Release from Blaine Harden, author of Escape from Camp 14.
On Friday, January 16, I learned that Shin Dong-hyuk, the North Korean prison camp survivor who is the subject of Escape from Camp 14, had told friends an account of his life that differed substantially from the book.
I contacted him by phone on Friday and talked to him at length, pressing him to detail the changes and explain why he had misled me. I then passed on this information to the Washington Post, for which I originally wrote a story about Shin in 2008.
The Post then reported its own story, published online on Saturday. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/prominent-n-korean-defector-shin-dong-hyuk-admits-parts-of-story-are-inaccurate/2015/01/17/fc69278c-9dd5-11e4-bcfb-059ec7a93ddc_story.html
Shin, 32, who lives in Seoul and whose testimony was a major factor in United Nations condemnation of North Korea for human rights violations, now says that he twice escaped to China from two different prison camps in North Korea. After his first crossing into China in 2001, he says he was caught after four months by local police and sent back to North Korea.
Shin now says that he was tortured in Camp 14 in 2002, when he was 20 years old, as punishment for his defection to China. In the book, he gave an account of being tortured in the camp when he was 13 years old. Shin has been telling that version for nearly nine years, since he first arrived in South Korea from China in 2006 and was debriefed by South Korean and American intelligence officials.
“When I agreed to share my experience for the book, I found it was too painful to think about some of the things that happened,” he said. “So I made a compromise in my mind. I altered some details that I thought wouldn’t matter. I didn’t want to tell exactly what happened in order not to relive these painful moments all over again.”
Escape from Camp 14 was first published by Viking in 2012 and published in paperback by Penguin in 2013.
It appears that much of Shin’s revised account is consistent with the story told in the book and with his testimony before a U.N. Commission of Inquiry on human rights abuses in North Korea: He says he was tortured in Camp 14, a sprawling prison in the mountains of North Korea. He also says he escaped the prison in 2005 by climbing over the body of a fellow inmate who was electrocuted on the fence that surrounds the camp.
But he has significantly revised details of his early life and substantially changed the dates and places of major events. He says that he was born in Camp 14, but when he was about six years old, he and his mother and brother were transferred to another nearby prison camp, Camp 18, located just across the Taedong River.
It was in Camp 18, Shin said, that he betrayed his mother and brother, after overhearing their plans to escape. It was also in this camp, he said, that he witnessed the execution of his mother and brother. (In the book, these events were described by Shin as occurring in Camp 14.)
For the first time, Shin now says he twice escaped from Camp 18 when he was a teenager, first in 1999 and then in 2001. After the first escape, he was caught within a couple of days. Following his second escape, he managed to travel to China. But police arrested him there, he said, and sent him back to North Korea. Guards returned him first to Camp 18 and then, for punishment and torture, to Camp 14, Shin said in the interview.
In Escape from Camp 14, Shin describes how guards tortured him by fire in that camp when he was 13 years old, when they suspected him of plotting to escape with his family. His lower back is still scarred from severe burns.
But in the phone interview, Shin said that he was actually tortured much later, when he was 20. It happened, he said, after his return from China. In Camp 14 in 2002, he said, guards confined him in an underground prison for six months, where he was repeatedly burned and tortured.
In was then, he said, that part of one of his finger was mangled, as guards pulled out his fingernails. In Escape from Camp 14, Shin said an angry guard cut off the finger because Shin dropped a valuable sewing machine.
Asked why he had altered such details, when they in no way changed the horror of his story, Shin said he thought the dates, places and circumstances were not all that significant.
“I didn’t realize that changing these details would be important,” he said. “I feel very bad that I wasn’t able to come forward with the full truth at the beginning.”
In light of my conversation with Shin, I am working with my publisher to gather more information and amend the book.
Last fall, the North Korean government released a propaganda video showing Shin’s father. In the video, his father says that Shin never lived in a political prison camp.
Shin has said that the North Korean government was forcing his father to lie.
Now, Shin said in the interview, he realizes that his altered story puts his credibility at question.
“I am asking for forgiveness,” he said.