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'I Was Shocked By Freedom': Defectors Reflect On Life In North Korea

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Watching footage of April' s military parades in North Korea — with soldiers marching in formation to patriotic tunes — Lee So-yeon recalls all the
Watching footage of April’s military parades in North Korea — with soldiers marching in formation to patriotic tunes — Lee So-yeon recalls all the steps. She was once one of those soldiers.
The daughter of a university professor, Lee, now 41, grew up in North Korea’s North Hamgyeong province. But when famine devastated the country in the 1990s, women — including Lee — volunteered for the military in droves, often for the food rations.
Since 2014, North Korean women have been drafted for seven years of mandatory military service. Men serve between 10 to 12 years. For each gender, those are the longest conscription terms in the world.
Lee joined the North Korean army in 1992 and served nearly 10 years, mostly in a desk job with the signal corps. But on holidays, she had to march.
“All of us soldiers had to march, ” she recalls in an interview inside a glass-and-steel skyscraper in South Korea’s capital, Seoul. “It unified us, and showed off our strength to the outside world.”
In the military, Lee says she witnessed sexual abuse and violence against female soldiers. She tried to defect, but was imprisoned and tortured. Finally, in 2008, she managed to sneak across the Tumen River to China.
“I was shocked by freedom — that I didn’t need permission to do anything!” Lee recalls. “I couldn’t believe there was hot water, hairdryers! I could vote for whomever I wanted. And all the food!”
Lee has since become an advocate for female defectors as head of the New Korea Women’s Union, based in western Seoul. But from her time in the military, she’s able to offer insight into what the North Korean government wants its own people to know — and what it’s like to be inside one of the most secretive regimes in the world at times of heightened tension with the West.

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