Mick Hartley

The tale of a prison guard and a prisoner who escaped together from North Korea, at the BBC:

On the face of it, Kim and Jeon couldn’t have been more different. 

While she made her money illicitly, learning as she did about the world outside North Korea’s strict communist regime, Jeon had spent the past 10 years in the military as a conscripted soldier. He was steeped in the communist ideology of the country's dictatorship.

What they didn’t realise was how much they had in common. Both were deeply frustrated by their lives and felt they had now run out of road.

For Kim, the turning point was her jail sentence. This wasn’t her first prison term, and she knew that as a second-time offender she would be more harshly treated this time around. If she did make it out of prison alive, then returning to a life of brokering – and potential arrest again – would have been an extremely risky thing to do. […]

Jeon, although not fearing for his life, was also feeling deeply frustrated. 

He had begun his mandatory military service – routine tasks such as guarding a statue of North Korea’s founder and growing grass for livestock – intending to eventually become a police officer, a childhood dream. 

But his father had now broken the truth to him about his future. 

“My father sat me down one day and told me that realistically speaking a person of my background would never be able to make it [into that position],” he says. 

Jeon’s parents, like their parents before them, are farmers.

“You need money to advance in North Korea… It’s getting worse and worse… Even the test you take to graduate from university, it’s now taken for granted that you bribe professors for good results,” says Jeon. […]

But they are both glad to have left behind North Korea’s repressive regime.

“Looking back, we all lived in a prison. We were never able to go wherever we wanted, do whatever we wanted.”

“North Koreans have eyes yet cannot see; ears yet cannot hear; mouths yet cannot speak,” says Jeon.