Lee Soon-ok

Korean spelling
Hangeul	이순옥
Revised Romanization	I Sun-ok
McCune- Reischauer	Yi Sunok
See also : Korean name

Lee Soon-ok (* 1947 in Ch'ŏngjin , North Korea ) is a Korean human rights activist . She is known to a wider public through her book Let me be your voice! , in which she describes her life in a North Korean prison camp . She fled to South Korea in 1996 .

Life

Lee Soon-ok was born in 1947 in the North Korean city of Ch'inngjin. During the Korean War , her family moved to Onsŏng in the extreme northeastern corner of North Korea ( Hamgyŏng-pukto Province ). There she attended the Ra Hueng Polytechnic High School. From 1963 she studied at a business school. After graduating, she became a member of the Communist Labor Party of Korea and worked as an auditor in the economic department of Onsŏng County Government. In 1978 she became head of the pension office for the state-owned enterprises in the Onsŏng district.

In that capacity, Lee Soon-ok was asked by the county security chief to donate material from stocks from the state-owned tailors' shop for his personal use. When Lee refused, she was arrested at work on October 26, 1986. Then, after a brief trial, she was sentenced to 13 years imprisonment in the detention labor camp (or re-education camp , in Korean Kyohwaso ) No. 1 in Kaech'ŏn ( Pyŏngan-namdo Province ) for alleged embezzlement of state property and taking bribes .

Lee Soon-ok lived there for six years and experienced slave labor, torture, executions, starvation and illness. Despite her somewhat preferred position as an accountant in the camp, she was repeatedly brutally tortured and, according to her own account, almost died of torture and illness.

In January 1992, after it became known that her detention was illegal, she was released for good conduct. In 1994, she and her son fled to China and hid there. With the help of foreign embassy staff, she finally came to Hong Kong and from there to South Korea in 1996 .

Lee's son Choi Dong-chul was deployed from 1985 to 1986 as part of his army service in the guard duty of the No. 11 Labor Camp for Political Prisoners in Kyungsung (Hamgyŏng-pukto Province).

credibility

Chang In-suk (장인숙) challenged Lee's claims when he was the head of the North Korean Refugee Association (북한 이탈 주민 연합) in Seoul. Chang said he knew firsthand that Lee was never a political prisoner but was sentenced for white- collar crime. Numerous former North Korean citizens agreed with Chang that Lee's claims are likely not to be factual. Jiyoung Song compares the criticism of Lee with the doubts about the credibility of Shin Dong-hyuk , saying that one problem is the cash payments North Korean refugees receive for interviews, which has been a common practice in the field for years, and this affects them Stories from the refugees because the journalists or authors are looking for "stories that can be sold".

Fonts

• Yi Sun-ok 이순옥 : Kkori-ŏpnŭn chimsŭn-dŭrŭi nunbit 꼬리 없는 짐승 들의 눈빛 . Ch'ŏnji-midiŏ 천지 미디어 1996, ISBN 89-86144-04-2 ; New edition: Kkŭrisŭch'an-chŏnŏl ch'ulp'anbu 크리스찬 저널 출판부 2003, ISBN 89-951378-3-5 .
• Soon Ok Lee: Let me be your voice! Six years in North Korea's labor camps . Brunnen, Giessen 2005, ISBN 3-7655-3848-5 .

See also

• Human rights situation in North Korea
• Persecution of Christians # North Korea
• Shin Dong-hyuk
• Kang Chol-hwan

Web links

• Literature by and about Lee Soon-ok in the catalog of the German National Library
• Treason and Torture: Soon Ok Lee for six years of martyrdom in a North Korean forced labor camp on the website of the International Society for Human Rights
• Article "A Survivor: Soon Ok Lee" MSNBC, January, 15, 2003 (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Committee for Human Rights in North Korea: The Hidden Gulag (Section: Witnesses and testimony witness: LEE Soon Ok, Kyo-hwa-so No. 1, page 103) (PDF file; 5.5 MB)
2. ↑ Die Sklavin ( Memento of March 17, 2009 in the Internet Archive ), Der Tagesspiegel of March 7, 2005.
3. ↑ The North Korean Gulag ( Memento of the original from March 31, 2010 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. , Süddeutsche Zeitung of June 12, 2009. 
4. ↑ United States Senate Hearings: Testimony of Ms. Soon Ok Lee ( Memento of the original from December 20, 2012 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. before the US Senate Judiciary Committee on June 21, 2002 (English). 
5. ↑ Committee for Human Rights in North Korea: The Hidden Gulag (section: Closed Kwan-li-so Witness: Former Guard CHOI Dong Chul, page 81) (PDF file; 5.5 MB)
6. ↑ Jiyoung Song: Why do North Korean defector testimonies so often fall apart? , The Guardian , Oct. 13, 2015.

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Korean. Lee is the family name here, Soon-ok is the first name.