Via reader tip comes news that the North Koreans have arrested two alleged South Korean spies:
North Korea said late on Thursday it had arrested two South Koreans based in the Chinese border city of Dandong, accusing them of spying for South Korea.
The North’s official KCNA news agency showed images of two middle-aged men it identified as Kim Kuk Gi and Choe Chun Gil speaking at a news conference in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.
The two men were South Korean nationals working as spies for Seoul’s National Intelligence Service from the Chinese border city of Dandong, it said.
“They zealously took part in the anti-DPRK smear campaign of the U.S. imperialists and the puppet group of traitors to isolate and blockade the DPRK in (the) international arena,” the agency said, using North Korea’s official DPRK acronym for Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. [Reuters]
You can read more at the link, but the real question is how were they arrested? Did the Chinese arrest them and send them to North Korea? Doubtful. Were they kidnapped by the North Koreans and brought to North Korea? The North Koreans have done this before. If so the South Korean government should be putting pressure on China to get them back.
Secondly are these people really spies? They are apparently Christian missionaries assisting North Korean refugees fleeing North Korea.So they may have just been kidnapped just like Reverend Kim Dong-sik was a few years ago simply to stop the underground railroad assisting North Korean refugees.
I think a lot of this growing trend has to do with the debt many of these people ran up to escape North Korea and then having a difficult time integrating into the hyper-competitive South Korean society:
A North Korean defector from North Hamgyong Province was given a prison sentence after getting caught smuggling drugs into South Korea from China last year.
The 38-year-old had looked in vain for a job and was desperate for money when she was approached by another defector who tempted her with the chance of some quick cash.
The defector told police she needed money to feed herself and felt rejected by South Korean society.
More defectors end up in prison here every year. In 2011 there were 51 defectors behind bars here, but that had risen to 97 in the first half of last year. Crimes range from drug possession, fraud and embezzlement to assault and murder.
A police officer said, “Defectors tend to be vulnerable to crime because they are often poor and face discrimination.” [Chosun Ilbo]
It looks like the North Korean defector Yeonmi Park who has made international headlines about her defection from the country has been exaggerating some of the tales she has been telling:
You’d have to have been inhuman not to be moved. But – and you’re going to hear a lot of “buts” – was the story she told of her life in North Korea accurate? The more speeches and interviews I read, watch and hear Park give, the more I become aware of serious inconsistencies in her story that suggest it wasn’t. Whether this matters is up to the reader to decide, but my concern is if someone with such a high profile twists their story to fit the narrative we have come to expect from North Korean defectors, our perspective of the country could become dangerously skewed. We need to have a full and truthful picture of life in North Korea if we are to help those living under its abysmally cruel regime and those who try to flee.
“Celebrity Defector”
I met Yeonmi Park a few months ago when I spent two weeks filming a story about her and her family for Australia’s SBS Dateline. We called the story, “Celebrity Defector.”
Back in South Korea where she now lives, Park is one of the stars of a television program featuring a cast of North Korean women. It’s called “Now On My Way To Meet You” and it daringly satirizes the Kim Dynasty. The women tell personal anecdotes about their lives in North Korea and their journey to the south. A number of the women were introduced to us as having been homeless and starving – the reason they fled.
Buried in the shows archives are some snapshots of Park’s childhood in North Korea that explain why she’s known on the show as the Paris Hilton of North Korea. They’re in sharp contrast to the story she’s now telling her international audience. [The Diplomat]
You can read the rest at the link, but it is a very convincing case that Park has exaggerated circumstances of her defection to possibly help raise awareness and funding for the North Korean human rights organizations she has been working with.
Here is Yeonmi Park’s response to this article:
I want to thank Mary Ann Jolley for caring so much about the terrible situation in North Korea that she would point out any inconsistencies in my quotes and how my story has been reported. Much of the time, there was miscommunication because of a language barrier. I have only learned English in the last year or so, and I’m trying hard to improve every day to be a better advocate for my people. I apologize for any misunderstandings. For example, I never said that I saw executions in Hyesan. My friends’ mother was executed in a small city in central North Korea where my mother still has relatives (which is why I don’t want to name it). And there are mountains you can even see on Google Earth – maybe you call them big hills in English – outside of Hyesan that we crossed to escape. There are many more examples like this.
But one very important thing to correct: I do not have a foundation. The website was a dummy site built by a friend, and it was not supposed to be live. There was no way it could accept money, and I haven’t taken any. I am so sorry for the confusion. The site has been taken down.
Also, I apologize that there have been times when my childhood memories were not perfect, like how long my father was sentenced to prison. Now I am checking with my mom and others to correct everything. I am also writing a book about my life in North Korea, my escape through China and and my work to promote human rights. It is where I will be able to tell my full story.
In the meantime, I thank you all for your patience and kindness to me.
I think most of the inconsistencies are pretty minor that could be explained by poor memory and English language skills other than the story of her mother being raped. If that is not true then that is a flat out lie. The organizations that promote defector testimony like this need to be very careful to not have defectors exaggerate or lie because this just plays into the hands of the Kim regime and its apologists. The truth about North Korea is bad enough, there is no need to lie about it.
[T]here may have been floating bodies in rivers in the terrible crisis years of the 90s when 600,000 people starved to death according to an estimate by the U.N. official who was then supervising foreign aid during the famine in the country.” (Abt’s sentences are as long as tapeworms.)
Bassett accuses Park of “sensationaliz[ing] the narrative to make everybody think that, you know, this is the ‘90s North Korea. It’s not.”
That is to say, Abt and Bassett insist that Park must be lying because there haven’t been “any” (Abt’s word) bodies found in North Korean rivers since 2000. Well, now…. If only some journalist who would rather inform his readers about a serious story than make a carnival sideshow of it would do someminimalresearch and conclusively establish just who’s really full of what here: [One Free Korea]
You can read the rest of One Free Korea’s take down of the North Korean apologists at the link, but it is just amazing to me these apologists make such claims when pictures of bodies floating along the border with China have been quite common in the South Korean media for the past decade. I highly recommend reading the comments over at One Free Korea that include a response from the journalist and one of the North Korean apologists. Not one of them was able to address One Free Korea’s specific criticisms.
Via One Free Korea comes this interview with 21 year old North Korean defector Yeonmi Park that explains what life was like for her in the “Socialist Paradise”:
In an interview with the Irish Independent, Yeonmi told how her first memory is of being told by her mother at the age of four “not to even whisper because the birds and mice could hear you”.
“That’s what I learned from my mum and that was really early – so that’s the way she could protect me from that terror,” said Yeonmi.
People are not really “living” there, she says of life in that country. “They are surviving there, and surviving is not that easy actually.”
When she was nine, she was forced to watch her best friend’s mother being executed on the street before her eyes.
Her only crime had been she had watched a James Bond movie and shared the DVDs with neighbours.
Watching her body crumble to the ground was a seismic moment in how Yeonmi viewed the world.
“She was a very nice, gentle mother,” she said.
“Always I knew that in North Korea when they kill the people, they justify themselves by saying these are criminals trying to destroy our socialist paradise.
“But I knew that lady. She was not that bad. She was not going to destroy our country,” she said.
“She was just being killed because she watched the Hollywood movie, James Bond. And that’s why she got killed.”
That same year, Yeonmi’s life changed catastrophically when her father, a mid-ranking civil servant, was arrested and imprisoned for selling precious metals to China on the black market.
Her mother, too, was interrogated and thrown into jail. Yeonmi and her sister, Eunmi were left to fend for themselves, at the age of nine and 11, foraging on the mountainsides for grasses, plants, frogs and even dragonflies to avoid starving to death. “Everything I used to see, I ate them,” she said. [Irish Independent]
You can read more plus watch a video interview with Yeonmi at the link. Make sure to read One Free Korea’s commentary as this link as well.
I wonder how much of a choice these defectors had in regards to returning to North Korea after they were caught in Laos?:
North Korea on Wednesday paraded before the state press nine young defectors who were coerced into returning from Laos last month. The teenagers, who are believed to be orphans, recited declarations of loyalty to the repressive state and accused South Korea of attempting to kidnap them.
The official KCNA news agency on Thursday said the young defectors “returned to the arms of their fatherland” after being tricked into leaving the North by the “puppet regime” of South Korea.
The young defectors had attempted to reach South Korea via China and Laos, but were taken back to North Korea late last month by North Korean agents, who apparently badgered them into submission in a Lao detention center. [Chosun Ilbo]
