North Koreans ‘Routinely Kill Imperfect Babies’
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
There are no physically handicapped people in communist North Korea because it is government policy for newborn babies with disabilities to be killed within hours of birth, according to a doctor who defected last year, Reuters reports.
Ri Kwang-chol told the New Right Union, a group of South Korean human rights activists, “There are no people with physical defects in North Korea.”
He said it was commonplace for children who were not physically or mentally perfect to be murdered as a means of ensuring that “egalitarian” communist society did not contain those who were “different.” The imperfect babies were killed in hospitals or in the homes where they were born and buried without ceremony or memorial.
The New Right Union is now pressing South Korea to abandon its diplomatic efforts to normalize relations between the two nations, which have been divided since the war between communist and United Nations forces in 1953, and concentrate instead on trying to prompt the north to improve its human rights record.
“The [South Korean] government should stop trying to avoid upsetting [the North Korean dictator] Kim Jong-il,” defector Kim Young-sun, 67, said. “It should try to upset Kim Jong-il.”
