It’s local election season and that means a near endless amount of leaflets, promises, and door knocks as political parties fight for control of councils on May 7.
Stockport is no exception and this year the race is set to be tighter than ever, with several parties vying for seats in the council chamber.
But one election leaflet in Stockport has been raising eyebrows the last few weeks. It simply reads: ‘From North Korea to Heatons North’.
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The man behind the leaflet is Timothy Cho, who escaped from North Korea twice and eventually moved to this corner of the world.
Timothy offered to share his story ahead of the local election next week.
He doesn’t give his exact age, but says he is around 37.
He’s standing as the Conservative Party candidate in the Heatons North ward, a suburb north of Stockport town centre.
Timothy was born in the northernmost part of North Korea in a province called Hamgyong.
He grew up in the town of Onsung, which is about a 20-minute walk from the border with China.
North Korea is ruled by Kim Jong Un.
“We were very deeply brainwashed from the time we started to walk,” Timothy explains.
“Even at nursery, before we ate we were giving thanks to the Kim family for giving us food.
“We regarded him as our God. When the first Kim died, I was seven, and I cried terribly. I thought God had died.”
Timothy spoke about the reality of life in North Korea(Image: Timothy Cho)
Timothy’s parents were both teachers. He explains that his father taught history, and in North Korea teachers hold a high status in society.
This was partly because it was thought teachers in North Korea have a key role to play in ‘brainwashing’ children, Timothy said.
During childhood, Timothy had ‘no idea what outside North Korea’ looked like, as his family and others dealt with regular power blackouts due to a lack of energy in the country.
Timothy said: “There were no phones, no internet, no social media, we never had the opportunity to learn about the outside.
“Information is completely blocked.”
He recalls the brutality of growing up in North Korea, when he said violence and death was common.
One memory he shares was of public executions.
These were used to frighten people into not daring to disobey the regime, or make any attempts to leave the country.
Timothy explains how people who had gone against these rules were killed publicly, with children gathered to watch.
One of the key moments in Timothy’s life came when he was just ten-years-old.
It seemed a day like any other, starting with the journey to school. But when he came home his parents were gone.
“One day I came home from school. I opened the door, and I could feel it: they were gone,” Timothy said.
“They didn’t say anything because of course I was too young.
“They didn’t make that choice. My father, due to something with political persecution, meant we could have been taken to a prison camp. It was an urgent decision to leave home, they couldn’t even tell me where to go.
“I went back, the train was gone, and I sat there and cried and cried. I came home and cried all night.
“One of the last times I saw my mother was waving on the train.
“I lived with anger and hatred for many years until I learned how I was able to forgive my own parents.”
From the age of ten, Timothy survived living on the streets in North Korea.
His childhood was living and sleeping outdoors, begging for food to survive. He could not attend school.
The fact that his parents had fled North Korea made him what is known as the ‘enemy class’, Timothy said.
In the eyes of the state, Timothy was the ‘son of a traitor’, and this would be a lifelong punishment.
He said: “When you’re in the enemy class, you’re being monitored constantly by the regime. All your opportunities are decided because of your status.”
The next key moment in Timothy’s journey came when he was aged 17.
At that time, Kim Jong Il was the then ruler of North Korea. It was the first time Timothy tried to escape.
Timothy said people in North Korea are ‘brainwashed’ from the moment they can walk(Image: AP Photo/Jon Chol Jin)
When he was 17, Timothy tried to join the army. He thought this would offer a path to a better life.
But owing to being considered part of the ‘enemy class’, he was refused, and instead told he would be made to work jobs that no one else wanted.
This included working in coalmines, in the deepest and most dangerous locations, places where many go but never return.
It was at this moment that Timothy joined four strangers and made to leave North Korea.
“We walked along a river, and safely arrived in China,” he said.
“It was night time when we crossed the border because it was very dangerous.
“I saw from miles away a spinning light. It was strange for me because North Korea doesn’t have any light.
“I told the group I was going to walk towards the light, and we split up from there.
“I walked towards the light and when I arrived there it was a market, the first time I saw a market full of light.
“Of course at Christmas time in Stockport we see it on the street and decorations, but that market in China was the first time I had seen it.
“People had different hair colours, it was the first time I saw you can do this, you would be executed for that in North Korea.
“I saw people wearing jackets with English words written on them, jeans, jumpers – jeans are banned in North Korea, and you can’t have a jacket there with any English words on it.
“I saw people wearing jeans with holes, young people, and I thought wow. I could smell delicious food.
“I felt dizzy standing there, it was my first picture of the outside. I was very shocked, we were told that North Korea is the best country in the world led by the Kim family, and we must stick with the Kim family.
“So at that market I started crying standing there.
“I was thinking that this is not what I was told the world would be like.”
After having survived the dangerous border crossing, Timothy was still far from safe.
He explained that many North Koreans who leave are caught and returned, facing the risk of brutal consequences, including torture and death.
He had no passport and couldn’t speak any other languages at the time.
Timothy continued: “I found someone who helped me get all the way to the border with Mongolia.
“When I arrived at the border, there were 17 other North Korean refugees who all came together.
“We tried to cross into Mongolia and we were all arrested by the Chinese military.
“In our group there were seven people who were a family – parents, children aged four and six, grandparents, and that family when it arrived in North Korea they ended up in a prison camp.
“We were arrested and sent to a military prison for a few weeks, and eventually sent back to North Korea, all 18 of us.
“There was a place in North Korea where we were put, and it’s a place I can only describe as similar to Auschwitz.
“When we arrived at the detention centre, there were underground prison cells, the first thing we did when we arrived was given numbers, we did not have names.
“Each prison there could be hundreds of prisoners, full of inmates, in a tiny square space.”
Timothy remembers having to sit upright leaning against other people in the cell to try and sleep.
He added: “The first time I took a nap leaning against a mate behind me. I felt his body getting heavier and heavier.
“I was going to tell him to lean against me less. When I turned my head around his body was falling. He died while he was leaning against me.
“His body was dragged out of the cell through the corridor. He was killed by torture, there was no medical treatment.
“At night you could hear people being tortured, begging and screaming to leave.
“Any women who came back from China pregnant, their babies were killed.
“After a few days I was no longer able to sit.
“We were not human beings there.”
Timothy says he still lives with the physical scars today from his time in the detention centre.
But a ‘miracle’ happened when the authorities decided to let him stay with his grandmother in her house based in the town he grew up in.
Timothy couldn’t walk from his experience in the detention centre, and he believes he was let go because he wouldn’t have survived much longer in those conditions.
When he left, he said the authorities and police were ‘constantly’ watching over his every move.
It was at this moment that Timothy decided to leave North Korea again.
Without being able to walk, he tied together plastic containers and held it on the river to cross the border for the second time.
He said there were others making the journey too, including one woman who refused to let him die each time Timothy fell into the water from his makeshift raft.
“You cannot die here,” she told him, helping him back on the plastic containers each time.
It took more than two hours for him to enter China.
Timothy said: “We knocked on one lady’s door. But that area in China, people can report us to the police, they get ransoms if they do that.
“That lady saw we were soaked because we had crossed the river, and she knew we were from North Korea.
“Instead of asking us anything she said ‘come in’ and offered hot food and a mobile phone.
“Up to this age in my life I have seen many miracles, all these miracles were done by men and women, and otherwise I wouldn’t be here today.”
Timothy also remembered a moment of kindness when the group of 18 were caught during his first time escaping North Korea.
When they had been caught and were being taken back to North Korea, a lady kept telling him: “If you ever survive, you must tell the world how we died.”
The woman did not survive, Timothy said.
“This is why I’m telling you now, and I’m constantly telling the story.”
The second time Timothy arrived in China he went to Shanghai. From there, he found help to go to an international school in the city.
A group of nine scaled the fence, and asked for help. It caused a commotion, panic and tears spread among the children, and the Chinese police soon arrived. The group were taken to Shanghai international prison.
It was there that Timothy met a prisoner from South Korea who he could speak with, and for the first time, he learned about God, and prayed.
Then another miracle happened.
Timothy said: “After several weeks, two men visited me in the prison. I thought I was going back to North Korea.
“They were two diplomats from South Korea, and one guy was a westerner.
“They said to me ‘Timothy we have very surprising news for you. The Chinese government made a decision to deport you and the group to the Philippines with a diplomatic passport.’
It transpired that a journalist in Japan got wind of what had happened to the group, and soon several news organisations and human rights groups were involved.
Pressure was put on China to release the group, Timothy said.
The diplomatic passport gave him the chance to travel to one country in the world – but it could only be used once.
Weighing up his options, Timothy had remembered the name of a country he had heard from his history teacher father – England.
He added: “He once told me about the industrial revolution, and when I looked on a map the UK was the other end of the world from Asia, and I wanted to go as far as I could.”
He got on the plane, first to South Korea and then to London, where he arrived in 2008 to start his new life.
Timothy is hoping to be elected as a councillor in Stockport(Image: Adam Vaughan / MEN)
This took him from London up to Bolton, where he started helping out at St Luke’s Parish Church on Chorley Old Road, supporting the homeless.
It was a mutually beneficial exchange, as Timothy said many local people and the homeless helped him to start learning English.
He continued his English studies at a college in Bolton, and went on to get a degree in politics from salford-university>Salford University, and a masters from Liverpool University.
Timothy now lives in Heaton Norris, Stockport, with his wife and two children, who are aged seven and three.
He works as the Secretariat for the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea, splitting his time between Stockport and London.
He said: “For 17 years I suffered a lot, I saw kids starve to death when I survived on the street, I tried to survive as much as I could, begging for food or at someone’s vegetable farm.
“I saw kids frozen to death, I couldn’t go to school. I was grateful to my grandmother who took me in.
“Each time I survived, it was miracles from men and women, and it was love.”
What happened to Timothy’s parents?
He explained: “Both my parents made it to South Korea. One day, I had a call.
“My mother couldn’t speak, she was in a care home, the doctor told me she was going to die soon.
“She had a stroke. Her body was paralysed. The Doctor said, ‘she has one question for you’.
“The question was: ‘do you forgive me?’
“She lived with her guilt for many years. She said what she regretted in her life was why she couldn’t take me with her.
“I told my mum I have already forgiven her, I don’t hate her anymore, and that I arrived in England, learned English, went to the best universities in the world, she always me wanted to go to higher education.
“I told her that I was also expecting to work in Parliament from 2018, because I applied for an internship after my masters in Liverpool.
“I worked for Fiona Bruce, the MP for Congleton.
“My mum was crying and crying. She actually lived for two more weeks after that phone call, she was meant to die sooner.
“That was part of her forgiveness, she didn’t want to die. I was able to attend her funeral in South Korea, it was beautiful.
“I said goodbye to her. I still miss her.
“I always wanted to have my mum’s food again. That wish still remains.
“One day I will see her again in that beautiful place.”
Timothy’s father still lives in South Korea.
As for his election priorities, he explained that he is standing for community safety, parks and green spaces, and improvements to roads and pavements, among other issues.
On his life in the UK, Timothy said: “This country, the United Kingdom, has given me so much. It is my time to give it back to the community and the nation one way or another.
“It doesn’t matter whether people support me or not, I am still grateful.
“To become a political candidate would be just impossible in North Korea, such democratic elections don’t exist.
“Not just in North Korea but in many parts of the world.
“This is why I ask people, even if you don’t vote for me, please use your vote, do not leave your choice in someone else’s hands.
“It is so important to protect and defend this freedom, it’s easy to take it away, and once it is gone, it could take a while to bring it back.”