The North Korean challenge

As a lieutenant colonel with a car, a chauffeur and access to foreign goods, Yong Kim was a member of North Korea's privileged class. But in 1993, the lifelong Party devotee was imprisoned for the rediscovered crimes of his father, a spy for the American CIA during the Korean War. "I wouldn't even recognize him if he was next to me at this moment," said Kim, who was six when his father was executed.

Modeled on the Soviet gulag, North Korean political prisons are filled with relatives of alleged political spies and traitors. Some are imprisoned for being the children of landowners. "People were just bones and skin, like dead people walking," Kim says. "There are no human rights, no humane treatment. I can hardly bear to remember." An estimated 1.5 million people are thought to have died in the political prisons. After working in a coal mine for 16 hours a day for six years, and subsisting on a daily fistful of corn, Kim escaped into China in 1999.

Among other nightmarish incidents, Kim — who visited Princeton last week — described an elderly, abandoned man who ate the meat of freshly buried corpses. He watched a fellow prisoner die in the winter chill after being tied to a tree, his punishment for being found with a scrap of newspaper. Other refugees' testimonies include reports starving children losing fingers for stealing food, and a man being force-fed roundworms retrieved from toilets. (He died a few days later).

North Koreans live in a society without freedom of speech, press, religion or assembly. Most do not have hot water or electricity. Hospitals lack antibiotics, anesthesia, sterilizing equipment. Subject to imprisonment, torture, sexual slavery and "human experimentation," North Koreans live in constant fear. At any moment, someone could turn them in for disloyalty. The penalty — imprisonment, then sure death — extends to all immediate and distant family members, even in-laws, and across three generations. Kim talked of a son who, upon discovering damning evidence about his father, secretly killed him to spare the family from danger. Kim said that after coming to the United States in 2003, he realized why his father had risked everything.

The tragedy is heightened because the North Koreans cannot see their own oppression. Kim, like many other North Korean refugees, was suspicious and hostile towards South Koreans who gave him food, shelter and medical aid. "They cannot find thanks because of the brainwashing since nursery school," Kim said. "The motto of the North Korean army is to eliminate all those who worship the Americans." If he had never been sent to prison, Kim said he would have fought to the death to keep the regime in power.

Taking on North Korea would be a formidable challenge. Its leaders have demonstrated a startling lack of basic humanity, its people brainwashed to hate us. But the North Korean government cannot be reformed. Kim Jong Il has lied so much to his people that in order to stay in power, he must oppress and frighten further so that they never realize the truth about their leaders, their economy, their country. Nothing short of regime change will help the millions who suffer.

For now, we need to help North Korean refugees — thousands every year — find asylum in new countries. We need to stop China's policy of tracking them down and sending them back to probable death. We need to acknowledge that the situation is horrifying beyond imagination, and we can't let them fool our politicians with pleasant facades on their visits. The very top of North Korean society may enjoy imported gourmet food and luxury amenities, but the majority of the country's citizens live in a different century, with thousands suffering in prison camps from which even their corpses will never return.

Only imprisonment enabled Kim to see that power, success and material comforts had blinded him to others' suffering. As his chauffeur drove him around and he bowed in thanks to the great leaders' portraits, his beloved government was oppressing, killing and starving its people. What's distracting us — among the most privileged of our generation — from paying attention to the major crises in the world? Julie Park is an English major from Wayne, N.J. She can be reached at jypark@princeton.edu.