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| China-Japan-Koreas |
| Opening a Window on North Korea's Horrors |
| 2003-10-04 |
| This made my blood boil this morning. EFL but please hit the link and read the whole thing. SEOUL -- Han, a Communist Party official in North Korea, was walking home from work when he heard he was in trouble. He had smuggled a radio back from China after an official trip. He listened to it late at night, huddled with earphones on and shades drawn, to hear music that brought him a whisper of sanity and took him away from the horrors of his day. Now, someone had found it, or someone had told. "It could have been my children who said something outside. It could have been my friend; one knew," said Han, 39, who spoke on condition he be identified only by his surname. "If a farmer or laborer had a radio, he could have been released," Han said. "But I was an official. In my case, it would have been torture and a life sentence in a political prisoners' camp." At that moment, he made a choice faced by thousands who flee North Korea: He left his family to try to save his own life. He went straight to the Chinese border on that July day in 1997 and waded across the river, abandoning his wife and sons, then ages 4 and 2, and spent the next three years on the run in China, until missionaries helped get him to Seoul. Since he left, he has had no contact with his wife and sons. "I think of them every day," he said recently in Seoul. "I try to forget it," he added slowly. "But they are my family." Defectors have gradually opened a detailed and frightening window on the brutal realities of survival for 22 million people in North Korea. For many years, the stories of the relatively few defectors were suspect, viewed as propaganda tools of the South Korean government. Their often lurid accounts of life in North Korea had the ring of exaggeration to please their new hosts. But today North Korean defectors number in the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands -- the full scope of the exodus is not clear. They sneak across the river to China, where they live as fugitives, or flee through deserts or jungles to Mongolia, Burma or Thailand. Their accounts have gained credibility by their number and their consistency, and by corroboration from the few outsiders who have worked in North Korea. In dozens of interviews in Seoul over two years, defectors painted a picture of cruelty, hardship and repression that made escape seem their only option, no matter the cost. Keep reading. We make fun of Kimmie, but he's a bloody bastard. He has to go. |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #8 wow, I was trying to parody the left in my post. I guess I'm better than I thought I was, lol. from now on I'll end my posts "/sarcasm", I thought the nick was sufficient. |
| Posted by: typical lefty 2003-10-5 1:52:53 AM |
| #7 You can blame typical lefty for many things: But he DID chose a fitting nick. I have lived in two of the most evil dictatorships of our times. YES we should take out EVERY dictator, one by one. Saddam was not a bad start after all. I guess typical lefty rather have North Korea replace Libya chairing the UN Human Rights Commission. |
| Posted by: True German Ally 2003-10-5 12:30:29 AM |
| #6 Oh yeah, then what? If we liberate the Afghanis, Iraqis, North Koreans, are we supposed to go around taking out every dictator who is just as bad as the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il? What a bright boy you are! You're getting the idea! Damn straight we take out the bloody dictators. Since you sign yourself "typical lefty" you're supposed to stand for things like human rights, democracy, etc, etc. Right? You can't possibly support these thugs, so why not take them out? Oh, right, we can't do it because it's the e-e-e-e-e-e-vil GWB at the helm. Nevermind that you never quite get what you want in a president, the notion of an e-e-e-e-e-e-vil USA doing something in the good really grinds your beans, eh? |
| Posted by: Steve White 2003-10-5 12:03:59 AM |
| #5 Keep reading. We make fun of Kimmie, but he’s a bloody bastard. He has to go. Oh yeah, then what? If we liberate the |
| Posted by: typical lefty 2003-10-4 9:45:01 PM |
| #4 You know I joke about Kimmie-boy but, seriously, he is a very evil man. Just read the Testimony of Sun-ok Lee - a former prisoner. However I warn you -- it is not for the faint of heart. Kim Jong and his government are very very evil. And that is why I feel sorry for the innocent (and duped) North Korean people. |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2003-10-4 6:52:06 PM |
| #3 Now this is interesting: "After a month in hiding, he climbed down a cliff to the Tumen River and crossed into China with his savings -- 80 U.S. dollars. His knowledge of the regime's hierarchy made him interesting to South Korean intelligence agents in China, and after they interrogated him for months, they helped him defect." SK intelligence agents in southern China? Operating overtly or covertly? |
| Posted by: Patrick Phillips 2003-10-4 5:52:39 PM |
| #2 You know, when Bush's State of the Union address referred to the "axis of evil" I winced a bit. The rhetoric seemed overblown, especially given that there were no immediate threats we seemed to face from Iraq, Iran & North Korea. Now we see from Kay's report that North Korea was willing to export missiles and more, we read recently that Iran has a nuclear program with enriched uranium traces "incompatible with European sources" and the Aussies stop an large ship full of drugs from the North cruising near their coasts. Looks indeed like both an axis and evil. I tend to agree with Dar about the husband, but what horrible choices these people face every day .... |
| Posted by: rkb 2003-10-4 5:51:01 PM |
| #1 As awful as the horrors of North Korea are, it's hard for me to find sympathy with the man who abandoned his wife and children to be starved and persecuted by the regime. I'm not any less apalled by the stories of starvation and brutality, but in his case my sympathy lies with his abandoned family--likely neglected and starved to death two or more years ago. |
| Posted by: Dar 2003-10-4 5:38:07 PM |