Shin Dong-hyuk really shouldn’t need defending. The thirty-two year old was born in, and grew up in, the North Korean gulag system. And as he has related in his book Escape from Camp 14, and in public appearances, what he saw on an average day in his childhood constituted more horror than most people will see in their collected nightmares.
At one point he overheard his mother and brother talking about an escape attempt from the highest-security category camp they were in. He informed on them, as he had been educated to do. Subsequently, along with his father, he was forced to watch their execution by prison camp guards. He later escaped the camp – the first prisoner known to have escaped from the highest security category of North Korean prison camps. He escaped by climbing over the body of a friend who had been caught and electrocuted on one of the fences that surrounded the camp. He finally got out of the country – itself a nearly impossible thing to do and much of what little we know about the details of these present day abominations that constitute the North Korean gulag system we know because of Shin’s testimony.
Today there is something of a press scandal over his testimony. The Times today runs a story with the headline ‘I lied, says defector who fled North Korean labour camp’. The BBC runs with ‘North Korea camp survivor Shin Dong-hyuk changes story’. Other papers here and in America go in harder. But all of them have gone big. You would get the sense from glancing over these headlines and some of the resulting stories that Shin Dong-hyuk is a media fantasist of the type the British and American media so rightly enjoy bringing down.
So it is important to consider the extent of the ‘falsification’ Shin has admitted to. I don’t know if there is more to come, but this is what we know now. The main charge is that in his book (co-written with the journalist Blaine Harden) he describes all of his life having been lived in Camp 14. He now says that he spent some time from the age of 6 in Camp 18, across the Taedong river from Camp 14. He was subsequently returned to Camp 14. The fact that he was routinely tortured is not disputed. Nor are any of the other atrocities that constituted his early life.
But there is something deeply sinister in this. There has been a campaign for some time by the North Korean regime to dismiss Shin Dong-hyuk and his story. That is hardly surprising. Amazing though it might seem even the worst regime on earth cares a little about its public image abroad, and is especially aware of the extent to which it is a burden to its few remaining allies. The regime’s fight-back so far has included videoed confessions from family members still inside North Korea disputing aspects of Shin’s story. That is to be expected from a regime which denies that the concentration camp system (for once the term is not hyperbole) it runs does not in fact exist.
But sustained campaigns of this kind can be clever and can eventually extract a price. This weekend, on Facebook, Shin has written a humble apology for letting readers down and questions whether, given his perceived failing, he will continue his work bringing the evils he witnessed to a wider attention. By way of explanation he has told his co-author:
‘When I agreed to share my experience for the book, I found it was too painful to think about some of the things that happened,’ Harden quoted Shin as saying. ‘So I made a compromise in my mind. I altered some details that I thought wouldn’t matter. I didn’t want to tell exactly what happened in order not to relive these painful moments all over again.’
I have met Shin Dong-hyuk only once, when the Henry Jackson Society hosted him in London. Hearing a story such as his (and there are not many) first hand is more than moving, it is in some sense mortifying. Not least because you sense what it must take from someone to till over again, for your benefit, what most people would do anything to forget. Ordinary rules of human engagement are hard to apply in such situations and with such people. I have met and known a few other people who have been through horrific events in their lives and a number who have written books about them. And I would say that it is not by any means uncommon for there to be anachronisms in their stories or small corners which are covered over and cannot be excavated precisely because some fact or other may lie underneath which will stretch them to a point where no one can go. Sometimes they can say something – as has Shin about his involvement in the death of his mother – which most of us may consider the thing we would never be able to mention had his life been ours. But for a person who can describe such a thing there will be other things which they will cover over instead. What I am saying is that that it is quite wrong to treat someone like Shin Dong-hyuk as though he were from the same school or background as Johann Hari or some such figure. We rightly expect the utmost accuracy from people who have no legitimate reason to cover things over. But someone from Shin Dong-hyuk’s experience will have reasons for creating elisions around some of their experiences which – unless the central pillars of the story were proved to be false – we should beware of treating in the same way. So far as I know there has been absolutely no serious challenge to Shin Dong-hyuk’s central story.
On the one occasion I met him, someone asked Shin a question we all had vaguely in mind. Having been born and brought up where he was, what did he make of being in a city like London? He was excruciatingly polite, complimenting us all on the city we lived in. Then he said that he had been in some other cities, including Seoul and Washington. But he said the difference between his life and these cities was not the biggest in his experience. The biggest difference had been the moment he escaped the camp and managed to get to a North Korean village. There he experienced the bigger shock – for there people seemed to be able to wear what they liked and go where they liked. And, he said, it seemed to him that it was paradise. I well recall the shiver that went up the back of everybody in the room. And the mental image of an animal trapped in a maze, thinking it had found freedom when it had reached only another desperate dead-end.
I have no idea what else, if anything else, Shin Dong-hyuk altered. But what has come out in recent days is so minimal as to be barely worth reporting, and certainly not worth the splashes it has received. No one doubts what this young man has seen. Nobody doubts the fundamentals of his story. And nobody should be surprised that there might be details in such a story which are going to have changed – as all stories change – around the edges. What is surprising is that the North Korean government’s attempts at public relations should have found such an eager and explosive echo-chamber in the free world’s media. The only result of today’s press will be that many people scanning over the pages of their papers today may come away with the idea that the blight on the planet that is the North Korean regime is perhaps after all something we should be more careful about ‘judging’. And so dealing with North Korea’s monstrous regime will be able to slide even further down from its already low rung on the ladder of global priorities.
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