Modern-Day Comfort Women Describe Escape and Survival
In a follow-on to interviews they gave here, some of the first six North Korean refugees are talking about their escapes from the North. Here is an excerpt from the Dong-a Ilbo’s report:
A woman who shared the same cell with Chan-mi died of malnutrition with her whole body swollen; another woman she witnessed was beaten to death. Chan-mi wept when she said, “When I was pardoned last year in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP), the other eight women were all dead.
The L.A. Times continues its excellent Korea coverage with a detailed report, which includes this account of the emotional welcome the defectors received from Korean-American church members at LAX:
They hugged each of the refugees and handed them bouquets of fresh flowers as they emerged near the baggage area, accompanied by Chun Ki Won, the missionary who helped them escape via an underground railroad through China and Southeast Asia.
Before leaving the airport, church leaders joined hands with the defectors and prayed for North Koreans still living in the hermit kingdom or hiding in China.
“This is the moment we’ve been hoping and praying for for years,” said Sam Kim, a lawyer and member of the Bethel Korean Church in Irvine.
One of Korea’s most legitimate historical grievances was the abduction and enslavement of many of its girls as “comfort women” for Japanese soldiers. Compare that to what is happening to North Korean refugee women in China:
Chan Mi Shin, 20, spoke of foraging for grasses, the only food her family could find, to make broth and of being so hungry during the famine that killed millions that she started hallucinating that an accordion’s keys were cookies and candies.
Speaking through an interpreter, she and the three other women — Na Omi, Young Nah “Deborah” Choi and Ha Nah — explained how each had been sold as brides or prostitutes to already married Chinese men who paid the equivalent of a few hundred dollars for them. Shin was sold into marriage three times within a year of turning 16.
Choi, 24, who stands about 5 feet 7, is taller than the others, perhaps because her father, a Communist Party official, had a higher standard of living than most North Koreans. But after Choi’s father was sent to prison for five years, the family was ostracized and Choi was banished from school.
She paid a broker to help her escape to China in 2004, but the agent instead sold her to a married man who confined her to a small room and raped her repeatedly for two years.
Omi’s family was slowly starving when she fled to China. A man she hoped would help her instead sold her as a bride to a Chinese man, whose family treated her like a slave. She was eventually deported and spent time in a North Korean prison before once again crossing into China.
No, these women are not being enslaved due to direct Chinese government action. They are being enslaved because China flouts the obligations it accepted when it signed the 1951 U.N. Convention on Refugees, instead calling these refugees — almost all of then denied food because they are politically disfavored — “economic migrants.” If China had a modicum of respect for the human rights of innocents, it would allow the United Nations to open refugee camps on the Chinese-North Korean border, where people like this could find food, shelter, and safety. Instead, it offers bounties for their capture, shocks them with electric cattle prods, strings cables through the flesh of their wrists, and sends them back to imprisonment and death in North Korea. That’s why these women had to travel across China along an underground railroad, at constant risk of arrest. That’s why they’re lucky to have made it.
When the last disappointing chapter is written in the history of the United Nations, the UNHCR’s failure to take any effective action or raise a public outcry on behalf of these people may well be one of the Mussolini moments that marks its descent into feckless irrelevance. South Korea’s meek response to China’s brutal treatment of its citizens (North Koreans are legally citizens of the South) may also mark the moment when Korea’s nationhood fell captive to Chinese bullying.
I have one last question: where are the feminists?
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