Defectors’ hopes shattered
For 10 unbearable months, Jung Gwang Il was hung upside down or waterboarded until he confessed to being a spy, before being forced into hard labour at North Korea’s notorious Yodok detention camp for three years.
‘‘In that first 10 months, I dropped from 75kg to 36kg,’’ he said. ‘‘In camp 15 I worked from 4am to 8pm every day, either logging or farming maize. We were given daily three lumps of corn mixed with beans, and slept on the floors of tiny cells crammed with 40 prisoners.’’
Jung survived and escaped to South Korea in 2004. Yesterday, he and other North Korean defectors expressed sorrow that their homeland’s ongoing dire human rights situation was ignored in an unprecedented summit between Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in.
Their meeting on Friday had been an overt display of brotherhood. Disarmingly friendly and self-deprecating, Kim ditched his strongman image to pledge to work with Moon towards denuclearisation and peace.
North Korea’s state news agency yesterday called the summit a turning point.
But, in the astonishing scenes of hand-holding and mutual praise, it was easy to forget that Kim’s regime stands accused of oppression and cruelty that includes execution, torture, arbitrary detention and rape.
That fact has not been overlooked by former victims like Jung, who plans to appeal personally to US President Donald Trump to raise human rights violations at his own summit with Kim, expected in May or June. Jung, who represents the Association of North Korean Political Victims and their Families, once smuggled flashdrives of a Trump speech denouncing North Korean ‘‘tyranny’’ into the reclusive state. The president thanked him for doing so when the two men met in the White House in February. A second meeting between the two is slated for May. Jung will give the president the names of 10 North Korean prisoners, urging him to ask Kim for their release.
Rights groups estimate that about 130,000 prisoners are currently languishing in gulag-like penal camps.
Jung’s horrific tale began in 2000, when he was accused of collaborating with a South Korean while on business in China and arrested as he returned home to his wife and two young daughters. Detained without trial, he was tortured daily by electrocution, and put in the ‘‘pigeon position’’ where hands and legs are tied before being hung from the ceiling. ‘‘I tried to hold out for my family as I knew they would be punished if I confessed,’’ he said. But after almost a year he could bear it no longer.
His torturers promptly shipped him to Yodok, 100km north of Pyongyang.
‘‘We willed each other not to die, to believe that we might make it out,’’ he said. Three years later he was released, and told he had been found not guilty.
By that time his home had been destroyed and his family hounded into hiding. They were finally reunited in China after he swam across the Tumen border river to escape. Jung warned that Kim should not be trusted. ‘‘It [summit] was a political show, and nothing has changed,’’ he said. ‘‘Human rights has been sidelined by politics.’’ – Telegraph Group