Enrique Rubio |
London (EFE).- Hunger strikes with renewed strength. The borders are more armored thanks to technology. The cult of the leader is even more tyrannical. But North Korean defector Jihyun Park says the worst thing is that her compatriots are forced to forget that they are human beings.
Park tells EFE in the United Kingdom, where he arrived in 2008 after a gruesome journey, how Kim Jong Un’s regime has eliminated from minds and hearts any hint of its own and differentiated existence.
“There are no personal emotions in North Korea, only political emotions. And there are only two. One is happiness: if the regime is happy, we are too. The other is hatred: to America, to the South Koreans, to the anti-socialist countries. We only learn hate from birth,” she says.
Park has gone where he could never have dreamed of when he lived in his native country: not only is he free to express his opinions and even write a book about his experience (“The Hard Road Out”), but, above all else, he has reminded that he is a person.
While writing the book with the help of South Korean Seh-Lynn Chai, she was asked various questions about her previous life. “That’s how I discovered that yes, I am a human being, although all of us have forgotten it.”
It happened in 2012, having dinner with her family in the city of Bury (northwest England), which has welcomed her as one more. Her children talked about her things from her school and something unexpected woke up inside her.
“When I saw the smile on their faces, I knew I was feeling something. I don’t know why, but I started crying at that moment. It was the first time that she felt a personal emotion ”, she recalls moved.
On the walls of North Korean houses, there are no family photos; any relative, he says, can become an informer. It is the portrait of the three presidents that babies see as soon as they are born. “There is a physical father and mother, but we do not bow down to them. We only bow down to Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un.”
For this reason, he believes that many people in the West do not quite understand what kind of system the North Korean is, associating it with the socialist regimes of Eastern Europe.
“It is not socialism, it is not communism, but a totalitarian country. Ideology is religion. That is why we call Kim Il Sun, Kim Jong Il, and Kim Jong Un father, and the Workers’ Party mother,” he explains.
a reclusive country
Park fled his country for the first time in 1998 with his brother, who had been sentenced to death. However, the man who helped them cross into China betrayed her and she was sold into slavery, before being returned to North Korea, where she was held in a labor camp.
In 2004 he escaped to China again. Four years later she obtained refugee status in the UK, where she settled with her husband, another North Korean exile.
Today I would have been incapable of that epic. As he explains, one of the big differences of the Kim Jong Un regime is border control.
The houses of people who lived along the borders have been demolished and now control is “much greater than in 1998”, especially since the outbreak of covid-19.
The same technology, which tightens the yoke on the North Koreans, allows at the same time to obtain the very little information that comes from that country, the most closed in the world.
“Many Chinese use Snapchat and TikTok. And they make videos from the border that they later post online on TikTok. This is how we get some information ”, he recounts, although he acknowledges the immense difficulty of knowing what is happening inside the country.
With the pandemic, even the embassies and the few international organizations that were still in the country, such as Unicef, withdrew, making it even more difficult to receive news about North Korea.
In her new life in the UK, Park gained public notoriety by becoming the first person from her country to run as a candidate in an election. She made it to Bury Borough Council in 2021, although she was not elected.
Despite declaring herself a convinced “Tory”, she is sadly attending the current immigration debate in her country, where the conservative government of Rishi Sunak wants to restrict the number of refugees it welcomes.
“Human traffickers are the illegals, not the refugees. We are only human beings who have been born in dictatorships. That’s why we fled our countries. I am not illegal, just a real human being. A real human being, ”he repeats.