From South Korea's Chosun Ilbo, reporting on human rights in North Korea - in Seoul:
Tales of unimaginable suffering were at the core of testimony from former inmates of North Korea's political concentration camps at a press conference Monday.
"I ate whatever I could put into my mouth, except stones," recalled an inmate at the Yodok camp between 2000 and 2002. "Grain stock was checked every day and we were kept away from grains, so you had this extreme pain of being unable to eat them even if they were within sight," he said. "As starving inmates surreptitiously ate seeds, security guards sprayed pesticides on the seeds, so many died from eating the poisoned seeds."
The event was organized by activist group Democracy Network against North Korean Gulag at the Seoul Press Center.
Of 250 inmates he met at the camp, 80 starved to death or executed in public after being arrested for attempting to flee the Stalinist country. He himself was held on espionage charges after being caught with a Bible smuggled in from South Korea.Women at the event wore dark glasses to conceal their identities but were unable to hide their tears. One recalled how she languished at the Kaechon political prison camp for 28 years after being taken into custody at 13 for guilt by association with a crime committed by one of her relatives. She said, "I saw a starving woman eat the flesh of her son who had died of a disease."
And, in Washington:
There were gasps in the audience at a press conference by female North Korean defectors in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday when Bang Mi-sun rolled up her black skirt and showed the deep ugly scars in her thighs. The event was part of North Korea Freedom Week.
As soon as she was asked to recount her life in a North Korean concentration camp, Bang (55) stepped on a chair and roll up her skirt. Various parts of her thighs were sunken as if the flesh had been gouged out. She also walks with a limp.Bang had formerly been an actress with the propaganda squad of the Musan Mine. She fled the North with her children when her husband starved to death in 2002, but soon fell victim to human traffickers. She was arrested by Chinese police and was sent back to the North, where she was tortured. In 2004, she escaped again.
Bang testified that one 21-year-old pregnant woman who had fled to China and been forcibly repatriated was killed when she refused to have an abortion. Forced abortions of half-Chinese children apparently aim to prevent the proliferation of "unclean" stock due to the North's archaic obsession with the national bloodline.
She called on U.S. President Barack Obama to make sure no more North Korean women are "sold like livestock in China. Please raise your voice in the international community so that North Koreans no longer receive this subhuman treatment in prison."
Still with the Chosun Ilbo, and the tone of this editorial - "N. Korea's Madness Must Be Stopped" - suggests that now, after the Cheonan sinking, at least some South Koreans are finally losing patience with the antics of the Dear Leader:
South Korea must come up with ways to deal with the antics of this cretin.
Comments