“The temperature went down to minus 20 or 30 degrees Celsius during winter in North Korean camps. When women were interrogated, their clothes were ripped off and their body parts, including their faces, were bruised from severe torture. Sexual violence was part of their life.”
An event was held on Wednesday (local time) by the Permanent Representative of South Korea to the United Nations in Manhattan, New York, to disclose North Korea's human rights abuses against women to the international community. On the occasion of the 69th UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) session, it allowed North Korean defectors to share their firsthand experiences and the atrocities they had witnessed under the regime.
Jan Eun-sook, a North Korean woman who escaped to South Korea at the age of 14, currently pursues a master's degree in the United States under the Fulbright Scholar Program. She was caught twice during her escape attempt, but now she stood up to reveal the deplorable conditions of detention facilities where she was imprisoned.
"More than 10 people, from infants to adult women, were detained in a cell of less than 16.5 square meters,” Jang said. “The space was so cramped that we had to sit with legs crossed all day long, and were even punished for making a slight motion.” She recalled that they would not even think about encouraging or talking to each other.
She described her hometown, located near the Chinese border, as a major trade hub for the regime, saying that almost all marketplace transactions in the region were handled in effect by women. “The women in the marketplaces had to negotiate with male officials and were highly likely to fact the risk of sexual violence,” she added.
Park Ji-hyun, another North Korean defector who leads North Korean human rights activities in Britain as a co-head of a North Korean human rights civic group, attended the event online. She also highlighted that North Korean concentration camps made prisoners engage in forced labor barefoot just as slaves, adding that “human rights” symbolized “shoes” for her as she was unable to wear them at the time.
South Korea’s Ambassador Hwang Joon-kook to the UN stated that the human rights situation in North Korea vividly reveals the nature of the regime, promising to work with the international community to call on it to change through the voices of survivors of human rights violations.
Woo-Sun Lim imsun@donga.com