September 22nd, 2005 by The Marmot in NK Human Rights/Refugees
While most defector tales are profiles of courage (and desperation), some manage to stand out among the rest.
According to the Chosun Ilbo, a North Korean woman, identified by her family name of Park, recently arrived in Thailand with her 19-year-old son and two North Korean women and is awaiting passage to South Korea. What makes Park’s story truly amazing is that this she made the trip without feet, having lost them thanks to torture she suffered at the hands of North Korean security authorities after she was repatriated to the Workers’ Paradise during a previous defection attempt.
Park’s first defection attempt came in winter of 2000, when she fled with her son to China. After spending time doing odd jobs in Changchun, she headed to the Inner Mongolian town of Manzhouli (leaving her son behind), which is commonly used by defectors to flee across the border to the Republic of Mongolia. She was arrested by Chinese police, however, and repatriated to the North in January 2004.
North Korean State Safety & Security Agency personnel welcomed her back by poking her frostbitten feet with a rusty iron skewer and mercilessly stamping on them with their boots. Her feet began to discharge bloody pus. Security personnel kept up the torture, though, telling her that only if her legs rotted away to the thigh would she be unable to flee to the South. This apparently made Park even more determined to get out. A month later, she was freed, and in September 2004, she fled across the border to China again.
Starving and with a pair of crutches, she made it to China. When she met her son, he hardly recognized her, her face mashed from the beatings and her body reduced to skin and bones. In February, she underwent surgery in China to amputate her feet. In June, she left Changchun again for Manzhouli to take the train to Mongolia, but when help disappeared following a strengthened Chinese crackdown on North Korean defectors from May, she had to change her plans.
In August, Park and her son left Beijing for Kunming, Yunnan province, where they joined up with two other North Korean women, one of whom was a Japanese-Korean who made the unfortunate decision to return to the Workers’ Paradise in the 1970s. On Sept. 6, they took a car to through the mountainous jungle region to the border with Myanmar. Due to sudden rains, however, the road across the border was swept away and they had to return to their hideout in in the border zone. On Sept. 8, they took a boat along a tributary of the Mekong River into Myanmar, and from there went to Laos. From Laos, they took another boat across the Mekong into Thailand, where they were caught by Thai police.
Do Hee-yoon, executive director of Citizen’s Coalition for Human Rights of Abductees and North Korean Refugees, said that if the group is turned over to Thai immigration authorities and recognized as refugees following a UNHCR screening, they could be sent anywhere they want. Do said his group sent a letter to the Korean embassy in Thailand on Sept. 15 asking that the situation be looked into, but he said he has yet to receive a response. The Japanese government, for their part, told a Japanese NGO it would take all necessary measures for the Japanese-Korean who defected with Park and her son.
In a letter to the Citizen’s Coalition for Human Rights of Abductees and North Korean Refugees, Park said, “The screams I cried and my moaning was not mine, but the screams and moans of our parents and brethren currently living in the North… Please pray so that they may come to South Korea.”
Original article from http://blog.marmot.cc/
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