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s North Korea is busy with its missile launches, its people struggle to make ends meet, grasping to provide for their basic daily needs.

Every year, a few thousand North Koreans risk their lives to try to escape from the appalling conditions there. Forty six-year-old Lee Myung-sook, a former North Korean Navy officer, had the courage to seek a change.

Before settling in Seoul, she fled the North in the hope of getting a better life.

After a 12-year career in the North Korean Navy, Lee was discharged and assigned to a job in a telecommunications office in Hyesan city.

In her new location, she began selling goods on the black market providing her with more money than her usual work. She also started to think about getting a better life.

In 2003, she fled to China through a broker who set up an escape route and managed to get to a Chinese city. She discovered then that she had been sold at a price of 8,000 won (US$7.1) to a disabled
Korean-Chinese man who took her as his wife.

However, he often abused her despite his having a physical impairment. For two years she put up with her violent marriage before she finally decided to flee her home.

Freedom did not last long as she was quickly caught by the Chinese police who beat her, despite knowing she was pregnant, and sent her back to North Korea.

She was interrogated and tortured by the police for leaving the country. She was stripped by the police who searched through her hair, body and even her body cavities, looking for money. Branded as a traitor, Lee was sent to Kaechon Gwalliso labor camp.

'€œI was sentenced to six years. I couldn'€™t defend myself. In fact, I never even heard the term lawyer,'€ she told The Jakarta Post during her visit to Jakarta, which was organized by the Seoul-based Citizen'€™s Alliance for North Korean Human Rights in cooperation with Kontras.

In the labor camp, prisoners had only a couple of dozen corn kernels to eat plus water. '€œWe were starving. Sometimes we took everything we found in the fields, roots, rabbits, even corn kernels inside animal dung!'€ she said.

Lee delivered a baby girl, with the help of another inmate who cut the umbilical cord with her teeth. But since there was no place for the newborn, the guards left the baby face down and let her cry for hours until she died.

The prison guards didn'€™t bury the baby as they waited for another nine corpses. The baby was put in a store room. '€œWhen the time came to bury all 10 corpses, the baby was only bones as rats had eaten my baby'€™s flesh,'€ she said, adding that seeing people starve to death was not unusual during those days.

Lee and other prisoners finally got a chance to escape. They walked for three months on their long journey to reach China. '€œI waded through thin ice sheets  and felt the cold as I crossed the river.'€

On May 18, 2006, Lee and her friends finally managed to escape from North Korea and arrived in China. The Yalu River and the Tumen River on the border are the main transit routes for defecting North Korean citizens.

Despite being geographically close to South Korea, the demilitarized zone '€” which separates the North and the South '€” has been the primary barrier for anyone trying to escape the repressive regime.

She met with a Korean-Chinese man who helped her continue her journey to Thailand and then on to South Korea.

Now, Lee expends her energy raising awareness about human rights abuses in her former country.

She never imagined before that she could live freely and fly to another country to tell the world about the misery of living in North Korea.

'€œI am so astonished to see food stalls everywhere along Jakarta'€™s streets. They make me think of my sisters and brothers back home. I wonder if they can even get food to eat,'€ she said.

Advisory committee member of the Citizen'€™s Alliance for North Korean Human Rights Kim Suk-woo said that the number of North Korean defectors had increased over the years.

Last year, there were 5,000 people escaping from the North. In the 1990s, there were only about 10 North Koreans defecting every year. Therefore, it was difficult to verify their testimony.

'€œBut as the numbers have grown, the stories have come out of the misery of life in the North,'€ he added.

Since 2003, the UN General Assembly has annually adopted a resolution condemning the North Korean human rights record, urging Pyongyang to end systematic, widespread and grave violations of human rights.

North Korea has rejected the resolution, saying it is politically motivated and based upon untrue fabrications.