North Korea

Jon Miller · January 16, 2003, 01:40

Jan. 15 — In the far north of North Korea, in remote locations not far from the borders with China and Russia, a gulag not unlike the worst labor camps built by Mao and Stalin in the last century holds some 200,000 men, women and children accused of political crimes. A month-long investigation by NBC News, including interviews with former prisoners, guards and U.S. and South Korean officials, revealed the horrifying conditions these people must endure — conditions that shock even those North Koreans accustomed to the near-famine conditions of Kim Jong Il’s realm.

“IT’S ONE of the worst, if not the worst situation — human rights abuse situation — in the world today,” said Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., who held hearings on the camps last year. “There are very few places that could compete with the level of depravity, the harshness of this regime in North Korea toward its own people.”
Satellite photos provided by DigitalGlobe confirm the existence of the camps, and interviews with those who have been there and with U.S. officials who study the North suggest Brownback’s assessment may be conservative.
Among NBC News’ findings:
At one camp, Camp 22 in Haengyong, some 50,000 prisoners toil each day in conditions that U.S. officials and former inmates say results in the death of 20 percent to 25 percent of the prison population every year.
Products made by prison laborers may wind up on U.S. store shelves, having been “washed” first through Chinese companies that serve as intermediaries.
Entire families, including grandchildren, are incarcerated for even the most bland political statements.
Forced abortions are carried out on pregnant women so that another generation of political dissidents will be “eradicated.”
Inmates are used as human guinea pigs for testing biological and chemical agents, according to both former inmates and U.S. officials.
Efforts by MSNBC.com to reach North Korean officials were unsuccessful. Messages left at the office of North Korea’s permanent representative to the United Nations went unanswered.
Eung Soo Han, a press officer at South Korea’s U.N. consulate, said: “It is a very unfortunate situation, and our hearts go out to those who suffer. We hope North Korea will open up its country, and become more actively involved with the international community in order for the North Korean people to be lifted out of their difficult situation.”

LABOR, DEATH, ABUSE
NBC’s investigation revealed that North Korea’s State Security Agency maintains a dozen political prisons and about 30 forced labor and labor education camps, mainly in remote areas. The worst are in the country’s far Northeast. Some of them are gargantuan: At least two of the camps, Haengyong and Huaong, are larger in area than the District of Columbia, with Huaong being three times the size of the U.S. capital district.
Satellite photos provided by DigitalGlobe show several of the camps, including the notorious Haengyong, for the first time outside official circles. Plainly visible are acres upon acres of barracks, laid out in regimented military style. Surrounding each of them is 10-foot-high barbed-wire fencing along with land mines and man traps. There is even a battery of anti-aircraft guns to prevent a liberation by airborne troops.
Ahn Myong Chol, a guard at the camp (which is sometimes known as Hoeryong) from 1987 through 1994, examined the satellite photos of Camp 22 for NBC News. They were taken in April, eight years after he left. But he says little has changed. He was able to pick out the family quarters for prisoners, the work areas, the propaganda buildings.
Looking at the imagery, Ahn noted what happened in each building:
“This is the detention center,” he said. “If someone goes inside this building, in three months he will be dead or disabled for life. In this corner they decided about the executions, who to execute and whether to make it public.

“This is the Kim Il Sung institute, a movie house for officers. Here is watchdog training. And guard training ground.”
Pointing to another spot, he said: “This is the garbage pond where the two kids were killed when guard kicked them in pond.”
Another satellite photo shows a coal mine at the Chungbong camp where prisoners are worked to exhaustion in a giant pit.
“All of North Korea is a gulag,” said one senior U.S. official, noting that as many as 2 million people have died of starvation while Kim has amassed the world’s largest collection of Daffy Duck cartoons. “It’s just that these people [in the camps] are treated the worst. No one knows for sure how many people are in the camps, but 200,000 is consistent with our best guess.
“We don’t have a breakdown, but there are large numbers of both women and children.”

BEYOND THE PALE
It is the widespread jailing of political prisoners’ families that makes North Korea unique, according to human rights advocates.

NBC News

Under a directive issued by Kim’s father, North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, three generations of a dissident’s family can be jailed simply on the basis of a denunciation.
NBC News interviewed two former prisoners and a former guard about conditions in the camps. The three spent their time at different camps. Their litany of camp brutalities is unmatched anywhere in the world, say human rights activists.
“Listening to their stories, it’s horrific,” said David Hawk, a veteran human rights campaigner and a consultant for the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Hawk has interviewed many former prisoners in Seoul.
“It’s hard to do more than one or two a day because they’re just so painful to hear: horrific mistreatment - all sorts of suffering, beatings to death, executions.”

Kang Chol-Hwan is now a journalist with Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s most important newspaper. His recent book, “The Aquariums of Pyongyang,” is the first memoir of a North Korean political prisoner. For nearly a decade, he was imprisoned because his grandfather had made complimentary statements about Japanese capitalism. He was a 9-year-old when he arrived at the Yodok camp. His grandfather was never seen again, and prison conditions killed his father.
“When I was 10 years old,” Kang recalled, “We were put to work digging clay and constructing a building. And there were dozens of kids, and while digging the ground, it collapsed. And they died. And the bodies were crushed flat. And they buried the kids secretly, without showing their parents, even though the parents came.”
The system appears to draw no distinction between those accused of the crime and their family members.
Soon Ok Lee, imprisoned for seven years at a camp near Kaechon in Pyungbuk province, described how the female relatives of male prisoners were treated.

“I was in prison from 1987 till January 1993,” she told NBC News in Seoul, where she now lives. ”[The women] were forced to abort their children. They put salty water into the pregnant women’s womb with a large syringe, in order to kill the baby even when the woman was 8 months or 9 months pregnant.
“And then, from time to time there a living infant is delivered. And then if someone delivers a live infant, then the guards kick the bloody baby and kill it. And I saw an infant who was crying with pain. I have to express this in words, that I witnessed such an inhumane hell.”

TESTING ON HUMANS
Soon also spoke about the use of prisoners as guinea pigs, which a senior U.S. official describes as “very plausible. We have heard similar reports.”
“I saw so many poor victims,” she said. “Hundreds of people became victims of biochemical testing. I was imprisoned in 1987 and during the years of 1988 through ’93, when I was released, I saw the research supervisors — they were enjoying the effect of biochemical weapons, effective beyond their expectations — they were saying they were successful.”
She tearfully described how in one instance about 50 inmates were taken to an auditorium and given a piece of boiled cabbage to eat. Within a half hour, they began vomiting blood and quickly died.
A shot of the enormous Chunbong camp from space.
“I saw that in 20 or 30 minutes they died like this in that place. Looking at that scene, I lost my mind. Was this reality or a nightmare? And then I screamed and was sent out of the auditorium.”
Prison guard Ahn’s memories are, like the others’, nothing short of gruesome. Every day, he said there were beatings and deaths.
“I heard many times that eyeballs were taken out by beating,” he recalled. “And I saw that by beating the person the muscle was damaged and the bone was exposed, outside, and they put salt on the wounded part. At the beginning I was frightened when I witnessed it, but it was repeated again and again, so my feelings were paralyzed.”
Moreover, said Ahn, beating and killing prisoners was not only tolerated, it was encouraged and even rewarded.
“They trained me not to treat the prisoners as human beings. If someone is against socialism, if someone tries to escape from prison, then kill him,” Ahn said. “If there’s a record of killing any escapee then the guard will be entitled to study in the college. Because of that some guards kill innocent people.”

Newsweek: Bizarre world of women, wine and weapons
President Bush told author and Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward last year that he was well aware of the camps and the atrocities. That, officials say, partly explains why Bush insisted on North Korea’s inclusion in the “axis of evil” in his 2002 State of the Union address.
“I loathe Kim Jong Il,” Bush told Woodward during an interview for the author’s book “Bush at War.” “I’ve got a visceral reaction to this guy because he is starving his people. And I have seen intelligence of these prison camps — they’re huge — that he uses to break up families and to torture people.”
Brownback, a senator with a reputation as a human rights advocate, thinks that the prison camps and abuses have for too long taken a back seat to nuclear arms and other Korean issues.
“It seems that what happened is that there got to be a complex set of issues, and people said, ‘Well OK, it’s about our relationship with China, it’s about the Korean Peninsula, it’s about this militaristic regime in North Korea that we don’t want to press too much because they may march across the border into South Korea.”
Brownback says the North’s nuclear program, its missile tests and generally unpredictable behavior has blurred a critical issue:
“I think people just got paralyzed to really put a focus on the human face of this suffering,” he said.

DinoDoc · January 16, 2003, 01:44

You seem shocked by this.

Jon Miller · January 16, 2003, 01:49

no merely pointing out how bad things are

Jon Miller

Ned · January 16, 2003, 02:27

I've changed my mind.

I had decided that the US should walk away from Korea and let the Chinese, South Koreans and Japanese solve their own problem.

But this -- this is a cause worth fighting for. Kim Il Sung is another dictator, like just like Hitler and Saddam, whose regime of terror must be ended ASAP.

I am waiting, just waiting for the leftist anti-American people here to say that somehow this is all the US's fault and that Bush is the real evil person for wanting to liberate the oppressed people of North Korea.

Shi Huangdi · January 16, 2003, 04:32

Makes you wonder why some South Koreans seem to sympathize with NK and believe that it was the US who arrived and devided Korea? Is this what they want for their country? Don't they think their brothers North of the border deserve better then this?

KrazyHorse · January 16, 2003, 04:35

Quote:

Originally posted by Ned
I've changed my mind.

I had decided that the US should walk away from Korea and let the Chinese, South Koreans and Japanese solve their own problem.

How are the North Koreans their problem but not yours?

Gatekeeper · January 16, 2003, 04:54

Hell, the United States can't do a damn thing about crap like this. Mention the word "force" and we're accused of imperialism. Well, screw it. Let's not bother with it. Let's see how 100 percent diplomacy works out with this.

C'mon, South Korea, shine your light a bit brighter, over there ... yeah, in that dark corner ... y'know, where the moaning is coming from, and the sick, slurping sounds ...

C'mon, Europe! Step right in and tell NK to stop this kind of stuff! Oh, wait, that'd be interfering with the internal affairs of other countries. Hey, hasn't stopped you from commenting on American problems, has it? What? Scared that NK might go nutso on you, too? Why? You're all peace-loving Euros. They'd never go nutso on you! Never! C'mon, man, use the moral authority you have in the world and put an end to this.

Sorry ... I'm just tired of it all right now. Between Iraq, North Korea and al-Qaida, things are just a bit strenuous right now.

Gatekeeper

KrazyHorse · January 16, 2003, 05:02

The Euros aren't even close to involved on this one, Gatekeeper. The last time they had any say in the Far East was in the 60s...

Lancer · January 16, 2003, 05:15

Free people anywhere should WANT to be involved. If more people cared less about their ***** political views and more about ridding the world of oppression there wouldn't be any dictators murdering thousands in hell holes. People would rather be critics of those who are actually doing something than get involved themselves. Feels good I guess, they can pretend to care.

KrazyHorse · January 16, 2003, 05:20

Quote:

Originally posted by Lancer
Free people anywhere should WANT to be involved. If more people cared less about their ***** political views and more about ridding the world of oppression there wouldn't be any dictators murdering thousands in hell holes. People would rather be critics of those who are actually doing something than get involved themselves. Feels good I guess, they can pretend to care.

Snooze. Any time the Euros try to get involved the US complains and tells them to butt out. I'd think you'd be happy; East Asia's been your sandbox for 40 years...

Rufus T. Firefly · January 16, 2003, 05:26

Quote:

Originally posted by Lancer
Free people anywhere should WANT to be involved. If more people cared less about their ***** political views and more about ridding the world of oppression there wouldn't be any dictators murdering thousands in hell holes. People would rather be critics of those who are actually doing something than get involved themselves. Feels good I guess, they can pretend to care.

I couldn't agree more; this is an issue that cuts across political lines. And I'd love to see this be the official US position; then maybe we'd stop supporting and even propping up murderous regimes, as we did throughout the Reagan and Bush I administrations.

Edit: BTW, you do realize that the only US president who has ever shared this point of view with you is Jimmy Carter, right? Just wondering.

Harovan · January 16, 2003, 05:29

Quote:

Originally posted by Ned
But this -- this is a cause worth fighting for. Kim Il Sung is another dictator, like just like Hitler and Saddam, whose regime of terror must be ended ASAP.

In case the news haven't yet reached your continent: Kim Il Sung is dead, and at least this he shares with Hitler indeed. The great chairman is his son Kim Jong Il.

Anyway, there are 2 eternal laws: NBC is a reliable source of information, and the Earth is a flat disk.

intrigue · January 16, 2003, 05:56

... Odd how anytime other countries might stand to make some money in a tense situation, or lose money because of a situation (Iraq and oil) they want to have a say - and try and guide the outcome to benefit themselves. But when a situation is perceived to have no immediate impact on their own country its suddenly the "US' sandbox." We have money - so I guess we are obligated to take care of all those issues.
Want to know why Russia, China and Japan have been mainly silent in this situation with Korea? Money. Lets just wait 'til the US dishes out the cash to appease the madman with the nukes...
The other issue that arrises from this recent set of events that simply pisses me off - is why does the rest of the world feel that the US needs the permission of the UN or NATO or any other group to protect ousrselves? If the UN inspectors declare that Iraq doesn't even have a rifle for its military to use - and that they infact use spears for combat - do you think the US will simply react with a "Oh... OK... well nevermind then." The nations of the world know Saddam is a problem and needs to be removed, but they all want to see how much money they can get out of it - or want to portray themselves as aiding in the efforts, all the while contributing as little as possible - just let the US take care of it anyway.
Sure we want allies in issues we take up - but why is the US always put in the situation of having to persuade countries to aid in a venture to eliminate a risk to those countries that can (and in many cases will LIKELY) be harmful to that said country if the situation is not changed? Why? MONEY.

Sad truth is the rest of the world's countries are as greedy as the US when it comes to wealth... and not even the most serious of situation stops them from playing political games.

Lancer · January 16, 2003, 06:15

Jimmy Carter? No kidding...

Dropped the ball recently at the Nobel speech, but he's old now and that does make a difference. Don't misunderstand, I hold old ppl in high regard, getting to be one myself soon, but sometimes they do stray a bit. Like they'll start talking about old folks in a NK thread...

Seeker · January 16, 2003, 07:20

Take it with a grain of salt guys, I know this Korean paper, it has often ran anecdotal stories with wild atrocities, like the South Korean commando camp atrocities, the suspect tortures, the student poltical prisoners atrocities....

Based on a month to month experience of Korean papers this screams yellow journalism.

Make no mistake: North Korea is effectively a giant work camp. It IS an Orwellian nightmare. But a lot of the lurid stories are exaggerations, I believe, based on all the OTHER similar stories they have run over the months that have turned out to be exaggerated.

If you want to lead the charge against the NK beaches, go ahead, just remember you will cause a massive bloodbath and even more human suffering.

The NKs don't need you to bomb them, they need you to make them rich and trade with them (so they can eat), and flood them with pirate cds and illegal videos, so that one day Young Kim wakes up and finds that no one really wants to keep him alive anymore.

BTW, NK State TV is....surreal. It's like watching Dr. Strangelove until you realize '****, they're actually serious'.

MRT144 · January 16, 2003, 07:44

wait,ned, dont you support american imperialism?

The Mad Monk · January 16, 2003, 07:46

I got that impresion from their news site.

Urban Ranger · January 16, 2003, 11:24

Seeker,

That's my impression of the article too.

Gatekeeper · January 16, 2003, 14:49

Hmm ... so this article is from a Korean equivalent of "The Weekly World News" that dots check-out aisles in the United States? Or the National Equirer?

Tell me it doesn't carry space alien stories, please.

Gatekeeper

GePap · January 16, 2003, 15:07

Let me the cold hearted bastard to say, that even if this whole story is utterly true (and I am inclined to believe more of it that not), SO WHAT?

I am sick of sanctimonius asses.

We ar not going to go to war with N.Korea unless N.Korea starts something. Hell, we denounced Vietnam when the invaded Kampuchea and ended the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror in most of the country (though they did not invade for any thing close to humanitarian reasons). For 3 month in 1994, anyone who wanted to watch the TV news would be shown heaps of corpses floating down rivers towards lake victoria as 1,000,000 wewre killed in Rwanda, and then 1.5 million fled after the tutsi rebels took over the country: were were you sanctimonious ones then: or where are you know, when over 20 million people are in danger of famine in East and southern africa?

N.Korea is hell just one variety of hell on earth currently running on planet earth, and the "world community" will not do much more about this one than they will about most.

Shocking, but true.