North Korean journalist who defected speaks for those who cannot escape

Just two years ago, Zane Han couldn’t have imagined his life today: living in Seoul and writing whatever he wants about the North Korean government, which once tried to control his every move.

Han, a broad-shouldered, energetic man approaching middle age, has led a dizzying life. As a teenager, he survived the famine of the 1990s; later, he attended an elite university in Pyongyang, where bribes were often required to earn passing grades. Eventually, he worked for a North Korean construction company in Russia, where harsh conditions drove him to seek freedom.

Now sitting in an office in downtown Seoul, where he works as a journalist, Han struggles with what it feels like to have gone from old-world North Korea to the vibrant modernity that now surrounds him.

“It’s like being in a time machine,” he told VOA in an interview.

Han is one of the remarkably few North Koreans to have escaped in recent years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, North Korea has tightened border controls, intensifying a crackdown that began when North Korean leader Kim Jong Un seized power in 2011.

Forced labor

Han’s escape began in the far-western Russian city of St. Petersburg, where he worked as a guest worker for 15 hours a day, pouring concrete, installing rebar and laying bricks at various construction sites.

Han said he and his North Korean colleagues were given only two days off a year. They were confined to temporary container homes on construction sites and rarely allowed to leave — usually about once a year.

At first, Han didn’t see himself as a slave. It wasn’t until he heard his Russian colleagues refer to him as a servant of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un — a pawn of a mafia boss — that the reality of his situation began to sink in. It was a moment of self-realization and what Han describes as the initial shock that set him on the path to escape.

“Of course I knew that we don’t have freedom within North Korea,” he said, “but I didn’t expect that North Korea’s image (in the outside world) would be so bad.”

Still, he persevered, trying to make the most of the rare opportunity he had been promised: he could leave North Korea and send money to his family in Pyongyang.

Dramatic escape

The breaking point came during the COVID-19 pandemic, when North Korean authorities demanded an even bigger cut in the earnings of foreign workers. Han was suddenly left with only $100 to $150 a month, half of what he was earning before.

He’d had enough. The next time Han was allowed to leave the construction site, he called the United Nations refugee agency’s Moscow office, using a cell phone he’d bought for about $30 from an Uzbek colleague.

The UN office helped him escape, first to Moscow and then via a third country. Within 20 hours of fleeing the construction site, he had landed in South Korea, one of only 67 North Koreans to reach the South in 2022.

New pattern

According to Lee Shin-wha, who was South Korea’s ambassador for human rights to North Korea until earlier this month, Han’s escape reflects an important trend.

Like Han, the most recent escapees were already outside North Korea — living mostly in China and Russia, working as diplomats, businessmen or migrant workers, Lee said. Some had been living abroad for 10 or 20 years before fleeing Pyongyang’s control, she said.

According to a UN report this year, there are still around 100,000 North Korean workers abroad, earning money for the North Korean government, despite UN Security Council resolutions banning such activities.

Activists have long sought to reach North Korean workers abroad. Despite operating in tightly controlled environments, they may still have access to outside information.

However, Lee also highlighted the difficult situation people have been facing in North Korea, especially since the pandemic, when North Korea has cracked down on unauthorized border crossings.

“The chance (of escape) of ordinary North Koreans, I think, is almost zero,” she said. “That’s my big concern.”

To speak out

Han, whose entire family still lives in North Korea, is also motivated by those who cannot leave.

After spending three months at Hanawon, a government-run facility that helps defectors adjust to life in the South, Han settled in Seoul and now writes for NK Insider, an English-language website that aims to elevate North Korean voices. The project, funded by the U.S.-based Human Rights Foundation, was launched earlier this year.

Han has used his contacts back home to write stories that help expose human rights abuses, such as sexual violence in North Korean prison camps, and has devised a new system to encourage North Koreans to spy on their neighbors.

Although Han speaks with urgency – almost an evangelical zeal – he is also cautious. He uses a pseudonym in part to protect his family, with whom he has still not spoken two years after his defection.

Despite the challenges, Han sees his work as crucial to revealing the real conditions inside North Korea.

“Nobody can imagine what the situation is (in North Korea),” he said. “(But) I was there — I know.”