Torture victim's plea for change

Friday May 02, 2003 21:40

by Agallamh

by Elaine Monaghan, London Times

THE frail 56-year-old weeps as she removes her spectacles and points to the paralysed side of her face. Soon Ok Lee was beaten so badly, she says, that she had to push her eyeball back into its socket. She is one of the few people to have survived the prison camps of North Korea.

Newly settled in America, she will tell congressmen today that President Bush should topple the regime that tortured her daily, not waste time talking to it.

“Kim Jong Il (the President) is worse than Saddam Hussein. The victims of a war would be fewer than the dictator’s victims now,” she said through her son, Dong Choi Lee, 36, who translated.

Her message comes amid a raging debate about how to deal with the Stalinist state’s threat to build nuclear weapons. Mr Bush convened a meeting on the issue yesterday, but the Administration rebuffed North Korea’s offer to drop its nuclear weapons programme in return for diplomatic, political and economic concessions.

Mrs Soon argues that America’s victory over Iraq has scared President Kim and that for humanitarian reasons alone America must act now to save the estimated 200,000 men, women and children in 12 camps, including Kaechon, where she was held from November 1987 until December 1992. She was incarcerated for seven years in all, and the tales she tells in her memoirs, entitled Eyes of the Tail-less Animals, after the pleading look of the cowering prisoners, are lent powerful credence by the scars on her body.

Once a fervent communist, she used to travel to China in the 1980s to buy fabric for the North Korean Government. Her crime was to refuse a superior’s illegal demand for more than his share of material. She was imprisoned in 1986 and tortured daily for 11 months. She “confessed” only after her family was threatened.

On one occasion a guard chained her to iron bars high up on a door. Guards also tied her to a bed, shoved the spout of a kettle in her mouth and pumped her full of water. She passed out and awoke to find two men trampling with boots on a wooden board on her stomach. Water came out of every orifice. She passed blood instead of urine and still suffers painful kidneys.

Women delivered stillborn babies after guards pumped salt water into their wombs. Other inmates were forced to strangle the newborns, or guards simply stamped on them, according to Mrs Soon.

“I experienced a living hell,” she says. “Even today, I am not sure whether I am alive or merely dreaming.”