AP Worldstream
02-15-2005
Dateline: SEOUL, South Korea
The 12-year-old girl's image is still burned in Kim Chun Ae's mind.
A few years ago, the girl was among dozens of young women cowering before North Korean border guards after being returned from neighboring China where they were sold as wives. Kim, 51, was looking for her own daughter whose fate she feared was the same. Now arrested and sent home, they both awaited their fate.
"I noticed this little girl clutching a piece of paper," Kim said Tuesday in an interview. The paper had the telephone number for the Chinese man who had bought her as his wife.
"The girl said she must find her way back to the man. She said the old man, her husband, used to place her on his lap and feed her rice," Kim said. "Back in North Korea, the girl hadn't eaten rice for years."
Human trafficking and other human rights concerns have emerged as a thorny issue between North Korea and an array of nations trying to get it to renounce nuclear weapons amid the nuclear standoff.
Thousands of North Korean women escape their communist homeland to seek food and work in China, only to fall victim to traffickers. The problem has grown worse as people living under Pyongyang's impoverished hardline regime have become increasingly desperate just to get enough to eat.
North Korea sees an increasing discussion of its human rights situation as an attempt to topple its regime.
The United States is relying on China to twist the North's arm to give up its nuclear ambitions and return to disarmament talks. But Beijing has refused to treat North Koreans on its territory as refugees and repatriates them as illegal migrants, and regularly cracks down on activists helping them defect to the capitalist South.
Even in South Korea, emotions are divided.
At the campus where a Tuesday conference on human rights in the North took place, students and activists hung banners condemning the gathering as part of a "U.S. ploy to isolate and stifle the North." They want reconciliation and gradual reform in the North over fears it might lash out unpredictably.
But at the Seoul conference, defectors criticized North Korean leader Kim Jong Il as a cold-blooded dictator.
"Kim Jong Il is keeping his people like cabbages in a field," said Kim Young Soon, 68, who arrived in South Korea in 2003. "And he waters them just enough, because no slave with a full stomach will obey his master."
Kim Young Soon said she spent 13 years in labor camps, along with people who committed such crimes as accidentally breaking a plaster bust of Kim Il Sung, North Korea's founding leader and the father of Kim Jong Il. Other crimes included listening to South Korean radio or using newspapers with Kim Il Sung's photo to cover a floor.
The mother, Kim Chun Ae, said her two daughters were kidnapped and sold to a Chinese man. Eventually, she was able to find them and the family defected to South Korea in June 2003.
But on her journeys to find her lost daughters, she got a firsthand glimpse of the human trade.
She described how human traffickers raped and sold North Korean women, and remembered a woman whose husband sold her for less than US$100. She recalled North Korean border guards beating a pregnant woman for "bringing Chinese seed home."
Twice, she was arrested and repatriated home but managed to escape again.
Despite all she's been through, she said she never wanted to return to the North, where worries about food were constant and even internal travel possible only with government permits.
"I spent so many nights in cow sheds to avoid human traffickers. ... But for me, there was no going back home," Kim Chun Ae said. "From China, I saw South Korean TV and I knew Kim Jong Il had fooled us."
Copyright 2005, AP News All Rights Reserved
North Korean human rights emerge as hot topic amid nuclear standoffSANG-HUN CHOE, Associated Press Writer
AP Worldstream
02-15-2005
Dateline: SEOUL, South Korea
The 12-year-old girl's image is still burned in Kim Chun Ae's mind.
A few years ago, the girl was among dozens of young women cowering before North Korean border guards after being returned from neighboring China where they were sold as wives. Kim, 51, was looking for her own daughter whose fate she feared was the same. Now arrested and sent home, they both awaited their fate.
"I noticed this little girl clutching a piece of paper," Kim said Tuesday in an interview. The paper had the telephone number for the Chinese man who had bought her as his wife.
"The girl said she must find her way back to the man. She said the old man, her husband, used to place her on his lap and feed her rice," Kim said. "Back in North Korea, the girl hadn't eaten rice for years."
Human trafficking and other human rights concerns have emerged as a thorny issue between North Korea and an array of nations trying to get it to renounce nuclear weapons amid the nuclear standoff.
Thousands of North Korean women escape their communist homeland to seek food and work in China, only to fall victim to traffickers. The problem has grown worse as people living under Pyongyang's impoverished hardline regime have become increasingly desperate just to get enough to eat.
North Korea sees an increasing discussion of its human rights situation as an attempt to topple its regime.
The United States is relying on China to twist the North's arm to give up its nuclear ambitions and return to disarmament talks. But Beijing has refused to treat North Koreans on its territory as refugees and repatriates them as illegal migrants, and regularly cracks down on activists helping them defect to the capitalist South.
Even in South Korea, emotions are divided.
At the campus where a Tuesday conference on human rights in the North took place, students and activists hung banners condemning the gathering as part of a "U.S. ploy to isolate and stifle the North." They want reconciliation and gradual reform in the North over fears it might lash out unpredictably.
But at the Seoul conference, defectors criticized North Korean leader Kim Jong Il as a cold-blooded dictator.
"Kim Jong Il is keeping his people like cabbages in a field," said Kim Young Soon, 68, who arrived in South Korea in 2003. "And he waters them just enough, because no slave with a full stomach will obey his master."
Kim Young Soon said she spent 13 years in labor camps, along with people who committed such crimes as accidentally breaking a plaster bust of Kim Il Sung, North Korea's founding leader and the father of Kim Jong Il. Other crimes included listening to South Korean radio or using newspapers with Kim Il Sung's photo to cover a floor.
The mother, Kim Chun Ae, said her two daughters were kidnapped and sold to a Chinese man. Eventually, she was able to find them and the family defected to South Korea in June 2003.
But on her journeys to find her lost daughters, she got a firsthand glimpse of the human trade.
She described how human traffickers raped and sold North Korean women, and remembered a woman whose husband sold her for less than US$100. She recalled North Korean border guards beating a pregnant woman for "bringing Chinese seed home."
Twice, she was arrested and repatriated home but managed to escape again.
Despite all she's been through, she said she never wanted to return to the North, where worries about food were constant and even internal travel possible only with government permits.
"I spent so many nights in cow sheds to avoid human traffickers. ... But for me, there was no going back home," Kim Chun Ae said. "From China, I saw South Korean TV and I knew Kim Jong Il had fooled us."
Copyright 2005, AP News All Rights Reserved
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