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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 of her names is often rendered as Yeonmi Park in Western media) is a defector from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). She first gained prominence in 2013, eventually moving to the United States of America where she currently resides. Over time, she moved further to the right and is currently backed by a U.S. libertarian organization called the Atlas Foundation. Park also claims 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 stories
Park claims that her best friend's mother was executed at a stadium in Hyesan in 2002, but according to several other North Korean 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 claimed it was a DVD from South Korea. Andrei Lankov, one of the world's foremost experts of the DPRK and a critic of the regime, was extremely sceptical of the notion that watching a Western movie would result in an execution.[1]
In 2014, Park 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 January 2013, she 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 saw it firsthand or is only repeating stories she heard from that era.
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
- ↑ 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.