South Korean plastic surgeons heal the broken survivors of North Korea

Via Singapore’s Straits Times comes one of the saddest, most hopeful, things I’ve read for a long time. South Korean plastic surgeons are volunteering to help repair the abused, broken, and scarred bodies of North Korean refugees.

Since news of the free surgery programme spread, dozens of defectors have signed up, including a man who cannot breathe through his nose after it was smashed in a logging camp accident.

One woman who lost a breast to cancer hoped that reconstructive surgery would make her more comfortable with using a public bathhouse and dating again.

“I often thought of killing myself and my five-year-old son to end my misery,” said Mrs Kim Seon Ah.

The 37-year-old wants to erase the cigarette-burn marks on her head and chest inflicted by a Chinese man, the father of her son. [….]

Superintendent Kim Kyeong Suk of Yongsan police station, who helps link defectors to plastic surgeons, came up with the idea for the programme after hearing many people from North Korea say they could not find work because of their scars.

She said: “Surprisingly often, you find defectors carrying big ugly scars, like crude stitches crawling like giant centipedes on their stomach, patches of hair missing from their scalp and other signs of torture, or they wear ideological slogans tattooed on their skin.” [Straits Times]

South Korea’s skillful plastic surgeons also healed our own Ambassador, Mark Lippert, after a slashing attack by a pro-North Korean assailant, an attack that North Korean state media openly approved.

President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the Obama Administration’s official view is that North Korea is “not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987.” Discuss among yourselves. 

There is much work for South Korean volunteer doctors to do for people like Ji Seong-Ho, who lost a hand and a foot after falling from a coal train; Park Jihyun, whose “leg bears an enormous scar” from an untreated wound she suffered in a prison camp; or Han Song-Ee, whose hands are “contorted and scarred from torture,” and who wears her “wavy black hair in a careful bun” to cover “the scars on the left side of her head where she was beaten by North Korean soldiers with a wooden rod,” breaking her skull.