhiguli, right into the camps.

I had expected that the camps would resemble Stalag 17, with guard turrets, klieg lights and huge, fearsome gates. But it turned out that in a place substantially isolated from the nearest transportation hub by more than 300 miles of hills and forest, with Russian and North Korean security keeping an eye on the train stations, it doesn’t take a lot of fencing to keep people in. Later, at the Khabarovsk train station, one Russian security guard said he was under orders to turn over any North Korean runaways to the local North Korean consulate–where they would vanish. Tears came to his eyes as he spoke.

I found and interviewed a number of North Korean lumberjacks who, despite the risk, had run away from the camps and were in hiding in Russia. I had assumed they’d been sent from North Korea to the camps as a form of punishment. They said no. Conditions inside North Korea were so bad that in some cases they had bribed officials there to be given a chance to come work in these logging camps. It brought them a step closer to the free world. But defecting was horribly dangerous. North Korean agents would hunt them. The penalty, if caught, could be death. Church groups were willing to help them. But among all the officialdom of the then-democratizing Russia there was no place systematically willing to offer sanctuary–not the offices of the United Nations nor the International Committee of the Red Cross nor the legations of such free countries as the U.S. or South Korea.

Inside the camps themselves the scene was bleak. Portraits of Kim looked down on barracks with nothing but plastic sheeting over the windows. Loudspeakers broadcast anthems of glory to rail-thin loggers in ragged clothes.

At one of these enclaves a North Korean worker was on duty, opening and closing a very ordinary gate. There was no drama to it. He was just a gaunt man, standing in the snow, wearing sneakers with no socks–peering out from that transplanted bit of North Korea into a world where asking for even a taste of his rightful human portion of liberty could bring him torture and death.

In the 16 years since, stories have surfaced from time to time about these North Korean lumber camps in Russia. Last August the BBC reported that they are operating still. Perhaps these days the loggers have socks? The horror is not these camps per se but the iron grip of the North Korean system behind them, which has destroyed millions of its own and can terrorize them even in other lands. Meanwhile, the world looks on, recording here and there the desperate requests for asylum, all of it blending into yet more business as usual. When does it end? What will it take?

Claudia Rosett, a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes.