As Kim Jong-un’s recent 12,400-mile round trip to Moscow on a 35mph train demonstrated, the art of leaving North Korea can be an intricate business, requiring in his case bulletproof windows, an onboard helicopter and lobsters by the plateful.
By contrast Kim Seongeun, also known as Pastor Kim, oversees a different kind of departure from North Korea: highly dangerous, unsanctioned, clandestine escapes from Kim Jong-un’s totalitarian and often insane-seeming regime. Based in Seoul and founder of the Caleb Mission, Pastor Kim has been in the escape business since 2000. His exploits are now the subject of Beyond Utopia, a gripping film that won the Audience award for US documentary at this year’s Sundance festival.
Although it gives some predictably dystopian glimpses of daily life in North Korea, the film’s true value lies in showing first-hand the desperate lengths to which a fugitive family of five – the Woos, including a grandmother of 80 – went in order to escape the deranged dynasty that has been ruining their country since 1948. Plotting their path to freedom by phone from South Korea, Pastor Kim is a gently smiling devout Christian brought to his calling after seeing a score of bloated dead bodies floating on the heavily guarded Tumen River, which separates North Korea from China.
Like Germany’s Oskar Schindler, Britain’s Nicholas Winton and Spain’s Ángel Sanz Briz, Pastor Kim clearly finds the desire to save the persecuted can become a compulsion, especially when it is also a religious calling. “Once you become aware that you can save innocent lives, it is hard to stop,” he says, adding that he thinks he may have brought 1,000 people out of tyranny in the course of 20 years, many of them taking perilous journeys through China, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand.
Understandably, there is a limit to what he can disclose about how he guides refugees through the jungle and across the Mekong River but, judging by the film, he clearly does not operate on a wing and a prayer. Everything is meticulously planned, requiring a network of safe houses run by “brokers” motivated mainly by cash not ideology. Beijing does not recognise asylum-seekers and immediately repatriates anyone captured, sending them back to appalling detention camps, so secrecy is paramount.
Much of the filming in Beyond Utopia is by mobile phone, held by the refugees and their underground handlers. By no means does every rescue work. The wife of one broker informed the Chinese police, Pastor Kim recalls, leading to the arrest of seven orphans aged under 10 who had been hiding in her home.
He admits Covid has made his rescue missions considerably harder since both the Chinese and North Koreans responded to the pandemic by trying to seal themselves off from the outside world. Both sides built new security fences along the Yalu and Tumen rivers. He estimates escapes fell by more than a third. The same is true to the south. According to official South Korean figures, 1,047 North Koreans arrived in the country in 2019, a number that fell to 229 in 2020, when the World Health Organization declared an emergency. In the following years, fewer people still managed to escape.
The cost of hatching escapes has also risen. “Just 20 years ago,” says Pastor Kim, “a guard might be bribed $5 and they would let people cross. Now, if they are caught taking a bribe, not just them but their family gets imprisoned, so the risk is higher.” As a result, the price of a bribe can be as high as $5,000, while the total cost of an escape can reach $20,000.
There are also new travellers on the underground network jacking up prices. Wealthy Chinese dissidents from Hong Kong are trying to escape too, and they are willing to pay more to a broker to get them across the jungle. “It is very sad that we are talking about the price when we are rescuing lives,” says Pastor Kim, “but costs constrain our activities.” Some of his donors, he laments, say they would prefer to fund a church.
Chinese technology is also making his mission harder. “We had two sisters escaping by train but the station’s facial recognition cameras recognised that they were not Chinese, and they were caught. Overall, I have 300 people hiding in China and 30 need emergency treatment because they are facing abuse from their husbands, or they are having to sell their babies.”
The price he has personally paid is extreme. “Previous falls overseeing escapes means I have a severe neck injury, a metal rod in my back, and I have had surgery to remove my gall bladder. My mother and brother went to jail in China. My son passed away when he was seven in an accident while I was on a mission abroad. I could not protect him because I was away. But it meant my wife and I resolved to do even more to help orphans. If I did not have faith, I am not sure I would carry on, but I do what is God’s will.”
His mission is not just to rescue individuals from a totalitarian regime, and help them to resettle, but to end its rule. Indeed, he sees the two as inextricably interwoven. “If a family member defects and learns the truth about the outside world, they contact family members still there to tell them they have been brainwashed. That is the biggest threat to, and best way to collapse, the North Korean regime.”
He likens the regime to a religious cult. “The only way to understand North Korea is as a religion. Kim Il-sung [the ruler who died in 1994] is the God. Kim Jong-il [died in 2011] is the son of God, as is Kim Jong-un. But alongside the guise of deity, there is communism. You need to see this as a religion combined with communism, and they are to be worshipped as such. It is weird because Kim Il-sung’s parents were Christians. His grandfather was a pastor.” So the family kept the apparatus of worship intact – but applied it to themselves to become the saviours of Korea.
“The regime does not care if the people are starving to death,” he says, “because the people think it is America’s fault. They’ve been brainwashed for 70 years to think that. They have nuclear weapons to tell the outside world, ‘Do not touch us’ – and to maintain their family’s power.” Would they ever use them? He doubts it. “If they did, they would no longer be in power. They would be dead.”
Asked why neither diplomatic engagement nor confrontation has changed North Korea, the pastor smiles and retreats apologetically, saying: “I am not a political figure. Everyone asks why North Korea has not changed yet. God never changes. God is always the same. God wants everyone to change. The Kim family think they are God and want everyone to change to suit them.”
There is some sign that Pastor Kim may now be catching a tide. Joe Biden has just appointed Julie Turner as his special envoy for human rights in North Korea, a post that has been left unfilled for seven years. He says he has met young people who want to put satellites over North Korea so ordinary families can have their eyes opened to an alternative to state TV’s diet of dictator worship. But there is a lot of misperception to unravel, as the film shows. Arriving at a safe house in Vietnam, the Woo family is bewildered to see lights on and a tap running continuously. “This,” one of them sighs, “is a haven on earth.”
Beyond Utopia is released in UK cinemas on 27 October
