Photograph from Alberta Rose (http://degenerasian.blogspot.com)
Among the various human rights codes violated by North Korean government, I wish that women’s rights, especially the rights of female refugees, are not overlooked. Studies on North Korean defectors have coherently estimated that the great majority, over 70%, of the recent defectors are women.
It is also widely estimated that 70-90% of those women are captured by human-traffickers and sold into sexual slavery. Bang Mi-Sun, who was an actress with a propaganda troupe in North Korea, was one of them. Excerpt from AFP news report
‘NKoreans treated as ‘livestock,’ women tell US’:
WASHINGTON (AFP) — North Korean women who escaped the sex trade in China have appealed for global action, saying the Chinese treat them like “livestock” and they face brutal treatment if they return home.
Bang Mi-Sun…said she fled to China with her two children after her husband, a miner, starved to death in 2002. She said a broker sold her for 4,000 yuan (585 dollars) to an older disabled man, the first of a number of Chinese “husbands.”
“The Chinese would even refer to North Korean women as pigs. We are forced to do farmwork and household chores by day and at night we were subjected to subhuman experiences,” she said tearfully at a news conference.
“The world needs to know what is happening. If I had a chance to meet President Obama, I would tell him that North Korean women are being sold like livestock in China,” said Bang, who escaped to South Korea in 2004.
China, fearful of a long-term economic burden or shift in ethnic makeup, considers North Korean defectors to be economic migrants and routinely deports them.
Bang said Chinese authorities sent her to North Korea when she was trying to find her children. Back home, she was put in a political re-education camp, where she said she had to do 100 squats, then run 100 times around a soccer field before undergoing intense beatings.
North Korean defector Bang Mi-sun shows her torture scars at a press conference in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday. /Yonhap
Bang, who walks with such a limp she is considered disabled in South Korea, stood on the table of the news conference and lifted her skirt to reveal bruises and gaping contortions on her thigh.
She said she also witnessed brutal treatment of other prisoners, including forced abortions on women returning from China. In one incident, she said she saw guards put a plank on a pregnant woman’s belly and force two male prisoners to stand on it; both the woman and the baby died.
