— Why do you want to return to North Korea?

— It’s a long story. I have to tell you what has happened over the last 70 years…

Ahn Hak-seop is a relic of the Cold War. To visit him, you must also go to a place where the Cold War is still alive.

The fence crowns a landscape of farmland. “That over there is North Korea,” says Pastor Lee Jeok, who is driving the car. Beyond the barbed-wire fence, anti-tank defenses are visible on the South Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the border strip between the two Koreas; then, the leaden waters of the Han River unfold. On the opposite bank, the bluish hills of the world’s most isolated country come into view. Technically, both sides are still at war.

Pastor Lee is the contact to reach Ahn. He has just passed through a military checkpoint to access this area under the control of the South Korean army, due to its proximity to the North. Here, in this small village in Gimpo, about 25 miles northeast of Seoul, is Pastor Lee’s parish, the Mintongseong Peace Church. He professes the Christian faith, but when asked about it, he says the church is dedicated to the reunification of Korea and to carrying out anti-American activities.

Regarding U.S. President Donald Trump, who landed in South Korea the same day in late October that EL PAÍS visited Lee, the pastor says: “It’s as if he’s come to inspect a vassal state.” His is an unusual parish. After driving up a tree-lined road, he stops the car in front of a house with an overgrown garden, where weeds climb everywhere, and a banner hangs by the entrance: “Return Ahn Hak-seop, the world’s longest-serving prisoner of war, to the North immediately, 42 years.”

Upon crossing the threshold, a U.S. flag doormat awaits, positioned so that it’s the first thing one steps on. Inside, Ahn Hak-seop, a 95-year-old former communist soldier in the North Korean army, listens to a Soviet military march on his cell phone. A friend of the pastor for many years, he now lives at the parish, near the border.

Ahn rests his hands on a walking stick and wears a felt hat. He was taken prisoner by the South in 1953. Convicted of espionage, he suffered brutal torture, but never signed a confession. He spent 42 years in prison and was one of the few who never changed his ideology. His unwavering gaze reflects his unyielding beliefs: “People don’t realize that we are like slaves under American colonial rule,” he says about South Korea.

The South Korean press calls him a “long-term prisoner who has not converted.” He is “one of six elderly former North Korean soldiers and spies who have not yet renounced their communist beliefs linked to North Korea, despite having spent decades in prison in the South.”

Now that his life is drawing to a close, he wants to return. A group of activists supports his cause. They have organized press conferences and demonstrations to demand that the Seoul government allow him to go back. Last summer, he tried to cross on foot, with the slow gait of an old man, through Panmunjom, the border village where Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un greeted each other in 2019. Ahn was detained by the military before he could leave South Korean soil. It’s difficult to understand his reasons for wanting to return to a place so many want to escape.

— I have to tell you what has happened over the last 70 years…

Ahn was born in 1930, when Korea was under Japanese rule, on Ganghwa, a border island a few miles from the parish where he now resides, in what is now South Korea. At that time, there was no such division, and he identifies as North Korean. He was not yet 10 years old when the world was engulfed by World War II; 15 when the war ended and the great powers that had contributed to Korea’s liberation — the United States and the Soviet Union — were debating the peninsula’s fate.

He says his anti-American sentiment began to take shape when U.S. General Douglas MacArthur announced the establishment of a military government south of the 38th parallel, the line that still separates the two countries today. “My political awareness began to develop.” Korea, he says, went from one colonial government to another.

Before the Korean War broke out, he studied in Kaesong, then under South Korean control, and now part of the North. There, he joined the Communist Youth League and participated in underground activities to subvert the American presence. He had run-ins with the police, spent time in hiding, and lived “under bushes and pine trees.”

The outbreak of the war in 1950 caught him at the age of 20. China came to the aid of the North with millions of fighters, and the USSR provided weapons. The South, with U.S. support, contained the blitzkrieg. From the first year, he remembers the Battle of Chosin. “There were many wounded Chinese volunteers; I helped with the transfers [to hospitals]. At the end of 1950, I went to Seoul…” He closes his eyes. He asks for a moment to think. He searches his memory, which seems shrouded in mist.

Sometimes it’s hard to follow him. The interview is conducted through an interpreter. Pastor Lee approaches and places some ginseng drinks on the table, with a metallic, sweetish taste. Ahn drains the small bottle almost in one gulp.

In 1951, he formally joined the North Korean ranks as “second-in-command of platoon 941, directly subordinate to army unit 52,” he rattles off. It was a six-man group assigned to move through the South, behind enemy lines, to support North Korean detachments. Their role was to deliver supplies from the North. In April 1953, three months before the armistice, when his unit had been completely decimated and he was the sole survivor, South Korean troops captured him. “I was in uniform,” he says. It’s a relevant detail: despite this, he was accused of espionage, and a cycle of brutal interrogations and torture began, lasting for decades. He was subjected to the ideological conversion programs, through which prisoners were forced to renounce communist ideology.

“I fully met the criteria to be considered a prisoner of war under the Geneva Convention. As such, I should have been returned,” he protests. “It was a violation of international law and a crime committed by South Korea.” When asked about the torture, he lowers his chin to his hands resting on his cane, and his voice breaks: “When I talk about it, my heart pounds, and I can’t sleep.”

He speaks of an icy cell he could barely fit into sitting down; of his arms being dislocated until they cracked; of whippings with knotted ropes; of simulated drownings; of his bare feet being beaten with sticks until his toenails fell off. He takes off his hat and points to the spot on the top of his head where they poured ice-cold water on him constantly until it felt as if he were being hit with a rock: “It drove me to the brink of madness.” They encouraged him to sign a confession, saying he could resume a normal life. He never agreed. The mistreatment lasted for years.

South Korea changed in the late 1980s. Democracy arrived. Ahn Hak-seop was finally released in 1995, thanks to pressure from human rights groups. In 2004, a government panel reported 77 inmate deaths linked to the ideological conversion program using torture. Later, another panel recognized Ahn as a victim of torture, according to a report in The New York Times.

He was released at 65; the Iron Curtain had fallen, and capitalism had transformed the country. At 70, he married a woman 32 years his junior. Today, she suffers from dementia and lives with a relative. He could have returned to North Korea in 2000, when Seoul organized the voluntary return of dozens of former prisoners. He chose to stay because he felt he had to defend his ideals in the South.

He met Pastor Lee, an activist who had been in a re-education camp in the 1980s after being accused of violating martial law during the regime of South Korean dictator Chun Doo-hwan. Ahn would eventually legally adopt the pastor’s wife as his daughter.

Ahn’s adopted daughter, who recently passed away, is the creator of the anti-American papier-mâché sculptures that fill the room. One depicts the Statue of Liberty, armed with a rifle, smoking a cigar, and with dollar bills peeking out of her clothing.

“North Korea is the birthplace of my ideology,” Ahn reflects. “I like socialism. The root of all problems is private ownership of the means of production. It only breeds greed. Here, the children of the rich live in luxury while others have nothing.”

When asked if he is aware that Pyongyang is accused of committing very serious human rights violations against its population, he replies: “People say North Korea is a dictatorship. But I feel that’s all lies. What is a democracy?” He defends Kim Jong-un: “He’s doing a good job.”

Six non-converts like him have requested permission to return to North Korea in recent months. His case is under review by the South Korean Ministry of Unification. Meanwhile, the North has not issued any statement, according to the Yonhap news agency.

“Those I knew in North Korea must be dead by now. But that’s irrelevant,” Ahn confesses. “I’m almost 100 years old. I’ve lived a long time. I’ve lost all affection for this country. I was born under colonial rule. I’ve suffered all kinds of human rights abuses, and even in death, I thought, I’ll be buried in colonial soil, while my colleagues rest in the independent land of the North. My legs can barely support me anymore. I’ve lost consciousness several times. That’s why I want to go back before I die. I must die in the North.”

He acknowledges that there are things he likes about the south; the welfare state, for example, “inspired by communism.”

— And have you ever tried an American hamburger?

It’s the only time he laughs during the interview.

— I did. And it was good. Much better than eating rice all the time.

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Svetlana Alexievich, the Belarusian author who writes in Russian and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, lives in the same Berlin apartment, with its high ceilings and spacious rooms, where EL PAÍS visited her four years ago. The author of Voices from Chernobyl, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War, and Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets continues to write by hand. On a long table lie fragments of the manuscript for her new book, which is no longer the one she was outlining in 2021, as events interfered with the work of the exiled author: in February 2022, Vladimir Putin, afflicted by imperial nostalgia, launched a war in Ukraine, and less than two years later, Donald Trump shattered the illusion of global solidarity.

A member of the Coordinating Council of the Opposition to dictator Alexandr Lukashenko during the 2020 protests in Belarus, the writer observes a widespread backsliding of democracy, which goes far beyond the Soviet legacy.

Alexievich gathers testimonies from the millions of Belarusians, Russians, and Ukrainians who have taken refuge in Europe, as well as from institutions that document repression and war in the Slavic territories that once belonged to the Soviet Union. She also explores other avenues in search of revealing insights. Alexievich is particularly interested in the possibility of coexistence between victims and perpetrators, and among her current reading is a book on dictatorships in Spain, Greece, and Italy, The End of the Regime: How Three European Dictatorships Ended, by Alexander Baunov, published in Russian in 2023.

Question. Let’s talk about the book you’re writing…

Answer. It’s not finished yet. I had almost completed it when the war came and… [with a slight wave of her hand and a hint of a whistle, Alexievich indicates that the project evaporated]. It became clear that another approach was necessary, and it’s difficult, because the war literally left us speechless, because words lost their meaning, because we didn’t have the necessary terms, and only now are we beginning to recover. In The Last of the Soviets, I wrote about how that empire was collapsing, but now a general process is taking place. Deep Russia and Deep America have risen up, and democracy is receding all over the world.

Q. In the fall of 2021, you wrote about the Belarusian opposition being harshly repressed by Lukashenko.

A. Now my book is broader. In the 1990s, when I was working on Secondhand Time, the subtitle [in Russian] was “The End of the Red Man” [translated into Spanish as The End of Homo Sovieticus]. I buried him too soon, because Homo Sovieticus hasn’t died; he’s in the Kremlin, and fighting and shooting in Ukraine. Some things from the first version are still valid, but there’s a lot to rethink and redo…

Q. Could it be said that, if The End of Homo Sovieticus was a chamber composition with some allegro ma non troppo fragments, we are now faced with a composition for symphony orchestra with a more tragic rhythm?

A. I never limited myself to the Belarusian experience, but now this is broader… I’ve read and seen much of what has been written and filmed about what Lukashenko is doing and about the prisons. These authors are hostages to suffering, and those books have fallen out of favor, even though the prisons remain full. People need new answers. In the first two years [of the war], Ukrainians hoped that America would help them win, and we hoped that Lukashenko would fall so we could return to our country and do what we couldn’t do in the 20th century. But it didn’t happen that way. Now, Ukrainians and Belarusians are desperate.

I feel a lot of hatred toward Lukashenko and his associates but I believe everything must be done according to the law and that they must be tried in the Hague tribunal

Q. Are your characters Belarusian, Russian, or Ukrainian?

A. I’m referring to all those who were swept off the ship by a great wave and who now have to rethink that experience. They are all castaways, but perhaps the Ukrainians have been freed somewhat more than the Belarusians and Russians. Belarus is now an occupied country, where there are Russian troops, aircraft, and military camps, where there are Russian military hospitals and service workshops for their tanks — a country from which the Russians can reach Ukraine at any moment with fresh forces. Considering all this, we are complicit in the aggression, but in an occupied country, you can’t demand that people take to the streets because they can be sentenced to 15 years in prison for carrying the Belarusian flag [the former national flag, banned by Lukashenko].

Q. Your works are choral, based on real testimonies. Have you spoken to many people for your new book?

A. Yes. This year I’ve worked in Prague, Vilnius, and Warsaw, as well as Berlin. In Europe, there are millions of exiles: Belarusians, Ukrainians, and “good Russians.” I’ve occasionally spoken with “bad Russians,” like one who, before joining the front in Ukraine, came from Siberia to say goodbye to his sister, who lives in Germany. He was a man of about 52, in good shape, and he explained that his family, reunited, had decided that the only way to finish paying off the mortgage and overcome their financial difficulties was to send him to war. And when I asked him if he had enlisted just for the money, he said he hated the khokhly [a vulgar way of referring to Ukrainians in Russian]. “I hate them, and that’s all,” he told me without further explanation. He considered the Russian soldiers in Ukraine to be heroes, as were the Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan, and accused me of slandering the latter in Zinky Boys.

Q. Among the material for the book are also testimonies recorded by a Ukrainian journalist, whom the Ukrainian authorities allow to lend his cell phone to Russian prisoners so that they can talk to their families in Russia.

A. Yes, I have heard, for example, a conversation between a prisoner and his wife, who tells him that an acquaintance, also a fighter in Ukraine, has sent his daughter a computer and sneakers and reminds him that his own daughter is about to start the school year and needs a tablet.

I have other testimonies. A journalist who traveled to Buryatia [a Siberian territory over 3,700 miles from Ukraine] spoke with a mother there who had just buried her son [who was killed on the Ukrainian front]. The mother began to speak, but then became frightened and refused to continue, claiming that if the journalist wrote it down, she wouldn’t receive the compensation for her son’s death, which she planned to use to buy her daughter an apartment. So she stated only that her son had fallen a hero and that, if it hadn’t been for him, the Ukrainians would have already reached Buryatia. That’s what television does!

Someone told me that a lot of money is circulating in Russia, war money with which Putin has bought the country and enslaved its inhabitants, especially those in the periphery, who live in abject poverty. And these poor people then boast about buying fur coats and rings for their wives.

Q. More informed Russians with a higher standard of living are also fighting.

A. Yes, and they live by the motto: “Keep quiet, or you won’t get the money.” They’re either complicit or they’ve sold out. In Belarus, on the other hand, Lukashenko didn’t buy off the population; he frightened them instead.

Q. When will your book be finished and what is its structure?

A. I think by the end of next year. I don’t want to reveal its structure, but it has three chapters: Time of Revolution, Time of Defeat, and Eternal Time. Many things have converged on us; on the one hand, artificial intelligence, with which we all interact to varying degrees, and on the other, the columns of tanks on the border with Ukraine. Several eras coexist in our time. People often tell me they talk to artificial intelligence because they have no one else to talk to. Damn it.

Q. Was communism a dying idea when you wrote The Last of the Soviets?

A. It was an idea that was dying, but it didn’t die, and imperial ideas also collapsed. [The conceptual artist] Ilya Kabakov wrote that, when we were finally satisfied with having defeated communism, suddenly, looking around, we saw that everything was full of rats. We don’t know how to fight rats, and literature can’t tell us either. That grotesque monster fragmented into a pile of rats. From it emerged other monsters that had been compressed there, and it turned out that, for money, human beings can go and kill their own Ukrainian brothers. People who knew the Era of Stagnation under Leonid Brezhnev [the Soviet leader from 1964 to 1982] tell me that the present times are more terrifying than then, when people were also imprisoned, but less so than during the Gulag era, of which there are hardly any survivors.

Q. In Soviet times there were people with ideals. Your father was a soldier and didn’t fight for money.

A. My father was a communist, a bright Belarusian boy who left his village to study at the military journalism institute in Minsk. As a student, he went off to war because his country was in danger. Afterward, he was offered a promotion within the party, but only if he divorced my mother. She was Ukrainian and had lived in German-occupied territories, which was a disadvantage for his career. My father loved my mother and refused to leave her, so he was sent to head a provincial school. He believed the communist ideal was good, but that Stalin had corrupted it. When I returned from Afghanistan and told him that his former students were acting like drunks and murderers there, he burst into tears. Then I understood — ah! [pauses] — that love was paramount. There was even a time when he and my mother, angry with me, wanted to disown me as if I were an enemy of the people, but they didn’t, because we loved each other. Before he died, he asked us to put his party membership card in the coffin. He believed until the very end.

Q. Are Belarusian political prisoners included in your book?

A. I tell stories about them. For example, about the mother of a talented computer programmer sentenced to many years in prison for opposing Lukashenko. She had her son’s portrait drawn on a board, put wheels on it, and took it with her everywhere.

Q. What is the West doing for political prisoners?

A. The West did a lot for them, but only through diplomacy. In contrast, Trump has started buying them off, and as far as I know, Lukashenko seized on this. “The money upfront.” And in return, he received parts for Belarusian planes that were no longer flying. There are nearly 2,000 prisoners in jail, and Lukashenko refuses to release them all at once. He prefers to do it in batches so he can get something for each one. Even worse, he imprisons new people — more people than he releases — such as those who help political prisoners or their families.

I am against the rejection of the Russian language in Ukraine, but I think it’s a temporary phenomenon born of desperation, not a permanent trend

Q. I imagine he’ll ask for a good price for Maria Kolesnikova [one of the leaders of the 2020 protests, sentenced to 11 years].

A. Someone who has been freed from prison has said that those who select prisoners for release have started feeding her better so she looks in better health. They suspect that perhaps they are preparing her for release.

Q. I was impressed by Nikolai Statkevich, the social democratic politician, who refused to leave Belarus after being released…

A. I’m not a supporter of our culture of heroism. Sign whatever it takes to get a pardon and go back to your family! Life is more important than anything else, and the most important thing is getting out of prison.

Q. In 2020 you were a pacifist, and now?

A. I was and I still am. If the Coordination Council had urged people to take up arms, I don’t think so many people would have taken to the streets. When the first revolution and its clashes occurred in Belarus [in 2010], some relatives from my village asked me to visit an acquaintance of theirs, a young man who was a member of the special intervention forces, OMON, who had been beaten and was in the hospital. I went to see him, and his bedmate was one of the young people who had protested. Seeing their mothers crying, I understood that I couldn’t incite bloodshed.

Q. I understand, but there are situations…

A. Yes, there are hopeless situations, like those described in the latest report by U.N. Special Rapporteur Mariana Katzarova on the treatment of prisoners in Russian jails. Horrific things, like sawing off their teeth, or torturing a Ukrainian journalist and handing her over to her parents without her internal organs.

Q. Does exile unite or divide?

A. If we talk about Belarus, where the dominant theme is the experience of 2020, those who left accuse those who stayed of complicity with the regime and of apathy, and those who stayed say they are doing well and that it’s as if we never existed, because we left no trace. I will return to Belarus when everyone else returns. I won’t return alone.

Q. Can Belarusian culture be developed in Russian, just as Irish culture is also expressed in English?

A. I am a Belarusian writer and I write in Russian.

Q. What do you think of Ukraine’s rejection of the Russian language and works written in Russian?

A. I’m against it, but I think it’s a temporary phenomenon born of desperation, not a permanent trend. After all, the languages left behind by the colonizers in Africa were a path to civilization. And that’s a good thing.

Q. Do you feel hatred for Lukashenko and his associates?

A. A lot, because I can’t go back home, but I believe everything must be done according to the law and that they must be tried in the Hague tribunal. In the book, I have a chapter about how we’re going to learn to live with the executioners. I ask people. Some, like me, say they should be sent to The Hague, but there are other opinions. One man told me he wanted to see them all hanged and suffering, but I believe that hatred is a dead end, one that will get us nowhere. Dialogue is the alternative.

Q. The question is how to transform hatred into constructive energy.

A. Yes, that’s why I say that the religious and political elite, writers, and artists will have a lot of work.

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It was further proof, visible to the world, of the U.S. president’s disdain for the democratic ideal of the separation of powers. And it was, once again, delivered on his social media platform, Truth, with a message posted Friday, in which Donald Trump said he would ask Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Department of Justice, “together with our great patriots at the FBI,” to investigate the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and “[former President] Bill Clinton, Larry Summers [former president of Harvard and a member of Clinton’s administration], [LinkedIn co-founder] Reid Hoffman, JP Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him.”

Trump justified the order — which breaks the rules of American institutional decorum, given that the figure of the attorney general is supposed to be independent of the White House — by claiming that the Democrats have resurrected the Epstein case, or “the Epstein Hoax,” according to the president, to “deflect from their disastrous shutdown, and all of their other failures.”

The maneuver seems to be aimed at another goal: to try to divert attention from the scandal caused by his refusal to release the files held by Bondi on the case of the pedophile, who died in 2019 in a maximum-security cell in Manhattan (he took his own life, according to the coroner, even though conspiracy theorists believe he was killed so that he would not expose his secrets).

It’s unclear whether Bondi will accept Trump’s assignment, or how the investigation might materialize if she does. It’s also unclear whether — as so often happens with Trump — his grandiose announcement will ultimately amount to nothing. Much less clear is whether it will achieve its diversionary objective: the release this week of more than 20,000 documents obtained by Congress from the family of the pedophile financier has resurrected a ghost that has haunted the president for years: that of his long friendship with Epstein and the suspicion that Trump’s determination not to release these materials — despite his own promises to do so — is hiding something.

The Republican denies any knowledge about the crimes of his former friend, with whom he maintained relations for 15 years until their falling out in 2004. Trump claims that they parted ways when he kicked Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club because of his “really weird” behavior toward some employees. In messages released this week, the convicted sex offender denied that this was the case. There is also an email in which Epstein appears to place Trump at a Thanksgiving party the two attended in 2017, during the Republican’s first presidential term, although there is no certainty that this actually happened.

There is also no evidence that Trump was aware of Epstein’s misdeeds, let alone that he participated in them, although in the batch of emails released in recent days, one states that he “spent hours at my house” with one of the victims and that “of course he knew about the girls,” referring to the minors whom the financier abused with impunity for years, with the complicity and participation of his procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving 20 years in a low-security prison.

In his message Friday, Trump points to Clinton, one of the influential figures most frequently linked to Epstein (again, without evidence that he committed any crimes) and to the list of rich and famous people that the millionaire supposedly kept, which has also been the source of numerous conspiracy theories.

It has been proven that the former Democratic president met Epstein through his daughter, Chelsea, and Maxwell, and that he flew on his private planes “at least 26 times” between 2002 and 2003, according to flight logs and as part of his work for the Clinton Foundation. This was also before the first trial against the convicted sex offender.

Trump also cited JP Morgan, which was Epstein’s main bank for 15 years, a period during which the financier made money transfers that triggered alarms among the institution’s anti-money laundering watchdogs, who never took action against one of their preferred clients. The relationship extended beyond the first trial. An investigation by The New York Times concluded in September that the largest bank in the United States facilitated the crimes of the sex offender, who moved vast sums of money to maintain his child trafficking network.

In his book The Spider: Journey Inside the Criminal Web of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, investigative journalist Barry Levine writes that in 2002, two witnesses twice placed Clinton on the private island where the financier committed many of his abuses, although there is no documentary evidence of this and no victim has accused Clinton of any crime. The former president has categorically denied traveling to the island or having a close relationship with Epstein, and has maintained that he knew nothing about his crimes.

Larry Summers has been one of the most prominent figures in this week’s latest declassification of documents (in two batches: the first, of three emails, was released by the Democrats; the second, of more than 20,000, was released by the Republicans). It was already known that Summers had had a relationship with the financier (a relationship he later publicly regretted), but not that he had continued to maintain such frequent contact with him between 2017 and 2019, years after Epstein’s first conviction for a prostitution-related crime, and even after the Miami Herald revived the case against him with a series of investigative reports.

In those exchanges, they talk extensively about Summers’ relationship with a woman in London about whom Epstein gives him advice. They also discuss Trump. From those dozens of emails exchanged between the two, it’s also impossible to conclude that Summers knew anything about Epstein’s crimes.

As for Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder was in talks with the financier when he asked him for money for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In that context, he traveled to the island once for a fundraising event.

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