North Korean defector calls on Europe for help

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay has called for a 'long overdue' investigation into North Korea's rights situation, the improvement of which defector Kim Joo Il says can only happen with Europe's help. 

The North Korean regime rules through fear, oppression, control of food supplies, an institutionalized system of labor camps, total control of the media and an education and social system that requires utter obedience and loyalty to the leader. Failure to adhere to rules laid down by Kim Il Sung after he was put into power in the northern half of the peninsula by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II means execution or a more lingering death in a gulag for the perpetrator and his or her immediate family.

In 2005, the injustice of the system and the barbarity inflicted upon the ordinary people by a government that can afford to develop nuclear weapons yet declines to put a stop to malnutrition and starvation was too much for Kim Joo Il.

Kim was a captain in the North Korean People's Army when he swam across the heavily patrolled Duman River one night in 2005 and escaped into China, where he earned sufficient money working in a restaurant to fund the rest of his journey and arrived in the UK in 2007. After settling in London, he started a campaign to enlist the support of European nations to bring about the downfall of the world's only hereditary communist state responsible for the deaths of millions of his countrymen and to replace it with a genuine democracy.

Kim, 39, has testified before the British Parliament about human rights abuses in his homeland and has recently completed a 12,000-word report, to be released soon by the Parliament Street think-tank, on how Europe should assist the starving and repressed people of North Korea.
The power of Europe speaking with one voice on the issue of human rights abuses, Kim believes, could prove to be the catalyst to major changes in North Korea.

Read more: North Korean defector calls on Europe for help | Asia | DW.DE | 14.01.2013