Trump’s North Korean defector: the harrowing full story

The harrowing full story of Ji Seong-ho, who managed to flee even though he’d lost a leg and a hand as a teenager | VIDEO

The sight of North Korean defector Ji Seong-ho hoisting a pair of homemade crutches above his head during extended applause will be one of the enduring images of the 2018 State of the Union address.

The 35-year-old managed to escape the dictatorship in 2006, President Donald Trump explained, even though he’d lost a leg and a hand stealing coal from a train as a teenager.

Since then he has worked as an activist helping others escape and directing pro-democracy radio broadcasts into North Korea. That won him the attention of the Oslo Freedom Forum — a human-rights group. He spoke to The Wall Street Journal on January 23.

The story he told began in North Hamgyong province, a frigid northeastern region of North Korea near its border with China and Russia, at the height of a famine in the 1990s. His town was near Camp 22, a notorious gulag 30 miles long and 20 miles wide where tens of thousands of prisoners toil at mines, farms and other hard labour. Trains laden with coal rumbled regularly out of the camp.

“The rumour we heard was if the prisoners failed to mine their daily quota of coal, they weren’t allowed to leave the mine,” said Mr Ji.

In 1995, government food rations stopped coming, he said. North Korea’s benefactor, the Soviet Union, collapsed years earlier, and North Korea’s economy ground to halt. Desperate, the Ji family — his parents and a younger sister and brother — started going to the mountains to collect grass and bark to eat.

“There is a particular tree with a soft layer under the hard outer bark that can be beaten and boiled until edible,” he said. “You can make a kind of cake by mixing the beaten pulp with cornstarch.”

After the last crops were harvested, they dug up and ate the roots. When those were gone, government officials told them to eat patches of earth that supposedly carried nutrients, Mr Ji said. They made a kind of cookie from the dirt.

His grandmother starved to death.

Ji Seong-Ho in Seoul in 2012.

By the late 1990s, North Korea was one of the world’s biggest recipients of food aid. Mr Ji said he heard about the donations, but never saw them. The closest he came was at an illegal market, where he traded a kilogram of corn for a large sack stamped with an unfamiliar logo. He had started stealing coal and wanted the bag to carry his haul. He later learned the bag was once filled with foreign aid.

“The problem with the aid was that the army was starving, too,” he said. “The people who were above us got the distributions.”

Mr Ji jumped coal trains in places where they slowed. He favoured trains that travelled at night, since the guards were more likely to be asleep. On a cold day in March 1996, he slipped while jumping between train cars.

The train sliced off much of his left leg and left hand. Soldiers stationed nearby made tourniquets of rags and took him to a nearby hospital in a cart. The hospital had no anaesthesia for him. The teenager faded in and out of consciousness as the doctor removed his leg and hand.

Back at home, he was alive but consumed by guilt. Seeing his younger sister and brother eat less so he could eat was unbearable. “I tried to die, but it is harder to die than you think,” he said. “After that, I started to think about how to live.”

His father made a pair of crutches, the same ones he hoisted during the State of the Union address. Missing his left hand, Mr Ji would tie that arm in place to use them. He then went back to stealing coal, hobbling alongside the trains, grabbing on with one hand and swinging himself aboard.

Asked how this is possible, he said: “Think of it this way, if you don’t do it, you don’t eat.”

Ji Seong-ho speaks to reporters at the White House on Wednesday. Picture: AP

Mr Ji resolved to defect after sneaking into China to obtain food in 2000. When he arrived back with rice, North Korean authorities arrested him and tortured him.

“We didn’t even get to eat the rice, they took everything,” he said.

In 2006, he nearly drowned crossing the Tumen River into China with his younger brother. He eventually made it to South Korea.

Mr Ji’s mother and sister also made it out. But Mr Ji believes his father was captured and tortured to death while trying to flee.

— by John Lyons, Eun-Young Jeong

The Wall Street Journal