The South Korean Reverend Seungeum Kim has spent 23 years traveling thousands of kilometers through “impassable jungles and rivers”, along seemingly impassable routes, to fulfill the task to which he has dedicated his life: rescuing those who escape North Korea. “The North Koreans can only find freedom if they manage to complete an arduous route” of thousands of kilometers through China, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand, explains the man, founder of the Mission Caleba Christian church from which it coordinates and directs the process of fleeing “deserters” from the Kim Jong-un regime and with which it has managed to bring “more than 1,000” people to safety.
“I have broken bones and suffered injuries that have required surgery,” says Kim, who personally participates in many of the rescue missions, “dangerous journeys”, which in addition to the injuries have left him with a string of “criminal records” in various countries. “Once I was even arrested in China,” she explains during a meeting in the Oslo Freedom Forumthe convention of activists that Human Rights Foundation organized last month in the Norwegian capital. He gives few details of how he has managed to plan the tour over the years, for which he needs the cooperation of a “network of collaborators” in different countries. But despite the risks, he is convinced that “North Koreans who want to escape could not do so without the help of the Caleb Mission or other NGOs.”
The difficulties of this odyssey have recently been portrayed in the documentary Beyond Utopia, by American director Madeleine Gavin, released this year. The film, which reconstructs the flight of several North Korean families with the support of Pastor Kim through real images sometimes taken with mobile phones, has received the audience award at the Sundance Film Festival. “He’s the kind of hero Hollywood could make a movie about and then cast Mark Wahlberg as the lead,” the American film magazine said of him. The Hollywood Reporter in his review of the documentary.
A love story
Kim’s life change began on January 4, 2000. “I went on my first mission [como sacerdote] to a place in China bordering North Korea, and suddenly, walking near the Tumen River [que hace de línea divisoria natural entre ambos países] I saw a group of malnourished North Korean children”, narrates the pastor. “Please, sir, help your own people,” he recounts that they begged him. And at that precise moment when he was aware of his own prejudices — “they had always told me that North Koreans were very different from us,” he recalls — he decided that he was going to “give his life for those people”. “What would have led those children, who were so thin from lack of food, to risk their lives to run away?” he wonders. And the answer was very clear: the desire to escape misery and repression.
I have broken bones and suffered injuries that have required surgery
Seungeun Kim, founder of Caleb Mission Christian Church
At that time, I still didn’t know how I was going to help them. One more stimulus was needed to discover the routes along which thousands of North Koreans who wanted to leave the clutches of the Pyongyang regime would begin to transit shortly after. I arrive soon. “A North Korean defector came to the church I served in China, and we fell in love and planned a future together,” she says, with a smile. But that woman, who is now his wife and co-founder of the Caleb Mission, was not safe in Chinese territory. “Beijing arrests and repatriates North Koreans it finds to North Korea, it does not recognize them as refugees,” she criticizes. And for women it is even worse: “They have become the prey of human traffickers, who force them into prostitution or forced marriages in China.”
Pastor Kim began “walking through the deserts of Mongolia and the jungles of Southeast Asia” and even considered taking her out on the river in a boat. “I had to find a route to get the love of my life to South Korea from China,” he explains. Finally, he achieved it “by plane”, although he prefers not to clarify how he did it. That experience helped him to build the escape routes that North Koreans fleeing to South Korea have used in the last two decades. From 2001 to June of this year, a total of 33,304, according to data from Seoul. Although the actual number of those trying to escape could be much higher. “We don’t know the numbers of how many try to flee, because many are trapped in China or in other countries,” he laments.
Always with very few clarifications on how he prepares the rescues, Pastor Kim slips that the process begins when the Caleb Mission has evidence of specific people who want to flee, either because they manage to communicate with the organization or because relatives who have already managed to reach Korea. South look for them. “Currently there are more than 200 North Koreans who have contacted us to ask to be rescued, and 30 of them are in an emergency situation,” he warned.
However, since the outbreak of the covid pandemic, rescue missions have plummeted. “We had to stop them” as a result of the border closure imposed by Beijing, he grieved. According to official figures from South Korea, 1,047 North Koreans arrived in the country in 2019, a number that fell to 229 in 2020, the year in which the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global health emergency due to the coronavirus. In subsequent years, very few people have also managed to escape North Korea compared to previous years: 63 in 2021 and 67 in 2022. Only in the second quarter of this year have arrivals started to increase — between January 1 and On June 30, 99 people touched South Korean soil—according to official data, a situation that Seoul attributes to the relaxation of control measures imposed by China.
Despite the slight improvement, the situation continues to present more obstacles than before the pandemic. “The cost of the rescue has multiplied by five and it costs about 20,000 dollars [18.100 euros] per person”, says the priest. But he is not resigned: “I know that the situation is gloomy, but throughout my life I have experienced how the support of some people towards others and solidarity can change the world.”
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