North Korea defector tells of escape and reveals what life is really like in secretive state
For David, the streets of Seoul are a much longed for safe haven.
To the casual observer, there is nothing out of the ordinary about him.
He is a slight man, softly spoken, dressed in baggy jeans and wide glasses that are fashionable in South Korea.
But his story and what he has been through to get here are utterly remarkable.
He is a North Korean defector, one of the very few to have escaped the DPRK (Democratic Republic of Korea) within the last few years.
“My mother bribed the soldier beforehand,” he tells me as he gestures on a map to where he crossed the border north into China.
“The river was frozen solid. I remember walking maybe 15 minutes to 20 minutes across the ice.
“I remember shivering after crossing the river and climbing over the fence that the Chinese guards had set up.”
For the safety of his relatives that remain in North Korea, we can’t tell you exactly when or exactly how he left. Any specific identifying detail could result in harsh punishments for his loved ones.
But his stories from inside are astonishing and offer a rare glimpse into what life has been like there since the pandemic struck.
Father disappeared without a trace
His childhood, it seems, was a relatively normal one in DPRK terms – helping from a young age to tend the fields and attending school when he could.
But everything changed shortly after his father suddenly disappeared without a trace.
“It wasn’t until about a year later when he got in touch with us that I realised he had fled to the south,” he explains.
“He contacted my mother via telephone. What we didn’t realise was that the North Korean state political security department had been tapping our landline. As a result, our mother was sent away to the labour camp.”
Initially, he was allowed to visit his mother every three months in detention, and he describes what he saw there as shocking.
“The amount of food provided in these detention centres is pitifully little,” he says.
“Prisoners receive around 20 to 30 kernels of corn each meal, which is obviously not enough for a person to survive on, so I packed a lunch when I went to visit her.
The pandemic has made North Korea all but impenetrable
“My mother’s body had shrunk to half her original size in the three months she had been in detention. My eyes filled with tears the moment I saw her; she was so dishevelled and gaunt that I didn’t recognise her initially.
“They also beat the women in prison. Mother’s eyes were swollen to bits and there were bruises everywhere. I wept when I saw her wounds.”
Mother tortured
David was just a child at this time but he was left to fend for himself and his siblings. He says he left school and tried to make ends meet, working in the fields and logging in the winter, but also stole food to survive.
He took what little he could to his mother.
“My mother said that if the inmates’ families didn’t visit them in prison, they would starve to death from malnutrition,” he explains.
“She said tens of people died every day from malnutrition. She even said that people would die in the middle of meals.
“To dispose of the corpses, she said they folded them at the waist and put them in sacks.
“Afterwards, the corpses were buried near the fences of the prison. Also, because the graves weren’t very deep, the stench of the corpses would come up from the ground in the spring when it became warmer.”
His mother described to him the torture she faced, being made to sit for up to 17 hours and beaten if they moved as much as a finger.
A military parade in Pyongyang in February
She also described how inmates whose families did not have the means to bring extra food or bribe the guards would have a life expectancy of just three to four years.
David’s stories matter because recent testimony from inside North Korea is very rare indeed.
The pandemic has made this already secretive state all but impenetrable.
Policy to shoot anyone trying to cross border
In the 2010s, around 1,000 people a year successfully defected from North Korea – the vast majority crossing the northern border with China before seeking asylum in a third country.
But a combination of the strict closed-border policy implemented by both China and the DPRK, plus a new policy to shoot anyone trying to cross, means that in 2022 that number had plummeted to just 67.
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It means that not much is known about how the country fared amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but there is mounting evidence that it further strangled an already dysfunctional economy, bringing fresh waves of shortage and suffering.
“The borders were sealed off out of fear that the pandemic would come from outside North Korea. No one was allowed to go near the border,” says David.
“All the trade routes were effectively closed down. We depended heavily on smuggled goods from China in order to survive.
“I’ve heard from my relative that more people are starving, and prices are rising. They say it has become even more difficult to live.”
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Indeed, many think it’s likely people have died due to a lack of food in recent years.
“I’d say [it’s a] chronic economic crisis, not acute. It’s just an ongoing, bad situation economically,” says Chad O’Carroll, the founder of NK News.
What is the situation in North Korea now?
He and his team try to analyse what is going on in North Korea. Since the pandemic, their sources have become fewer and more nervous, but there is a lot of evidence all is not well.
“I definitely think some people would be in serious health problems due to the food shortages,” Mr O’Carroll says. He explains that there is evidence that the crisis is even biting the elites who live in the major cities.
“In Pyongyang and other major urban areas there has not been such significant shortages, but the diversification and nutritional value of the available food has significantly decreased,” he says.
“So if you have a chronic health problem, if you’re old, that could probably really push health conditions in a negative way.
“There’s been very large scale mobilisations of people from all walks of life to get into the farms to get their hands dirty and help.
“We’ve got some sources that say middle, even senior elites in some cases, are having to do their part and helping the nation tackle this food shortage situation.”
It is relatively unlikely that this latest crisis will cause major instability to the ruling Kim regime.
The propaganda machine has been in overdrive blaming the global pandemic and showing pictures of wide-scale deaths and hospitals in crisis elsewhere.
Indeed, the North Korean people are also no strangers to hardship.
Most agree the increased secrecy has been of real value to the DPRK’s security services and will thus likely remain.
But for a nuclear-armed power so increasingly assertive internationally, the reality of life inside is still largely shrouded in mystery.
A group of school children in their smart uniforms skip past us, overseen by their mums and dads.
In front of us, the highway is empty of all cars except for two armoured police vehicles slowly making their way up a hill.
The children and their parents are on “Airport Road”, which leads into the centre of Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. The airport is a few miles away to the north.
The parents are leading the children to an intersection where they will turn right towards their homes.
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Police use heavily-armoured vehicles to patrol in Port-au-Prince
Everything beyond that intersection is gang territory, and nobody ventures past it but the police, who appear to be probing the gangs’ defences.
This part of the Airport Road, beyond the intersection and stretching for miles, is an area controlled by the gangster Jimmy Cherizier, known here and abroad as “Barbecue”.
The security forces are desperate to capture Barbecue, himself a former policeman, and to dismantle his gang.
A boy sleeps at the bottom of a staircase inside a displacement camp
As the families near the intersection, automatic gunfire bursts from the turret of one of the armoured police vehicles. Instantly the children and their parents run for safety, hugging a wall – they know what is about to happen.
Within seconds the police are being attacked with volleys of machine gun fire. We watch, holding our breaths, and thankfully all the children make it round the corner to the relative safety of a side street.
They live on the edge of what’s called the “red zone” where the gangs control the streets.
Security forces want to take it back.
Getting out of the cars would be suicide for police officers
The first armoured police vehicle makes it into Barbecue’s territory unscathed, but the second vehicle is hit.
One of its tyres is punctured, so they have no choice but to turn back.
The firing intensifies as the police vehicle makes its way down the hill, and we can hear the crack of bullets as the gangs target the police.
My team and I are travelling in two separate armoured 4x4s. The police are the targets, and we are filming their exchanges with gang members hidden up the hill and in side streets, firing from multiple positions.
As the police vehicle nears the intersection once again, it comes under sustained fire.
At this point the streets and the intersection are completely empty of people and traffic, anyone in the vicinity has taken cover.
A stray round passes uncomfortably close by our team still outside the vehicles, so we decide it’s time to go, and reverse as the armoured police vehicle loses its tyre, rolling forward on its rim.
Children caught in the crossfire in Port-au-Prince
Getting out would be suicidal for the police. The vehicle limps towards another crossroads to get away from the firing.
This, I’m told, is just an ordinary day in Port-au-Prince.
Nobody can fully agree on a number, but by most estimates, the gangs control around 90% of Port-au-Prince now. People don’t venture into their areas, and cars turn away from the boundaries to avoid being hit by sniper fire from inside or being caught in the crossfire.
Barbara Gashiwi and baby Jenna
Hundreds of thousands of Haitians have lost their homes, and many now find themselves in heaving makeshift displacement camps. They huddle for protection, but in reality there really isn’t much on offer.
In a narrow alleyway in a camp set up in the grounds of a church, I meet Barbara Gashiwi, a new mum. She gave birth to her daughter Jenna a month ago, beneath the plastic sheets where she still sits.
Barbara was forced out of her home by the gangs days before she was due to give birth.
Barbara Gashiwi tells Sky News she doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to go home
“They pulled guns on us and told us to give up the house, after that we ran outside on to the street and took off,” she told me.
She says she doesn’t think she will ever go back to her home again. Very few of the 10,500 people living in this one displacement camp believe they will ever go home.
The gang warfare has left some Port-au-Prince streets completely derelict
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A year ago, we visited displaced Haitians living inside the government’s communication ministry.
At the time we walked in off the street, but this time we could barely move for the crowds – the forecourt is now a camp too, and the difference is stark.
The government has abandoned this and other ministries, moving higher up to safer ground, leaving whole communities on their own.
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The gangs’ lawless, and often murderous, activity means that the roughly 10% of Port-au-Prince still free is packed with people and traffic.
Just a few districts in Port-au-Prince are left, and they’re completed surrounded, leaving the people who live in this city squeezed into the only places that haven’t fallen.
The few free districts in the capital are packed with people and traffic
It’s hard to describe the claustrophobia and tension that pervades life here.
And with everything else happening in the world right now, the people of Haiti feel they’ve been abandoned, and are condemned to live their lives under the rule of the gun.
Stuart Ramsay reports from Haiti with camera operator Toby Nash, senior foreign producer Dominique Van Heerden, and producers Brunelie Joseph and David Montgomery.
The UK and EU have placed fresh sanctions on Russia as the Kremlin refused to put a timeline on ceasefire talks with Ukraine.
The UK’s Foreign Office said a total of 100 further sanctions will target Russia’s military, energy and financial sectors.
The new measures will target the supply chains of Russian weapons systems, including Iskander missiles, Kremlin-funded information operations, financial institutions that help Russia evade sanctions and ships in the Kremlin’s “shadow fleet” of oil tankers.
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The Foreign Office said Vladimir Putin had repeatedly fired Iskander missiles into crowded civilian areas “with a callous disregard for life”, including on 13 April in Sumy when 34 civilians, including children, were killed as some headed to Palm Sunday services.
Similarly, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said an 18th package of EU sanctions against Russia is already being worked on.
“It’s time to intensify the pressure on Russia to bring about the ceasefire,” she said on X, after a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
These new sanctions are being imposed to ratchet up pressure on Mr Putin after Russia fired 273 drones at Ukrainian cities on Saturday, the biggest drone attack since it invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Firefighters put out a fire after Russia carried out its biggest drone attack in Ukraine. Pic: AP
Foreign Secretary David Lammy said: “Putin’s latest strikes once again show his true colours as a warmonger.
“We urge him to agree a full, unconditional ceasefire right away so there can be talks on a just and lasting peace.
“We have been clear that delaying peace efforts will only redouble our resolve to help Ukraine to defend itself and use our sanctions to restrict Putin’s war machine.”
Following Donald Trump’s two-hour call with Mr Putin on Monday, the US president said Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations for a ceasefire; however, the Kremlin gave no timeline despite Mr Zelenskyy agreeing to one months ago.
The call prompted the UK and EU’s new sanctions.
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New British sanctions have also been placed on 14 more members of the Social Design Agency (SDA), which carries out Kremlin-funded information operations to undermine sovereignty, democracy and the rule of law in Ukraine and across the world.
The UK had previously sanctioned the SDA and several of its leaders last year, but all levels of the organisation are now being targeted.
Russian servicemen training in Ukraine. Pic: Russian Defense Ministry Press Service
Another 46 financial institutions that help Russia evade sanctions have also been targeted.
Sanctions have also been placed on a further 18 ships, following 110 earlier this month, in Russia’s “shadow fleet”, which carry Russian oil under different flags (often Liberian) to continue shipping oil around the world despite sanctions that have placed a price cap on Russian oil.
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John Ormerod, a British national who procured ships for Russia’s shadow fleet has been sanctioned, and two Russian captains of shadow fleet tankers.
The UK and Western allies are looking to lower the price cap of Russian crude oil from $60 a barrel to prevent profits from being used to fund the war.
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in 2018. File pic: Reuters
The Foreign Office said UK and other Western sanctions have severely hit Russia’s economy, with its GDP shrinking in the first quarter of the year and the non-defence economy in recession for some time.
It said security and defence spending now accounts for more than 40% of Russia’s federal budget, with Mr Putin raising taxes and cutting social spending to continue the war.
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