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WARSAW -- The "5th International Conference on North Korean Human Rights & Refugees," held from Feb. 29 to March 2 in Warsaw, Poland, has drawn the attention of international media.
Within Europe, interest in the North Korea problem has increased remarkably, probably as a result of a BBC documentary on suspicions that North Korea has been testing chemical weapons on political prisoners. Recently, footage from Japan's Fuji TV depicting conditions in the North's Yodeok Prison Camp has been telecast in Poland, and Polish media has paid a lot of attention to the Warsaw conference.
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Political prisoners carry human excrement from homes of guards and security officials at Yodeok Political Prison Camp in South Hamgyeong Province, North Korea. Video was released on Japan's Fuji TV.
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At this conference, five defectors discussed their tragic conditions in which family members have been lost or scattered about.
Polish media such as state-run TVP1, news channel TVN24, and major daily papers like Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita have been covering the event. Moreover, the BBC, Wall Street Journal, TBS (of Japan), Asahi TV, Fuji TV, and others are attending the conference and paying much interest to the defectors' stories.
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At the North Korean Human Rights International Conference held on Feb. 29 in Warsaw, Poland, a defector from North Korea, Han Bong-hee (left) holds a press conference and testifies to the actual human rights condition in N. Korea. Lee Young-kook, sitting in the middle, talked about the sad situations of the concentration camps./AFP
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Of the five defectors who have testified, three are young people in their 20s who either lost their parents early or were forced to separate from them at an early age.
27-year-old Han Bong-hee, who came to South Korea in August 2001, escaped North Korea by crossing the Tumen River into China together with her family. Chinese police, however, caught her mother and father and forcefully repatriated them to North Korea. She has yet to hear from them since.
Fighting back tears as she recalled his family's history, Han said, "I was moved when I came to Poland and saw that foreigners are paying attention to the human rights situation in North Korea," and, "I ask the international community to show even more interest so that North Koreans can quickly find freedom." 22-year-old Kim Hyeok, who was born in Cheongjin, North Hamgyeong Province, lost his parents at an early age and was raised in an orphanage. When he was teenager, he began crossing back and forth across the Chinese border in order to make a living. At the age of 16, he was caught and forced to spend time in prison. While he was in prison, he saw an engineer -- a university graduate -- brought in on charges of eating children. "At first, I thought, 'How can a person eat other people?' But as I starved, I began to experience hallucinations in which people appeared as beasts, too. I became extremely frightened of myself." When Kim was released from prison, he crossed over the Chinese border once again, and with the help of locals, reached South Korea in 2001. 23-year-old Byeon Nan-i's older brother was publicly executed, and even though she crossed over into China together with her family, circumstances separated them. Bursting into tears, she said, "I went to China to get word of my parents who returned to North Korea, and I heard that because of my older brother who was publicly executed, the state took away their home. They put up a plastic tent in the mountains, and live by picking and eating grass. They're now bedridden."
Foreign media attention has been particularly focused on 41-year-old Lee Yeong-guk, who in 1978 was selected as a bodyguard for Kim Jong-il at the tender age of 16. He served in that capacity until 1989.
Lee attempted to defect in October 1993, but was arrested by North Korean authorities and subjected to extreme torture. Afterward, he spent four years at Yodeok Political Prison Camp. Discussing life at the camp, Lee said, "We ate an average of 120g of corn gruel a day and had to endure 15 or 16 hours of forced labor. Men and women had to lay face down, wearing only their underwear, and were beaten with ash tree branches until 10 [branches] snapped."
He told of how starving inmates would catch snakes, frogs, and mice, and eat them in their entirety -- snake skin, mice fur, guts and all. He testified that while he was at Yodeok, there was a prisoner who was charged with having salt in his pocket. The guards killed the man by chaining his ankles to a car and dragging him until the flesh from his head and back had been stripped off. Now and then, guards would kill prisoners by beating them with rifle butts or kicking them with their boots until their heads cracked open.
Of the five defectors, the oldest was 59-year-old Kim Hee-suk, who lost to starvation her mother-in-law, husband, and son -- in that order. Kim came to South Korea following her daughter, who had defected previously. Fighting tears, she said, "Coming to South Korea, every time I eat my fill, I think of my only son who starved to death, and I can't eat." As soon as the defectors finished their stories, questions started coming fast and furious.
"All the defectors at this conference come from North Hamgyeong Province. Why is that, and how many defectors from other regions are there?" "How many defectors cross the border into China a month?", "How should the international community help defectors who are now in China?" -- attention concentrated on the defectors' circumstances and their ideas on how to improve the human rights situation in North Korea.
When the morning conference ended, all 200 or so participants rose to their feet and gave the five defectors a standing ovation.
According to the Citizens' Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, expectations were for about 100 people to show up for the conference, but over 200 people ended up coming. For this, co-organizer Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights (HFHR) played a vital role.
The HFHR really helped physically and spiritually, translating the defectors' tales into Polish and published them in book form and spreading word of this international conference throughout Poland. Ten young students majoring in Korean Studies at Warsaw University handed out flyers about the conference throughout downtown Warsaw before things got under way.
In the opening ceremony, National Remembrance Institute president Leon Kieres said in his keynote address, "Even though I've never been to the Far East, when I look at the situation as a Pole, a people who have experienced things like the Nazi Holocaust, there are clearly things in common between the North Korean prison camps and those of the Nazis and Soviets."
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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