A North Korean defector unexpectedly interrupted a United Nations human rights conference Thursday and tearfully begged the international organization to let her return to Pyongyang.
Tens of thousands of North Koreans have risked their lives to escape to the South, including a brave North Korean soldier who was shot fives times as he made a desperate dash for freedom at the DMZ last month, but every now and again, a defector will suddenly decide to go back.
It is illegal for North Korean defectors to return home.
“I’m a citizen of Pyongyang of the Democratic Republic of Korea,” Kim Ryon-Hui said, her voice trembling, according to Reuters and AFP. “I have been forcefully detained in the South for seven years.”
Kim traveled to China to visit relatives and seek medical attention for a liver disease in 2011, she revealed to CNN. To cover the steep costs of medical care, Kim took a job at a restaurant in Shenyang in Northeastern China, but she was not able to earn enough to pay for her treatment. A middleman convinced her there were better employment opportunities in South Korea.
Kim told reporters that she only intended to stay in South Korea for two months and was unaware that she would never be allowed to return home to North Korea, to her daughter and aging parents in Pyongyang.
“A mother is someone who can’t be apart from her daughter for even a moment, but seven years just hurts too much,” she told those at the U.N. conference.
Kim has attempted to take her life and has been imprisoned on multiple occasions for violating the National Security Act by forging a passport and falsely confessing to espionage. “I miss my daughter so much and I feel sorry since I can’t take care of her,” she told NK News reporters at an event earlier this year.
North Korea often cites Kim’s case, as well as the cases of a dozen waitresses who defected to the South, as examples of South Korea’s poor human rights record, asserting that the South is kidnapping its citizens.
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