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.
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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March 2024: Thousands flee Haiti violence
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.
Donald Trump has said there is a “good chance” of peace between Russia and Ukraine – but added the US has a red line in upcoming talks.
After a two-hour phone call with Vladimir Putin, the US president announced on Monday that Russia–Ukraine discussions will begin “immediately”.
It is unclear how these will differ from negotiations that already started in Turkey last Friday.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office later on Monday, Mr Trump said he does have a red line on when he’ll stop pushing Moscow and Kyiv for peace – but would not say what it is.
There are “big egos involved”, he said before adding: “This was a European situation, it should have remained a European situation.”
The US president also claimed he asked Mr Putin on their call: “When are we going to end this bloodbath?”
He said of the Russian president: “I do believe he wants to end [the war].”
“My whole life is deals, one big deal, and if I thought that President Putin did not want to get this over with, I wouldn’t even be talking about it because I’d just pull out,” he added.
The US president spoke to his Russian counterpart on Monday as part of a bid to push the two countries towards agreeing a truce in the war.
Donald Trump speaking in the Oval Office on Monday. Pic: AP
In a Truth Social post, published shortly after the call, Mr Trump said Russia and Ukraine “will immediately start negotiations towards a ceasefire and, more importantly, an end to the war”.
Mr Trump continued: “Russia wants to do large-scale trade with the United States when this catastrophic ‘bloodbath’ is over, and I agree.
“There is a tremendous opportunity for Russia to create massive amounts of jobs and wealth. Its potential is unlimited.”
Vladimir Putin at a meeting in Moscow last week. Pic: AP
Ukraine “can be a great beneficiary on trade, in the process of rebuilding its country”, he said.
The Vatican “has stated that it would be very interested in hosting the negotiations”, Mr Trump added. He signed off his post with: “Let the process begin!”
Mr Putin found the call “informative, frank and very useful”, Russian news agency RIA reported.
“A ceasefire in the situation in Ukraine for a certain period of time is possible if appropriate agreements are reached,” the Russian leader reportedly said.
Discussions are ‘positive,’ says Zelenskyy
The US president spoke separately to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and various European leaders.
At a briefing after the day’s calls had taken place, Ukraine’s leader said he told Mr Trump that Russia “might propose some particularly difficult conditions” for a ceasefire – which could be “a sign that it is the Russian side that is unwilling to end the war”.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks to reporters after his own call with Mr Trump. Pic: Reuters
“I think we are still discussing the very possibility of strong and severe sanctions [on Russia],” he continued. “I don’t yet have an answer to that question.”
Kyiv is considering the possibility of a meeting between “high-level” teams from Ukraine, the US, Russia and some European countries, Mr Zelenskyy said, describing the talks on Monday as “positive”.
He continued: “Such a meeting could take place in Turkey, the Vatican, or Switzerland. We are currently considering these three venues, as all three countries – all three venues – are neutral.”
European leaders and Ukraine have demanded Russia agree to a ceasefire immediately, and Mr Trump has focused on getting Mr Putin to commit to a 30-day truce. The Russian president has resisted that, insisting that conditions be met first.
The Trump-Putin call came as Russia has continued to target Ukraine with attacks.
Moscow on Monday claimed its forces have taken two villages in Ukraine, according to state news agency RIA.
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Russia recently began pushing into the Sumy region after claiming it had ousted Kyiv’s forces from Russia’s neighbouring Kursk region.
RIA cited the defence ministry as saying Novoolenivka, in the eastern Donetsk region, and Marine, in Sumy, have now been taken by Russian forces.
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Russia launches war’s largest drone attack
Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 112 drones over various parts of the country overnight, killing two people and leaving another 13 injured.
On Sunday, Kyiv officials said Russia had launched the largest drone attack of the war so far by firing 273 explosives into Ukraine over the course of Saturday night into the following morning.
Israel has said it will allow a “basic quantity of food” into the besieged enclave of Gaza to avoid a “starvation crisis” following a near three-month blockade.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the decision was “based on the operational need to enable the expansion of the military operation to defeat Hamas“.
Gaza, where local authorities say more than 53,000 people have died in Israel’s 19-month campaign, has been under a complete blockade on humanitarian aid since 2 March.
It comes as global food security experts warn of famine across the territory and after a UN-backed report from last Monday which warned one in five people in Gaza were facing starvation.
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Israel ramps up bombing in Gaza
The statement from the prime minister’s office said it would “allow a basic quantity of food to be brought in for the population in order to make certain that no starvation crisis develops in the Gaza Strip”.
“Such a crisis would endanger the continuation of Operation ‘Gideon’s Chariots’ to defeat Hamas,” it added.
“Israel will act to deny Hamas’s ability to take control of the distribution of humanitarian assistance in order to ensure that the assistance does not reach the Hamas terrorists.”
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Gaza is ‘a slaughterhouse’ says surgeon
It comes after a British surgeon working in Gaza said in a video to Sky News the enclave is now “a slaughterhouse” amid Israeli bombardment.
Israel has just ramped up its offensive in Gaza – where it’s been conducting a military campaign in retaliation for 1,200 people killed and 251 taken hostage by Hamas on 7 October 2023 – with Palestinian health officials reporting at least 130 people were killed overnight into Sunday.
Israel Defence Forces (IDF) confirmed troops had begun “extensive ground operations throughout the northern and southern Gaza Strip”.
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said 464 people had died in Israeli military strikes in the week to Sunday.
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In a statement on Sunday, IDF said its air force struck “over 670 Hamas terror targets throughout the Gaza Strip to disrupt enemy preparations and support ground operations” over the past week.
Israel has launched an escalation to increase pressure on Hamas, seize territory, displace Palestinians to the south and take greater control over the distribution of aid.
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