The Hard Way Out

By EDWARD W. DESMOND/SEOUL

Cho Chang Ho, 63, has been to hell and lived to tell about it. The South Korean army lieutenant was reported killed in action during the Korean War, and he had been forgotten, even by his family. But all those years Cho was alive in North Korea. Last week he finally made it home and recounted his story in a tearful hospital reunion with his sisters and brother in Seoul. He says he was captured by Chinese soldiers and forced to fight in the North Korean army. When he tried to escape, he was sentenced to 12 years in a notorious gulag where so many inmates died of hunger, cold and beatings, he said, that "no one wept, no one expressed sorrow, no one asked how anyone died." After his release in 1964, he was sent to a coal mine, where he worked 13 years, until the dust ruined his lungs. From then on, after marrying and raising three children, he lived on meager rations and edible roots in a remote village near the Chinese frontier.

Two years ago, his children grown, Cho began studying how to escape. He befriended a Chinese smuggler and on the night of Oct. 3 stole to the banks of the Yalu River, where he met the smuggler and his well-hidden boat. A driving rain cloaked their escape from the numerous watchtowers and patrols, and in 10 silent minutes they rowed across to China. There he made his way to the port city of Dalian, where he found another Chinese smuggler, who transported him to South Korean authorities.

Cho joined a growing number of North Koreans who have risked their lives to cross the world's last cold-war frontiers, including the dangerous strip along the country's northern border with China and Russia. But the perils of flight have begun to look less daunting as economic conditions in the North deteriorate and word spreads of a better life elsewhere. Yo Man Chul, 48, an out-of-favor police captain, slipped across the frozen Tumen River on a dark night with his wife, two sons and daughter. When he finally arrived in South Korea, he said, "I thought there was no difference between dying while fleeing or dying by starvation."

This year 46 defectors reached South Korea, up from eight last year, and hundreds more are still in parts of China and Russia close to North Korea, taking shelter with large Korean communities there. China and Russia turn a blind eye toward the runaways, and South Korean diplomats in Beijing and Vladivostok sometimes help them, but many rely on a rudimentary underground run by Korean ethnics. There is as yet no wholesale stampede from the North similar to what happened in the last days of East Germany, but any openings like the agreement two weeks ago between Washington and Pyongyang just might give potential defectors an extra push. The refugees make good propaganda for South Korea, which stages press conferences for new arrivals and keeps them under close observation for several months to help them adjust to their new life and ensure that they are not double agents.

In interviews, South Korean intelligence personnel always accompany the defectors, and there is no way to check the accuracy of their stories. Some tales do not even ring true. Last year army Lieut. Kim Young Seon told debriefers that he knew of a coup attempt against Kim Il Sung and a nuclear accident that had claimed hundreds of lives. Most experts agree that in highly secretive North Korea, no low-ranking officer could have access to such information. Other defectors reveal secrets that sound plausible. Ahn Myung Jon, a military infiltration expert, said he used his skills to cross the heavily fortified DMZ on the 38th parallel after a disagreement with his superiors. He described being trained inside an uncannily accurate underground model of Seoul to insinuate himself into the capital. Given North Korea's success in sneaking agents into the South, the account had credibility.

A surprising number of defectors claim to have been Communist Party members in good standing who were fed up with the decline of living standards and the complete isolation of North Korea. Chung Kee Hea, 52, said he held a senior party job but still could barely feed his family. Last December he walked across the frozen Yalu, planning to get a job in China and then bribe guards to let his five children and wife join him. When he realized it was difficult to make a living on the run in China, he moved on to South Korea. The danger, Chung readily admits, is that his family, like that of any defector, may be imprisoned or even executed.

Dissatisfaction with the hard life in the North was on the mind of U.S. and North Korean negotiators when they concluded their deal two weeks ago. In exchange for curbing its nuclear development program, Pyongyang will get 500,000 tons of free heavy oil and growing ties with Washington that the regime hopes will help strengthen its grip. The U.S. is betting that more contact with the West will have just the opposite effect -- and that eventually the walls designed to keep North Koreans at home will crumble.

With reporting by K.C. Hwang/Seoul