‘[W]e believed the United Nations could save us.’

I wonder how many mass graves could be marked with those words.   

That quote — it would be funny, though epitaphs  seldom are — comes from this testimonial of a Yodok survivor, via the International Herald Tribune. 

In 1999, a group of seven North Koreans fleeing their country was intercepted in Russia. The Russian authorities, rejecting appeals from the United Nations and human rights groups, sent them to China. China returned them to North Korea.

In the ensuing uproar in South Korea over the government’s failure to rescue them, the foreign minister had to step down. And then, the seven were largely forgotten. Those who remember them may have recalled their frightened faces on Russian television, where they said they feared death if sent back to their Communist homeland.

Now, two of them have escaped again and arrived in South Korea, contradicting what the North Korean government told United Nations officials about the group’s fate – that most had been returned to their homes and jobs. One brought with him accounts of life and death at North Korea’s infamous prison camp No. 15, known to the outside world as Yodok.  [IHT]

Read the rest on  your own.

Anju links?  Why, yes!

*   You mean by trying to  do it  at all?   In a recent conversation with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Camp David, Bush admitted  the U.S. “screwed up” the Banco Delta money transfer (HT).  Japan is subtly expressing its dissatisfaction with the new U.S. policy’s unfolding failure:  “[T]he international community must work together to pressure North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program.”

*   More red-on-red fighting in Iraq:  Iraqi Sunnis versus al-Qaeda in Baghdad.  Bill Roggio has much, much more, including accounts of the capture of a man who links al-Qaeda to Iran, long rumored to be sheltering Saad bin Laden, among others.