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Torture victim's plea for change national |
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news report
 Friday May 02, 2003 21:40 by Agallamh
 by Elaine Monaghan, London Times THE frail 56-year-old weeps as she removes her spectacles and points to the paralysed side of her face. Soon Ok Lee was beaten so badly, she says, that she had to push her eyeball back into its socket. She is one of the few people to have survived the prison camps of North Korea. Newly settled in America, she will tell congressmen today that President Bush should topple the regime that tortured her daily, not waste time talking to it. “Kim Jong Il (the President) is worse than Saddam Hussein. The victims of a war would be fewer than the dictator’s victims now,” she said through her son, Dong Choi Lee, 36, who translated. Her message comes amid a raging debate about how to deal with the Stalinist state’s threat to build nuclear weapons. Mr Bush convened a meeting on the issue yesterday, but the Administration rebuffed North Korea’s offer to drop its nuclear weapons programme in return for diplomatic, political and economic concessions. Mrs Soon argues that America’s victory over Iraq has scared President Kim and that for humanitarian reasons alone America must act now to save the estimated 200,000 men, women and children in 12 camps, including Kaechon, where she was held from November 1987 until December 1992. She was incarcerated for seven years in all, and the tales she tells in her memoirs, entitled Eyes of the Tail-less Animals, after the pleading look of the cowering prisoners, are lent powerful credence by the scars on her body. Once a fervent communist, she used to travel to China in the 1980s to buy fabric for the North Korean Government. Her crime was to refuse a superior’s illegal demand for more than his share of material. She was imprisoned in 1986 and tortured daily for 11 months. She “confessed” only after her family was threatened. On one occasion a guard chained her to iron bars high up on a door. Guards also tied her to a bed, shoved the spout of a kettle in her mouth and pumped her full of water. She passed out and awoke to find two men trampling with boots on a wooden board on her stomach. Water came out of every orifice. She passed blood instead of urine and still suffers painful kidneys. Women delivered stillborn babies after guards pumped salt water into their wombs. Other inmates were forced to strangle the newborns, or guards simply stamped on them, according to Mrs Soon. “I experienced a living hell,” she says. “Even today, I am not sure whether I am alive or merely dreaming.” |
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Comments (17 of 17)
Jump To Comment: 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1As regards this question of whether N Korea would be better off being ruled by America than by its present rulers, we would do well to remember the aftermath of Britain's withdrawl from its Asian and African colonies after world war two. Without exception, the former colonies descended into chaos, poverty and dictatorship after 'independence.' An opposition politician in a certain former British colony in Africa when asked recently by a journalist what was the way forward for his nation, looked the journalist in the eye and said quite candidly: 'Is there any chance of us being readmitted to the British Empire?'
There are degrees of evil. An American Empire would be a lot less evil that some of the alternatives, just as the British Empire was a lot less evil that what took its place in Asia and Africa.
It appears any article written against Israel or the US on this site is either removed by the editors on any pretext they can find or if no such excuse is available it is rained out by a bunch of pro-zionist hecklers bearing supposed "Irish" names and displaying some knowledge of the Irish language and certain parts of south Dublin,
You will have to watch the site with this in mind if you want to find your own proof. I find those who are capable of seeing, will , and those who will not will not be told. Do you get my meaning?
What the fuck are you talking about this time?
Not so easy for me to get a free education at the Irish taxpayers expense and then ship off to Israel to steal a Palestinians land . It's alright to be an Irish citizen when you want free education but when the time comes to join the Israeli army off you go speaking your best Irish .
James,
You should check out what AI have to say about North Koreas treatment of prisoners. Are they Zionist/US propagandists too?
Is SARS inhalation anthrax?, if you look up the symptoms of inhalation anthrax, low and behold they're identical to inhalation anthrax, well thats one way of wiping out chinese communists.
Load of old bollix, from the nazi scum that brought us Iraq 2. Is it just coincidence SARS/inhalation anthrax virus is released in China, in the era of Brigadier general Gordon Kerr.
Are you trying to say that it was a bad thing to do to free the Iraqis of Saddam? Don't you think that it would do a power of good to N Koreans to be free of famine and torture?
Just because the US is pursuing it's own interests, don't you agree that they might (inadvertantly) do some good along the way?
Maybe it might be better for people like Soon to live in an American Empire than to have their lives count as naught to their fellow countrymen?
Don't be blinkered by the propaganda you get from the likes of James McKenna. Just think entirely for yourself, draw your own conclusions.
>
Perhaps not everything the US does is evil.
nothing is ever as simple as it seems. so for example just because the us might use stories such as this as propaganda, the way they take peoples suffering and twist it to legitimise their own fucked up agenda.... doesnt mean that we should forget or write off disgusting human rights abuses like the one above. when the us were talking about invading iraq/ invading iraq pro war people never stoped talking about how sadam was a tyrant...disgusting human rights record...dictator..ect...usual stuff. And dispite all the millions of reasons why the war was/is wrong and dispite all the disgusting stuff thats happening now in iraq like the anti-american protesters who were shot...the fact remains that sadam was a "tyrant" he did very bad stuff
to the iraqis
[i know that no one is dening this] and disgusting things happened under his regime. that does not legitimate what has and is happening at all, but im just trying to say that things are never simple
Go away and let us fight imperialism in peace!
Sounds like American propaganda to me but perhaps there is some irony or witicism that I'm missing.
What is the point?
North Korea is EVIL. Sure Criminal George has already explained that to us.
North Korea evil
South Korea Good
North Korea evil
South Korea good
Give the US propaganda a rest you troll!
Anyone trying to leave communism should be given this treatment and shot! Communism forever! Guevara forever! Down with capitalism!
instead of cutting and pasting. Try and produce your own material instead of acting as an unpaid newsboy for the Sunday Times. Thanks.