Kim Seongmin, a former military propagandist who fled North Korea by jumping off a train, defected to the South and from there, as a human rights campaigner, broadcast news to his isolated home country in the face of death threats, died Friday in Seoul, South Korea. He was 63.
His death, in a hospital, was announced by his station, Free North Korea Radio, which is based in Seoul. He told The New York Times in November that cancer that had started in his lungs had spread to his liver and brain, and that doctors were giving him only months to live.
Although he could not work or sleep without painkillers, Kim continued to broadcast twice a day into his last weeks. His reports, by shortwave radio, brought North Koreans information that they could not get at home because all news media there is controlled by the government.
Free North Korea Radio has aimed to chip away at the personality cult that underpins the totalitarian rule of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un. North Korea has compared South Korean television shows known as K-drama and other outside media content reaching its people to a “vicious cancer.”
It has enacted new laws in recent years to suppress such material by imprisoning people who watch or possess it and exacting even harsher punishment, including execution by firing squad, of those who put movies, K-pop videos and other material in the hands of North Koreans.
“Our goal is to help North Koreans realize that they are living not like free humans but like trapped animals,” Kim Seongmin said.
Kim Seongmin was born in 1962 in Huichon, North Korea, the only son in a family of seven. His father, Kim Sun Sok, was a poet and professor at the prestigious Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang. Kim Seongmin joined the military at 17 and composed poems while marching and training. He eventually became an officer in charge of propaganda in his artillery unit.
Propaganda was a key part of military life.
“It’s all about patriotism — anti-American, anti-Japanese and anti-imperialist,” he told the Times in November, speaking in his home, in a rural area west of Seoul, where he recorded and edited programs while fighting cancer. “In a skit I wrote, a soldier on the stage didn’t know rice prices, he didn’t know medicine prices, he didn’t know anything — except that he should be ready to give up his life for the party and the leader.”
“As a writer,” he added, “I had to write it in such a way that soldiers watching the play went wild clapping.”
His military career began unraveling when other soldiers in his unit stole trumpets, a drum set and other Japanese musical instruments from an arts troupe in a nearby town. An investigation began. Soon, political officers learned about a letter that Kim Seongmin had tried to send to an uncle of his in South Korea by first sending it to relatives of a fellow soldier in China.
Kim Seongmin was a captain when he fled to China in 1995. He reached Tianjin, where he hoped to get aboard a ship as a stowaway to escape to South Korea. But he was caught by the local police at the harbor. Handed over to North Korean agents, he was put on a train to take him home to a certain death penalty. One agent shackled one hand to one of Kim’s and even followed him into the toilet. It was a long journey: Because of inadequate electricity in North Korea, the train would crawl, stop and crawl again.
“After three days, the train toilet became so incredibly dirty that the officer uncuffed me and let me use it alone,” Kim said. “That was the last and only chance I had to jump out the window and run.”
He made it back to China, where he worked in a coal briquette factory in Yanji and married an ethnic Korean woman there. In China, he saw a banana for the first time.
“I was at a loss how to eat it. I tried eating the peel first,” he said. “When I later saw a monkey in the Yanji zoo peeling bananas to eat the fruit inside, it was one of those moments that I realized what a cheated life I had had in North Korea.”
He finally succeeded in connecting with his uncle in South Korea, who helped him escape to that country from China in 1999. During a 10-month debriefing at a government facility in the South, Kim marveled that the faucet in his room could produce both hot and cold water. In the buffet cafeteria, he found, people were free to decide how much they wanted to eat — something unimaginable in the famine-stricken North.
“I took five fried eggs from the tray to see what would happen,” he said. “The chef glanced at me and refilled the tray without comment.”
Kim was leading an association of North Korean defectors in Seoul in 2004 when he saw that the two Korean governments had suspended their propaganda war in a rare detente, with the South agreeing to switch off its government-funded loudspeaker broadcasts along the inter-Korean border. Kim said he considered that pact a huge mistake, because it deprived many North Koreans of their only source of outside information.
In the North, authorities required all radio sets to be registered and altered them to receive only government channels. But many people tinkered with them themselves to receive broadcasts from the South.
In the North, Kim had kept two sets: one for government broadcasts and the other for signals from the South. It was through South Korean broadcasts that he learned that North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong Il, the father of Kim Jong Un, was not born on the slopes of the North’s sacred Mount Baekdu, as Northern propaganda said, but in Russia’s Far East.
“If the government didn’t want to do it, I thought defectors like me should do it,” he said of South Korea’s decision to dial down broadcasts.
Kim Seongmin launched Free North Korea Radio in 2004, with a staff of several defectors and volunteers, and the backlash was swift.
Untraceable postal packages were delivered to his office containing dolls smeared with red paint and stuck with knives. One package contained seven dead mice. One day, a call came in from China. On the other end was an officer Kim had befriended in North Korea. He warned that Kim should stop criticizing the North in his broadcasts if he didn’t want his sisters in the North hurt.
In 2012, North Korea arrested a defector who it said had slipped back into the North from South Korea to dynamite statues of its leaders. It fingered Kim as the mastermind behind the plot and vowed “merciless retaliation.” He denied involvement. But like other outspoken North Korean defectors in the South, he lived under round-the-clock police protection.
Seoul has turned its official propaganda broadcasts on and off, depending on the inter-Korean mood. Under President Lee Jae-myung, who supported reconciliation with the North, it again stopped those broadcasts, saying that they did little other than provoke Pyongyang.
Kim Seongmin is survived by his wife, Moon Myong-ok, and their daughter, Kim Ye-rim.
“I will miss him greatly, but I promised him before he died that we would continue this work,” said Suzanne Scholte, president of the Defense Forum Foundation, a nonprofit human rights group based in Falls Church, Virginia, that has supported Kim’s work.
And Lee Si-young, a leader of Free North Korea Radio, has vowed to pick up where Kim left off. On Friday, the day he died, the radio station began the morning with his familiar, prerecorded opening: “Hello, my compatriots in the North!”