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Kim Seong Min risked everything to escape from North Korea
The activist, poet and broadcaster died on September 12th, aged 63
Sep 25th 2025|5 min read
He could not shake the shackle off. At the other end of it was a North Korean officer, who went with him everywhere. If Kim Seong Min as much as used the lavatory, the officer came along too. For three days they were yoked like this, hostile twins, while the train crept through northern North Korea. The punishment for his crime, leaving North Korea without permission as a captain in the army, was public execution. But he was hatching a plan. As the lavatory became ever filthier, the officer at last let him go by himself. Once in, jumping to swing on a ceiling beam, he kicked out the wood-frame window and tumbled after. The train was going at around 50 miles an hour, but he was lucky; he landed in the soft-turned soil of a sesame field. Then, his broken shackle still dangling, he ran away.
It was his second escape. On his first, a well-tried route from Pyongyang to China by wading across the Yalu river, he had been picked up by the Chinese police, lightly tortured, handed to North Korean agents, tortured more and put on the train. After his jump, he was more successful. Undetected he got back to China, worked in a coal-briquette factory, managed to get counterfeit papers and three years later, in 1999, flew to South Korea as easily as any businessman. Yet his business was very different. It was to broadcast truth, by all means possible, back into his home country.
His reasons for escaping from North Korea were both proximate—disciplinary trouble in his army unit, illegal letters to his uncle in China—and slower-growing. For all his boyhood and for most of his ten years of military service he was completely loyal to the Supreme Leaders, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il: singing the songs of gratitude, cursing his country’s enemies. He never made much of a soldier, because he wanted to be a poet; a fine poet, like his father. It was rare that he even put on a uniform; assigned as he was to the arts and propaganda unit in Camp 620, he sat writing most of the time.** On marches or when training he made up poems to help the tedious stuff along.**
What began to bother him more were the leaflets. On some mornings, when he left his tent, the ground would be white with them, dropped from South Korean planes. They described how much food there was in South Korea, and how high car production was. He also had a radio, illegally tinkered with, that could pick up South Korean signals. These told him one day that Kim Jong Il had been born not under a rainbow on the slopes of sacred Mount Paektu, but in a military camp in Russia’s far east.
He wanted to dismiss these tales as propaganda, which of course he wrote himself. All the same, he knew that North Korea made relatively few cars, and that not only scarcity, but famine, stalked the land. In one scathing poem he talked of a man sacrificing his sister’s chastity for a handful of rice, and wondered why that rice should be cherished “above all else”. It was common to see corpses in the streets; he had once come upon a pile of 20, emaciated and writhing with maggots, outside a railway station. As for the Supreme Leader’s newly humdrum birthplace, it sounded like a lie, but could be true. A doubt was sown.
The leaflets also talked a lot about “freedom”. He was not sure exactly what that meant. But if it was a place, it might be worth going to. By 2004, after five years in South Korea, he knew it was. Freedom was “our breath”. Since the South Korean government, under its short-lived “Sunshine” policy of conciliation with the hermit kingdom, had stopped proclaiming freedom northwards, he set up Free North Korea Radio (FNKR) to do the job instead. He used short-wave to reach them; his tiny staff, almost all exiles, used pseudonyms. A brave band of stringers north of the demilitarised zone interviewed ordinary North Koreans, using small digital recorders, phones with prepaid Chinese SIM cards and Chinese memory sticks. Those were transferred hand-to-hand back to Seoul. When any of his team in the North fell silent, presumably arrested or killed, he was devastated.
North Koreans who dared to tune in found a station that was, in some ways, familiar: broadcasting in their own dialects, often on subjects they especially enjoyed. “Hello, my compatriots!” cried Mr Kim. Quite unfamiliar was the sound of their own countrymen (their voices electronically distorted) attacking the regime. They could also hear from exiles in Seoul about bright clothes, mains hot water and overflowing food tables, the things that had most dazzled Mr Kim. At his first debrief in 1999 he had not only been offered a Coke, a Sprite and rice wine, but a different drink for every day of the year. In the buffet, realising his new power, he took five fried eggs. The cook merely replaced them.
Money for his station was a struggle. The Americans gave funding, and also helped send out his programmes, but he did not want to be seen as their puppet. Attacks on FNKR were legion, as were threats to himself. He was sent untraceable, disturbing packages containing dolls stuck with knives, or dead mice. But nothing could deter him. His countrymen had been told repeatedly that they lived in heaven on earth. He and his team told them, for one hour twice a day, 365 days a year, that on the contrary they were slaves of the dictator, trapped like frogs in a deep well. Real heaven was freedom: to dress, to practise religion, to hold contrary opinions, as you liked. Heaven was freedom of choice.
Several of his poems, though, told a more nuanced story. He mourned the things he could not forget: the white forsythia at the foot of Moran Hill, the path at the edge of his village, the shyness of a sister, one of four, he had left behind. He remembered his mother in her sweat-stained apron, knitting late at night, or standing by the Taedong river in her homespun jacket. She was always smiling. **But he felt he had “gently laid a handful of dirt” on her. In South Korea, “this foreign land that is not foreign”, he kept calling for her. **Some ties were more easily cast off than others. ■
〈金成民——用自由的聲音打破北韓沉默〉
一位真正勇敢的人——金成民。
他是一位脫北者、詩人、也是廣播主持人。
他在 2025 年 9 月 12 日離世，享年 63 歲。
但他的一生，像是一首關於自由的長詩。
金成民曾是北韓軍隊的上尉。
他的「罪行」，就是想離開北韓。
那在北韓，是會被公開處決的。
他第一次逃跑失敗，被抓回去，又被拷打。
第二次，他被鐵鍊綁在一名軍官身邊，一起搭著慢慢行駛的火車。
上廁所時，軍官也要跟著。
三天後，廁所髒得軍官受不了，終於讓他自己去。
他一進去，就跳起來，用力踢破窗戶，從火車上滾了出去。
時速大約 80 公里，但他幸運地落在鬆軟的芝麻田裡。
鐵鍊還掛在腳上，他就這樣拼命地跑。
他再次逃到中國，在煤磚工廠打工，靠假證件過活。
三年後，也就是 1999 年，他終於飛到了南韓。
但他的「新事業」，不是賺錢，而是用廣播把真相傳回北韓。
他年輕時，其實是忠於金日成與金正日的。
他會唱頌揚領導者的歌，也寫愛國詩。
但有一天，他在軍營外看到地上滿滿的傳單，
上面寫著：「南韓有很多食物，有汽車工廠。」
他起初不信，還以為那是敵人的宣傳。
直到他偷偷改裝收音機，聽到了南韓的節目。
那裡說，金正日不是在白頭山的彩虹下出生，
而是在俄羅斯遠東的一個軍營。
那一刻，他心裡的信念開始動搖。
他看到飢荒，看過街上餓死的人。
他寫詩，寫一個男人為了米飯犧牲妹妹的尊嚴。
他開始懷疑：
「如果自由是一個地方，那應該值得去一趟。」
到了南韓，他明白——
自由就是「我們的呼吸」。
於是他創立了「自由北韓廣播電台」，
用短波把節目傳進北韓。
節目裡的聲音有時會被改音，
但聽眾聽得出，那是他們自己的語言。
「北韓的同胞們，你們好！」
節目裡，他這樣喊著。
他講南韓的生活：五彩的衣服、熱水、滿桌的食物。
這些，讓他第一次覺得自己真正活著。
資金不多，美國給了一些幫助，
但他不想被說成是美國的傀儡。
他收到過恐嚇信，甚至有人寄來插著刀的娃娃、死老鼠。
可他從未退縮。
他說：北韓人被告訴自己住在「人間天堂」，
但真正的天堂，是「選擇的自由」。
在他的詩裡，也有溫柔的一面。
他想念母親，想念村口的小路，
想念那株白色的迎春花。
他說：「我好像在母親的墳上，輕輕放下一把土。」
即使在南韓——這個「不陌生的異鄉」，
他仍然不停呼喚母親的名字。
有些枷鎖，可以掙脫。
但有些牽掛，永遠留在心裡。
è 這就是金成民的故事——
一個用詩與廣播，讓北韓聽見自由聲音的人。
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