Mick Hartley

The Daily NK regularly features interviews with North Korean defectors:

Calls are mounting to hold those in the North Korean leadership accountable for crimes against humanity. The Center for Investigation & Documentation on Human Rights in North Korea was established in Seoul to document abuses perpetrated by the North Korean authorities and record the testimonies of victims of abuse. One of its major goals is to prepare the groundwork for a legal basis to prosecute those responsible in the North's leadership.

In order to understand the importance of why South Korea and the international community must undertake such work, we are interviewing victims of the North's human rights violations themselves.

And here's the latest:

Today we are speaking with Ms. Go Ji Un, a human trafficking victim who was sold to a husband in China. 

Can you please introduce yourself? 

I was born and raised in Ryanggang Province Hyesan City. In September 1997, I crossed the Yalu River and defected for the first time. 

You were 28 years old when you first defected. Can you tell us about the motivation behind your decision to escape North Korea? 

I was heavily influenced by a friend. She had previously escaped to China, but was caught and repatriated. When she told me about what she had seen in China, I was shocked. The most surprising thing was what she had learned about South Korean society. It wasn’t at all like the country that the North Korean authorities portray. I realized that the North Korean authorities are liars, and that the country has no hope and no future. 

Hearing about the outside world like this, I started to develop my own dream. I wanted to go out and see it for myself. My parents were sick at the time, so I couldn’t leave right away, but there was an incident that strengthened my resolve to escape. 

Can you tell us about the incident? 

I was on my way back from seeing my older sister. I had just given her something in a backpack. A soldier stole the entire backpack and its contents. My mother pleaded for them to return it, but the soldiers insisted that I had stolen it, and so they had a right to take it from us. Then they struck me with the butt of a gun.

I was sad that the soldiers had stolen my things and hit me. But the thing that really got to me was that my country was going down the drain. The soldiers did not get enough to eat from the public distribution system, so they were forced to steal from residents. The army is advertised as the People’s Army in propaganda, but they act like highway robbers and steal from the people. 

How was the food situation at that time? 

I saw many people starve to death. There were many people lying on the ground near the train station and on the road. I once asked a rice cake salesman near the station if the people lying on the road were sleeping or dead. He responded, “They died a few days ago. But the security officers are not even thinking about taking their bodies away.” When I heard that, I knew that the country really had no hope at all. 

Read on, about the human trafficking of North Korean women in China – a practice which the Chinese authorities seem uninterested in stopping.