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Opening a Window on North Korea's Horrors
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 2003-10-04 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=19468 |