cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/49589624
“Doina Bumbea was born on 25 January 1950 in Bucharest, Romania. She had two brothers, one of them being Gabriel Bumbea. The other one died in 2014. Her father died in 1989, but as of 2014, her mother was still alive.
In 1970, Bumbea left Romania and went to Rome, where she married an Italian citizen. Bumbea would later study fine arts and become a painter. In 1978, she met an Italian posing as an art dealer who promised her a job as a gallery curator in Tokyo, Japan, if she made an art exhibition in Pyongyang, North Korea, first. She accepted this and was sent to North Korea, from where she would not be allowed to leave.
According to Charles Robert Jenkins, an American defector in North Korea, this country reportedly kidnapped Bumbea and other foreign women for a “spouse-sourcing” program for American defectors in North Korea, as the birth of ethnically mixed Koreans went against the wishes of the state, but also to obtain a number of ethnically non-Korean agents for the country. Therefore, Bumbea was forcibly married in the early 1980s to the American defector James Joseph Dresnok by the North Korean authorities. She had two children with Dresnok, Theodore Ricardo Dresnok, born in December 1981; and James Gabriel Dresnok, born in February 1983. Bumbea died from lung cancer in January 1997 in Pyongyang, isolated from the outer world. Her husband died in 2016, while her two children would become soldiers in the North Korean army.
Bumbea’s family only discovered what had occurred to her in 2006, when they connected Jenkins’s accounts with a BBC documentary about James Joseph Dresnok, who was still in North Korea. In 2008, following her death, Bumbea’s brother Gabriel founded the Doina Bumbea Association, a Romanian NGO dealing with missing persons and their search and rescue. In 2014, he attended a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, representing this association. At this meeting, the situation of the North Korean abductees was discussed. He also attempted to meet with or contact his nephews, although unsuccessfully. Gabriel has created a page in honor of Bumbea on Facebook.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Romania was aware of Bumbea’s case and met with Gabriel to talk about it. It made some statements, but did not speak much about the subject. Gabriel has also met with former Romanian presidents Ion Iliescu and Traian Băsescu, but also with senator Dan Horațiu Buzatu and MEP Marian-Jean Marinescu, all in relation to Doina Bumbea. Although the Ministry of Foreign Affairs made efforts to clarify the situation with the North Korean authorities, they were ignored in Pyongyang.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doina_Bumbea)
Another wild NK story was there were these girls that were approached by someone asking for them to host a prank show on YouTube or something. They had them pull 4 or 5 harmless silly pranks on people where they sometimes sprayed people with like a fart spray or something. It was going well and the girls were excited to make some money. Then on one of the pranks this dude starts freaking out and calling for authorities saying he was a high profile figure. It turned out that dude was Kim Jon Uns half brother or something and NK used those girls to unknowingly be assassins. He had been sprayed with a nerve agent and later died. I believe the girls were acquitted for not knowing what was happening.
this is almost as bad as that time a cute puppy was trained to do cute tricks like rolling over or something. one time the cute puppy rolled over onto a button that detonated a bomb or something that blew up the entire hometown of a guy who refused to get the jong-un haircut or soemthing. it had been a dastardly plan the whole time! the dog trainer was an evil north korean guy with a big hat and many medals! the cute puppy became public enemy number one and had to be smuggled into the US or Germany or something where now she is a youtube celebrity and democracy advocate
edit: i forgot to add more "or something"s
um, that one is true as far as I can tell… the guy was killed and the women were acquitted of murder (although one did serve three years for lesser charges)
what is not mentioned is that Kim Jong-Nam had CIA ties, I believe as an informant
https://en.natopedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Kim_Jong-nam
On 10 June 2019, after the trial, The Wall Street Journal reported that former US officials stated Kim had been a CIA source. A book by Anna Fifield, The Washington Post bureau chief in Beijing, had earlier reported this, stating he had been previously filmed abroad with a US intelligence agent, and had carried a backpack that contained $120,000 in cash.
cool, learned something new
or something
an Italian posing as an art dealer
no info on this person however
Look, do you know how many Italians pose as art dealers promising to get people Japanese citizenship but making them need to go to North Korea first? It’s so many, it’s practically the Italian national pastime.
10000 "Fuck NK, Fuck the Kims, fuck “tankies”, (also fuck Trump because i’m not a rightwinger honest)
redditors can’t engage or think about anything on a level deeper than “thing bad! FUCK thing. this is what it means to take a stand”
FUCK cancer!
FUCK running out ofbrea- (dies)
Romania was totalitarian tho she must have had to jump the wall
Yeah my spidey senses tell me this is a case of defection that’s being dressed up as kidnapping.
Except Romania had good relations with the DPRK at the time,and the time she left Romania was before the July theses which are often cited as the beginning of the rather poor attempt to replicate Juche in Romania, with the period prior being described as a “thawing” similar to Perestroika, where limited cultural exchange with the West and lessening of restrictions was implemented
thinking about all the Epstein victims who were not allowed to leave Little St. James
Just really got to get all the racist tropes in there don’t they? Got to do the “They’re kidnapping and removed our women!” thing too.
Is there truth to this story?
several of the named people and countries exist(ed).
Then this is one thing I condemn the dprk for, that’s really fucked up.
easy there, you asked if there was truth to it, not whether the whole thing is true.
Yeah I may have jumped the gun, other posters are pointing out this might have been defection dressed up as a kidnapping.
Now I do wanna know more, given while wouldn’t necessarily be 100% cause to go against the Korean project, it’d be vile if true
Literally “Big if true”
Her brother was unable to contact her, the Romanian government claims no information, and Hitomi Soga claims a similar story. I’m sorry, I believe it. This is genuinely bad. Even if no force was involved (Which, to be clear, I don’t believe. Some of these women had existing families), the total lack of transparency and ban of contact with the families of the women involved in the “Spousal search” program is totally beyond the pale.
How credible is Jenkins?
There is no counter narrative, he was definitely there, and although unlike some other defectors he had no actual plans to stay in the DPRK (His hope was to get sent to the soviets and then gets sent back home, claiming to have been captured by the koreans), but he has also definitely lied about some stuff (He claimed to have been a korean double agent before his defection for instance, which is just obviously false).
The fact that he has positive things to say about individual soviet functionaries (So it’s not just all doom and gloom) and he acknowledges his relative privilege gives him some credibility to my view, and of course if he’s lying his wife is telling the same lie.He’s obviously incentivised to play up any horrors (he was court martialed), and he is a proven liar.
Was she not allowed to leave? Or did she defect on account that Romania was notoriously shitty to women?
