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Park Yeonmi 박연미 | |
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| Born | 4 October 1993 Hyesan, Ryanggang Province, North Korea |
| Nationality | Korean |
| Known for | Spreading misinformation about North Korea |
Park Yeonmi (last name Park, though the order is often rendered as Yeonmi Park in Western media) is known for "defecting" (emigrating without warning) from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). She first gained prominence in 2013 for her story, and now resides in the United States of America. Over time, she moved further to the right and is currently backed by a U.S. libertarian organization called the Atlas Foundation as the face of manufacturing consent for regime change in Korea. Park has also claimed the U.S. has "fallen to socialism". Her stories as a defector are highly inconsistent and contain large amounts of false information.[1]
Inconsistencies in story[edit | edit source]
Park claims that her best friend's mother was executed at a stadium in Hyesan in 2002, but according to several other similar defectors, public executions in Hyesan only ever took place on the outskirts of the city, and there haven't been any public executions there since 1999. Park initially stated that the woman was executed for watching a James Bond movie, but later changed it to be a DVD from South Korea. Andrei Lankov, a Western critic of the DPRK who writes from South Korea (where praise of the DPRK is illegal), was skeptical of Park's claim that watching a Western movie would result in an execution.[1]
In January 2013, Park said that she never saw anyone starving in the DPRK. She later claimed that she saw people eating grass and insects to survive. This practice was attested to during the years of the Arduous March, the years during which Park was living in the DPRK,[2] but it is unconfirmed whether Park remembers it firsthand or is only repeating stories she heard, as she herself would have been only five years old at the end of the Arduous March.
In 2014, she said that she defected to China from the DPRK with her mother and father. She later changed the story and claimed that her father stayed behind.
In an interview with North Korea Today, she said that she could not afford to go to school in the DPRK. In another interview with them, she talked about what she learned in school and said the DPRK had a free education system.[3]
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Mary Ann Jolley (2014-12-10). "The Strange Tale of Yeonmi Park" The Diplomat. Archived from the original on 2022-08-01. Retrieved 2022-08-05.
- ↑ “The defectors that are in their 20s and 30s right now from birth or childhood grew up not knowing what rice or meat is because they were born during the Arduous March. As soon as they were born, they only had corn, grass and tree bark to eat, and instead of going to school they had to trade in the market every day or go up the mountains to gather firewood.”
"Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang (서울의 평양 시민들)" (2024-08-16). DPRK News Room. - ↑ "Yeonmi Park: The Defector Who Fooled the World" (2014-12-22). JooPark3782 Blog. Archived from the original on 2022-03-28. Retrieved 2022-08-05.