Running Out of the Darkness

By Bill Powell/Seoul

On a winter's day in late 1998, Kim Myong Suk, 20, lay shivering and weak from hunger on the cold concrete floor of a cell in a prison camp in North Korea, not far from the Chinese border. She was five months pregnant and was about to lose her unborn child. Of all the horrors she recalls from that day, she says, two stand out. One is that her sister, who lived in a nearby town, had been brought in to watch what was about to happen to her. The other is the name of North Korean guard, the man who she says killed her unborn child: Hwang Myong Dong. It is not a name, she says, "that I'll ever be able to forget.''

Hwang, Kim says, referred repeatedly to the baby as "the Chink," because the father was a peasant from northeastern China, where Kim had fled earlier that year. As she lay on the prison floor, Hwang demanded that she abort the fetus herself. She refused, so the guard began kicking her in the stomach. Then he beat her and, as her sister screamed, continued beating Kim until she blacked out. When she regained consciousness, she says, she "was taken to a clinic in the camp, and in the most blunt manner, they removed [the fetus] from my body."

Eight years later, the memory of those traumas aren't far from her mind as Kim moves briskly through the streets of a town not far from Bangkok. It's just before dawn, the daily chaos of noise and traffic still hours away. Kim (a pseudonym she used to protect her family in North Korea) is about to meet, for the first time, the men responsible for saving her life. One is Kim Sang Hun, a lay Christian from Seoul. The other is the Rev. Tim Peters, a soft-spoken evangelical Christian pastor from Benton Harbor, Mich., who runs the Seoul-based charity Helping Hands Korea. More than any other Westerner, Peters has become the public face of a network of activists, many motivated by their Christian faith, who have devoted their lives to helping North Koreans, including many living illegally in China, escape to freedom in South Korea. He and others in the network compare it to the Underground Railroad, which took African-American slaves from the South to freedom in the North. The activists are convinced that their cause is as urgent as the abolitionists' was. "When we look back at this era, at what North Korea has done to its people, I'm convinced the civilized world will be shocked and also shamed," Peters says. "In the meantime, we do what we can."

That's getting riskier by the day. Two governments--North Korea and China--seek to put the Seoul Train out of business. For the past two years, the Chinese have conducted a strike-hard operation to round up and repatriate North Koreans who are in China illegally. It's working. The number of refugees making it out of China to South Korea fell to 1,217 last year, according to the South Korean government, down from a record 1,894 in 2004. Meanwhile, more and more activists running the railroad are getting caught in the sweeps. Underground-railroad activists told TIME that late last summer, Chinese authorities arrested an American who aids North Korean refugees in China. He remains jailed not far from the North Korean border in the northeastern city of Yanji, where he is awaiting sentencing, according to activists. A South Korean man involved in extricating Kim Myong Suk from China--who asked to be identified only by his nom de guerre, Hite--spent almost two years in a Chinese prison for helping North Koreans trying to escape.

The U.S. is taking notice. In a meeting with China's President Hu Jintao at the White House last week, President George W. Bush raised the case of Kim Chun-Hee, a woman recently deported to North Korea by the Chinese. "He said he felt that China needed to think about its obligations to these people ... and that the plight of the North Korean people is very important," says Dennis Wilder of the National Security Council. Activists like Peters view Bush as one of their own, a conservative Christian who is unafraid to speak the truth about North Korea and its dictator. ("I loathe Kim Jong Il," the President famously said in 2002.) Bush appointed former domestic-policy adviser Jay Lefkowitz last summer as a special envoy to deal with North Korean human-rights issues. A senior Administration official told TIME that a federal interagency group is developing procedures for how and whether to begin accepting North Korean refugees.

But the idea of opening doors to North Koreans is likely to face skepticism in Congress and from some diplomats in the State Department, who argue that the move will only further anger North Korea and sabotage the chances of a deal on its nuclear-weapons program. Legislation passed by Congress in 2004 calls for $24 million a year to help with accepting refugees from North Korea and to broadcast news and information there, but there has yet to be any funding appropriated to carry out the policies. So for the foreseeable future, at least, the best hope for desperate North Koreans is not politicians in Washington but a quiet American standing on a Thai street corner, waiting to greet one of the hundreds he has guided to freedom.

TIM PETERS CAME TO BE ONE OF THE founding members of the underground railroad long after he first arrived in South Korea. He was a senior at Michigan State University when he dropped out after what he calls "a highly transforming conversion to Christ." Within a few months, in 1975, he was in Seoul as a lay missionary, where he joined what has become Christianity's great success story in Asia. "Think of Korea's history," says Peters. "Conquest and occupation by other nations, poverty, civil war. It's fraught with suffering--suffering now experienced most acutely by North Koreans. This is the fertile soil in which the Gospel always thrives." About 30% of South Korea's population identifies itself as Christian. At night the neon crosses that sit atop countless churches in Seoul are visible as far as the eye can see.

When Peters arrived in South Korea, it was an authoritarian state. As part of his missionary work, he became involved in human-rights issues and was soon thrown out of the country for handing out leaflets that criticized the Seoul regime. After a new government came to power, he returned to Seoul in the late '80s and went back a third time in 1996. South Korea was by then a democratic, prosperous nation, but North Korea was in the midst of a horrific famine. "One night it just dawned on me. I wasn't here this time for South Korea. I was here for the North, to try to do the Lord's work and help people there. It couldn't have been any clearer." Peters formed Helping Hands Korea in 1996, and within just two years, as refugees tried to escape the famine, the beginnings of the underground railroad took shape. The organization's mission became more focused: helping North Koreans in crisis, people who really needed help getting out.

Kim Myong Suk was one of them. In February 1998, she fled North Korea for China. In October of that year, however, Chinese police conducted one of their periodic raids in search of refugees from the North. She tried to hide, but two policemen discovered her. She was arrested and sent back to North Korea, where she was sentenced to three years in a labor camp. "We were so hungry in the camps that we used to pick up and eat the remains of apples that the guards had thrown away." After a year and a half, during which she says she was beaten and had the forced abortion, she was released under a special amnesty decree.

She went to live in Onsong, a town near the border with China, and quickly decided that she would try to flee again. Her mother and an older sister had followed her out of North Korea and were living in Heilongjiang, a province in northeastern China. Refugees say the most common way to cross the 900-mile North Korea-- China border is to bribe a guard on the Korean side. Kim, however, relied on a friend who lived near the border and each night watched the routes patrolled by the guards. "You knew where they were going to be and where they weren't going to be and when," Kim says. "My friend guided me." On a bitterly cold night in early March 2002, she went for it. "My head and my heart were pounding," she says. If caught--either in the attempt or in China--she would have received at least a long prison sentence and could quite possibly have been executed. At 2 a.m., with no guards in sight and clutching just one small bag with a change of clothes in it, she hustled across the frozen Tumen River and into China for the second time.

At the time, Kim says, she had no thoughts of going beyond China. While she was in the labor camp, her mother had begun attending a church for ethnic Koreans. "I started to pray for her all the time there," her mother says. In February 2004, after Chinese police raided the church, Kim's mother and sister fled to Seoul, but Kim didn't follow. "I was frightened by what had happened to me the first time," she says. "I didn't want to try to get out and risk getting caught." For the next year, Kim lived a quiet life with her new husband, a Korean-Chinese translator. But the fear of arrest gnawed at her. Her Chinese was not fluent, and in 2005 the crackdown on refugees intensified. Because of her forced abortion, she could not have children, which caused irreparable strains in her marriage. In October 2005, her mother met Kim Sang Hun--a prominent underground-railroad activist in Seoul who took the case to Peters. The two of them started working on the logistics of Kim Myong Suk's flight to freedom.

A successful operation needs money, a meticulous plan and reliable people. The operatives working in China are critical. Peters and Kim Sang Hun prefer to depend on fellow Christian activists but will work with trustworthy brokers. There's no magic formula for knowing how many people or how much money is needed. Nor can the route be specified in advance, although right now there are two hot roads out of China--one through Mongolia, another through Laos.

On Nov. 15, 2005, Kim Myong Suk told her mother she was ready to go. Peters had raised $1,500 for the operation, and he and Kim Sang Hun had recruited four people to help. Kim Myong Suk's husband did not intend to leave China but accompanied her to the Laotian border. That was critical; it meant there was no need for safe houses, since the authorities would see just an ordinary couple traveling through the country. On Dec. 9, they boarded a train headed for the city of Kunming in southern China. Several days later, with the help of two fixers hired by Peters, Kim reached China's southern border with Laos.

She thanked her husband, said goodbye and climbed into a taxi that headed for the heavily guarded border, deep in the mountainous terrain where Laos, China and Burma meet. Kim and her guide got out at a remote spot and started to walk. For two hours they trekked through the mountains until they met a car, which took them to Vientiane, where Hite, the activist once arrested by the Chinese, was waiting. On Dec. 24, Kim called her mother in Seoul, and Hite called Kim Sang Hun and Peters. A month later, Peters and Kim Sang Hun went to Thailand to meet the latest survivor of the journey along the underground railroad. When Kim Myong Suk saw the two men waiting for her, she grasped Kim Sang Hun's hand and stared at the ground speechless, overcome with gratitude and pain.

ON A RECENT SUNDAY MORNING, PETERS stands at the pulpit of Youngnak Presbyterian Church, one of the oldest churches in Seoul. The congregation is more than 2,000 strong, joined together in a two-day prayer vigil for North Koreans. Though buoyed by Kim Myong Suk's success, Peters is weighed down by the arrest of that American activist now jailed in Yanji, China, a man in his late 60s. He wonders who will take his place, and the place of other, older activists. "Where are the young soldiers to step into the place that older missionaries now fill?" he asks the congregation. He steps down from the pulpit, and the organist begins playing the anthem associated more than any other with escape from bondage. In Korean, 2,000 voices swell to sing The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

With reporting by Matthew Cooper/ Washington, Donald Macintyre/Seoul