North Korean biochemical expert flees to Finland: source

http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/news/2015/07/02/0200000000AEN20150702010200320.html

by willvarfar • 11 years ago

83 37 11 years ago

english.yonhapnews.co.kr

mcs• 11 years ago

chilling

killface• 11 years ago

Damn... I predict that even with how awful we expect it to be, we'll still be shocked by what is in there.

akavel2• 11 years ago

Is there any way an outside person can somehow help the cause of human rights protection for North Koreans? I understand that it's the place where the worst things on Earth are happening in our times, but have no slightest idea if it's anyhow possible to help the oppressed people...

edit:

Wikipedia suggests e.g. this: http://www.libertyinnorthkorea.org/ (via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_in_North_Korea, via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_North_Korea#In...) as a charity rescuing NK defectors hiding in China into US. That said, can one anyhow confirm if they do what they advertise? Still, I plan to try donating regularly to them anyway now (which may be cumbersome without a credit card), unless I manage to find something looking even better anyhow.

Another option from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea_Strategy_Center ("sent over (...) 400 radio sets (...) into North Korea" -- I recall people living under communist regime in the past as mentioning that radio is important for giving a glimpse of a different, better world; also from "NKSC's History": "While [the future founder of NKSC] Kang Cheol Hwan lived in North Korea he remembers being influenced by foreign South Korean radio broadcasts which helped him decide to defect from the country after having lived 10 years in the Yodok Political Prison Camp.")

Also, I'm not from US.

danieltillett3• 11 years ago

Not that I can think of. The rulers of NK seem to not care about any level of suffering the poor people stuck there go through. Our attempts to bring about change via sanctions have just increase the suffering of the average person. It really is the closest we have to an Orwellian nightmare on the planet.

hackuser8• 11 years ago

Three things off the top of my head:

1) Make sure as many people know about it as possible, which creates political pressure on your government.

2) Make sure your government knows that it's a priority for you.

3) Contact Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch; they probably can tell you much more about what you can do.

In my very humble opinion, I think the key is the Chinese public. If they pressure their government, it may be a hassle the Communist dictators decide that they don't need.

personjerry• 11 years ago

This surprised me. To be honest, I've seen a lot of "information" (and misinformation) about North Korea, and the media makes jokes about them to a degree that it's been difficult for me to tell what's real and what's not.

I knew it was probably pretty bad, but I did not know exactly how bad. There's no way they could all starve and have no internet, right? That seemed like one of the exaggerations to me. But this article implies (and what develops will likely prove) that there are in fact many serious human rights violations going on in that country though, so this helps a lot.

Edit: I understand why this could be seen as ignorance, so I understand the downvotes. However, I want to clarify that my comment is more about the impact that the media has, at least on me, in actually reducing the perceived "terribleness" of North Korea. Perhaps I am just too easily influenced and uninformed.

DanBC• 11 years ago

We've known for a long time that NK is fucking terrible. The evidence just keeps piling up. Here's something from Oct 2013.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/10...

TallGuyShort3• 11 years ago

I agree they are terrible, but it's also still true that defectors have admitted to lying, and not everything that's been said about them has been true. It's good that he has data because that can be verified, and I think we'd all agree verifying this, true or not, is what should be done.

GunlogAlm• 11 years ago

Hopefully this will turn out to be true, and something detrimental to the NK regime, and not one of the many false, ridiculous stories about North Korea we've been hearing over the past few years -- everything from "he was fed to dogs" to "prisoners shot with anti-aircraft missiles!".

brohee• 11 years ago

What makes you think that the NK regime wouldn't feed someone to dogs?

gwern• 11 years ago

Nothing, but the story in question was simply a hoax.

hackuser8• 11 years ago

I don't know about those specific stories, but the horrors perpetrated by the North Korean regime on its people are well-documented.

AndrewKemendo• 11 years ago

As a point of clarification it was an Anti-Aircraft Gun [1] which is not unprecedented.

ISIS has and continues to do this [2].

[1]http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/13/north-korean-de...

WARNING: GRAPHIC[2]http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=edd_1423009069 WARNING: GRAPHIC

contingencies• 11 years ago

"Defected to Finland" means walked in to the Beijing Embassy of Finland, I guess.

I've been to the China/North Korea border for a few days, and it was scary. But honestly, in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanji area just inside of China, I ate the best bibbimbap I've ever had, and for only 5元! "Immature fern fronds baby! Shakin' that 'bap..." Far better than Seoul.

To riff on the same theme, IIRC early North Korean defectors complained about South Korean food lacking buckwheat noodles. That has since been rectified.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fern#Uses

UnoriginalGuy5• 11 years ago

I'm going to wait for trusted experts to look at the data, before I assume this is true. However if the data holds up then I'm not sure what the West can do, only China seems to have the ability to influence NK right now (as we've already sanctioned them about as much as we can).

PS - The reason my initial reaction is skeptical is not that this type of thing cannot happen (as we witnessed during WWII). It is that other defectors have defected from NK before and told the West exactly what we wanted to hear so they'd receive preferential treatment, these claims get splashed all over the headlines, then it turns out further down the road these people's accounts might not be true (and the corrections are on page 5 in a one paragraph story). But raw data is very compelling proof, hard to fake, so as soon as it has been verified I'll buy it.

hackuser8• 11 years ago

As I posted elsewhere, there is little doubt and plenty of evidence of the NK regime's atrocities against its own citizens (and other nations' citizens too, sometimes).

EDIT: Interestingly, there are several posts using the same arguments to create doubt about this and all NK defectors (something I also posted elsewhere; sorry).

EDIT2: This follows the pattern of the professional/governmental astroturf campaign pretty closely (though, because the astroturfers' goal is to look like everyone else, I could of course be wrong). Certainly you can imagine the value of creating doubt about all NK defectors. Generally the pros build reputation by making posts on topics unrelated to their goal, and then, when it's time to take action, try to make arguments that go as far as they can while sounding reasonable. Here's a great story on a Russian operation:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html

UnoriginalGuy5• 11 years ago

While there have been highly credible reports of concentration camps within NK (inc. satellite photos of the complexes), I think some of the other claims against NK come from single sources and are hard to corroborate.

Which isn't to say they're untrue. Just unverified.

It is also worth considering that if the West cared about the North Korean people's health and wellbeing we would also have to discuss sanctions in that conversation, as sanctions have definitely caused deaths and suffering within NK.

All I am getting at is, when it comes to NK there is a lot of legitimate "bad" you can say about them. But there is also a lot of propaganda. It is sometimes hard to sort those two things into what is credible and what is uncredible, and defectors are going to say what we want to hear.

Interestingly, there are several posts using the same arguments to create doubt about this and all NK defectors (something I also posted elsewhere; sorry).

And there are several posts claiming this is just categorically true without even wanting to wait for trusted experts to look at the data. I just want fact, and I believe in this instance (because of the raw data) it is likely that after an examination of the details we can determine with a reasonable degree of certainty the facts of this case.

Seems like that is the minimum we should expect before we start beating our drums of war once more.

oxide• 11 years ago

What corrections? What is 'not exactly' true?

UnoriginalGuy5• 11 years ago

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/19/world/asia/prominent-north...

http://thediplomat.com/2014/12/the-strange-tale-of-yeonmi-pa...

http://adamcathcart.com/2014/10/09/north-korea-misinformatio...

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/north-korean-...

hackuser8• 11 years ago

It doesn't mean much. NK has been a brutal dictatorship for over 60 years; undoubtedly, like with anything else, there has been some misinformation about the issue. It doesn't make NK defectors particularly hard to believe, and especially doesn't cast doubt on the overall picture of oppression.

mullen• 11 years ago

I expect to see Unit 731 type of stuff but on a smaller scale.

There are really shocking things that go on in North Korea right now. Massive prisons to hold political prisoners and their families, executions by all kinds of devices, starvation of the population on a wholesale level and it won't surprise me to find they are also doing human experiments.

danieltillett3• 11 years ago

My biggest fear is that they have been working on germ warfare - something like the smallpox the Soviet Union produced with a 90% kill rate that our vaccines don't work on [1].

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_smallpox_incident

UnoriginalGuy5• 11 years ago

Did you link to the right thing? That smallpox outbreak didn't have a 90% kill rate and vaccination did work against it. All three of the deaths were amongst the unvaccinated (with 7 others who were vaccinated surviving).

I'm sure the USSR and US did create super bio weapons during the cold war. The claim isn't strange to me, the link is however.

danieltillett3• 11 years ago

This was the best result I could find for demonstrating what the soviet smallpox weapons program was about. This outbreak showed that vaccination did not provide protection and the strain caused a very high rate of haemorrhage. When you have only 10 individuals infected you can't really estimate the large scale death rate.

The death rate for the strain they developed was estimated from animal studies - not even the soviets were bad enough to test this directly on humans.

curiously2• 11 years ago

Hopefully this will be enough motive for rest of the world to stop a real modern day holocaust. There's no oil in North Korea but how's about lifting 30 million people out of hell?

UnoriginalGuy5• 11 years ago

How do you propose we do that? I am legitimately asking.

Right now NK has nuclear weapons with warheads capable of reaching at least Japan and a Chinese ally which is meant to come to NK's aid if they get attacked.

It could literally start world war 3 if we just attacked NK tomorrow without getting the Chinese and Russians aboard.

I think a lot of Western countries would love to liberate NK, oil or not. But the politics of the situation make that tricky to say the least.

curiously2• 11 years ago

I don't know why are you asking me?

hackuser8• 11 years ago

It's surprising how many comments are casting doubt on the story and on the stories of all NK defectors, and all using the same arguments. It's 3 of the 10 top level comments as of now.

EDIT: Rather than repeating myself, there's more in my post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9821740

Mikeb85• 11 years ago

Probably because past defectors have eventually admitted to fabricating stories.

WaxProlix2• 11 years ago

It's surprising how many comments are literally just from this one account that you're using - 20% of the discussion by comment at the moment. Someone has skin in this game, and my gut tells me it's not the people who are advocating caution where lies have been seen before. They're not calling this guy a liar, they're saying to wait and see before getting the old pitchfork out.

North Korean biochemical expert flees to Finland: source

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