Michael Kirby and a generation stolen by North Korea Pleading: Sukham Panjoy (left), the brother of Anocha, and his son Banjong Panjoy. She disappeared from Macau in 1978. Photo: A.M. Sandford North Korea's official news agency describes witnesses who have given harrowing accounts of human rights atrocities before a United Nations inquiry chaired by Australia's retired judge Michael Kirby as "human scum." Testimonies about a mother forced to drown her baby in a bucket and prison camp inmates forced to eat rats and lizards to stay alive are part of a US-hatched plot to slander North Korea, according to a shrill propaganda despatch by the Korean Central News Agency. But Sukham Panjoy, one of the witnesses, just wants the secretive Stalinist state to allow his sister Anocha to return to her quiet village in northern Thailand, where chickens scratch in the dirt outside the family's stilted wooden home and her childhood dolls and teenage clothes have remained undisturbed in her bedroom for 35 years. Snatched: Anocha Panjoy, a year before she was abducted. "I've gone crazy waiting for her and I am in bad condition," says 66-year-old Sukham, who pins his last hope of seeing his sister again on a landmark UN Commission of Inquiry into Human Rights in North Korea that is being chaired by Kirby, a former judge of the High Court. Anocha is one of more than 500 people across the world, many of them Japanese, who were abducted by North Korean agents in a bizarre program ordered by the dangerous and eccentric Kim dynasty in the 1970s and 80s. Some of the victims were used to teach spies about the culture and language of foreign countries but others had no idea why they were abducted and have not been able to leave North Korea. Former judge Michael Kirby at the UN. Anocha Panjoy was snatched from the Portuguese colony of Macau on May 21, 1978, where she had been working as a massage therapist in a hotel, sending money home so her poor family could build a new house in San Kamphaeng village in Chiang Mai province. Her disappearance remained a mystery for almost three decades until former US army deserter Charles Jenkins revealed in a book that a Thai woman called Anocha had been his neighbour in Pyongyang, telling him she had been ambushed on a beach in Macau, forced on to a boat and taken to North Korea. According to Jenkins, Anocha married another US defector Larry Abshier, who died in 1983, and then remarried an East German businessman. A decade ago, North Korea admitted abducting a small number of Japanese nationals but according to Thai officials has denied kidnapping Anocha, whose family believes the Thai government has not done enough to secure her release. "If Anocha was the child of privileged people in this country she would have received help by now - people would be enthusiastic to help," says Anocha's nephew, Banjong Panjoy, 45. Anocha is the child of poor people from the country so the authorities don't think it important. There has been no known sighting of Anocha since Jenkins saw her in 1989. "Even if she cannot return alive, even if Anocha is dead, we wish at least to receive her bones wrapped in white cloth," Bangjong says. She can come home alive and walking or wrapped up. We still want to know it is her, Anocha. Anocha's family members testified last month in a closed hearing in Bangkok before Kirby's three-member inquiry, the first international investigation into the north's human rights abuses. The inquiry heard evidence that included the existence of a photograph of a woman on a North Korean beach who appeared to be Anocha. Kirby, who retired from the High Court in 2009, says he hopes the inquiry can help secure the release of the people abducted and taken to North Korea in a program he called "shocking." Appointed by the UN Human Rights Council in March to chair the inquiry, Kirby is due to deliver a final report early next year that will document the horrors committed in North Korea over 20 years, including so-called gulags or prison camps where, according to independent estimates, there are between 150,000 and 200,000 inmates who are malnourished or being worked to death. North Korea has ignored repeated invitations from the inquiry to respond to what Kirby describes as evidence of "unspeakable atrocities" that reminded him of the dark days of the Second World War. "An image flashed across my mind of the Allied soldiers, Russian, American, British, at the end of the Second World War, and the discovery of prison camps in the countries that had been occupied by the Nazi forces," he says. But after 18 months ruling North Korea, 30-year-old dictator Kim Jong-un has shown no sign of loosening the xenophobic and rigid rule of his father Kim Jong-ll and grandfather Kim ll-sung. Kim Jong-un denies any rights abuses have taken place, refuses to recognise the inquiry or to allow access to Kirby or his investigators and keeps his country's borders closed, the internet off and television and radio stations tightly controlled. "An ounce of evidence is worth far more than many pounds of insults and baseless attacks," Kirby says. So far, however, the evidence that the [commission] has heard has largely pointed in one direction - and evidence to the contrary is lacking. Kirby says the ancient and proud Korean civilisation now lives in a world of universal human rights and "no country can shut itself off from the light that universal human rights brings to people everywhere." "That light is now shining into dark spaces in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea [North Korea]," he says. Among the first witnesses at the inquiry was 34-year-old defector Jee Heon-a, who told of eating frogs to stave off extreme hunger in a prison camp in 1999. Everyone's eyes were sunken. They all looked like animals. Frogs were hung from the buttons of their clothes, put in a plastic bag and their skins peeled off," she said. They ate salted frogs and so did I. Jee described how a mother was forced to kill her own baby by guards who thought it impure that the father was Chinese. It was the first time I had seen a newborn baby and I felt happy. But suddenly there were footsteps and a security guard came in and told the mother to turn the baby upside down into a bucket of water," she said. The mother begged the guard to spare her, but he kept beating her. So the mother, her hands shaking, put the baby face-down in the water. The crying stopped and a bubble rose up as it died. A grandmother who had delivered the baby quietly took it out. Shin Dong-hyuk, another former prisoner who now lives in South Korea, said his finger was cut off for dropping a sewing machine. "I had no idea at all ... I thought my whole hand was going to be cut off at the wrist, so I felt thankful and grateful that only my finger was cut off," he said. Kirby says he wants to emphasise the inquiry is not concluded and any findings in the final report will need to be backed up by strong testimony. But he says the commission heard from ordinary people who faced torture and imprisonment for doing nothing more than watching foreign soap operas on DVDs or holding religious beliefs. The commission listened to political camp survivors who suffered through childhood starvation and atrocities, punished for other family members' perceived political views or affiliation. The commission has posted testimonies online, an unprecedented step by a UN commission of inquiry. The commission has no powers to prosecute and North Korea has not signed statutes that would enable any of its leaders to be prosecuted at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. But Kirby says his inquiry will focus on identifying those responsible, including officials in state institutions. He says the specificity, detail and shocking character of the personal testimonies so far will "without doubt, demand follow-up actions by the world community." Kirby, who served as a judge for 34 years, says he "doesn't want to exaggerate" his own position but has spoken publicly about shedding tears while hearing the testimony of some witnesses. All I can say is for someone hardened by years of stories of vengeance, cruelty, anger, rage and death, the unremitting testimony of so many witnesses before the commission has been very distressing. With A. M. Sandford in Chiang Mai and agencies