#tumun

[tustylediaries]

It doesn't matter whether you speak at the MUN. What matters are the compliments about how great you are dressed and tons of pictures!

[davidahickey]

‘I was a walking corpse’

Head bowed, eyes down and arms planted rigidly by her side, Jihyun Park calmly recalled how she was handcuffed to the bed of her detention camp in Tumun, Kangwon Province, strip-searched for drugs or money, forced to give up her shoes and outer clothing and consigned to hard labour, ploughing the fields by hand from 4.30 in the morning to 8 at night. “I was one of 40 women,” Park explained last week in central London to a UN panel leading an inquiry into human rights abuses in North Korea. “We had to make sure the officers were provided with food so we prepared the corn and took care of vegetables. Our jobs included [working] the hills.” Thought of as escape risks, the women were not allowed to wear shoes. “The road was rough,” said Park. “It was difficult for four women, two of us at the front pulling a cart, two at the back pushing. It was about a tonne in weight, even as we lost some of the load on the way. There must have been some broken glass or human faeces being used as fertilizer [on the ground] and that infected my leg. On another occasion, Park was forced to wear a bloodied hand towel that she had been using as a sanitary towel, which were banned on the camp. Park’s crime had been to use drinking water to clean it. The year was 2004. Park had escaped several years earlier to China, to where she had been trafficked, forced into marriage and given birth. Arrested and repatriated to North Korea, she had left behind her young son. Park eventually escaped North Korea for a second time, returning to China via a broker. Her son had been living with his grandmother. “When I escaped I called and asked to speak to my son. He got on the phone but he didn’t say a word and for about a minute he just hung on to the phone. The next day, the same thing happened. And the third time I tried I said, ‘this is your mother!’ And then he finally said just one word, ‘Mummy!’ And he started crying. When she was finally reunited with her son, Park told the inquiry that he looked as though he had never had a bath. “My son was worse than a kotjebi (homeless child). He was covered in grime.” Eventually, Park decided to leave China once again, this time with her son, then five, for what she describes as her “final journey”. But her leg had still not fully recovered. “If I was arrested again going towards South Korea this would have meant death. I thought this was the last time I could try. There were nine of us in this group and I couldn’t tell them about my leg condition. The others were ahead of us, crossing the Mongolian border. I had my son with me and I didn’t want to tell him we were really lagging back because I didn’t want him to get scared. At this time we were still in China and we saw others crossing the Mongolian border. “Somebody came over and he just grabbed my son and started giving him a piggy-back and started running and held my hand. I didn’t know who he was and I just decided to go along and was running and we crossed the Mongolian border.” This would be the man that Park would later marry and settle with in Manchester, north-west England. “He had noticed this mother and child were lagging behind so he had crossed the China and Mongolian border only to save us, risking his own life.”                                                            ****

The United Nations’ interest in human rights abuses in North Korea is not a new concern. It created a Special Rapporteur for human rights for that country nearly a decade ago. Yet the UN appears to be having no influence in Pyongyang and with the country’s leaders refusing either to allow UN representatives in or to cooperate with this latest Commission of Inquiry on human rights, the future of the 100,000-200,000 prisoners or detainees in North Korea's camps looks bleak. So, what is the point? The commission’s chair, Michael Kirby, said that once he has reported back with his findings to the Human Rights Council in Geneva in March next year, “it is for the UN institutions to respond cooperatively in doing what needs to be done.” Kirby is candid about what that might mean. “[It] doesn’t involve punishment. We have no blue helmets to deploy. But it will involve responding, it may involve technical assistance and outreach to try to bring North Korea back into the community of international nations.” However, the panel is reportedly consulting legal experts on the possibility of extending the remit of the International Criminal Court. North Korea, like China is not a party to the Rome Statute that set up the ICC. But the United Nations Security Council, of which China is a permanent member, could move to extend the court’s remit. Complicating matters, Kirby suggested China’s own treatment of North Korean defectors could also be called to account. It would be inflicting a second tragedy on defectors such as Park if the only response of the international community to their brave testimony is more of the same “outreach” that has yielded so little result to date.