Choe Sang-Hun has posted another report on the plight of a group of seven North Koreans that were fleeing their country, but were sent back by Russia and China.
Five of the seven were sent to the infamous Yodok Prison camp. The one woman of
the group was tortured by North Korean security for months until she had “shriveled to the size of a dog” by the time she was sent to Yodok.
Kim Gwang Soo described what happened to the young woman who wanted to marry Heo (one of the seven).“Pang arrived in Yodok on a stretcher,” he said. “Heo hoarded his rations and traded them for candies. After work, he took them to Pang. The day she died, we buried her together,” he said. “Heo cried a lot. He blamed himself for her death.”
She died only two months after arriving.
Two of the seven eventually escaped to South Korea.
You can read more of this account here.
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R. Elgin, so maybe KJI’s dictatorship tortures a few Koreans for having the nerve to leave paradise, but as our resident sock troll Netizen Kim says:“North Korea maintains the purest sense of Korean identity largely free of foreign contamination,” so how dare we criticize.
“Purity” is a thing that exists only in the moment but not in the past or the future, for it never was truly and never will be entirely.
North Korean ideology can but lead only to needless suffering.
So, obviously the Sunshine Policy, or whatever it is called now, isn’t producing the results it was intended to do. How long will it last before conditions in North Korea get much better?
Sitting by while knowing that the aid sent up North does not make it to the ones who are the most in need (but instead it is used by Kim Jong Il to bribe the military into extending its support to him) is probably not the most moral thing to do. One thing for sure: historians will look at this as one of the greatest travesties of the early 21st century.
The South Korean government needs to be more forceful with the North Korean government, it needs to take adequate actions to ensure that aid does make its way to the ones that are most in need. Taking the North Korean government’s word that it is certainly isn’t good enough.
There are no words.
In reality, the Sunshine Policy has been little more than the act of taking it where the sun don’t shine just to keep KJI and his cronies from crumbling and ruining the party in the South.
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There is nothing funny about that. (response to “Ledtim” posting)
From what I can tell, self-righteous moral anger, sanctions, and the geopolitical dilemma caused by Cold War legacy hasn’t done very much to save North Korean lives either.
“From what I can tell, self-righteous moral anger, sanctions, and the geopolitical dilemma caused by Cold War legacy hasn’t done very much to save North Korean lives either.”
That’s not what I was calling for. Do you think that inspecting 20 truckloads of aid a year, all on the same day after having given advance warning to the NK government, is sufficient? Well, isn’t that what a whistle-blower, a South Korean university professor who has served as an aid inspector in NK, said? On top of that, North Korea has been known to send food aid inspectors to villages filled by actors, the tallest, healthiest, most handsome and beautiful people they could find, that were bused in from all over North Korean specifically for the visit.
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