Well those Chinese public security officers have shown some creativity (tongue heavily in cheek here) and have taken electric cattle prods to a group of 18 North Korean asylum seeker made largely of women and children.
I am just raging as I blog this. Don’t know where to begin, but it makes me want to go there and somehow get involved. If only I had been a professional rugby player, I could tackle some of those guards and give them a taste of their own medicine. Cattle prods, man!
Ok here it goes. Sometime early morning on the 25th of October a group of 18 North Koreans attempted to enter the South Korean consulate building inside the Embassy compound. They had tipped off a KBS film crew who were there to film the whole thing (good. that’s rule number 1: make no moves without film crews there to verify the incident) and snipped through some barbed wire fence. They then scaled a wall/fence to enter the compound and made for the consulate building. On the film you can see it was a hard scrabble, since they had no ladders or scaling equipment, and it appears that at least one of them cut their feet on the barbed wire. In the end 14 of them got inside, and another 4 were arrested or ran away from approaching Chinese security police.
It was at that moment that Chinese guards/police came at them, wielding truncheons and (sickeningly) electric cattle prods. Watch the footage if you dare. It’s awful. At one point a Chinese guard says “???????, ????????, ????????????!” Jing, Yen Jun and others can correct me if I’m wrong, but KBS gave the translation as “zap him, just zap that guy!” (???????? ?????, ???????????? ??????? ?????!).
Around this point (hard to tell exactly when without seeing the unedited footage), some of the North Koreans unfurled a South Korean flag ( ?????) and banged on the shut metal door of the consulate, demanding it be opened and crying out “We are North Korean defectors (?????????)! Save us!”
According to a YTN report on the same story, “with the north Koreans running around trying to avoid the electric cattle prods and screaming, calling out “save us”, while the children were crying loudly, it was a really miserable scene.” You can only imagine.
Somehow, three of the defectors - a woman in her 30s with her 9 year-old son and another woman in her twenties - managed to get into the building by pushing desparately on the shutter door. All the rest were taken away. The building itself enjoys extraterritoriality (diplomatic privilege) while the area around it is controlled by the Chinese public security police.
In an interview I just saw extracts of on KBS news at midnight, the South Korean Consul-General in Beijing mentioned that what with all these defectors running around, it was getting mighty hard to do any consular work, and the Consulate might have to be temporary closed down (like it was in October last year). One imagines this would be at least until they get the 120 + 3 defectors who are already in there out to a third country.
Something that shocked me almost as much as the unprecedented use of the electric torture devices was the fact that it was so little reported. If you watch the footage (and YTN has some more of the raw footage on its site) you can see and hear the thing going for at least 10-15 seconds. And yet of all the stories in Korean covering it, just the KBS and YTN stories mentioned this new tactic (the Korean word for the day is ???????). Only one English media outlet covered this anngle, the South African Independent Online newspaper. I would say that this is a major human rights violation in any country, no? Unarmed people being attacked with an electric cattle prod?
Again, I would reiterate what I said in an earlier post: to those who are helping and/or co-ordinating these events, please be careful. People’s lives are at stake, and I don’t think that this footage, however important, is worth the lives of those 11 if they get sent back to North Korea.
On the other hand, what could the South Korean consulate do differently? Did they fail in their duty to protect fellow citizens? (As I understand it, under the ROK’s constitution, those people are ROK citizens. ) Frankly, I think the consulate did let them down, but then again a friend whom I respect and admire tells me he is offended by this. Maybe it’s just my fatigue and long, drawn-out cold talking here. I welcome your feedback, gentle readers.
37 Comments
“OK, everybody, next time when you see a boatload of Chinese people washing up on your shores seeking refuge, send them all back into the sea.”
well that is what they did. passing ships of various countries (except for the scandadivians) simply just ignored the viet chinese refugees in their sinking boats. tens of thousand of these people will killed by pirates and/or drowned.
many who reached australia and other countries lived in very dire conditions in camps for many years.
kimbob
i guess the nazi like actions that the south koreans took to remove the chinese minority amongst them have been forgotten.
“On the other hand, what could the South Korean consulate do differently?” - Opening the door would be a good start. I doubt I am as tired as you and it sickens me also.
Unfortunately a few South Korean media personnel getting detained for a few hours by US soldiers in Iraq will get much more media coverage than this real human rights abuse by China towards North Koreans. Head in the sand.
Afriad this wont make headlines across the world until you have footage of several(as in plural+) 100 dead north koreans freshly slaughtered on a street after trying to run to freedom showing up on drudgereport.com, Its just not shocking enough yet to even get a raised eyebrow, horror needs to be raised above human comporehension before it will ever really register.
My heart aches after watching that miserable scene. I could hear the blop blop blop sounds of the cattle prod firing. Somehow I think it’s a fitting scene since the Chinese think of North Korean refugees as no more than animals. “Please save us, we want to live!” were their cries. Despicable! We can expect what we expect from that evil satanic North Korean regime. But I wonder if any of the Chinese citizens are allowed to view this and the actions of their “police” in their media. Probably not. I guess it’s lucky they didn’t use guns instead. Instead, they used the cattle prods for “protection” against poor nine year old refugees - you know that they are very dangerous..
I’m also angry at the mild manner ways in which South Korea is treating this as. South Korea needs to have some backbones and stop being afraid of offending China for a change!
Really, what the world should be doing is to put on the economic sanctions against North Korea and China.
I will never ever knowingly buy any Chinese made goods. We should not buy anything from barbaric countries who are not civilized enough in basic human rights. I bet Jing and Yen jun will have no problems defending China’s latest actions. Truly, North Korea and China deserve each other. F***ng bastards!
Unfortunately as far as I know it didn’t make the main news in the UK. We hear very little about Korea over here unless Dubya is causing trouble.
The OhMyNews Scale explains all.
These human lives are worth 3 1/2 points out of 10 to the Korean media. Page 4 of the Joongang Ilbo. Just because it’s possible to calibrate something doesn’t mean you can comprehend the skull-bursting illogic beneath it. Chinese police can shock women and kids with freaking cattle prods and they will enter and leave the gates of their own embassy in Seoul unmolested. Imagine if an American MP did the same thing to one of those snotty Hangchonryon zombies. The value of your shares in Hanhwa candle company would double overnight.
The Koreans are madder about access to historical sites than the enslavement and murder of their countrymen. There are South Koreans who get it, of course, but they are so few in number that they can’t even provide a moral voice to a credible political opposition.
One of the guards yelled at the defectors to essentially to cease and desist and then yelled Dian Zi a couple times, which does mean to electrify.
Actually the use of electric stun batons by law enforcement is fairly common let alone unprecedented. A lot of countries use them in fact, though I can see why some people would find it degrading. There was a scandal somewhat recently in Australia when they were used to herd refugees. I don’t know whats worse, being stunned or beaten with a plastic truncheon.
I’d say both are small kamja compared to that big one-way ticket to the concentration camps.
Pepper spray canisters in BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, USA, MAN!
http://tv.ksl.com/index.php?nid=5&sid=128157
21-year-old woman killed after she was hit by a pepper spray canister by Boston riot police after the Red Sox won the ALCS.
Yeah, police brutality sucks in any country.
But what irks me as well are Westerners with their irritating White priviledge and their self-righteous sense of Western superiority, living in developing Asian countries, carrying the torch of the White man’s burden. These Oriental savages, when will they ever learn, eh?
As White folks like to tell us immigrant folks here in the good old US of A, if you dont like it there, go back to your own country!
Jing, and bluejives,
It figures that you guys would excuse the inexcuseable to justify the unjustifiable. What bunch of hogwash!
These are cattle prods designed for putting down big animals, not stun guns designed for violent people. Why don’t you try to get zapped by one of those cattle prods and let’s see if you can survive the voltage.
As much as you guys refuse to acknowledge it, these are people who are escaping for their lives from one massive concentration camp called North Korea. They include women and children. They’re not some drunken rioting violent idiots who deserve the whatever shit they get from the coppers. Poor examples, not even close. Try again.
What’s even worse and I’m sure you’ll try to justify it as well, is the forceable sending back of these people, knowing full well they face grueling deaths. After all, they’re even asking that they stay in your hell hole China, since all they want is a safe passage to a third country. You can’t allow that to happen, of course because of your allies, North Korea.
I wish people wouldn’t lump me with random other posters, it makes debating so much harder when people assume I’ve said things or taken positions I never had.
Both those weapons the officers carried were specifically designed for security duty and not to coral cows. Cattle prods aren’t even designed for “putting down” big animals, they are designed to irritate them enough to get them moving in a certain direction.
I fully admit that the likely fate for these would be defectors will be “unpleasant” to say the least and I wish China would not send them back to North Korea. Unfortunately nothing can be done and the world is full of unpleasantries that most people would rather not know about. I would like to think of myself as pragmatic(others may think cold-blooded), but there seems little political will in either South Korea or the United States to do anything for these people. Write to your congressman Kimbob to change things, organize underground organizations to smuggle North Korean defectors to safety, lobby South Korean politicians to ask China to stop sending defectors back. It’s easy to be indignant over the internet. However, it’s a far cry from doing something that can affect any relevant outcomes.
OK, everybody, next time when you see a boatload of Chinese people washing up on your shores seeking refuge, send them all back into the sea. We don’t want them setting their feet on our soils. “Nothing can be done and the world is full of unpleasantries that most people would rather not know about”, so send them all back in their boats.
Chinese police attack refugees with cattle prods
In the latest attempt by North Korean refugees to enter the South Korean consulate in Beijing (11 out of 14 succeeded), Chinese guards attacked some of the defectors (including children) with electric cattle prods. Marmot has more details from the…
mw:
If the Chinese can be even half as much humanitarian towards the North Koreans as the Park Chung Hee’s removal of the ethnic Chinese in the 1970’s, then we would actually be getting somewhere wouldn’t we? Park forced the Chinese to leave Korea by restricting them economically (which was a wrong and shameful act in Korean history, but at the same time does not justify PRC lying comfortably with the NK in the same bed), but one thing he never did was to round them up by force, flog them, then send them kicking and screaming over to Communist China against their will. In fact, most Chinese were free to go wherever the hell they wanted, including Taiwan. Now, if China can return the same favor in kind, that would be great.
Damn the Chinese to hell.
They are supposed to save the cattle prods for the pot smokers.
There is always that 10% that don’t get the memo. I mean really. Was any pot found on the defectors?
Any pot at all?
Communists ALWAYS get a free pass from (most of) the media. It’s sickening…but not surprising.
Eyes on Korea: 2004-10-26
Eberstadt’s article; China plans annexation?; NK defectors making “big push”; Chinese humanitarianism; Reactions to the NK Human Rights Act; The information war; NK prison camps; Various diplomatic military strategies; ROK in Iraq; Anti-Americanis…
“Communists ALWAYS get a free pass from (most of) the media. It??s sickening??but not surprising.”
My first thought was Join the Dark Side, but then I realized that was complete bullshit.
How do communists get a free pass from the media? There are a constant barrage of human rights denunciations from practically every angle. Every action is perceived as to be part of some diabolical communist plot. Free pass from the media my ass.
Freakin Noh Moon Hyun and his idiotic paleo-liberal bull!@#$@#-they don’t give a damn about these people just making up with their ideological fathers.
“As I understand it, under the ROK’s constitution, those people are ROK citizens.” They are when the Uri Party is complaining about the U.S. North Korean Human Rights Act, but not when they’re receiving electric shocks for daring to defect from their country. And to cattle-prod apologist jing, you know where you can stick it.
RE comment: “?橫On the other hand, what could the South Korean consulate do differently??? - Opening the door would be a good start.”
Sounds good, though that might alert the Chinese authorities. And if, as I suspect many readers here suspect, SK govt really doesn’t want them, maybe it would be a good idea not to call the embassy and ask them to open the gates…
I recently heard someone say the SK embassy isn’t doing enough to protect the 120ish NKoreans currently inside the embassy, and that much would seem an unfair accusation. I also heard this person suggest it’s SK’s fault the 120 inside aren’t in SK yet - as if China just lets embassies take people out of the country. Even with the NK Human Rights law taking effect you won’t see the US embassy bringing out hundreds of people in diplomatic bags, either.
I’m all for dropping radios, pamphlets, and food from airplanes over NK and any sort of constructive destructive mischief, but when it comes to what can really be done (except in a case by case, moment by moment basis) on the ground in China without the full cooperation of the Chinese, I’m not sure what’s out there as a possibility.
Meanwhile, I’d love to see one of those electric shock devices short circuit. I’ve got a school seonbae who has been told he can’t have children because he got the treatment to his testicles here in SK. If used consistently over time, that stuff even does strange & permanent things to your fingernails.
It is a disturbing film, and I agree, Orackay, this footage desperately needs to be seen more in the West. But it won’t. Why? because the overall mood in the US and in most other Western media seems to be to almost ignore human rights violations everywhere right now. It’s not just in regimes run by the right, as some would say, or the left, as others would say. There is a general desensitization - a numbing - going on. And it doesn’t speak well for the future of the human race for it to be happening. This is what happens before major world wars.
People who want to stop this need to speak out each and every time they see stuff like ths happening, not just when it fits their pet profile of a cause they ‘like’.
Its very important…
[...] just became Taiwanese. And a woman. Lastly, the Marmots guest-blogger Hamel has a terrible story of human rights abuse involving North Korean refugees that wi [...]
The western media isn’t ignoring this story. Google news found 143 articles in English that specifically mentioned the use of cattle prods.
Just like the Korea Times and the Korea Herald, you have to give their “reporters” a day or two to translate the articles they read in the Korean langauge press
http://news.google.com/news?hl.....od+beijing
where can i buy diet pills in canada
Please visit some information on diet pill us made
payday loans
You are invited to check out some relevant information dedicated to mortgage cash advance loans
top 10 diet pill online
You are invited to visit some helpful info in the field of diet pills ultra 99
sprts gmblng wb st
Please check out some relevant information dedicated to txs bb lgl gmblng
discover card
You are invited to check out some relevant pages in the field of home loans mortgage rates
free play keno sites
You can also check the pages in the field of keno reels baccarat baccarat legacyforlife.net
casions
Take your time to check the sites in the field of poker holdem
live michigan club keno results
You are invited to check out some relevant information on KENO GAMES FOR COMPUTER
tamiflu 10 price
You are invited to check out the pages on tamiflu capsules tamiflu relenza
dwnld txs hldm fr fr
In your free time, take a look at the pages on txs hldm crd gm
forex trading robot
Take your time to check some information in the field of active forex trade