Doina Bumbea

Doina Bumbea (born January 25, 1950 in Bucharest , † possibly January 1997 in North Korea ) was a Romanian artist who disappeared in Italy at the age of 28 . There are suspicions that she was kidnapped to North Korea and forcibly married to a US deserter there .

Life

Bumbea was born in Bucharest in 1950. In 1971 she married an Italian and has lived in Rome ever since , where she studied art and worked as a sculptor . Some sources report that she suffered a miscarriage in the early 1970s that was believed to have resulted from a dissolute lifestyle and drug use. The marriage ended in divorce after a few years. In October 1978, according to her parents, Bumbea was invited by an Italian to exhibit her work in public in Hong Kong or Japan . Bumbea wanted to accept the invitation. She has been missing since then. Her parents had her pronounced dead in the 1980s and organized a funeral ceremony in Romania.

Possible kidnapping to North Korea

Twenty-eight years after Bumbea's disappearance, suspicions arose about her kidnapping in North Korea. The trigger was on the one hand the British documentary Crossing The Line from 2006, which traced the life story of the American soldier James Joseph Dresnok , and on the other hand the autobiography of Charles Robert Jenkins , published two years later . Dresnok and Jenkins defected to North Korea via the Demilitarized Zone in 1962 and 1965 , respectively, and each lived in the country for several decades.

Dresnok explained in the film that from 1980 he was "married to a mysterious Romanian woman who always refused to talk about her past". Dresnok never announced her name. Charles Richard Jenkins, who lived with Dresnok and his wife in Pyongyang for almost two decades, calls her "Dona" in his autobiography. Jenkins explains that “Dona” was a Romanian artist who lived in Italy in the 1970s. She was lured to East Asia by a North Korean agent under false promises and was arrested during a stopover in Pyongyang in North Korea. He gained this knowledge in discussions with "Dona".

According to Charles Robert Jenkins, Bumbea was part of a program with which the North Korean regime wanted to provide defectors with wives, on the one hand to prevent mixed marriages between them and Koreans and on the other hand to create children who could be more easily employed as agents. A total of up to two dozen citizens from Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Macau, Lebanon, Jordan, France, Italy and the Netherlands are said to have been integrated alongside the Romanian Doina Bumbea.

Dresnok had two children with his wife: Ted Ricardo (* 1981) and James Gabriel (* 1983), who, like Dresnok himself, still lived in North Korea in 2016. Dresnok's wife died of lung cancer in Pyongyang in January 1997 , Dresnok himself died in 2016.

The assumption that the (first) wife of Dresnok was Doina Bumbea is based on the similarity of the first names of both persons and the coinciding nationality, which was also conceded by Dresnok. Bumbea's family also wants to recognize a considerable external resemblance between Dresnok's second son James Gabriel and Bumbea. Another indication is seen in the fact that Dresnok's second son with (second) first name is Gabriel; Doina Bumbea's older brother also bears this name. Unlike in the case of various Japanese, whose kidnapping the North Korean regime publicly admitted in 2002, there is no official statement from North Korea about Doina Bumbea. Allegedly, the Romanian government is also not trying to clear up the matter.

literature

• Charles Robert Jenkins, Jim Frederick: The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea , University of California Press 2008, ISBN 978-0-520-25333-9 .
• Laurentiu Mihu: La noi nu interesează pe nimeni cazul româncei răpite de Coreea de Nord (German: "Nobody cares if a Romanian is kidnapped to North Korea"). Interview with Gabriel Bumbea from April 15, 2014 in the Romanian newspaper Romania Libera.
• Mark Seddon: The Dear Leader takes care of me . Interview with James Dresnok in: The Guardian, September 9, 2008.
• John Sweeney: North Korea Undercover. Inside The World's Most Secret State. Random House, London 2013, ISBN 978-1-4481-7094-4 (Chapter 17: The American Who Went To North Korea And Stayed)

Web links

Doina Bumbea on Facebook

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Anamaria Dobrişan: O femeie a fost răpită acum 30 de ani pentru a fi spion ( Memento of the original from September 10, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Expresul de Sud, April 6, 2007, Romanian, accessed September 10, 2014) 
2. ↑ ^{a b} Short biography of Doina Bumbea from March 22, 2007 at www.choson.com (accessed September 10, 2014).
3. ↑ Mark Seddon: The Dear Leader takes care of me . Interview with James Dresnok in: The Guardian, September 9, 2008.
4. ^ ^{A b} Charles Robert Jenkins, Jim Frederick: The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea , University of California Press 2008, ISBN 978-0-520-25333-9 , p. 73 .
5. ↑ ^{a b} N.Korea kidnap victim's brother wants Pyongyang to come clean ( Bangkok Post , AFP , March 17, 2014, accessed September 10, 2014)
6. ^ Charles Robert Jenkins, Jim Frederick: The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea , University of California Press 2008, ISBN 978-0-520-25333-9 , p. 133.
7. ^ John Sweeney: North Korea Undercover. Inside The World's Most Secret State. Random House, London 2013, ISBN 978-1-4481-7094-4 , p. 308.
8. ↑ Laurentiu Mihu: La noi nu interesează pe nimeni cazul româncei răpite de Coreea de Nord (German: "Nobody cares if a Romanian is kidnapped to North Korea"). Interview with Gabriel Bumbea from April 15, 2014 in the Romanian newspaper Romania Libera.