Posted on 04/28/2010 7:01:11 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
The Abductees We Must Not Forget
By Chris Green |
Anocha Panjoy, an abductee from Thailand (source: Bangjon Panjoy)
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It was January, 1978 when Anocha Panjoy left the countryside of Thailand for Macau. Along with two friends, the 23-year old was off to work in the richer, Portuguese colony.
According to the testimony of friends, Anocha left her Macau apartment on May 21st of the same year, saying she was heading for a beauty parlor. By the time she was reported missing on July 2nd, she had been gone for more than two months.
Now, Anocha has been gone more than 30 years, just one among hundreds of foreign nationals reportedly abducted by North Korea during the second half of the twentieth century, and the only one, as far as is known, from Thailand.
Why North Korea took her is unclear, though many of the much better known Japanese abductees of the era were apparently taken so they could train North Korean spies in the language, culture and mannerisms of Japan. But take her they did; and for the 27 years immediately following her disappearance, nobody even knew that much.
The breakthrough came when Charles Robert Jenkins, the “Reluctant Communist,” one of four American servicemen who famously deserted their posts in South Korea and defected to the North during the early 1960s, was allowed to leave North Korea in 2004 with wife Hitomi Soga. The following year, he revealed that one of the three other American defectors, Larry Abshier, had married Anocha and lived with her in an apartment near his for almost a decade between 1980 and 1989.
According to Jenkins, Anocha explained to him how she had been tied up by agents in Macau, sedated and left on a beach where she was picked up by boat and taken to North Korea. En route, Anocha apparently recalled, the North Korean agents even washed her clothes.
Jenkins and Soga had more evidence, too. When Anocha’s family met Jenkins and Soga in Tokyo, Soga was able to pick Anocha out in any picture of her and her friends and family dating from before her disappearance.
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Jenkins with his wife and daughter on Wonsan beach (source: Bangjon Panjoy)
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But better still was one photo which Jenkins gave to Anocha’s family. In it, Jenkins sits, sunburnt and smoking a cigarette, with Soga and their young daughter Roberta on Wonsan beach some time, Jenkins believes, in the summer of 1984. It is a nice photo of a family day out, a very normal scene.
But in the left corner of the frame, some meters away and looking down at another child, sits Anocha. It is the last picture of Anocha, anywhere.
North Korean Freedom Week is not just a time to work for the freedom of the North Korean people. It is also a time to remember and advocate loudly on the behalf of the 500 or more South Koreans, up to 100 Japanese and twenty or more citizens of other nations whose kidnappings at the hands of the North Korean state have gone, in many cases, largely uninvestigated. One of those unfortunate few is Anocha Panjoy.
▲ Anocha Panjoy’s father, a Korean War veteran (source: Bangjon Panjoy)
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P!
“Bangjon and Ebihara hope, however, that if Thailand is elected to the UN Human Rights Council in 2011 it will be possible to bring more pressure to bear on the Thai government to try and get Anocha back from North Korea.”
Sorry, Bangjon and Ebihara. The UN “Human Rights Council” primarily exists to cast aspersions at Israel for not quietly allowing islamiacs to kill them en masse. The council won’t do a thing about this act of war (literally) by the Norks.
Unbelievable. Poor lady.
Sad and interesting, thanks for posting it.
The communists work hard at getting what they want and care little of the pain it may cause the rest of us.
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