THE TELEGRAPH: Hyok Kang, who escaped from his oppressive homeland in 1998, provides a unique and harrowing insight into Kim Jong-il's dictatorship, which can build nuclear weapons - but not feed its people
I was nine when I saw my first execution. The man had been condemned to death for stealing copper wire to sell in China, crossing the border under the cover of darkness. He was dragged to the foot of the mountain near a railway track. A train that happened to pass stopped to let passengers watch the scene.
Executions were a frequent occurrence in our small city, but the inhabitants never tired of them. Primary and secondary school pupils skipped classes to join the audience, which always consisted of hundreds, even thousands, of people. Posters went up in the city several days before. When the time came, the condemned man was displayed in the streets before being led to the place of execution, where he was made to sit on the ground, head bowed, so everyone could get a good look at him. He was dressed in a garment designed by army scientists for public executions, a greyish one-piece suit made of very thick, fleece-lined cotton. That way, when the bullets are fired, the blood doesn't spurt out but is absorbed by this fabric, which turns red. The body is thrown on a cart and then abandoned in the mountains for the dogs to eat.
was born on April 20 1986 in a village not far from Onsong, a city of 300,000 inhabitants in the north-east of the People's Democratic Republic of Korea, close to the Chinese border and Siberia. The city is divided into ku (districts) and ban (classifications) of 20 families. My parents lived in ban number three, in a semi-rural zone. The house was like dozens of others built on the same model and lined up in rows. There was a door, a single window, and a roof of curved orange tiles. The walls were white, but they had been painted blue to a height that I must have passed about the age of eight or nine. Each time the district officials came to check the hygiene of the houses, as they regularly did, they ordered us to change the colour of this lower part: to green, now blue, now light brown, but all the houses in our ban had to be the same colour; perhaps because dwellings, like everything else in North Korea, are the property of the people. That means that nothing belongs to anyone.
Inside were two rooms separated by a sliding door. The floors were covered with pale brown varnished floor-paper, and in the main room hung portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. That was compulsory. You had to call the father: "Dear respected comrade head of state Great Leader Kim Il-sung", or, more simply, "Comrade Great Leader". For his son, the formula was "Dear Leader Kim Jong-il", until Kim Il-sung's death in 1994; then we had to call him "Great Leader Kim Jong-il". >>> By Hyok Kang | Sunday, May 31, 2009
*This Is Paradise!: My North Korean Childhood by Hyok Kang, is available from Telegraph Books from £7.99 + 99p P&P. To order, call 0844 871 1516 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
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