Monday, September 26, 2022

We Can Do Better Than Melanie Joly

Only in Canada can someone that dim fail upwards.

Talk about this, you unaccomplished chair-moistener:

“Terrifying reports from female defectors depict undergoing forced abortions after they fled to what they thought was freedom in China, only to be repatriated back to North Korea by authorities in China," said Olivia Enos, Senior Policy Analyst for Asian Studies at The Heritage Foundation. "Other women from North Korea recount having aborted babies born alive or giving birth in ordinary prison camps only to have border guards smother or drown their babies before their very eyes."

**

After crawling into her cell, Lee Young-joo was ordered to sit cross-legged with her hands on her knees.

She was not allowed to move for up to 12 hours a day.

A slight shuffle or a hushed whisper to her cell mates would be harshly punished.

She had limited access to water and was given only a few ground corn husks to eat.

"I felt like an animal, not a human," she said.

She told the BBC she spent hours being interrogated for doing something many of us take for granted - leaving her country. She was trying to escape North Korea in 2007 and was caught in China and sent back.

She spent three months at the Onsong Detention Centre in North Korea near the Chinese border, waiting to be sentenced.

As she sat in her cell she listened for the "clack clack clack" of the metal tips of the guard's boots as he patrolled outside. Backwards and forwards he went. As the sound went further away, Young-joo took a chance and whispered to one of her cell mates.

"We would talk about plans for another defection, plans to meet with brokers, these were secretive talks."

Prison was supposed to deter people from escaping North Korea - it clearly didn't work on Young-joo or on her cell mates. Most were waiting to be sentenced for trying to leave the country.

But Young-joo's plans had been overheard.

"The guard would ask me to come to the cell bars and put out my hands, then he started beating my hands with a key ring until it got all bloated and blue. I didn't want to cry out of pride. These guards consider those of us who tried to leave North Korea as traitors.

"You could hear others getting beaten because of the cells sharing this corridor. I was in cell three but I could hear beatings from cell 10."

** 

United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley held a meeting on the human rights situation in North Korea where one defector spoke about how she was forced to have an abortion following her repatriation from China.

The woman, Ji Hyeon-A, describes a harrowing scene of prison dogs eating dead bodies at her prison camp. She pleaded for the world to act.

The event was titled “The Terrifying experience of forcibly Repatriated North Korean women,” and was sponsored by the U.S. France, Japan, South Korea, Canada and the U.K.

Ji Hyeon-A was repatriated three times to North Korea after she was caught in China. She finally escaped to South Korea and spoke of her horrifying experiences.

She described how North Korean women who got pregnant in China were forced to have abortions.

“Pregnant women were forced into harsh labor all day,” she said. “At night, we heard pregnant mothers screaming and babies died without ever being able to see their mothers.”

North Korea does not allow for mixed-race babies, she said. At one detention center, she described how inmates starved to death. Their dead bodies, she said, were given to the guard dogs for food.

The third time Ji Hyeon-A got caught and sent back to North Korea she was three months pregnant. She tearfully described how she was forced to have an abortion without medication at a local police station.

** 

Under the new policy, married couples are prohibited by the Communist government from having more than two children. For unmarried women who find themselves pregnant, the Chinese Government continues to enforce a zero-child policy, counting all unwed births as out-of-quota births unless they marry within 60 days after the child’s birth.

**

"Every woman has almost gone through a forced abortion or forced sterilization," Nanfu Wang, co-director and producer of the documentary, told PBS. "Sometimes the babies...they were born alive, and because of the policy and her job, she had to kill them after they were born alive, and she is really traumatized because of that."

Wang spoke to the midwife who delivered her, who admitted doing 50 to 60,000 abortions over her time to enact a policy that the government claims prevented 400 million births.

** 

Three Uyghurs who fled from China to Turkey have described forced abortions and torture by Chinese authorities in China’s far western Xinjiang region, ahead of giving testimony to a people’s tribunal in London that is investigating if Beijing’s actions against ethnic Uyghurs amount to genocide.


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