The telegraph
From North Korea to Burial: the conservative candidate who escaped torture and sex traffickers
It is a familiar refrain in British politics that more elected representatives must come from different backgrounds, with more diverse life experiences. But few could claim a life as unusual and distressing as Jihyun Park, Bury’s conservative 52-year-old local council candidate who spent the first 40 years of her life fleeing the North Korean government. Her long journey to the UK involved leaving her family behind, being smuggled across the border into China – twice – by human traffickers, serving years in a forced labor camp and being sold to the sex slave trade. . Mrs. Park, now a human rights activist and refugee, was born in North Hamgyong province, in the rural north of the country in the late 1960s. “As a child, I didn’t know what it meant to have a full stomach because we were always with hungry, ”she says. “The Government totally controlled our freedoms: freedom of expression, freedom of politicians, everything. Life in North Korea was like slavery. ”Ms. Park painfully recalls the North Korean famine, which paralyzed the country in the 1990s after the USSR collapsed and ended financial support for the regime. Official estimates of the death toll are uncertain, but her uncle was among the hundreds of thousands who died of starvation, while she suspects that her father’s death occurred shortly after she and her brother decided to try to escape to China. “Everyone saw dead bodies on the street, from neighbors and family,” she said. “I left my sick father alone in the cold dining room. I still don’t know when he died or where his body is. ”Mrs. Park and her brother were smuggled across the mountainous border by sex traffickers, who separated them and sold her to a Chinese farmer for about £ 500. Her brother was captured and sent back to North Korea. She never saw him again. For five years, she lived as a captive housewife, protected from the eyes of Chinese authorities, who routinely sent deserters back across the border as political prisoners. Upon being discovered, she was also returned to North Korea and arrested in a forced labor camp. “We were treated like animals,” she said. “We work barefoot in the mountains and in the fields, planting corn and beans. “There were rocks and glass everywhere, so our feet used to bleed and they didn’t care.” Her release came only after a cut on her foot became so infected that she was unable to walk. “They let me go because I couldn’t work. My temperature was 40 degrees and my leg was oozing yellow fluid, ”she says. “The swelling was disgusting and my hair and the color of my skin changed. I looked inhumane, and they said that I shouldn’t die in prison – I should die outside. “