‘[W]e believed the United Nations could save us.’
I wonder how many mass graves could be marked with those words.
That quote — it would be funny, though epitaphs seldom are — comes from this testimonial of a Yodok survivor, via the International Herald Tribune.
In 1999, a group of seven North Koreans fleeing their country was intercepted in Russia. The Russian authorities, rejecting appeals from the United Nations and human rights groups, sent them to China. China returned them to North Korea.
In the ensuing uproar in South Korea over the government’s failure to rescue them, the foreign minister had to step down. And then, the seven were largely forgotten. Those who remember them may have recalled their frightened faces on Russian television, where they said they feared death if sent back to their Communist homeland.
Now, two of them have escaped again and arrived in South Korea, contradicting what the North Korean government told United Nations officials about the group’s fate – that most had been returned to their homes and jobs. One brought with him accounts of life and death at North Korea’s infamous prison camp No. 15, known to the outside world as Yodok. [IHT]
Read the rest on your own.
Anju links? Why, yes!
* You mean by trying to do it at all? In a recent conversation with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Camp David, Bush admitted the U.S. “screwed up” the Banco Delta money transfer (HT). Japan is subtly expressing its dissatisfaction with the new U.S. policy’s unfolding failure: “[T]he international community must work together to pressure North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program.”
* More red-on-red fighting in Iraq: Iraqi Sunnis versus al-Qaeda in Baghdad. Bill Roggio has much, much more, including accounts of the capture of a man who links al-Qaeda to Iran, long rumored to be sheltering Saad bin Laden, among others.
I’m working on a page for the Yantai Incident that will basically be a platform to present the video of the North Korean who told about her experience as part of the recent NKHR Week.
One point I add is to emphasize how she and another person who had escaped the initial police net in China turned themselves in after seeing the news coverage about the incident – because they thought the group would eventually be sent South.
I don’t know if it would be better or not for North Koreans to get just a little more info about the outside world.
They would perhaps lose that last ray of hope – but they would also understand how little the world cares.
The blame here rests first with N.K, second with Russia, third with China, fourth with S.K. Not sure how you can level blame at the U.N here.
You just named 2 of the heavy hitters in the U.N.
The UN creates a Security Council, commissions on human rights – its very mandate is supposed to be about preventing war, advancing freedom and democracy, and dealing with things like a Hitler and the kind of atrocities (both via war and oppression of the people) that Hitler unleashed.
How can a nation like North Korea do what it does decade after decade without it being a blow to the United Nations?
The United Nations is a group of nations. Some more powerful than others. With Russia and China being two of the heavy hitters….
Laying the blame for NK at their feet is laying the blame at the feet of the UN as well.
(And the US can’t escape the tar either….)
Van: Look no further than the cowardly performance of the UNHCR on the refugee issue.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050227/news_mz1e27rosett.html