North Korea Undercover Read Online Free Page B

beat him up a little, but that didn’t dent his conviction that there was something profoundly wrong about North Korea. Pretty soon he was on his way back into China. Not long after, Jimmy realized that smuggling second-hand clothes from China to North Korea was never going to make him a rich man. Instead, he switched to smuggling a commodity out of North Korea, where there were no real markets, into China. That commodity was gold. Jimmy explained that in the north of North Korea there was plenty of gold. Miners would sell you nuggets for a fraction of the price he could obtain in China; if you looked in the right place, you could find some yourself, just lying in streams or on the surface of the earth. His trade built up, he got to know ‘fences’ on the Chinese side who would give him a good price for his gold. He also realized that with gold – far less bulky than second-hand clothes – he could swim across the river when it wasn’t frozen, tripling his potential profits. Boats were never an option. They would be spotted by the border guards and destroyed. The more often he crossed the border, the richer he became. His biggest shipment had been 900 grams of raw goldnuggets worth around 150,000 won (£15,000, $17,000) and everything worked brilliantly. And then he got too greedy.
    Inside North Korea, someone betrayed him, and he was trapped by the police and caught with his biggest cache of gold yet: 3 kilos, worth 500,000 won (£50,000,$65,000). Had he been eighteen when he was arrested with 3 kilos of North Korean gold, he would have been executed, he said, but because he was a minor he just got fifteen years in prison, hard labour.
    He ended up in Prison Camp 12, also known as the Chongori Re-Education Centre. His camp was for common criminals, not part of the political gulag. But conditions sound grim. Everyone who enters the camp is greeted by a big black metal gate, and when it opens up a big sign behind it says, ‘Escape is suicide!’
    Jimmy admitted he had a hard time, but back then, around the turn of the millennium, Prison Camp 12 was not one of those nightmare camps you hear about where guards kill people for fun. People, he said, just died from malnutrition. He was hungry for a whole year. They gave the prisoners three thimbles of corn a day or some salty soup, sometimes with bits of cabbage. The food was so bad that even a pig would have turned his nose up. If anyone managed to catch a rat, they were the luckiest person alive because it was at least meat. Some people ate grass, others bits of corn in cowshit.
    His mother got him out after a year, bribing the doctors and the guards, claiming he had tuberculosis. It cost his mum around £400, a kings ransom in North Korea. The authorities are nervous of anyone with TB. With a prison population on the edge of starvation, dozens can die with one outbreak, and that can be bad for production targets. Corruption has grown more common, by all accounts, since the famine. Money can only buy so much: ifsomeone is in serious trouble with the Bowibu, then no amount of money can save them.
    Since Jimmy was banged up inside Prison Camp 12 – around the year 2000 – conditions have reportedly got far worse. It’s become the main prison camp for would-be ‘border-crossers’, people who jump the border to make money, not necessarily to defect for good. But since the famine, when everything went to pot, crossing the border has been treated more severely. The One Free Korea website reports hard labour is much heavier at Prison Camp 12 than at other ordinary re-education centres, and torture and beatings are routine. The website says that anybody who has crossed the border is automatically sentenced to up to three years of forced labour at Prison Camp 12, under instructions that they are to be punished as traitors. This marks a change from Jimmy’s period of captivity, when ‘simple defectors’ – not gold-smugglers – got a few months in prison and then were