True lies

On Aug. 20, 2013, Shin Dong-hyuk raised his right hand to show the missing top of his middle finger. When he was a child at Camp 14, North Korea’s most notorious life-term labor camp, a guard had chopped it off after he accidentally dropped a sewing machine—or so Shin told a UN commission of inquiry.

The only person known to have escaped a North Korean gulag, Shin is the most prominent advocate for North Korean human rights. No surprise then, that he was “Witness No. 1” at the UN public hearings into human rights in North Korea. For two hours, he patiently and stoically answered the commission’s painstaking, oftentimes personal questions. Handsome and soft-spoken, Shin looked dignified in a trim navy suit. Just seven years ago, he reminded the audience, “I was in an inmate uniform. Seven years ago, I was akin to an animal—like a pig.”

His suit covers the markings of 23 years in prison camp: Scars etch across his lower back and buttocks, around his ankles, and up his shins. Although the physical wounds have healed, his memories haunt him in his dreams. He may be comfortable physically, “but psychologically, I’m still in pain.” Turns out, that might have been the most truthful statement Shin uttered that day. In January Shin recanted key parts of his testimony, almost three years after it was published in the best-selling book Escape from Camp 14 with author Blaine Harden.

Shin’s admission confirmed what many defectors had long suspected: He didn’t spend most of his life in Camp 14. When he turned 6 or 7, his home village was incorporated into the less draconian Camp 18.

Shin twice ran away from Camp 18 in 1999 and 2000, only to be caught and tortured when he was 20, not 14 as he’d claimed. It was at Camp 18 where several crucial events in his testimony had occurred, most significantly his mother and brother’s execution. He’d altered even the most innocuous details: He now says he lost his finger during torture when a guard pulled out his fingernails.

Yet as Shin testified at the 2013 UN hearing, he unhesitatingly affirmed all accounts in the book were “100 percent accurate.” He reiterated that he was born in Camp 14, never leaving it until his escape at age 23. He then identified parts of Camp 14 on a satellite image: Here’s the farm where pigs and chickens were raised, he pointed, and there’s the village where the guards lived. He said all this convincingly, consistently, and sincerely—but by then, he’d had nine years to practice telling those false details, over and over and over again.

In a new foreword for his book, which will be added to the e-book and in future editions of the paperback, Harden wrote, “In retrospect, I should have done more to examine the psychological dimensions of his relation to truth.”

Shin, now 32, says the core of his story is still true: His stunted stature, physical scars, and symptoms of psychological trauma substantiate his claim as a camp survivor, according to medical experts. Shin told Harden that he thought the details of time, place, and circumstances “wouldn’t matter,” as long as the framework of the story remained. He now says he altered events because he found them “too painful to think about” and didn’t want to “relive these painful moments all over again.”

It’s common among traumatized refugees to “really, really, really struggle to communicate their stories,” said Kristen Orakwue, clinical director at the Center for Survivors of Torture, a nonprofit providing mental health services to refugees who survived torture and trauma. For people with post-traumatic stress disorder, any random thing can trigger symptoms, Orakwue said, “so you might rearrange events in your story to ensure that if something randomly triggers you, you don’t have to relay the exact specifics of what happened.”

Shin told Harden he’d lied because he was ‘terrified’ that people would ask, ‘Are you even human?’

Many refugees find vocalizing their memories too real and painful, and many have fuzzy memories on the chronology or location of certain events. But accurate details do matter in Shin’s case. His story has been so prominent, many fear his lies will shake the credibility of other refugees and distract precious attention from North Korea’s continuous human rights abuse. It appears Shin told half-truths, but the truths of his experiences remain bad enough to horrify impartial observers.

WHEN SHIN FIRST MET then-Washington Post correspondent Blaine Harden in 2008, he had no idea that within four years, he would catapult into international fame. That afternoon, he was a 26-year-old jobless North Korean defector meeting an American journalist for an interview and free lunch. It hadn’t been long since he was hospitalized for depression, and he was still suffering from nightmares.

Between shovels of rice and beef, Shin told Harden how his mother and brother were publicly executed after guards caught them trying to escape. Shin, according to the Post’s front-page feature, was “startled” to hear about their escape plan. Guards tortured him for months in an underground cell, trying to extract a confession from him about a “family conspiracy.”

The Post story attracted a torrent of emotional letters and offers of money, housing, and prayers. Yet Harden waited nine months before Shin finally said yes to expanding his story into a book (Shin shared half of the book’s royalties). Even so, interviewing him felt “like a dentist drilling without anesthetics,” Harden wrote in Escape from Camp 14. “He struggled to trust me,” Harden wrote of Shin; Harden too “sometimes struggled” to trust Shin.

Since the “Hermit Kingdom” prohibits free access and information, it’s virtually impossible to verify certain details of North Korean defector testimonies. Unable to interview inmates and guards or follow any paper trail, Harden vetted elements of Shin’s story as much as he could by cross-checking it with other camp survivors, scholars, human rights specialists, and research papers.

Then, a year into their interviews, Shin came clean to Harden: He was responsible for his mother and brother’s death. He had overheard them whispering about escape, and he had betrayed them for the empty guarantee of more gruel and fewer beatings. Shin told Harden he’d lied because he was “terrified” that people would ask, “Are you even human?” (In recent revisions, Shin further revealed he’d given false statements that they had committed murder—a fatal seal to their execution.)

What Shin didn’t foresee was that this revelation further humanized and dramatized his story. It had the whole package: physical gore, emotional angst, psychological tension, and family betrayal, all tied up for a novel perspective into a fascinating regime. The book met international acclaim, rocketed up bestseller lists, and was translated into 27 languages. Shin became a global celebrity. Shin perhaps saw an opportunity to do penance by becoming “the face of North Korea,” as many human rights advocates encouraged him.

But celebrity status created a dangerous situation for Shin, said Richard Mollica, a Harvard psychiatry professor and director of the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma. The financial, social, and moral incentives pushed an emotionally unready person to take on responsibilities before he was ready. “There’s this huge industry now marketing human suffering as entertainment,” Mollica said. “People like to hear disturbing details and find them rewarding and exciting, but for the person telling the story, it might be re-traumatizing.”

STILL, SHIN’S ACTIVISM played an influential role in shifting the media and public perspective. At the time, news on North Korea mostly was limited to either alarmist reports on nuclear security or satires of the country’s supposedly bizarre antics. But Shin’s book and public testimonies turned hearts and minds to the real people of North Korea.

That’s why firsthand accounts are so “absolutely crucial,” said Sokeel Park, director of research and strategy at Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), a nonprofit that aids North Korean refugees. Shin once worked for the group as an ambassador. The defector’s voice humanizes the inconceivable, said Park, and “builds more social and political pressure for change.”

Reading Shin’s book and meeting him and other camp survivors stirred UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay to champion an “in-depth inquiry” into North Korea’s human rights abuses, which Pillay called “not only fully justified, but long overdue.” The result was the UN inquiry’s 372-page compilation of defector testimonies and research—an unprecedented record of North Korea’s ongoing inhumane atrocities.

Then for the first time, several nations including the United States openly urged North Korea “to address the international community over its human rights violations.” Other nations also pointedly mentioned human rights during their diplomatic talks with North Korea. The dictatorship in Pyongyang fretted and threatened—but thanks to increased international pressure has reportedly begun restraining certain practices, such as forcing abortions on pregnant women repatriated from China.

Such is the domino effect of first-person testimonies. But very few North Korean refugees are willing or able to voice their experiences in public, said Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK), a Washington, D.C.–based research organization.

For the rare individuals who do step up, “you can tell for sure that it’s not easy,” Scarlatoiu said. “It takes a lot of courage, energy, and determination to be able to continue telling these compelling stories.”

For years now, Shin has traveled around the world reliving memories of torture, death, and shame to rooms full of strangers with foreign languages, backgrounds, and cultures. At times, he got disillusioned watching the international community talk and talk about change, yet accomplishing little.

At a conference on North Korean human rights in Seoul, Shin, who was invited as a panelist, reportedly expressed visible frustration and anger, calling such seminars “a waste of time.”

At the same time, North Korea began harassing him with slander and threats. Last October, North Korea released a video featuring Shin’s father denying the existence of prison camps and urging his son to repent. Shin was shocked—he had long assumed his father was dead. It’s well-known that North Korean authorities retaliate against known defectors by punishing their family back home. Recently, Shin told Scarlatoiu that he already blames himself for the death of his mother and brother—he couldn’t bear the responsibility of his father’s death as well.

It’s evident that Shin’s burden is a heavy, lonely one. “The problem is we don’t have enough people on stage,” Park said. “If we had 10 Shin Dong-hyuks, they would share the burden.”

SHIN’S RETRACTION comes at a crucial moment: Three UN committees have passed a resolution to refer Kim Jong Un and his henchmen to the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity. That they specifically called out Kim has North Korea more on edge than ever. The Interview, the comedy film about assassinating Kim, also has North Korean authorities paranoid that such mockery will infect its citizens.

Revelations of Shin’s inaccuracies, however, have shifted the spotlight away from North Korea’s tender spot. North Korean authorities pounced on Shin’s confession as evidence that the UN report is based on “lies” and demanded the “collapsed” UN resolution be withdrawn.

But Shin is only one of 320 individuals privately and publicly interviewed by the UN commission. Satellite images and medical examinations corroborate the accumulated evidence. That Shin spent time in Camp 18 is “a trifle,” said UN commission chairman Michael Kirby: “His camp may have been two stars on the horror scale whereas Camp 14 is three stars, but any detention camp in North Korea is horrible enough.”

Despite the inaccuracies, Shin’s story holds broader truths: He is one of millions of trauma victims going through the healing process as refugees, be they from North Korea, Syria, or Somalia. According to the latest UN report, civil war and persecution forced a startling 51.2 million people out of their homes in 2013—the highest record of forced displacements since 1989. Half of them were children, and some 16.7 million were refugees. Many of them, like Shin, witnessed brutal violence, torture, and degradation of human dignity. “We’re in a new refugee era,” Harvard’s Mollica said. Beyond their stories, their trauma too needs to be heard.