STAND UP TO CHINA
NoKo defector’s cry after sex-slave escape
A North Korean dissident who escaped the brutal dictatorship as a teen is calling on the international community to condemn the Chinese Communist Party’s sponsorship of the regime, and denouncing Western leadership for ignoring human-rights abuses to maintain Chinese favor.
“Most people do not understand that North Korea can only exist with the Chinese Communist Party’s help. Without it they could never survive,” humanrights activist Yeonmi Park, 26, told The Post from her home in Chicago.
“China sponsors this dictatorship. The Chinese Communist Party gives them oil so they can maintain their missile weapons program,” she said. “North Korea could never make anything on their own.”
“When defectors escape to China, the Chinese regime catches them and sends them back to North Korea to be killed. That is against international law and the Geneva Convention,” she continued.
Park fled the despotic regime with her mother at the age of 13. After crossing the frozen Yalu River into China in 2007, her mother was raped by a humantrafficker, and they were both sold into sex slavery. Her price was less than $300.
Now safe in her new home in America, the mother of one says there are up to 300,000 North Korean women like her who are trafficked in China.
She says their plight has been ignored by the international community.
“You hear about the Boko Haram girls. You hear about these girls captured by ISIS. We give them Nobel Peace Prizes, but nobody has acknowledged the North Korean defector women in China,” she said.
“Up to 300,000 of us are being enslaved by these traffickers, and no one talks about it. Ninety percent of them have been trafficked and raped constantly,” she continued. “I was one of them.”
“This is happening right now, and nobody in the Western countries — because they all have interest in having business with China — none of these people want to talk about it, so these issues are completely buried on purpose,” Park added.
China and North Korea have been allies since the 1960s. The communist nation is also the largest trading partner and supplier of aid to the Hermit Kingdom.
Asked if the regime would ever fall, Park said that the average North Korean was too brainwashed to rise up and that other countries had to provide a safe way for whistleblowers to undermine leader Kim Jong-un (inset) without fearing the execution of their families.
“If there is some way for countries like America and South Korea to secure a safer way for the elites to defect, I do think that can help in shaking up the regime,” Park said.
“But right now, I don’t think any country is trying to do that.”