Lee Soon-ok

Lee Soon-ok (born 1947 in Chongjin, North Korea) is a North Korean defector and the author of Eyes of the Tailless Animals: Prison Memoirs of a North Korean Woman, her account of being falsely accused, tortured, and imprisoned under poor conditions for crimes against the state and her subsequent release from prison and defection from the country. Since leaving North Korea, she has resided in South Korea.

For the volleyball player, see Lee Soon-ok (volleyball).
In this Korean name, the family name is Lee.
Lee Soon-ok
Hangul
이순옥
Revised RomanizationI Sunok
McCune–ReischauerRi Sunok

Imprisonment

According to Lee, she was a manager in a North Korean government office that distributed goods and materials to the country's people when she was falsely accused of dishonesty in her job. She believes she was one of the victims of a power struggle between the Workers' Party and the public security bureau police.

She describes being severely tortured and threatened for months following her arrest while maintaining her innocence; however, a promise made by an interrogator to not take any punitive action against her husband and son if she confessed—a promise that she said she would find out to have been false—finally convinced her to plead guilty to the charges.[1][2][3]

For six years, Lee was imprisoned in Kaechon concentration camp where she reports witnessing forced abortions, infanticide, instances of rape, public executions, testing of biological weapons on prisoners (see human experimentation in North Korea), extreme malnutrition, and other forms of inhumane conditions and depravity.[3]

It is not clear why she was released, although Lee suspects that the officials responsible for jailing her were the subjects of investigations by higher-ranking members of North Korea's government.[1]

Defection

Following her release, Lee wrote several letters of protest to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il[4] about her cruel treatment in the camp but never received a response and was eventually threatened with unspecified consequences if she wrote any more letters. She managed to reunite with her son and escape from North Korea soon afterward, converting to Christianity along the way. Her husband disappeared during her imprisonment and she has not heard from him since.

Since escaping with her son via China to South Korea in 1995, Lee has written Eyes of the Tailless Animals: Prison Memoirs of a North Korean Woman, a memoir of her six-year imprisonment on false charges in Kaechon concentration camp and testified before the US Congress.[2][5] She estimated that in her camp alone there were at least 6,000 political prisoners. Lee says she has been partially disabled due to the physical torture she was subjected to for well over a year, including but not limited to water torture.[2][5]

Along with fellow North Korean prison camp internees Kang Chol-Hwan and An Hyuk (both were in Yodok concentration camp), she received the Democracy Award from the American non-profit organization National Endowment for Democracy in July 2003.[6]

Reception

Lee's accusations of human experimentation in North Korea have been described as "very plausible" by a senior US official quoted anonymously by NBC News.[7] The authenticity of some of Lee's accounts of North Korean prison camps have been questioned by some South Korean researchers and North Korean defectors.[8][9][10]

See also

References
  1. Hawk, David. "The Hidden Gulag" (PDF). The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Retrieved 10 January 2016.
  2. "A Survivor: Soon Ok Lee". NBC News. 15 January 2003. Retrieved 9 January 2016.
  3. Lee Soon Ok (June 2002). "Testimony before the United States Congress". Archived from the original on 2012-12-20. Retrieved 2011-11-25.
  4. Martin, Bradley K. (2004). Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty. New York, New York: Thomas Dunne Books. p. 613. ISBN 0-312-32322-0.
  5. Hawk, David. "The Hidden GULAG: Exposing North Korea's Prison Camps" (PDF). U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Retrieved 2023-08-12.
  6. "Three N. Koreans Named Winner of NED's Democracy Award", Yonhap News, 2003-07-16, retrieved 2010-02-26
  7. Robert Windrem, "Death, terror in N. Korea gulag", NBC News, October 24, 2003, archived June 6, 2021, at archive.today.
  8. Yi, Joseph; Phillips, Joe; Lee, Wondong (1 October 2019). "Manufacturing Contempt: State-Linked Populism in South Korea". Society. 56 (5): 494–501. doi:10.1007/s12115-019-00404-2. ISSN 1936-4725. S2CID 203069756. Mainstream media and academics, based in South Korea and other countries, have actively investigated and sometimes debunked the claims of defector-activists. Lee Soon-ok was 'later found not to be a political prisoner but a petty economic criminal, a fact of which other North Korean defectors [testified].'
  9. Bregman, Sarah (2021). "Celebrity Defectors: Representations of North Korea in Euro-American and South Korean Intimate Publics". In Cathcart, Adam; Green, Christopher; Denney, Steven (eds.). Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. p. 537. ISBN 9789462987562. It is worth noting that Lee and her son were granted political asylum in the United States after providing key witness testimony. Both Lee Soon Ok and Kang Chol-Hwan's testimonies have been called into question by South Korean researchers. The work of Jiyoung Song (2015) is noteworthy.
  10. Ku, Yangmo; Lee, Inyeop; Woo, Jongseok (2018). "North Korean human rights". Politics in North and South Korea : political development, economy, and foreign relations. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. ISBN 9781138647503. Many of the defectors are associated with conservative political forces and NGOs in South Korea and the United States. They usually prefer more hostile approaches toward North Korea and tend to dramatize and even exaggerate their experiences to generate global attention and put pressure on North Korea so that the regime might collapse or be replaced. For example, Lee Soon-ok, who defected from North Korea in 1994, claimed that she was in a prison camp for political prisoners. She testified before the US Senate on her experiences and published her story...Later, some defectors claimed that many of her testimonies were exaggerated or fabricated, and that she had been in prison for economic and social offenses rather than political offenses.

Further reading
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