Forced repatriation: Sent back to hell
A policeman with white gloves sitting in a police car while patrolling in Beijing, China on Nov 4, 2017. (Photo by Bartosz Luczak, Courtesy of Shutterstock, Inc.)
Part three of a four-part series based on the writer’s personal experience. For parts one and two, see here and here.
“If the Chinese police get you, they’ll wrap wire around your wrists or run it through your nose and you’ll be dragged back across the border.”
The rumor went around the North Koreans hiding underground in China. Although nobody could confirm if such brutality was really true, the thought was enough to make everyone terrified of being caught.
Our turn came one night in 2002, not long after my brother’s first birthday, when my mother, my sister and I were caught unexpectedly by police. They took us to a detention center where the Tumen River forms the border with North Korea.
There, we shared a cell with other women, who had been caught like us. It had a black plastic bucket in the corner for detainees who were menstruating. With a surveillance camera high up in another corner and under the gaze of other inmates, we had no privacy when we used it. We had to try and act as if we were oblivious. This was how the dehumanizing process began.
Five days later, on April 5, a bus took us across the river. We were handed over to North Korean authorities. They removed the Chinese handcuffs and bound our wrists with our own shoelaces.
We were crammed onto trucks with dozens of others and taken to the local office of the Ministry of State Security (MSS), the secret police, for interrogation. We were immediately intimidated into compliance by the disdainful glares and harsh tone of the guards. We stood in line and obediently waited our turn.
We were ushered into rooms in groups of five or six for a body search.
“Undress,” a guard barked. We undressed. They ripped open our sanitary pads and squeezed out toothpaste. They were looking for money.
“Lie down.” We lay down.
“Open your mouth.” We opened our mouths.
“Sit. Stand up.” We sat and stood up.
Some detainees expressed embarrassment. Guards hit them and swore in the most vulgar manner. Shame was a luxury we subhumans were not allowed to feel.
After the body search, we were put into a cramped cell with 40 other women. We hardly had space to sit. At night, we lay down, our bodies intertwined. The cell had a toilet with a basin. The toilet had no door. Soon, the cell was filled with a foul smell. The toilet became a source of contention at night. Some people wanted it exclusively for themselves, choosing to sit alone there rather than be squeezed in between others.
Standing was prohibited unless under exceptional circumstances. Sitting all day on the hard floor, we developed sores on our buttocks.
Like trash heaped up for collection, we awaited interrogation. We faced life imprisonment in the gulag or the possibility of offender institutions and rehabilitation.
We were extensively questioned on every detail of our activities in China. Sometimes, people didn’t return from their interrogation. A few managed to bribe their way out. But most were found to have gone to a church, read the Bible, or expressed a desire to go to South Korea or another country. They didn’t come back and rejoin us. At the time, we had no way of knowing where they were taken. I presume it was the gulag. That is what we have learned over time from defectors.
The secret police was able to identify religious believers and would-be “traitors” with the help of spies in the detention centers on the Chinese side of the border. At least, that is my assumption. There was a woman there who openly talked about her intention to go to South Korea. She asked us if anyone wanted to join her or if we knew of anyone who did and how to contact them. When we were moved across the border, she disappeared. I remembered then a telltale sign of how she was the one person who wasn’t depressed. I remembered she had some red pepper powder, which she shared with other detainees for use against Chinese guards as part of an escape plan that never materialized.
The other secret police method, of course, was torture. I often heard people screaming when they were being interrogated. A lot of women had bruises on their face when they came back into the cell.
Those of us found to have had no contact with Christians, South Koreans or Americans were sent to the Onsong County Labor Training Center. This facility is run by the Ministry of People’s Security (MPS) law enforcement agency, and is in North Hamgyong Province a few hundred meters from the Chinese border.
Here, we underwent physical examinations. Again, they were looking for money. This time, we were crammed in with men and women of all ages. In addition, repatriated escapees like us were mixed with people convicted of minor criminal offenses as well as people awaiting sentencing for murder and other serious crimes. We political offenders were thus policed on two levels, by MPS guards and common criminals in the cells.
In our cell, a man in his twenties swore and verbally abused a woman in her seventies and nobody was there to stop him. If an ordinary criminal hit a defector, guards pretended not to notice. Sometimes they even ordered criminals to be rough with us.
After being forcibly separated from my baby brother, who has Chinese citizenship and so was not sent back with us, my mother developed severe mastitis. She was nevertheless forced to work every day. Eventually, she collapsed. I then thought for the first time that I might lose her. My sister and I stayed by her side, quietly and without shedding tears. We had no more emotions left and had already become numb to death. We accepted it as if it were natural to think that maybe next it would be my sister’s or my turn.
After being sent to provincial prisons after MPS labor training, adult defectors are required to work. If supervisors detect a problem, they give inmates a real problem, making them carry logs and run back and forth until they collapse. One day a body was there lying in the yard. Inmates said the man had died after suffering from diarrhea for several days. Such deaths are not even recorded. One man’s fierce struggle for survival was over and his life erased as if he had never existed.
At that time, due to the high death count during the famine, the authorities presumed a person dead if nothing was heard about them for three years. As our repatriation was after four years in China, the system had already declared us dead. In prison, therefore, we were classified as unidentified individuals, and existing in a kind of limbo where there was nowhere else to be transferred.
As it was not practically possible to keep two minors and one medical patient, which is what my mother had become, in the detention center forever, provincial authorities gave us our freedom after just two months.
It didn’t take long to realize once again that we couldn’t survive in North Korea.
We had no home to return to and faced starvation. We slept under bridges, traded the clothes we brought from China for food, and somehow endured.
Sand and mud seeped into our shoes, worn out from forced labor, but we were grateful we could still cover our toes. We constantly felt the scrutiny of passing eyes as we were labeled as traitors, and had to be vigilant at all times, monitoring our every action.
We came to realize there could be no greater hell than this. We knew we had to risk dying in order to live, and we made our plans to escape once more.
Eun-ju is a North Korean defector and the author of "A Thousand Miles to Freedom." She currently works as a social cooperation officer and researcher at the EUM Research Institute, contributing regularly to research on North Korea and defectors. Eun-ju holds a master’s degree in sociology from Korea University.
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