Celebrity Assholes

The Telegraph ran this interesting article on North Korea the other day - I find it incredible that a famous American institution like the Harlem Globetrotters can engage with such an odious regime - Dennis Rodman and his chums should be ashamed of themselves.  

Why Dennis Rodman should not be friends with Kim Jong Un - by a survivor of the North Korean gulag

Kim Jong Un's comic book villain image belies the very real horrors of North Korea - and foreign celebrities should have nothing to with him

Dennis Rodman poses for pictures with North Korean basketball players and government officials during a practice session in Pyongyang Photo: AP Photo/David Guttenfelder

By Peter Foster in Washington

Dennis Rodman, the former Chicago Bulls basketball star, does not appear to be a man given to self-doubt. But before setting off for his latest trip to Pyongyang, he should perhaps have taken a minute to look into the eyes of the only man to have escaped from a North Korean gulag.

Had he done so, it is hard to believe he would not have questioned the wisdom of his relationship with Kim Jong-un, the pudgy-faced North Korean leader who last week ordered his uncle Jang Song Thaek to be executed by machine gun.

Kim Jong-Un and Dennis Rodman at a basketball game in Pyongyang in March 2013 (KCNA/AFP/Getty Images)

As Shin Dong-hyuk quietly testifies, the purging and execution of Jang is but the least of the crimes perpetrated by a North Korean regime that keeps more than 120,000 people in the gulags and concentration camps where Mr Shin was himself born 31 years ago.

Among those held prisoner is Mr Shin's father, a man whom he scarcely knows. Nor does he know the nature of the supposed "crime" that led to his father's incarceration and forced labour - for what will almost certainly be the rest of his life.

When we meet in Washington DC, Mr Shin says he is "angry" with Mr Rodman for refusing point-blank his request that he use his personal influence with Kim to raise North Korea's abominable human rights record.

"It has nothing to do with me," 53-year-old Mr Rodman had shrugged, during a stop-over in Beijing. "I mean, these things have been going on for years and years and years. I'm just going over there to do a basketball game and have some fun."

Asked to respond to Mr Rodman, Mr Shin does not rant and rave, but looks straight ahead for several seconds, apparently searching for an appropriate response to a remark of such obvious gaucheness.

"It makes me angry," he says, speaking quietly but firmly. "To me, North Korea is not a party resort. Not the kind of place where one goes to enjoy oneself and 'have fun'. To me, North Korea is a country where people starve to death, where people are sold into slavery, where people die in imprisonment in political prison camps."

Mr Shin now devotes his time to campaigning for the eradication of North Korea's prison camps (REUTERS/Gary Cameron)

If Mr Rodman was ever interested, the slave-labour camp where Mr Shin was born is easily located on GoogleMaps; a clutch of huts and factories situated on the Taedong River, in the hills northeast of Pyongyang.

As he zooms in on "Kaechon Internment Camp No.14", Mr Shin observes that Mr Rodman could pull the map up on his smartphone and show it to the North Korean leader as they share a glass of one of those expensive imported whiskies that Mr Rodman says Kim dispenses with such abandon.

Skimming over the landscape, Mr Shin points out the barbed wire fences, and the collection of grey huts where he was born, the off-spring of two inmates who - like animals - were allowed to "mate" for a few days each year for good behaviour.

In a few seconds he locates the detention-centre where he was held and tortured as a 14-year-old after reporting to camp guards that he had heard his mother and brother discussing an escape plan.

Mr Shin, who had been indoctrinated from birth to inform on fellow prisoners, thought he would receive an award; but instead he was tortured, along with his father, in case he held further information: the guards put a steel hook under his skin, so he could not move, and then held him over a charcoal fire until his skin bubbled.

Next he lingers briefly over an aerial view of the rice paddy that doubled as an execution ground for his mother and brother. Mr Shin and his father were forced to watch as two stakes were driven into the ground, and the condemned pair tied to them before being shot.

At the time, Mr Shin recalls with characteristic bluntness, he felt little emotional bond with his father with whom he had almost no contact and so scarcely knew when in the camp, but now – after several years living in South Korea and the US – he has begun to feel differently.

"My thinking about my father has changed now that I've been living in the free world. While I was in the camp, quite frankly, I didn't think of him as my father. I thought of him as a fellow criminal," he says, adding that he has tried to find more about him since his escape.

"The UN has asked the North Korean government to provide information about my father but they have provided no such information."

Lastly, there is the section of forest where, in 2005, Mr Shin finally escaped while out on a firewood collection detail, crossing the high-voltage wire using the body of another inmate who died in the attempt to shield himself from the current.

Despite the psychological damage that comes with re-telling a story that was made internationally famous by the book Escape from Camp 14, Mr Shin now devotes his time to campaigning for the eradication of North Korea's prison camps.

"I have to revisit bad memories, past trauma, and I have to do this almost on a daily basis. So I can tell you, it is quite difficult," he says, "I hope that my work will help my father, who is left behind in the gulag, or my fellow prisoners left behind in the gulag, my family members left behind.

"So if it helps even a little bit it means that it's well worth it, and this is practically what keeps me going despite the psychological difficulties."

Like many people, Mr Shin says he was initially hopeful that Kim Jong-un, who was schooled in Switzerland and so had has some taste of Western democracy, might prove a reformer – opening up North Korea just as Deng Xiaoping did China after the death of Mao Tse-Tung. Instead, he has been bitterly disappointed.

The purging of Jang who had visited South Korea in 2002 and was a potential ally in economic reforms is, says Mr Shin, yet another signal that Kim is now determined to become the sole ruler of North Korea, like his father and grandfather before him.

"What I see is that Kim Jong-un is not at all concerned with the improvement of the economy of North Korea or the improvement of the lives of his people," he says.

"What Kim Jong-un is concerned about is constructing facilities such as ski slopes for foreigners so that he can make more hard currency, and he can spend that hard currency partying, drinking, and having a good time in North Korea."

That party lifestyle which Mr Rodman dignifies with his celebrity, is plain evil to Mr Shin, who grew up in the camps, the son of a criminal who was so low in the social index that he did not even receive the ideological indoctrination of higher 'castes' in the North's social system.

"We did not receive any ideological education. All we learned was how to live, how to work, what to eat, what rules to respect and how to respect those rules," he says. "The prisoners are treated as lesser entities even than the brute animals."

After bribing a border guard and escaping to northeast China across the shallow Tumen River, Mr Shin made his way to South Korea along the underground railroad that collects up defectors after they cross the Chinese border.

He converted to Christianity, but resists any notion that he was chosen in some way by God to survive and fulfil his mission to publicise the camps which satellites photographs show have expanded under Kim Jong-un since 2009 as continues to purge those who would challenge his grip on power.

Whatever subject he addresses – Mr Rodman, his religion, his escape - Mr Shin is disarmingly matter-of-fact.

"I decided to escape from Camp 14 was not because of hope or to tell the outside world," he says. "I just made up my mind, even if I were to be shot dead the following day, I was going to try to find some better kind of food than what was given to us inside."

He is similarly straightforward on the subject of his religious faith, which he says he first stumbled upon not in some Damascene moment, but as a way of making friends and forming a network in South Korea.

"In church I find some personal space of my own," Mr Shin says, though he also admits to days of doubt. "Naturally I try to discover God when I'm in church, and I try to get God to help me get rid of the anger that I still feel. But, at the same time it occurs to me, 'How can God allow this to happen, and if he does exist, why is he keeping so quiet?'"

Mr Shin asks the same question of the media and international community, which he sees focusing far more on the soap opera of the Kim dynasty, the vanity-project golf courses and ski-resorts or the threat of nuclear proliferation, than the overwhelming suffering of millions of ordinary North Koreans.

And if he had the chance to sit in the centre-court box with Mr Kim and Mr Rodman as they sipped their whiskies and vodkas and munched on exquisite foods while a basketball match was played before them, what would he say to them?

"I would ask them to go inside and try to live in there, at least for an hour," says Mr Shin, as his finger hovers again over the place where he was tortured and starved. "I'm confident that they wouldn't want to be there - not for an hour, not even for a second."