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CHICAGO, KOMPAS.com – A North Korean defector girl who fled the country at the age of 13 reveals her dark childhood there.
The girl named Yeonmi Park said that there were many corpses lying on the road, then she was forced to eat insects to survive due to mass hunger and was raped with her mother.
Cold, darkness and hunger are part of daily life in the ideological country of Juche, Yeonmi said. She blamed North Korea’s nuclear ambitions for damaging the country’s economic order.
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According to the news Daily mail On Friday (4/9/2020), after fleeing North Korea and crossing the frozen Yalu River into China, Yeonmi and her mother were kidnapped and later sold and raped by her captors before fleeing again to Mongolia. At that time, she was 13 years old.
Yeonmi, now 26 and a human rights activist, said New York Post, “There are no friends, only acquaintances” in North Korea and people are very afraid of the Kim dynasty that ruled for more than 70 years.
“You will see so many people die. It is normal that we see corpses thrown in the streets,” said the author of the book. To live, a North Korean girl’s journey to freedom was quoted from Daily mail.
“I have been in slums in Mumbai (India), in other countries, but nothing like North Korea because of the hunger of its citizens, the systematic hunger of a country that chooses to starve us.”
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Yeonmi’s grandmother and uncle died of malnutrition and as a child she was forced to eat insects to survive, she recalls.
“If they put aside just 20 percent of everything they spend on making nuclear weapons, no one will have to starve in North Korea, but Rezom chooses to starve us,” said the girl who made the list. than 100 BBC women in 2014.
He also described how the school children were taught to respect the Kim family as divine leaders with supernatural powers.
When Yeonmi was a child, North Korea was still led by Kim Jong Il, who later died in 2011 and was succeeded by his son, Kim Jong Un.
Yeonmi revealed that “there is no concept of friendship” at school because students are forced to fight each other in a “critique session.”
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Very few people crossed the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) into South Korea, while defectors like Yeonmi and her mother fled North Korea via China.
Yeonmi also described a gang of North Korean smuggling specialists in China, lacking women due to the one-child policy.
Some of the women worked as prostitutes to generate income to return home, while brothels in Shanghai and Beijing allegedly drugged them to prevent them from leaving.
After almost 2 years with her captors, Yeonmi and her mother risked their lives to escape to Mongolia by crossing the frozen Gobi Desert.
Yeonmi then moved to Seoul, New York City, then Chicago, and said that some of her North Korean relatives had disappeared.
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He is concerned that his family members may be executed or sent to prison camps in North Korea.
Political prisoners are subjected to “torture, sexual violence, forced labor and other inhumane treatment,” according to Human Rights Watch.
They also perform “tough and exhausting work in dangerous conditions, sometimes in winter without the proper clothing,” the group said.
North Koreans can also be sent to prison camps for trying to defect to South Korea or working or staying in China.
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