Woman who escaped North Korea three times tells Trump to stop sending defectors back
Grace Jo says she is "good at escaping" after managing to flee North Korea and its authoritarian regime not once but three times, though most of her family was not so lucky.
The 25-year-old, who is now an American citizen, has a clear message for President Donald Trump: stop sending defectors back to North Korea.
"We want President Trump to accept more North Korean refugees in the US and allow us to provide resettlement services," Jo said.
"Also, President Trump, please tell China, Vietnam and Laos to stop repatriating the refugees. Sending them back to North Korea is returning them to torture, imprisonment or even death".
Even as the reclusive Asian nation steps up its military provocations, millions of its people still struggle to get enough to eat.
But those like 25-year-old Jo who can find their way out of the country often find themselves sent back once they are discovered by authorities in neighbouring countries.
Such was Jo's fate the first time she fled North Korea, when she was about seven years old.
"We walked three nights and four days," she said.
Only her mother and her sister Jinhye, who was 10 at the time, made the trip with her.
A few months earlier, her father had been arrested and beaten by authorities for crossing the border to buy a bag of rice. He died on the train taking him to prison.
Her grandmother and two younger brothers died of hunger, and her eldest sister had gone off to search for food and never returned.
In the second half of the 1990s, North Korea was experiencing a famine that left hundreds of thousands dead.
Once, she said, she and her little brother would have nothing to eat for 10 days.
Crossing the border into China did not put an end to their problems. Her family's three survivors were forced to go underground for fear of being sent back to North Korea.
Eventually, they were caught and jailed, and sent back home.
They managed to flee once again after Jo's mother bribed a border guard, but once again they were caught and returned.
In 2006 she made her third and final escape, this time thanks to an American-Korean pastor who paid members of North Korea's secret police $10,000 to secure the three women's freedom.
After receiving UN refugee status, they moved to the United States in 2008.
Jo has since acquired American citizenship, an unlikely turn of events for someone taught that "Americans are the biggest enemy" and "we should kill them or report to the officials if we see them."
Since the end of the Korean War in 1953, more than 30,000 North Koreans have fled their country, most of them after the 1990s famine. Almost 10.5 million people, or 41 per cent of the population, remain undernourished, according to the UN.
