SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/57696_nkorea09.shtml

North Koreans not getting food aid, defectors claim
Saturday, February 9, 2002

By JOJI SAKURAI
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

TOKYO -- Three North Koreans who fled oppression and famine in their homeland claimed yesterday that international food aid is not reaching the starving and the government is resorting to elaborate schemes to fool U.N. monitors.

The defectors, who are in Tokyo to give testimony at an international conference on human rights in North Korea, said millions of dollars worth of food aid is being stockpiled in military complexes and used to feed soldiers and the ruling elite.

"Aid hasn't gotten to people in need, and it's being redirected to the North Korean military and the people in power," said Lee Young Kuk, a former bodyguard to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

"I know about this because I worked in the security network. ... It's all a farce," he told a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan.

Another defector, Lee Jae Kun -- a native of the South who was trained as a North Korean spy after being abducted by Pyongyang agents -- said security officials order villagers to load carts with bags of rice to show U.N. aid monitors. When the observers leave, the rice is taken away, he said.

The defectors, who now live in South Korea, gave a detailed picture of misery in the North: rivers flowing with the bodies of those who starved to death, labor camps where live burials and flaying are common, an atmosphere of paranoia in which relatives denounce each other to the authorities.

The former bodyguard, Lee Young Kuk, said he was sent to the North's harshest political prisoner camp, Yodok, after he was tricked into visiting Pyongyang's embassy in Beijing -- thinking it was the South Korean mission -- during his first defection attempt. He successfully defected in March 1999.

One inmate accused of stealing salt was tied to a vehicle and dragged for 2 1/2 miles at high speeds and "became deskinned," he said in written testimony released yesterday.

In his comments to reporters he said: "I have watched so many deaths in North Korea I almost lost the concept of human dignity."

Despite their brutal experiences, the defectors had mixed feelings about President Bush's appraisal of Pyongyang as forming part of an "axis of evil."

"Bush is stepping ahead without looking around," said Lee Jae Kun.