A screenshot from the video
A North Korean military defector fled across the border to South Korea as he was pursued and shot at by his compatriots before being hauled to safety by troops from the other side, according to new footage released by the UN command in the South Korea on November 22.
Incredible footage of the North Korean soldier making his escape through the DMZ, first in a jeep and then on foot. Can clearly see North Koreans running to shoot their “comrade” pic.twitter.com/JRzTdYBvq4
— Anna Fifield (@annafifield) 22 November 2017
The defector was shot and injured during a rare but successful attempt to defect to South Korea by escaping across the countries’ heavily armed border on November 13. The video shows him racing towards the border village of Panmunjom in a military vehicle before crashing it and continuing his escape on foot. It also shows the man collapsed on the ground after being shot just south of the Korean Demilitarised Zone (DMZ).
Yonhap news quoted a government official as saying that the soldier had regained consciousness and had asked to watch television. He was being shown South Korean films for his “psychological comfort”, the official said. Parasitic worms have been found inside the soldier, highlighting nutrition and hygiene problems that observers believe have plagued the isolated country for decades. One of the worms was 11 inches long. The parasites appear to confirm that parasite infection problems and serious health issues have been prevalent in North Korea.
This defection came before an interview with a former female North Korean soldier was published by BBC on November 21, in which she reported incredibly poor treatment of female staff in particular, including being raped.
A day after US President Donald Trump announced that the US will designate North Korea as a state sponsor of terror on November 20, the US has unveiled new sanctions against North Korea which it says are designed to stop its funding of nuclear and ballistic missile programmes.
“As North Korea continues to threaten international peace and security, we are steadfast in our determination to maximise economic pressure to isolate it from outside sources of trade and revenue while exposing its evasive tactics,” said Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin on November 21.
Three Chinese companies accused of trading with North Korea — Dandong Kehua Economy and Trade, Dandong Xianghe Trading and Dandong Hongda Trade — are added to the US Treasury’s sanctions list as a result of the decision. Also targeted is the Korea South-South Cooperation Corporation which is alleged to have created revenue for the North by sending workers to countries like Russia, Poland, Cambodia and China.
China did not stay silent on the matter as Air China have “indefinitely suspended” flights between Beijing and Pyongyang. The suspension means North Korea’s Air Koryo is the only airline, which connects the country to China. Its website lists flights to Beijing, Shanghai, Shenyang, and Dandong in China and Vladivostok in Russia.
How do we know this fleeing person is not just a criminal? And, regarding the health of the NK people, US sanctions are not helpful.
Yes they are under blockade for so long that it was illogical.
People flee totalitarian regimes all the time. When a country has giant pictures of its leader(s) everywhere and the borders are watched with fences and guard towers you’re not dealing with a happy place to live in, but basically a giant prison. And the biggest giant prison on the planet is currently North Korea. And inmates of prisons often dream of freedom. And try to escape.
I know that some people here romanticize North Korea, because it opposes the US, which is something they like. I can understand that sentiment, but we should always keep in mind, the enemy of my enemy is NOT my friend. Just because you agree with parts of North Korea’s foreign policy doesn’t make it a nice country. North Korea is still a totalitarian shithole of Orwellian nightmarish proportions.
Our point is these starvation isn’t solely their government faults. They are economically blockaded.
They may be blockaded, but a communist command style economy sucks at agriculture. Soviet and Chinese collectivization caused massive famines in both countries. The system just doesn’t work to put enough food on table, even without a blockade.
That’s a citation from a US military or CIA handbook !
Maybe, but it is a fact that NK and Soviet Union (partially, not in the extent of NK) had huge issue with the agriculture during great oil crisis back in the 70s, while Kubans, after initial shock and the first year of rate agricultural mechanization utilization – next year produced more food then before the crisis: as they organized so called “urban gardening”, completely atomic and self-owned in nature there was a crisis law giving right to any person in the country to put fence on a slice of fertile land and to grow food for his own family. They even grown vegetables on building roofs and terraces.
That is hardly a CIA’s handbook story.
No, that’s reality. Tsarist Russia was the breadbasket of Europe. Communist Russia had to import grain. Communism doesn’t work. I wish it did, as I hate free market capitalism.
Yep, the free market would cause hundreds of thousands of square miles of arable land to pop into existence!
No, because when you actually own your own land you’re actually going to make an effort to produce something. That’s why in the former USSR the massive collective farms had tiny plots of private land that that were WAY more productive then the state owned land.
I mean, think about, when you go to work in your cubicle for a soulless corporation, what incentive do you have to go the extra mile? You’re not getting any of the profit, and if it means the CEO can get a few extra dollars on his shares by firing you, he will. Now if it were actually your own business, then you would go the extra mile. Huge collective farms are basically like soulless corporations. There is no incentive to go the extra mile and most likely whoever is in charge is the communist counterpart to Dilbert’s pointy haired boss.
Free markets would not pop in extra arable land. But privately owned farms, as in by the local farmers, would probably be a hell of a lot more productive.
No, if they had the free market, hundreds of thousands of square miles of arable land would form magically and oil reserves would form too!
And what did you expect? A country bombed to ruins, put on fire, raped, pillaged by western hordes, needs a vertical structure to defend itself. The US created the totalitarian regime.
No, it pretty much existed the moment the original Kim took power in 1945. And chances are he took over the Japanese state apparatus of repression, just like Soviets did in East Germany.
The real reason is that north Korea’s underground contains huge quantities of precious minerals the US wanted to control !
That was not an issue at all in 1950 when Kim the First sent his army across the DMZ.
The first war was an inevitable consequence of the US overthrowing Imperial Japanese control over the occupied south of Korea, and replacing it with US Occupation. The US ruled as Japan had, via local elites acting as collaborators. Kim il Sung rightly expected to be able to form a unified Korea after the japs were ejected, but the US simply took over where the japs left off and nixed any suggestion of reunification
US backed Sygmun Rhee ordered his troops to raid NK villages along the border only weeks before the full scale assault by the NKs, killing hundreds. The NKs had had enough at this point, and war was inevitable.
Korea in the 50s was very similar to Vietnam in the 60-70s, except in the latter case, the US-backed despots lost and Vietnam is now a peaceful and quite prosperous unified nation. If only the US had the good sense to let nature take its course in the 50s, then all this current day BS wouldn’t be happening.
That’s hearsaying, did you have being overthere, people who went declare the opposite !
It’s arguable that the Gaza Strip is the biggest prison in the world. However the North Koreans used to be just Koreans. Remember?
No, North Korea is bigger. Hamas is nowhere as repressive as the North Korean state. Unlike the Gaza strip however the North Korean population doesn’t get bombed by their neighbor on a regular basis.
…but they have been threatened by destruction by US nukes for the last 70 years, and have a living memory of being carpet-bombed into the ground by USAF heavy bombers that targeted every NK city and left nothing above one story standing anywhere north of the current day DMZ.
Ah! I guess you have lived
there to have such knowledge. Where abouts was your home?
Do they care about that? Nope, no they don´t.
There was that Russian dissident that sewed his mouth shut with iron wires, nailed his schlong and set fire to a bank.
He also nailed his balls to the flagstones of Red square, and our feckless MSM hailed him as a “performance artist”. Funny though how the MSM weren’t so enamored with his attempt to burn down the bank in Paris….
Without ambition to give definitive opinion on this story, I just want to remind all you guys here: production of this video would cost max. 1500$ and would take max. 2 days, even with improvised equipment and unskilled filming crew. Actually, for a bet I would organize and produce video like this with my friends from local pub in 24h. So, video clip, official statements … all that is really cheap to fake, especially it is easy to say: we found 11 inch parasite in the soldier. Can you imagine any possible way that someone refute such statement?
So, relax.
This story has value like a Ledi Gaga’s statement on global warming.
yes, sanctions make them less healthy!
Hmm. So tragic that almost unrealistic. Waiting for update of this.
Why do I have this tingly feeling that tells me we’re not getting the full story?
The narrative is being created to bomb the population of North Korea into oblivion again for their own good as the US did in the war of 1953/4.
The funny thing is the US will lose again if they invade. Tokyo and Seoul will be glassed flat if the US keeps pushing for war with NK
That’s possibly what the US wants in order to balance their trade deficit with those countries :)
They want to destroy/cripple these countries on a permanent basis.
https://i.warosu.org/data/jp/img/0158/35/1473874721234.png
“Are you some kind of conspiracy theorist? You should trust the mainstream medias!”
If some Mexican was shot by US border police it certainly wouldn’t make it into the news. With or without parasitic worms. This defector could tell his “saviours” in the South ANYTHING and of course the media will happily pick up on anything that puts the PRNK into a bad light. They don’t want good news from North Korea and therefore we will not hear any good news. Smells very much like propaganda to me. Btw. Barba_Papa, did you know that Israel is surrounded by a 10ft fence & barbed wire + strips of mines between + sand which gets swept every day so the IDF can see any foot prints + guard towers + surveillance cameras? So yes, maybe the fence between PRNK and South Korea is meant to keep North Koreans inside, but it might as well have a reasonable function to keep unwanted guests outside. Maybe if there wasn’t a constant threat from predatory capitalists and blockade, the PRNK might be more open than it is? Look what happened to Syria. It had open trade and borders with Jordan, Iraq, Turkey and Lebanon, so it was easy for Wahhabi Salafists and Predatory Capitalists (CIA) to infiltrate the country and set off a proxy war that crippled the country into ruins. If the US and western capitalists are such freedom seekers and obviously so much better, why do they need all this propaganda? Why push a story of 1 person illegally crossing the border in such a manner? This clearly isn’t about a humanitarian cause. Just like little Bana in Syria, this is designed to make you believe that the PRNK is a death camp, which the western capitalist heroes have to invade and free from its totalitarian regime. Trump even goes so far and threatens to completely annihilate North Korea. How okay is that??
True. Some think they are quite enlightened by repeating western propaganda.
How do we know that this isnt set uped?
a DEFECTOR IS NOT A COMRADE IT’S A TRAITOR ! How do americans call own military(Manning) or CIA members(Snowden ) who report US warcrimes !
You have a solid point rudy, but honestly anybody who leaves a terrible regime is doing the right thing. Any person who wants to leave North Korea is doing his family a favor. If i was living in DPRK or some other socialist hell hole, like Venezuela, i would be doing everything to get my family to safety
Kim Jong Un eats babies alive with his bare hands, CNN told me so!
I am sure he is a stand up guy. DPRK is probably a socialist Utopia.
Socialist hell-hole? What country are you from, Eskandar?
I am from the United States. I do not think DPRK is a Utopia, but it seemed like sarcasm well spent.
What the F do Muricans know about “socialism”? Seppos don’t understand the word and falsely accredit to it everything they hate, regardless of fact. Wise up buddy. The US elite establishment and its media assets habitually trash socialism and all other collectivists schools of thought as they don’t want US sheep from understanding that there is an alternative to the US brand of rapacious dog-eat-dog neoliberal capitalism that has made the sociopathic US elite as wealthy as they are.
Social justice requires a balanced society, one that provides for private enterprise, but also asserts collectivist needs and applies a legislative brake on the ambitions of rich greedy psychopaths. The US ticks all boxes for the former, but sucks biggly on the later, and it is the corruption of the US polity by private money and the ever-growing inequality that results that is the real enemy, not some fictitious “commie-socialist” strawman.
Commie socialist is not a strawman, it is a dangerous, evil individual, masquerading as a do-gooder
Thanks for proving my point… You clearly lack any ability to look beyond the slogans and Murican cultural bias and groupthink.
more like you clearly have nothing but bias against Americans. You can address the substance of my post or you can f off, tosser.
Hmm. Sarcasm is tricky in print :) I’m from a capitalist hell-hole.
How amusing. Of course we have stories circulating in the MSM about the horrific conditions in North Korea (gigantic worms – fancy that!) when the USA is trying to drum up support for an indescribably horrific blanket bombing and occupation of North Korea like in… oh I dunno… the Korean war? Anyone got a photo of NK soldiers bayoneting babies?
Kind of a loss and a win for North Korea. On one hand, it says that a part of its population wants out of the population. On the other hand, it should stay the hand of the US and South Korea from outright nuking everything.
Each society usually has some of its members who want out. But in Nokor’s case, more of the population would inevitably be repressed.
USA and it’s puppets put sanction for years against North Korea.But for propaganda shake are concern about flee criminals health.USA run by stupid billion dollar mad fat fuck.