Category: Humanitarian Aid and Relief

Defector to reveal human experiments taking place in North Korea

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A North Korean scientist has defected to Finland, and he may have evidence that his native country has been conducting ghastly experiments on humans involving chemical weapons, reports the South’s Yonhap News Agency.

The scientist is identified only as a 47-year-old named Lee who worked at a facility in Ganggye near the Chinese border. He reportedly managed to escape via the Philippines last month, carrying with him a storage drive loaded with information on the North’s human experiments.

He is expected to testify before the European parliament this month. “His ostensible reason for defection is that he felt skeptical about his research,” says Yonhap’s source.

“We have been told similar stories in the past that human experiments are carried out in prison camps,” says the director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, per the Independent.

In fact, a North Korean officer who defected in the 1990s recounted biological and chemical warfare tests on victims including mentally and physically disabled children, reports the Telegraph. “We watched the instructors carrying out the tests on humans to show us how a person dies,” he said in an interview last year. “I saw it with my own eyes.” No actual evidence of such tests has emerged, but this latest defection could change that.

North Korea: Life in a brainwashed society

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A North Korea defector, Hyeonseo Lee, has revealed in a new book how she was forced to watch her first execution at the age of seven.

Lee and her classmates grew up convinced they lived in the ‘greatest nation on earth’ run by a benevolent god-like leader whom they loved in the way many children love Santa Claus. It wasn’t until she left North Korea at the age of 17 that she began to discover the full horror of the government that had fed her propaganda since birth.

All family life took place beneath the obligatory portraits of North Korea’s revered founder Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il which hung in every home. Failure to clean and look after them was a punishable offence. At supper Lee had to thank ‘Respected Father Leader Kim Il-sung’ for her food before she could pick up her chopsticks.

The faintest hint of political disloyalty was enough to make an entire family – grandparents, parents and children – disappear. ‘Their house would be roped off; they’d be taken away in a truck at night, and not seen again,’ she says.

Public executions were used as a way to keep everyone in line. After Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994 she recalls a spate of executions of people who had not mourned sufficiently. Lee witnessed her first execution at seven.

In the mid-1990s North Korea suffered a famine which killed an estimated one million people. Lee’s first inkling of the crisis came when her mother showed her a letter from a colleague’s sister living in a neighboring province. “By the time you read this the five of us will no longer exist in this world,” it read, explaining that the family were lying on the floor waiting to die after not eating for weeks.

Lee, who still believed she lived in the world’s most prosperous country, was stunned. A few days later she came across a skeletal young mother lying in the street with a baby in her arms. She was close to death, but no one stopped.

Beggars and vagrant children began to appear in the town and corpses turned up in the river. ‘The smell of decomposing bodies was everywhere,’ Lee said, speaking at her book launch in London.

In her book she describes taking a train through a ‘landscape of hell’ to visit a relative. She saw people roaming the countryside ‘like living dead’. In the city of Hamhung she recalled people ‘hallucinating from hunger’ and ‘falling dead in the street’.

The government blamed the famine on US sanctions, but she later learnt it had more to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union which had been subsidizing North Korea with food and fuel.

[Daily Mail]

North Korean defector: Leaving North Korea is like leaving another universe

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Hyeonseo Lee left North Korea at the age of 17 and began to discover the propaganda the government had fed her since birth.

In a memoir published in London on Thursday, Lee gives a rare insight into the bizarre and brutal reality of daily life in the world’s most secretive state. “Leaving North Korea is not like leaving any other country. It is more like leaving another universe,” she writes in The Girl With Seven Names.

Lee, now a human rights campaigner living in South Korea, grew up in Hyesan next to the Chinese border. Her family was well regarded and her father’s job in the military meant they were not short of food. As Lee entered her teens, however, her world was turned upside down when her father was arrested by the secret police. He was later released into a hospital. He had been badly beaten and died soon afterwards. The circumstances remain unclear.

One winter night in 1997 she slipped out of the house and crossed the narrow stretch of frozen river to China. But China was not safe either. Lee lived in fear of being unmasked and deported back to North Korea, where she would have been imprisoned or even killed.

To survive she changed her name numerous times – hence the book’s title. She had many close shaves: she narrowly escaped an arranged marriage, almost became enslaved in a brothel, was kidnapped by a gang of criminals and caught and interrogated by police.

After years on the run she reached South Korea where North Koreans are given asylum. But she missed her family desperately. In a daring mission she returned to the North Korean border to rescue her mother and brother and guide them 2,000 miles through China into Laos and from there to South Korea – a journey beset by disaster from start to finish.

[Reuters]

Young North Korean defectors now Pyongyang Poster Children

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A CNN crew led by Will Ripley met several North Koreans Pyongyang intent on defending their country’s tarnished human rights record. As is normal procedure, the team was given no advance notice about what or who they would be able to film before they arrived in the capital. On the first morning, they were led into the same meeting room at the Koryo Hotel, where most visiting foreigners stay.

In 2013, these youngsters had been caught on the Laos-China border as they attempted to head for South Korea. Returned to North Korea, the world feared for their safety at the hands of a state that is usually merciless when it comes to defectors they regard as traitors.

But instead of being punished, they told CNN they received special treatment, extra tuition to make up for three years of missed schooling while on the run, as well as places in the best educational establishments in the Pyongyang — poster children for the state’s “benevolence and forgiveness.”

While there was no way to confirm how they were chosen to speak, the highly secretive state seems keen to get its point of view across when it comes to its rights conduct — it vehemently rejected claims in a United Nations report that it “terrorizes” its own citizens.

[CNN]

North Korean refugees endure rape and starvation

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Rape and repeated sexual abuse of female North Korean refugees is extremely common. Many defectors have testified it was common for military men to rape women in North Korea and then shame them for being sexually assaulted. Many were forced to abort children conceived through these rapes.

This echos the tale of Park Yeonmi, a refugee who has traveled the world to create awareness and alarm regarding the situation in North Korea. A Chinese soldier raped Park’s mother in front of her; her mother had sacrificed herself to prevent her young child from having to endure the rape herself.

Another woman, Song Kyong-ok, lost her mother, whom the local government chose to execute when the girl was ten-years-old. She had been caught praying, which UPI describes as “an act of treason.” During her time as an orphan in North Korea, Song “was forced into the streets to beg for food, finding it in the unlikeliest of places–such as unpicked fecal matter containing edible kernels of corn.”

The allure of escaping the yoke of Kim Jong-un is enough to attract thousands to try to escape, triggering increased vigilance on the part of the North Korean government.

China has also pressured North Korea to keep its people from using China as a bridge to South Korea. Many who defect from North Korea have experienced severe trauma, and some have raised the ire of the Chinese government.

[Breitbart]

The night I helped my mother escape North Korea

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Extracted from The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story by Hyeonseo Lee:

I set my phone to silent, dressed myself entirely in black and walked calmly and purposefully through the hotel lobby. Outside I hailed a cab and directed the driver to take me to the point where the town ended, about 200 yards from the river. There, at the end of a row of low buildings, was the derelict house among the trees where I was to meet my mother and brother. I crouched down behind an old garden wall and waited. … I peeped over the wall and saw North Korean border patrols passing on the opposite bank of the river.

‘I had not seen my mother in 11 years. In the half-light I saw a strained, old face and a body moving stiffly’

My phone was buzzing. Min-ho’s voice was fast and tense: “We’ve had a problem.” Quickly Min-ho explained that just as he and my mother had been about to cross they had walked straight into a border guard.

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Famine and further malnutrition projected for North Koreans

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Even a simple piece of fruit was unfamiliar to Lee So-yeon when she fled North Korea seven years ago. She had never seen an orange. So when she came across one at a South Korean market, she bit into it like an apple — peel and all.

During the famine of the 1990s, Lee was forced to eat grass from the mountains to survive. “We were told that any grass that rabbits eat is edible,” she says. “So we picked any grass we could find that wasn’t poisonous and mixed it with rice, or used it to make grass porridge…. Children were suffering from malnutrition. Their stomachs were very swollen. … Their whole faces were covered with fine hair and their hair was a very light brown color instead of black. Their arms and legs were so skinny they looked like tree branches.”

Now, North Koreans are again facing a “looming humanitarian disaster” according to the United Nations human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, who told CNN, “We call for the international community to support the DPRK and help the DPRK in a respect of what is going to be a very difficult famine. … You may well see starvation on a massive scale unless there’s a massive relief effort in the weeks and months to come.”

The Asia deputy regional director for the U.N. World Food Programme, John Aylieff says. “It doesn’t take long for malnutrition to spike … So a short and fairly serious shock to the food system of the country can create quite serious implications for the population.”

State media, which usually paint only a rosy picture of life for North Korea’s citizens, have been publishing reports about what they call the worst drought in 100 years.

“Their decision to officially report the drought in their internal media is remarkable,” says Andrei Lankov, a professor at South Korea’s Kookmin University. “It’s a signal to both domestic and foreign audience that probably something will go bad later this year. So they will probably apply for foreign aid.”

[CNN]

Following North Korean defectors on their exodus

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Much of the information we get about North Korea comes from people who’ve escaped the regime and sought refuge in South Korea, or from the people who do business along the river border that separates China and North Korea.

Lee Hark-joon, a journalist for the Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s largest newspaper, sheds new light on the ordinary lives of North Koreans with his extraordinary book “Crossing Heaven’s Border,” in which Lee focuses on everyday people, telling stories of “common hardships,” as he puts it. It grew out of a documentary he made with the same name, which was broadcast on PBS in 2009 and was nominated for an Emmy in 2010.

To get these stories, Lee did something unprecedented – he “embedded” with North Korean defectors. Between 2007 to 2011, Lee lived among North Korean defectors in China, enduring some of the same hardships that these terrified escapees endured. He takes incredible risks to tell these stories; the book at times reads like a thriller as Lee makes a perilous, 12,000-mile journey through China, across into Laos and then Thailand.

Lee’s book is compelling because it offers a fresh perspective on the puzzle that is North Korea. He writes about the challenges he faced in reporting on this story and the ethical questions he encountered, and the toll it took on him as a person.        Read more

Motivated to accompany North Korean defectors in their escape

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Lee Hark-joon, a journalist for South Korea’s largest newspaper who’s now in England working on another project, answered some questions from The Washington Post about his work and his book “Crossing Heaven’s Border”.

WP: First up, kudos to you. You lived among North Koreans on and off for years, taking many of the same risks they did. What motivated you to go above and beyond the call of duty like this?

LHJ: In 2007, my boss suggested that I do a piece about the human rights situation of North Korean defectors. At that time, reporting related to North Korean defectors was mostly done by international media, but my boss pointed out it was an issue about our nation so South Korean media needed to take charge of the issue.

It’s an issue about real people. I was thrilled to cross borders with defectors and see them finally find freedom. I often wonder if the purpose of my education and becoming a journalist was to feel this joy.

I wasn’t able to help the defectors but they helped me. When we were crossing the border between China and Laos, our group included a woman in her 60s and a boy. We embarked on a journey walking 18 hours in the mountains. I was so worried that someone in the group may not be able to make it but I was sure of myself as I had completed my military service. Surprisingly, I was the one who began to fall behind.

The North Koreans’ passion for life and freedom helped them overcome their age and physical disadvantages. I was holding the group back so I asked them to leave me and go on. For them, being captured could lead to their repatriation to North Korea, but for me, my punishment would just be spending some time in Chinese prison.

But they didn’t leave me. They said they couldn’t abandon a journalist, a Korean like them. They carried my bags and pulled me by my hand and we finally crossed the border together. Maybe this kind of experience, relying on each other and meeting people who care for others, kept me going and working on this issue for such a long time.

I consider North Korean defectors as “the Jews of Asia.” It’s been a long time since the Holocaust but the world remembers it. It should be the same for North Korean defectors. …. I hope more attention will be given to them until their misery is over.

[Washington Post blog]

Why some North Korean defectors tend to exaggerate

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In the past in South Korea, when defection from North Korea was rare, we used the term “returned hero” to refer to a North Korean defector. The South Korean government offered a lot of money and support for their resettlement. That kind of support doesn’t exist anymore.

When they’re in China or in Russia, North Korean defectors tend to think they would be fully satisfied if they just had freedom. But when they arrive in South Korea they find it hard to accept the reality that they’re no longer treated as returned heroes but instead have to settle down to life as second-class citizens.

In this situation, some people exaggerate their stories. Why do they exaggerate?

Exposure to media leads to opportunities for speeches at churches in South Korea and the U.S. A defector gets paid. As the world started to pay more attention to North Korean defector issues, more defectors seek fame. Some end up believing in their exaggerated stories, and the media plays an important role in this process.

North Korean defectors have [experienced] serious trauma and they tend to maximize their damages. Media outlets look for more sensational stories. In other words, they want North Korean defectors who are selling attractive stories. NGOs, the South Korean and American governments want sensational stories as they believe they can put more pressure on North Korea about its human rights issue with a symbolic figure.

It is sad because the North Korean defector situation deserves international attention by itself.

I did a lot of my interviews in border areas between China and North Korea.  … People don’t tend to lie about themselves when they’re in imminent danger. I believe they were pure and honest at that moment. … Maybe that is why defectors I’ve interviewed tend not to exaggerate.

[Excerpts of a Washington Post interview with Lee Hark-joon, a journalist for the Chosun Ilbo]