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Not helping, Yokohama: Accidentally tweeting that North Korea has fired a missile. Seriously?
Meanwhile, these interview excerpts with Kim Hyun-hee, the former spy who bombed a South Korean passenger plane in 1987, is a good reminder of both how horrifyingly evil the North Korean government is, and how terribly, tragically innocent the North Korean people are.
At first, Kim says she refused to give in to her interrogators, but it was not until they took her driving through the streets of Seoul that she realised all the lies she had been fed by the North Korean regime.
"I saw how modern it was," she said.
"I listened to how the agents around me spoke so freely. This contradicted everything I'd been told in North Korea. I realised then I'd taken innocent lives and I expected to be given the death sentence."
She was, but she was pardoned, ruled a victim of brainwashing.
"I once heard a story that a defector saw my family in a concentration camp about 15 years ago," she said.
"But to this day I have no idea what happened to my family."
She believes the latest sabre-rattling from North Korea is all an effort for the untested leader, Kim Jong-un, to play the tough guy in front of his domestic audience.
"Kim Jong-un is too young and too inexperienced," she said.
"He's struggling to gain complete control over the military and to win their loyalty.
"That's why he's doing so many visits to military bases, to firm up support."
She says the effects of the regime and what it compelled her to do will haunt her for the rest of her life.
"I regret what I did and am repentant. I feel I should not hide the truth to the family members of those who died," she said.
"It is my duty to tell them what happened."
In a way, I admire the strength it takes to acknowledge wrongdoing on that scale, and live with it. Historically, the general course of action for people who have done something that terrible, and subsequently realised how wrong their action was, has been suicide. Instead, it seems that Kim Hyun-hee has spent a quarter of a century acknowledging her crime, owning her guilt, and accepting it as a burden she must carry, to live as a witness to the circumstances of such a terrible, terrible event.
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