I defected from North Korea twice. Now, I’m standing to be a Tory councillor

A few years ago, in 2021, Timothy Cho was canvassing on a doorstep in Greater Manchester wearing a Conservative Party rosette when a woman shouted that his party leader – Boris Johnson, at the time – was “a dictator”. Cho was nonplussed. “She was yelling at me for, I think, around 15 minutes,” he says. “And I didn’t move. I just stood there. I listened to her… It was actually a happy moment. Because if she did that in North Korea, she would have been executed.”

Cho has a deeper appreciation for British democracy than most. Born and raised in North Korea, he was abandoned by his parents when they fled the country during the famine of the mid-1990s (dubbed “the Arduous March” by its government). He was just nine years old. As the son of defectors, he was ostracised as a member of the “hostile class”, had no access to education, and knew he would be subject to dangerous enforced labour. He finally escaped the country aged 17 after one failed attempt and four imprisonments, and eventually sought refuge in the UK.

His experiences have led him to believe that Britons underappreciate our democracy – not least the right to vote in fair and free elections. “Especially in the younger generations. I’m nearly 40, and [the younger] generations haven’t experienced what it means to have a life without freedom,” he says. “Freedom is very fragile; once it is taken away, it is hugely costly to get it back.” He is overjoyed when he has a conversation with someone who intends to vote. “Even if they say, ‘Sorry, we vote Labour’. That’s fine. At least you’re using your vote.”

He remembers being at a polling station in North Korea. “I was following my parents – people lined up, nicely dressed. And at the door, someone gives you an envelope,” he says. “You don’t even know what’s inside. There’s just one candidate. And you put it in a box. And if you don’t, you end up in prison. And that is what they call a democratic election.”

It is for that reason – alongside his work as a human rights activist and in the secretariat to the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on North Korea – that he decided to run as a local councillor. He first campaigned in 2021 in Denton South (part of the Gorton and Denton constituency, where Green MP Hannah Spencer was recently elected). He was unsuccessful there on two further occasions; this year, he is running again in nearby Heatons North, part of Stockport Metropolitan borough council. The ward has had Labour representation continuously for the past decade, but with the split that could occur between Labour and the Green Party, Cho says “anything could happen” when the ballots boxes open on Thursday.

Cho is speaking to me over Zoom from his home office. He chose to join the Conservatives because he feels they best reflect his values of true democracy, religious freedom and a respect for history. “When I look at my idols – William Wilberforce and Winston Churchill – they stood and fought for democracy and freedom today.”

If elected, he intends to focus on the issues that really matter to local people. “I promise three things on the doorstep: Stockport has very high council tax, which needs to be addressed. The second thing is that people aren’t satisfied with local services, and there are lots of potholes – an issue up and down the country. The third thing I have promised is that I will be very visible. That is what a councillor is for.”

Cho was born in the late 1980s – he does not share the exact year for security reasons – in Onsong, a county in the far north of the country, to schoolteacher parents. He bowed to pictures of the Kim family every morning before he left for school. “That held the role of religion in your life,” he says. “We worshipped them, we loved them, we gave everything.”

From middle school, he wore a patriotic lapel badge, as virtually all North Koreans do, and took part in mandatory “self-criticism sessions” – a sort of secular confession – where he admitted to his shortcomings and was criticised by his peers.

North Korea is consistently rated as the worst country in the world for religious freedom and, by one estimate, between 50,000 and 70,000 Christians are currently imprisoned because of their beliefs. He was taught that Christianity was invented by America, and that America was trying to destroy North Korea. Jeans were banned for similar reasons, and both men and women could only choose from a selection of permitted hairstyles. However, he did not realise that the extreme restrictions on his life – with no freedom to travel or watch non-state-sanctioned television – were abnormal until his parents defected.

“I still remember the day they disappeared,” he says. “I had breakfast with them and there was silence; something was going on.” His mother waved him off for an unusually long time, lingering until he was out of sight. “I went to school, but I couldn’t focus all day. And then I went home and opened the door; you could feel it. The atmosphere was frozen and I knew my parents were gone.”

Cho – who goes by an English first name that he chose when he fled – was eventually taken in by his grandmother, but, at first, the severe famine meant she could not afford to look after him and he was forced to live on the streets in Onsong.

He first tried to leave the country aged 17, when he was told that, instead of joining the army, as all young North Korean men must, he would be subject to forced labour in the country’s dangerous coal mines because his father had betrayed the country.

Along with three others, he made the dangerous journey across the Yalu River and over the border into China. “I was terrified because I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew I had to escape,” he says. It was the first time he had seen people with different hairstyles and wearing jeans. They made it all the way to the border with Mongolia before they were caught, arrested and repatriated.

That was his first experience of a prison and detention centre. “Something happened that still lives with me today,” he says. “We were all crammed into a room; there were about 55 inmates. A man who was leaning against me was getting heavier and heavier, and I realised early in the morning that he had died. You could hear men and women screaming, being tortured and beaten. That was hell.”

As soon as he was released, he knew he had to escape again. This time, he made it to Shanghai. Cho broke into an American-run international school in the city, hoping he would be offered assistance. Instead, the Chinese police were called. He knew that if he were returned to North Korea, he would likely be publicly executed. What he did not know at the time was that a student at the school had contacted a journalist about what had happened.

The story was picked up by newspapers across the world, forcing China’s hand. Instead of being repatriated for a second time, he was released. He was given a choice of where to go next. “I could only remember England, because North Korean high schools teach some English,” he says. So England it was.

He had to take “baby steps” towards freedom: first learning English in the soup kitchen of a local church in Bolton, where he was placed by UK immigration services at the age of 19, then getting an education.

“I never thought I would enter politics,” he says. He was illiterate when he arrived in the UK as a refugee, but completed an English course and then took both GCSEs and A-levels (in chemistry, physics and maths), before going on to study politics at Salford University and then a Master’s in International Relations and Security at the University of Liverpool.

Soon afterwards, he found a job as a parliamentary assistant and worked for the then Conservative MP for Congleton, Fiona Bruce.

After a chance encounter with Lord Alton, who chairs the British-DPRK All-Party Parliamentary Group, Cho was invited to visit Parliament for the first time in 2013. “That was a very overwhelming experience. To come from where I had, as a homeless boy in North Korea, escaping the terrible atrocities I had experienced,” he says. It gave him a completely different view of what politics could be.

“I saw, while dealing with many of these constituency issues and letters, and hearing people’s stories, that Britain is one of the finest democracies I know,” he says. “I have been given great opportunities in this country, and the people of the UK have given me a second chance. Now, I regard it as my home.”

He married in 2018, but keeps the name and identity of his wife – and their two children – private for security reasons. “Thankfully, there is no threat on British soil, but North Korea still follows us, and [there is a risk] if I am travelling outside the UK,” he says.

He is reminded of his freedom every morning as he walks his seven-year-old to school in Stockport and when she tells him about the songs they sing in assembly. “That is not how I grew up. I grew up singing the same song for the Kim family [the three-generation lineage of North Korean leadership], brainwashed,” he says. “We regarded them as gods. But in Britain, we still have freedom, we still have choices… even if that is being threatened in many ways right now.”

The main threat, as Cho sees it, is an encroachment on freedom of speech. In particular, he laments the fact that the teaching of the Bible and Christian religious education are disappearing from UK schools.

“In the first sentence of Magna Carta, it emphasises freedom of religion,” he says. “Once we stop talking about core parts of British identity – including the Church of England, as we are a Christian country – [we will be] diminished.”

Having escaped to China and been arrested for defecting from his home country, Cho himself experienced a dramatic conversion to Christianity in a prison cell in Shanghai. His cellmate – a South Korean “gangster” – gave him a Bible and taught him to pray. That day, he struck a deal with God: if he escaped what was a near-certain death sentence, he would devote the rest of his life to Him. China then made the unprecedented decision to release Cho, something he now believes was a miracle.

But at one point after arriving in the UK, the trauma of what had happened caught up with him. “There was a certain period every night when I couldn’t turn the light off,” he says. “I even thought I was going to commit suicide.” It was only thanks to his strong Christian faith, he says, that he was eventually able to find the strength to forgive those who had harmed him in prison, and his parents for abandoning him as a child.

“In front of the church, I declared I forgave them. And that was quite powerful.” Years after his parents had abandoned him, he visited his mother at a care home in South Korea, where he was able to tell her in person that he forgave her for what she had done.

“I can say confidently that I’m rehabilitated now,” he says. “But I have also realised my past didn’t let me go for a long time – I was going through a lot of anger and hatred…”

He has been a committed Christian ever since and works as a part-time spokesman for Open Doors, a charity that supports persecuted Christians in countries including North Korea.

That woman on the doorstep – the one who shouted at him in 2021 – is one of the reasons he is standing again in this week’s local elections. “She said, ‘You never know, I might change my mind’,” says Cho. “She is testament to the fact that [in Britain] we have a choice. We have several candidates, and you can put them all on the table and choose between them.

“I want people to remember that many others don’t have that privilege – in countries like North Korea and China, never mind what’s happening in Russia. In Britain, every person, on every doorstep, has that choice.”

[Source: Daily Telegraph]