Outwitting the North Korean regime

Jul 07, 2023

Welcome back to Global Insider’s Friday feature: The Conversation. Each week a POLITICO journalist shares an interview with a global thinker, politician, power player or personality. This week, Senior Foreign Affairs Correspondent Nahal Toosi talks to an activist who has spent years helping North Koreans flee their country.

Follow Nahal on Twitter | Send ideas and insights to ntoosi@politico.com

The Conversation

South Korean pastor Seungeun Kim speaks.

This picture taken on March 25, 2014 shows Seungeun Kim, known for helping North Koreans escape to Seoul, as he release video footages from North Korea. | Jung Yeon-Je/AFP via Getty Images

For North Koreans desperate to escape their brutal regime, there is often no better champion than Pastor Seungeun Kim.

Kim leads the Caleb Mission, a South Korea-based Christian church that bills itself as a modern-day Underground Railroad for North Koreans. He and his network of smugglers and activists have helped more than 1,000 North Koreans reach safety.

Under the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the number of defectors reaching South Korea has been dropping for years. The Covid-19 pandemic is no doubt a factor. Plus, it’s hard to know exactly how many North Koreans reach and stay in China or other countries. But the drop also appears to coincide with what Seungeun Kim says is deepening repression inside North Korea, one aided by surveillance technology.

I sat down with Kim during the Oslo Freedom Forum last month and, with the help of a translator, we talked about defection from North Korea and the future of the country. The following has been edited for clarity and length:

You’ve helped North Koreans flee their regime for years. How are those fleeing today different than, say, the ones who were fleeing 10 years ago?

Ten years ago, most of the people who escaped were those trying to just survive, eat, fulfill basic needs. Nowadays, more people among the elite classes in North Korea are defecting also. People like Thae Yong Ho, a North Korean official who became an elected lawmaker in South Korea.

When North Korea comes up in Washington, its nuclear program is always the number one topic. Is that a good thing?

The people in Washington, D.C., they only look at North Korea’s impact from the outside. They never really see deep inside of North Korea.

From the outside, we see the North Korean regime focus most on the nuclear issue — to protect itself. But actually, inside what it’s really focusing on is stopping people from defecting. Because if it lets them do that, more outside information will get into North Korea, and the people there are going to know that they’re not living in a utopia. That’s more dangerous for the regime in trying to avoid collapse.

If the outside world wants to change North Korea — I know we keep going for efforts that won’t prompt them to do anything crazy on missiles and nuclear. At the same time, we should figure out how we can give outside information to the people inside North Korea.

LISTEN TO POLITICO'S ENERGY PODCAST: Check out our daily five-minute brief on the latest energy and environmental politics and policy news. Don't miss out on the must-know stories, candid insights, and analysis from POLITICO's energy team. Listen today.

Let’s just say that the North Korean regime falls. What happens the next day?

I’m afraid that it’s going to be chaotic in North Korea. They’ve been living under control, like brainwashing. They never really make their own choices. So when this regime collapses, people won’t know what to do. It will be all chaos.

We need to be prepared for how to control the chaos.

But to be clear, you want the regime to fall?

Yes, of course, I want the regime to collapse. But my assumption if they collapse is the Chinese government is going to take over first. If they collapse right now, the Chinese will try to take over faster than anybody else.

I think China would try to manipulate and use the North Korean situation to deal with the United States.

What tools have you found to be useful in your efforts to help North Korean defectors?

We have so many North Korean female defectors who were kidnapped by human traffickers and sold into prostitution and forced marriage in China. We rescued many of those women. Many had children. We rescued the women first. But the mothers, they missed their children. Those kids in China didn’t have documents. The Caleb Mission went back to rescue these children and brought them to South Korea.

Also, most of the time, North Korean defectors struggle to adjust to South Korea because they grew up in a communist dictatorship. So the Caleb Mission made a North Korean defectors community center. We not only rescue them, we actually help them become self-reliant in South Korea. We give them education, we try to teach them how to survive, get a job, or buy what they like.

SUBSCRIBE TO POWER SWITCH: The energy landscape is profoundly transforming. Power Switch is a daily newsletter that unlocks the most important stories driving the energy sector and the political forces shaping critical decisions about your energy future, from production to storage, distribution to consumption. Don’t miss out on Power Switch, your guide to the politics of energy transformation in America and around the world. SUBSCRIBE TODAY.

Does human rights advocacy work anymore? It seems like dictators don’t feel much shame. Or they’ve found ways to destroy rebellions.

Yes, it works. And it affects Kim Jong Un a lot when human rights activists raise our voice.

At the beginning, I told you that inside of the North Korean regime they put all their energy into stopping people from going outside of North Korea because they don’t want these people to go outside and talk about their human rights violence. They’re scared. That’s why they don’t they don’t want more people to go outside to talk about their reality.

Bringing awareness to the situation helps a lot.

Thanks to editor Heidi Vogt and producer Andrew Howard.