An interesting article by Blaine Harden in the Washington Post of the horrors a North Korean defector endured in North Korea:
Shin Dong-hyuk (26) is described as having a baby face with wary eyes. It is no wonder that he is wary. “There are burn scars on his back and left arm from where he was tortured by fire at age 14, when he was unable to explain why his soon-to-be-hanged mother had tried to escape. The middle finger of his right hand is cut off at the first knuckle, punishment for accidentally dropping a sewing machine in the garment factory at his camp.” He lived in a North Korean camp where savageness and cruelty were “common and almost routine.” Some examples given were ”the rape of his cousin by prison guards and the beating to death of a young girl found with five grains of unauthorized wheat in her pocket. He once found three kernels of corn in a pile of cow dung, he writes. He picked them out, cleaned them off on his sleeve and ate them. “As miserable as it may seem, that was my lucky day,” he wrote.
But even though he has escaped the brutality of the North, his life in South Korea is also filled with anxiety. “He is unemployed and worries about how to pay his $300-a-month rent. His defector stipend of $800 a month, which he had received from the South Korean government since arriving in Seoul 2 1/2 years ago, ended in August.”
Like many defectors to South Korea he has problems adjusting and fitting in. With no family here, he, like many defectors, turns to religion but is unfulfilled. “I go to the church, but I don’t really understand the words or the concepts,” Shin said and later added, “I have recently discovered that I am lonely, [and] I realize you really need a family.”
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It’s a heart-breaking story…
The left does not want to help people like this to keep inter-Korean relation smooth.
The right doesn’t want to help people like this in fear that they will create a wave of economic depression and skyrocket crime rate.
No one in Korea or outside really wants to nor have the power to effect change…
Sometimes I get so angry that carpet bombing Pyongyang seems the only morally justifiable stance.
“Sometimes I get so angry that carpet bombing Pyongyang seems the only morally justifiable stance.”
Ummm… Bulldozing a house to kill a cockroach just doesn’t seem “morally justifiable” to me…
There are times when the house don’t look like a house, but a cockroach den.
But usually, I’m not like this so don’t worry. I won’t be writing a letter to Obama asking for a preemptive attack on North Korea.
On some abstract level, though, all those people living in Pyongyang represent the hardcore supporters of Kim Jong Il government. Sometimes when I get angry from news like this, I feel that if we wipe them clean from the face of the earth, more people might be saved.
I understand your frustration, virtual wonderer. Everything about North Korea is a massive clusterfuck, and I have no idea as to how to make the situation better.
Nor does anyone else, it seems. Certainly not anyone in power.
1. Defectors get a stipend?
Can I defect from my country and get paid too?
2. 300,000 won per month rent? Wow!
3. What exactly does the pro-North K. Left do when such stories
surface? Just denounce such testimonies as vicious lies? (It is sorta hard to lie about a missing finger and burn marks.)
4. How can there be a pro-North Left when such stories keep surfacing?
How f’ing stupid do you have to be to believe KJI’s B.S. especially while sitting pretty in the South??????
exit86:
As I’ve paraphrased before: if the pro-North Left could be reasoned with, then there wouldn’t be a pro-North Left.
But to be fair, I think most of the people who try to quell stories such as Shin’s and try to stop leaflet distribution and whatnot are not the blind fools you think they are. I believe most of them want to see an end to the North’s regime, but have a very different way of going about it. They want to coax the North into reconciliation and see any anti-North propaganda as being embarrassing to the North, and therefore damaging to North-South relations and to reconciliation. Maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt that many of them “believe KJI’s B.S.”
So yes, they certainly are blind fools, but not in the manner that you might think think.
I’ve read aquariums of pyongyang and this is paradise. Any other good autobios from former gulag guests?
There have been extended documentaries on Shin Dong-hyuk on the BBC and on the Al-Jazeera English network. Terrifying, believable, poignant. He also has burn marks on his shins from climbing thorugh an electrified fence to escape the camp he had been incarcerated in since birth. The only reason he made it at all is that he was able to crawl over the body of his escape mate who wasn’t so fortunate. In one of the documentaries, Shin gave an informal talk to a group of students in a Korean university. There was also a documentary on the BBC a couple of years back on an escaped camp commandant, who was then living in Seoul. His stories were horrific. He only began to realize that the inmates were human beings when he witnessed two parents trying to protect their child from poisonous gas in a death chamber. Needless to say, they did not succeed. Before that he believed them all to be sub-human, and therefore had no conscience issues.
As long as there is not an overwhelmingly large population of refugees from the north in the south, supporting these people financially and easing their transition into society would be money well spent.
i donno soondae… the money that is being spent is providing ample evidence to Korean conservatives what would happen to Korea if the country was unified…
it’s a problem with out a solution.
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