A blog of a more serious nature.

Greetings everybody,

I hope this post finds you well.

I had a ‘girls’ night out’ the Friday before last with the expat women of Jinju. We of course talked about dresses and embroidery and other such trivial things that women delight in. We also shared a large pot of octopus soup. I was prevailed upon to sample a tentacle but I could not be coerced into gorging on the head as its eyes were looking at me. This Friday and Saturday night involved much the same fare as last weekend; drinking with the expats, munching on indoor barbeque beef and slowly melting in the unforgiving Korean sun.

The only event of note that I have attended during the last two weeks was a lecture at the local university given by a woman who had escaped from North Korea. Her story was fairly horrific. She had been raised to believe that North Korea was a paradise and that the rest of the world was violent and uncivilised thanks to the propaganda that is spread by Kim Jong-il's regime. Her eyes were opened as an adult. She experienced the famine in the 1990s and saw starving people eating the bark from trees whilst humanitarian aid was diverted to the army. She later ended up being imprisoned in a concentration camp for a minor offence. There she lived in sub-human conditions and witnessed many atrocities until her escape to China. Her life in China wasn’t much better though as she had to live in hiding from the Chinese government. The Chinese have a nasty habit of forcing defectors back into North Korea. The people who manage to make it across the North Korean border are officially regarded by the Chinese government as ‘illegal economic immigrants’ rather than refugees seeking asylum. Accordingly they are shown no mercy by the Chinese police who actively hunt them down and prevent them from moving on to other countries where they would be welcomed. The speaker testifies that defectors who are repatriated are seen as traitors and are therefore punished with torture, death and sometimes the execution of their relatives. She herself was caught and sent back to North Korea. Miraculously, she managed to escape again but not before being brutalised so badly that she has been left permanently disabled. 

We were then shown some horrific genuine footage of refugees who were trying to make their way from China to South Korea without being detected so that they might have a chance of living freely. Some of the scenes were extremely hard to watch as not all of the refugees made it. One family comprised of a 2 year old girl, a mother, a father, a grandmother and an uncle tried to make a dash through the gates of the Japanese embassy in China in order to seek asylum. The men were supposed to push the guards aside at the embassy entrance so the women and child could make it through first but they panicked and just ran through. Consequently, the women and child were caught just as they were crossing the gate and arrested.  Thankfully, the Chinese allowed this particular family to go to South Korea as their escape was caught on camera and leaked to the media and they did not want the issue to get any further press. Another family in the documentary tried to legally claim refugee status by going through the official channels and making a plea for their lives but the Chinese police just used their information to locate them and send them to their deaths. The whole thing was highly disturbing to witness. North Korea basically came across as a large prison camp; not a country.

My apologies if that was distressing to read. I am a ridiculous human being who usually only writes about the absurd so I was debating whether or not I should even mention a subject of this gravitas. However, the lady who spoke to us wants her story to get out to raise awareness of the lack of human rights in North Korea so she asked us to use the internet to spread her tale. She herself can’t afford to be too high profile; she was unable to even give us her name because she fears for her safety and that of her family still living in North Korea. 

Next time I write I shall have news of a cheerier nature as I shall be attending the Boryeong Mud Festival soonly.

That is all.