North Koreans 'live in a virtual prison'

North Korea: Defector Reveals Harrowing Escape

Defectors fleeing North Korea are routinely sentenced to death as the government attempts to shut its people away from the world. Here one woman tells her story. The North Korea that the government hides from the outside world is characterised by food shortages, indoctrination, military paranoia and labour camps where thousands toil to stay alive; locked up for showing even the slightest dissent. Attempting to escape the country is a capital offence.

The regime is determined to keep its iron grip on the population. Defectors send messages home revealing that the outside world is not determined to crush North Korea and that people do not need to live in a twilight of perpetual shortages. Some do make it, accepting they will never see their families again. They spend their lives living as anonymously as possible; a picture of them in the south on any type of media would condemn their families at home to instant imprisonment. In North Korea punishment lasts three generations. A husband and wife, their children and their grandchildren will all be punished, will all be locked up in the camps.

Lee Hyeonseo escaped with her entire family so is happy to speak out. Speaking in a drop in centre for North Koreans at a Seoul university she said: "A family would completely be sent to a prison camp if they found out their family are in South Korea; it is a little problem if they are in China but it is a different thing if they are in South Korea. "People in the north don't know the truth about what is going on as they can't hear or see anything about the wider world.

"They don't know about human rights or the suffering. They live in a virtual prison." The journey to South Korea is difficult, long and dangerous. They cross to China. If they are arrested there they are sent back to certain death. They then make their way through Laos, Cambodia or Vietnam heading for Thailand where they present themselves to a South Korean embassy and apply for asylum. Miss Lee said: "It is very hard and long and very difficult." She will not give any details of how she bribed her way out, but she did it for herself and her family and she certainly had no money.

The current crisis is about the regime holding on to power according to Miss Lee. She said: "He (Kim Jong Un) needs to do something to show the people that he is protecting our country. The people are told it was started by the US or other countries. "This is good propaganda for him that is why he is doing this it is all absurd."

This is so sad, people living in constant fear in appalling conditions. The government really needs to get it's priorities in order and forget about wasting money on bombs, especially when their own people are starving.
I always wondered why they kept themselves so shut off from the world and I've realised it's because if the people know there is something out there that is better, they would try and leave and they don't want that. They know too much.

Source

So there it is doubters. Kim is just posturing. There will be no war.

Shame really because that means we can't free them from their own indoctrinated ignorance but then if you look at some posters here on ATS from the US who are in their own mental, aggro and phsyco prison while living in the land of the free, I wonder who is the freest?

The one who knows they are not free (the North Korean) or the one who is but is trapped in his own bottle of ignorance, suspicion, paranoia and insanity....and still lives in New York for example.

The propagandas strong on this one

reply to post by haven123


Indeed. Just seen Kerry on TV spouting his rhetoric. "Their people need food, not missile launchers". This from a man who's country is bankrupt, where a growing number of people are living in tents and government handouts are practically non exstant. Try feeding your own people Kerry, then worry about what Kim is doing.

Originally posted by sarahlm
The government really needs to get it's priorities in order and forget about wasting money on bombs, especially when their own people are starving.

You could say the same about a lot of western countries too.

At least North Korea don't hit us with sanctions.

reply to post by sarahlm


that chica is a north korean dis-info agent, its all an illusion.

reply to post by solve


Is the entire image set for North Korea in Google Earth as well as other independent databases, fake and propaganda too?

Anyone....anyone except those without electricity in 90% of North Korea, can pull up Google Earth and zoom right to street level and as close as any Western one for detail. Anyone can see what there is ...and what there is, is just sad. I really do feel deeply for the North Korean people. It doesn't take faith in a defector or runner over the new wall (they really did shoot them going over the Berlin Wall too), it just takes the time invested to look at the imagery in the public domain.

It's like nowhere else in the world ....and by a WIDE margin at that, IMO.

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


GOOGLE EARTH?! gimme a brake...
no, absolutely you are right....

reply to post by solve


Ummm.... What are you suggesting? Someone actually modified every frame of 42,000 square miles of imagery ....just so some curious person out here in the world could be fooled and think a slightly different thing than is the truth?

The sheer degree of man hours ...tens of thousands of them...to accomplish that without flaws any child could see on closer look ..is staggering. It's SO staggering, I'd find the mere suggestion utterly ridiculous.

Besides....You can compare videos shot by Vice and other people who have been in North Korea with Google Earth imaging as it stands today and clearly compare, A - B that they are, in detail, the same places with the same features. Right down to the roof tops and relation of village buildings to each other.

Unless you've been there, you know nothing except what you have been told.