One of the most electrifying moments in President Trump’s State of the Union address was the sight of Ji Seong-ho, the North Korean defector and double amputee, leaping up and waving the crude home-made crutches that helped him make his way to freedom. This is Part One of Ji Seong-ho’s story. It is taken from accounts he gave to The Freedom Collection and to Michael Glendinning of the European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea (EAHRNK), as published in The Guardian newspaper.
Ji Seong-ho’s Story
President Trump told of the unimaginable suffering Ji endured, but there is much more to the story. During the North Korean famine of the 1990’s, Ji had to resort to stealing coal from railroad trains to trade for food. One day, as he was riding a train to get some coal, he fainted from hunger as he was passing between two cars.
“My father was a member of the Party. Even though he would go to work, there would be no food to eat.”
When he regained consciousness, Ji found that his left hand and left foot had been cut off by the wheels of the train. “It hurt so much. I was screaming so much that the sound would [have been] like watching an action movie in the cinema. Nobody helped. I went to the hospital. There, I received surgery without anesthetic because they didn’t have it. The surgery took 4.5 hours.”
His mother and sister had been gathering coal with him. He says his mother’s memory of his screams persists, that she can’t get them out of her mind. And here we come to a part of the story Trump had no time to include.
Hearing Ji’s story, it would be reasonable to form the impression that his family were living on the edge of North Korean society. But he said, quite to the contrary, that his father was a member of the North Korean Communist Party. Their family was better off than most! But Ji’s injury shook his father’s faith in the Party.
“My father was a member of the Party. Even though he would go to work, there would be no food to eat. When my father came to see me after the accident happened, he finally realized that it was more important to save his family rather than the party.”
Ji confessed to having felt resentful toward his father’s commitment to the Party, but his father’s changed attitude was apparent to him. “My treatment lasted for around 10 months, but there was no follow-up rehabilitation. I would have infections. My father would try to treat them at home. He would gather grass and things to sell at the market to get medicine or antibiotics.”
Escape
The entire Ji family tried to escape. Most of them made it out, but his father was caught, and died from the torture he endured at the hands of the authorities. Seong-ho’s feelings about that will be addressed in a follow-on article.
“I wanted to move to a land where I could be treated as a human.”
After his recovery, Ji crossed the border to China in search of food. Upon his return, he was arrested, beaten and tortured. “They took my crutches away. I didn’t know why I was being tortured. The reason was obviously that for anyone who leaves North Korea, they deface the image of the North Korean regime.”
The experience confirmed to Ji that he wanted to leave. “That was when I realised that this was a land I never wanted to stay in. I wanted to move to a land where I could be treated as a human, whether that was South Korea or somewhere else. That’s why I defected in 2006.”
Ji crossed again into China, and made his way gradually, over a period of weeks, to South Korea. He was shocked to find how hard it was, and almost turned back.
“Previously, I had thought that as long as I could reach a Chinese city, there would be South Korean government assistance and somebody would come with a plane and take defectors like myself to South Korea. Once I reached China I realized that that was not the case. If you want to defect to the South, you have to figure out your own way. What usually happens is, once you reach China, you enter into countries like Mongolia or other Southeast Asian countries. That is how you reach [South] Korea.”
The story of Ji’s trek through China and Southeast Asia, and his work in South Korea once he arrived there, is the subject of another article. President Trump was right to have focused attention on Ji Seong-ho’s experiences. Nothing encapsulates better the senseless cruelty of that regime, or its failure to serve its citizens. Even those who are relatively privileged lead lives of scarcity, privation and terror. It is difficult to imagine the weight of that level of human suffering imposed on 25 million people. May God have mercy on their souls.
