Kim Jong-Il Is a Fat, Evil Man

Don't believe me?

The 20,000 defectors who have escaped to South Korea offer the most graphic and grim glimpses of life in austere, impoverished and isolated North Korea.

They talk of hunger and deprivation; of torture and fear; of constant suspicion and endless surveillance, and of their enduring desire to escape.

Kim Mi-ran, a 50-year-old mother of three children who are still in North Korea, says she first fled to China in 1998 when famine gripped the country and her family was starving.

There, she was sold for 7,000 yuan (about $1,000) as the bride of a disabled and mentally retarded Korean-Chinese man, 20 years her elder. When she threatened to turn herself and everyone else in the family in to the police, she was allowed to leave.

But the woman kept getting caught and repatriated to North Korea, where she was jailed, interrogated and beaten before being released, only to try to escape again.

"North Korean women live like a bird in a cage in China," she told a conference on North Korean human rights in Toronto yesterday.

"They don't even have the status of a stray dog. Some are sold into marriage because they want a bowl of rice. Others are forced into prostitution or become sex slaves or are simply taken advantage of."

Ms. Kim, who spent a total of four years in prison for trying to flee, insists her year in solitary confinement -- because someone had reported seeing her praying in prison--was the worst time of her life.

"To survive people had to eat what they could catch ... frogs, grasshoppers, insects ..."

Awakened each day at 5 a.m., she had to sit still on the edge of her bed for five hours before being interrogated. If she moved or glanced at her guards, they slapped and beat her.

Interrogations, conducted for hours, were done with her kneeling on the floor, with her hands tied behind her back. "They kicked my sides and breast," she said. "I couldn't even feel the pain because I was losing my mind." She tried to commit suicide by starving herself, but was dragged from her cell and force-fed.

Finally, she was transferred to a regular prison for three years, before being released in February 2007 and told to return to her hometown. "But I walked from Hyesan City for a month and escaped to China," she said. Over the next year, she made her way to South Korea via Burma and Thailand.

All of this while the Dear Leader- whose demise could lead to a power vacuum- feasts:

A fat man in a country frequented by famine, Dear Leader has bought more top-of-the-line Hennessy cognac than anyone else in the world; imported "pleasure squads" of Swedish blondes to satisfy his lust; and, supposedly, injected himself with the blood of virgins to stay young and healthy.

The battle for power after Kim Jong-Il's death would be between his son, Kin Jong-Un, the military and the political hangers-on. The ensuing bloodbath and confusion will lead to more refugees struggling to get to South Korea where they may be recognised as citizens. This is why it is important to act now.


But will the South Koreans accept reunification or let North Korea subsist as its country? While living in South Korea, I posed this question to Koreans many times. The default answer was always reunification. Reunification would be an expensive and socially awkward maneuver. It would be expensive to rebuild a backward economy and acclimatise the North Koreans into the twenty-first century. The Koreans, I found, are not patient. Sometimes, their pity for North Korea went only so far. Of, course, living in poverty and terror was horrible but actually having North Koreans in their backyard was too much to bear.


However they may feel about it, it is their problem and they had better find a way to fix it.