Recently, a large number of North Korean defectors in China were forcibly repatriated and are currently being detained in Ministry of State Security (MSS)-operated holding centers along the border. At these centers, Ministry of State Security officials investigate the details surrounding each defector’s escape, their whereabouts inside China, and whether or not they had intended to flee to South Korea. This process frequently involves serious human rights violations, including violence, torture, and sexual assault.
On Oct. 20, Daily NK met with Lee Young-joo, a North Korean defector who had personal experience being repatriated and detained in MSS-run holding centers in Onsong and Sinuiju. Lee’s interview provided insight into the dire human rights situation now facing the defectors detained in these holding centers.
Lee was repatriated twice and escaped the country three times, a harrowing journey which she has detailed in her book, “The True Face of North Korea that Even Kim Jong Un Needs to Know.” She first escaped from North Korea in March 1997, after which she married a Chinese man and had a daughter. However, the perpetual fear that she could be caught as an illegal resident and repatriated at any time continued to hang over her and ultimately motivated her to make an attempt to reach South Korea. However, she was caught in Inner Mongolia by Chinese border agents and detained at an immigration detention facility in Tumen, Jilin Province.
In September 2006, she was forcibly sent back to North Korea and detained for two weeks at a MSS holding center in Onsong. Thankfully, her crimes were deemed to be purely economic in nature, and she was sentenced to forced labor at a Ministry of Social Security-run labor camp in Onsong county.
Shortly after her release from the labor camp, she made a second attempt in November 2006 to cross into China to see her husband and daughter. She lived together in hiding with other defectors who shared a goal of reaching South Korea, but they were caught after someone alerted the Chinese police.
In March the following year, Lee departed the Chinese detention center in Dandong (Liaoning Province) and was repatriated to North Korea. She was held for 40 days in a MSS holding center in Sinuiju before eventually being sent to a forced labor camp. As she made her way back to her hometown after serving her sentence, Lee found herself contemplating another escape attempt, but ultimately turned herself in. She was punished again, this time by serving three years of reform through labor at the Chongori reeducation camp in Hoeryong, North Hamgyong Province.
In November 2010, she escaped North Korea for a third time and finally made it to South Korea in July 2011.
The following are excerpts from Daily NK’s interview with Lee.
Daily NK (DNK): We have learned that the defectors recently forcibly repatriated to North Korea are currently being held in MSS holding centers in Onsong and Sinuiju. As someone who has been detained at both of these places, what can you tell us about these holding centers?
“Just thinking about it now is overwhelming, that’s how awful the place is and how little human rights are protected there. You could say they treat people like animals. People are packed together like sardines standing up inside small cells. If you bend your legs to try to sit down, you can’t move at all, and people in the cells are stuck like that all day. You can’t lay down and sleep at night either. There’s a toilet in each cell, but it’s beyond unsanitary with rats covered in feces scurrying around all over the place.
For food, you receive corn-rice that’s half husks and doenjang [fermented soybean paste] soup made from just doenjang paste and water, but the food itself is so gritty that it’s hard to even swallow. Moreover, the plastic dishes the food is served on are made out of recycled flimsy plastic. If you put rice or soup in them that is even remotely hot, the dishes give off this disgusting plastic smell that makes the food even harder to eat.
With so many people crammed together and no way to wash, there are tons of fleas, bedbugs, and lice. It was so bad that sometimes there’d be this faint taste of blood in my food, and I’d realize that fleas must have gotten into the food. As a woman, one of the worst things was that when you had your period, there were no pads and obviously no toilet paper. So, you just had to use a single piece of thin cloth. But, come morning, there was nowhere to wash and dry it out, so you had to keep using the same blood-soaked piece of fabric.”
DNK: At the MSS holding centers, we’ve heard there are practically no female prison guards or supervisors. Were there any female supervisors in the Onsong or Sinuiju facilities when you were there?
“There wasn’t a single female supervisor at the Onsong facility, and there was just one female military medical officer at the center in Sinuiju. In Onsong, the male supervisors at the relocation center said they needed to search the female prisoners for any cash they had hidden on their bodies and made them strip off their clothes and jump around. That way, they said, any money a woman had hidden in her uterus would come out. When you needed to defecate, you had to do it in front of a male guard. When I was at the MSS relocation center in Sinuiju, they gathered all the women into one cell and the female military medical officer stuck her hand into each woman’s uterus to check whether we had hidden any money or valuables.”
DNK: What sort of interrogations did you undergo while you were at the MSS relocation center?
“For the first three days or so, there wasn’t any sort of interrogation and I was just waiting inside a cell. I just spent my time shaking in fear about what would come next. Then they started calling people out and taking them to the interrogation room one by one, where they asked things like where did you go in China, what broker did you go through, what did you do in China, etc. The most important question was whether you had intended to go to South Korea. If they found out you had planned to go to South Korea, they’d send you to a political prison camp for the rest of your life. A lot of the people who were there at the same time as me were dragged off to Yodok Prison Camp. So you cannot let them find out that you were trying to get to South Korea under any circumstances. If you’re planning to go to South Korea with a group of other people, it’s good to agree on a story in advance. But I never imagined getting caught and didn’t plan ahead, so getting our stories to line up was difficult. If they ask you a question, you only have one second to answer. Otherwise, they did things like hit you with a piece of wood so hard it could knock you out. The majority of people leaving the interrogation room had to be dragged out like corpses.”
Translated by Rose Adams. Edited by Robert Lauler.
Please direct any comments or questions about this article to dailynkenglish@uni-media.net.
