Interviews with Ahn Myeong Chul

North Korea is most afraid of the United States, because it is the most influential country in the world today.

I think the U.S. has a huge responsibility and a huge role to play in fixing North Korean issues. I am not 100 percent content with what the U.S. government is doing regarding North Korean matters.

What I am hoping for is that the U.S. can apply even more powerful policy tools towards North Korea.

Currently, you cannot even attempt to communicate with North Korea. They simply are not a partner for talks. The sanctions have been proven to be useless so far.

So I’m hoping that the United States can carry out a more forceful policy where it isolates North Korea and applies even greater economic and military pressure, in the hopes that North Korea will collapse.

Along with other policy tools, the U.S. Government can assist NGOs that are currently working towards the democratization of North Korea.

We need to send programs and broadcasting into North Korea. Supporting NGOS would be quite important.

I think [North Korean] defectors are the ones that know best what to do with North Korea in the least amount of time, because they lived in North Korea. They understand the country. We have to induce internal collapse of North Korea.

I hope the United States really heeds the testimonies given by North Korean defectors. The U.S. should keep a close eye on the kind of work defector NGOs do, and try to reflect those actions in U.S. policy making.

In order to democratize North Korea, on the one hand, you have to apply strong pressure and sanctions. This has to be done by the international community, including the United States. The international community must seek ways to punish the dictators of the world.

On the other hand, I think the United States should assist NGOs, because they are the ones that are working to change the mindsets and philosophies of ordinary North Korean residents.

North Korean residents need to understand what a liberal, free democracy means. They need to understand what is really happening in the outside world.

Only when North Korea changes from both the inside and outside, can meaningful change really happen.

Ahn Myeong Chul was born in North Hamgyong Province in North Korea. As a teenager, he was the only person from his province selected to serve as a political prison camp guard. Ahn worked in several camps for a period of eight years where he was brainwashed into believing that political prisoners were enemies of the state unworthy of sympathy. As many as 130,000 men, women and children are imprisoned in North Korea’s vast system of gulags.

Although Ahn witnessed executions, starving children, and extreme torture, it was not until he became a prison truck driver that he questioned the system. Ahn would converse with prisoners he transported and was astonished to learn they knew nothing about the reasons for their imprisonment. It was his introduction to the country’s system of “guilt-by-association” punishment; in North Korea, whole families are incarcerated for the offenses of a single family member.

While on leave in 1994, Ahn learned that his father, a member of the ruling Workers’ Party, had committed suicide after questioning the regime’s rationing system. Ahn’s mother and siblings were imprisoned for his father’s offenses. Fearing that authorities would come for him, he fled to China and eventually reached safety in South Korea.

Since his escape, Ahn has become a North Korean human rights activist. He has provided testimony at the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and is now the secretary general of the organization Free NK Gulag.