Author Archives for Grant Montgomery

Children on the margins of North Korean society

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Among the North Korean defectors testifying to the U.N. Commission of Inquiry into Human Rights in North Korea on Thursday was Kim Hyuk, 32, who at the age of seven after his mother’s death became a “ggotjebi” ― the North Korean term for street children, mostly orphans, who beg, scavenge and steal to survive.

As children began to die in the streets, Kim said special police units were set up to round up all the ggotjebi and send them to shelters and orphanages, where many still died of starvation. “There was no food at all,” Kim said of the orphanage where he spent three years. “Just powdered corn husk which left you constipated. I caught and ate lizards, snakes, rats and grass.”

Of the 75 children in the orphanage, 24 died. “The officials said it was due to disease, but it was malnourishment. They became too weak to walk. Their bodies were buried in the backyard,” Kim said.

Kim ran away but was then arrested for making smuggling runs across the border with China and served 20 months in a re-education camp where the conditions were as bad as the orphanage. “There were 24 of us who entered the camp on the same day. Only two survived,” he said.

Released from prison, Kim sneaked across the Tumen (or Apnok) River into China in December 2000 and arrived the following year in Seoul, where he now lectures on his experiences on behalf of the Unification Ministry.

[AFP]

The Deadly 10 Commandments in North Korean Prison Camps

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The 10 Commandments in North Korean prison camps, according to survivor Shin Dong Hyuk:

1. Do not attempt to escape. The punishment is death.
2. Never gather in groups of over three people or move around without the guard’s authorization. The punishment for unauthorized movement is death.
3. Do not steal. If one steals or possesses weapons, the punishment is death. The punishment for failure to report the theft or possession of weapons is death.
4. Obey your guards. If one rebels or hits a guard, the punishment is death.
5. If you see outsiders, or suspicious-looking people, report them immediately. The punishment for abetting in the hiding of outsiders is death.
6. Keep an eye on your fellow prisoners and report inappropriate behavior without delay. One should criticize others for inappropriate behavior, and also conduct thorough self-criticism in revolutionary ideology class.
7. Fulfill your assigned duties. The punishment for rebelling against one’s duties is death.
8. Men and women may not be together outside the workplace. The punishment for unauthorized physical contact between a man and a woman is death.
9. Admit and confess your wrongdoings. The punishment for disobedience and refusal to repent is death.
10. The punishment for trespassing camp laws and rules is death.

[Excerpted from Shin Dong Hyuk’s book, “Escape to the Outside World”]

Nine years in North Korean gulag because of a secret

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As a member of the North Korean elite in the 1970s, 77-year-old former dancer Kim Young-Soon had it all: well-connected, well-heeled and well-housed. Her privileged lifestyle was largely the result of having an older brother who was a general during the 1950-53 Korean War.

She also had many equally privileged friends — among them a pretty, married actress, Song Hae-Rim, who in 1969 became the lover of Kim Jong-Il, the as-yet unmarried son and heir of then-leader Kim Il-Sung.

“I knew I would never see her again,” Kim told the commission of the day Song visited her house to say she was going to move in to the junior Kim’s residence. Kim Jong-Il and Song never married and their relationship was kept secret for years in the deeply conservative North, even after Song gave birth to a son.

In her testimony on Wednesday, Kim Young-Soon said she was among a group “purged” to prevent the story of the relationship spreading. In 1970 she was summoned by the secret police, locked in a room and grilled for two months about her knowledge of “senior party officials”.

She told them nothing but was then taken — along with her four young children and both her parents — to Yodok, a newly-built prison camp in a remote mountainous region in the northeast. There was no trial, and no indication of her sentence.

“They didn’t even tell me what my offence was, and only said, ‘All of you are supposed to be dead, but are being allowed to live here at the greatest mercy of our leader’,” Kim recalled.

So began a nine-year ordeal in what Kim described as “the most hellish place in the world”. Inmates had to work from dawn to dusk — tending fields, cutting trees, building livestock sheds — followed by hours of ideology classes in the evening. Rations were a handful of salt and maize that was cut if inmates failed to meet their daily work target.

Kim said they supplemented their diet with anything they could catch, including snakes, salamanders and rats. “We ate anything that moved or sprouted from the soil,” she said

Inmates caught trying to escape or scavenging leftovers from the guards were executed in public. Anyone showing sympathy for them was either beaten, tortured or even executed themselves.

Kim’s said her father starved to death within a year and was soon followed by her mother. One of her sons drowned in a stream while one daughter was sent to live with a farmer family and never seen again.

Kim said many fallen members of the elite were in the camp, including a celebrated movie director, former generals and a prominent soccer star. “No one was free from the grips of the Kim dynasty,” she said.

Nine years later, a visiting military official who knew Kim Young-Soon’s brother managed to help arrange her release in 1979. After getting out, she found her husband had been sent to another prison camp which “no one can walk out alive from”. She never saw or heard from him again. Kim’s youngest son was caught trying to flee the North and executed in 1989 at the age of 23.

She was also under constant surveillance by neighbors and secret police, who warned her against spreading “ungrounded rumors” about the leadership.

The famine that decimated North Korea in the mid-1990s — coupled with the shock at her son’s execution — convinced Kim that it was finally time for her to escape. In 2001 she bribed her way across the border with China and eventually made it to Seoul in 2003, where she works as a dance teacher and lectures on life in North Korea. “Those who live in a free society will never truly understand what happens in those labor camps,” she said.

[xinmsn]

Former prisoners tell UN inquiry about life in North Korean prison camps

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Being forced to kill your own baby is a daily occurrence in North Korea’s prison camps, former inmates have told a United Nations inquiry held in Seoul. The inquiry, chaired by former Australian High Court Justice Michael Kirby, is the first to expertly examine North Korea’s human rights record, ABC News reports.

One ex-prisoner, 34-year-old Jee Heon-a, told the hearing about a mother who was forced to drown her own child.”It was the first time I had seen a newborn baby …. ” she said. “Suddenly there were footsteps and a security guard came in and told the mother to turn the baby upside down into a bowl of water. 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.”

Jee was incarcerated in 1999. Her fellow inmates were barely fed. “Everyone’s eyes were sunken. They all looked like animals, she said. “Frogs were hung from the buttons of their cloths, put in a plastic bag and their skins peeled off. They ate salted frogs and so did I.”

Another defector, Shin Dong-hyuk, was forced to watch the execution of his mother and brother. Shin, who was born in the prison camp, overheard his family members planning an escape attempt and turned them in.

In a separate incident, the North Korean guards chopped off Shin’s finger after he accidentally dropped a sewing machine. “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,” Shin said.

There are 150,000-200,000 people trapped in North Korean prison camps, Reuters reports.

A brief history of US economic warfare against North Korea

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The breadth and depth of US economic warfare against North Korea can be summed up in two brief sentences:

• North Korea is “the most sanctioned nation in the world” — George W. Bush
•“There are few sanctions left to apply.” – The New York Times

From the moment it imposed a total embargo on exports to North Korea three days after the Korean War began in June 1950, the United States has maintained an uninterrupted regimen of economic, financial, and diplomatic sanctions against North Korea. These include:
o Limits on the export of goods and services.
o Prohibition of most foreign aid and agricultural sales.
o A ban on Export-Import Bank funding.
o Denial of favorable trade terms.
o Prohibition of imports from North Korea.
o Blocking of any loan or funding through international financial institutions.
o Limits on export licensing of food and medicine for export to North Korea.
o A ban on government financing of food and medicine exports to North Korea.
o Prohibition on import and export transactions related to transportation.
o A ban on dual-use exports (i.e., civilian goods that could be adapted to military purposes.)
o Prohibition on certain commercial banking transactions.

In recent years, US sanctions have been complemented by “efforts to freeze assets and cut off financial flows” by blocking banks that deal with North Korean companies from access to the US banking system. The intended effect is to make North Korea a banking pariah that no bank in the world will touch. Former US president George W. Bush was “determined to squeeze North Korea with every financial sanction possible” until its
economy collapsed. The Obama administration has not departed from the Bush policies.

Washington has also acted to sharpen the bite of sanctions, pressing other countries to join its campaign of economic warfare. This has included the sponsoring of a United Nations Security Council resolution compelling all nations to refrain for exporting dual-use items to North Korea (a repeat of the sanctions regime that led to the crumbling of Iraq’s healthcare system in the 1990s.) Washington has also pressured China (unsuccessfully) to cut off North Korea’s supply of oil.

[Excerpt of article by Stephen Gowans]

North Korea looks to Africa

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North Korea is increasing diplomatic overtures to Africa amid tighter UN sanctions that are further isolating the country.

The Korean Herald reports North Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs head Park Ui-chun is leading a delegation to Africa. Park’s visit to the resource-rich continent is the fifth from North Korea this year, with propaganda secretary and member of the Political Bureau Kim Ki-nam visiting Equatorial Guinea earlier this month.

This year’s visiting parties have come from all three sectors of North Korea’s ruling elite, comprised of members from the military, party and government, as opposed to 2012, when only one official North Korean visit was made.

North Korea is emphasizing in its relations with Africa “South-South Cooperation,” a term coined to describe the promotion of technological, economic and knowledge exchanges between developing nations.

North Korean army of cyber warriors

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North Korea has assembled a team of 3,000 cyber agents, including hundreds of trolls, whose job is to undermine morale in South Korea, according to a South Korean think tank.

The computer experts spread propaganda by hacking into South Korean websites and linking them through to pro-North Korea outlets.

The trolls – believed to number about 200 – reportedly use identities stolen from South Korean internet users to post comments on web forums.

“The North has established a team of online trolls at the United Front Department and the Reconnaissance General Bureau,” Ryu Dong-Ryul of the Police Policy Institute told a seminar at the Seoul Press Centre, as reported by Chosun.

The think tank said the United Front Department hacks into South Korean websites through servers based in 19 countries, using constantly changing IP addresses to avoid detection. It said the trolls were part of a 3,000-strong cyber army and claimed they posted more than 41,000 items of propaganda online in 2012, up from 27,000 the year before.

An estimated 300 North Koreans are trained in cyber warfare every year, compared to just 30 in South Korea, Lim Jong-in of Korea University told Chosun. They are picked from elite middle schools in the North Korean capital Pyongyang and spend 10 years honing their skills at Kim Il-Sung Military University, Mirim University or Kim Chaek University of Technology, the newspaper reported.

In June, the internet security company Symantec suggested a string of attacks on South Korean websites dating back four years were the work of a gang known as DarkSeoul, although it could not confirm the group is run by North Korea.

 

How North Koreans view their country and history

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North Korea has long been vilified and condemned by the Western press as bellicose, provocative and unpredictable.

However, to many Koreans, North Korea represents something praiseworthy: a tradition of struggle against oppression and foreign domination, rooted in the experience of a majority of Koreans dating back to the end of WWII and the period of Japanese colonial rule.

This tradition found expression in the Korean People’s Republic, a national government, created by, for, and of Koreans, that was already in place when US troops landed at Inchon in September, 1945. The new government was comprised of leftists who had won the backing of the majority, partly because they had led the struggle against Japan’s
colonial occupation, and partly because they promised relief from exploitation by landlords and capitalists.

By 1948, the peninsula was divided between a northern government led by guerrillas and activists who fought to liberate Korea from Japanese rule, and a southern government led by a US-installed anti-communists backed by conservatives tainted by collaboration with colonial oppression. Bringing this forward to today:
• Park Geun-hye, the current South Korean president, is the daughter of a former president, Park Chung-hee, who came to power in a military coup in 1961. The elder Park had served in the Japanese Imperial Army.
• Kim Il Sung, grandfather of North Korea’s current leader Kim Jong Un, was an important guerrilla leader who, unlike the collaborator Park, fought, rather than served, the Japanese.

North Korea thus represents the traditions of struggle against foreign domination, both political and economic, while the South represents the tradition of submission to and collaboration with a foreign hegemon.

North Korean troops have never fought abroad, but South Korea’s have, odiously in Vietnam, in return for infusions of mercenary lucre from the Americans, and later in Iraq.

[Excerpt of article by Stephen Gowans]

Deteriorating Kenneth Bae moved to hospital

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Kenneth Bae, the American citizen sentenced to 15 years in a North Korean labor camp, has been moved to a hospital after a serious deterioration in his health, his sister said.

Detained in North Korea in November and sentenced in April for “hostile acts to bring down its government,” Bae is now suffering from severe back and leg pain and has lost more than 50 pounds, his sister Terri Chung told CNN late Sunday.

Chung said she received the information from the U.S. State Department, which told her the Swedish ambassador to North Korea had visited Bae in the hospital on Friday. Sweden represents U.S. interests in North Korea because the United States has no diplomatic presence in the secretive state.

Kenneth Baeimprisoned Kenneth BaeDetention in North Korea has taken a heavy toll on Bae, who has already been dealing with other health problems, including diabetes. In a video released early last month, Bae had stated, “Although my health is not good, I am being patient and coping well,” his head shaved and face noticeably thinner than in earlier photos. in that interview, he spoke of health problems including diabetes, high blood pressure, fatty liver and a back problem.

“I think the last three months in the labor camp have certainly been very trying on both his mental and physical health,” Chung said by phone from the Seattle area. The eight hours per day of farm labor, which Bae had never done before, appear to have worsened his symptoms, she said, adding that “he’s also under a tremendous amount of stress.” Other problems he’s suffering from include kidney stones, dizziness, blurred vision and loss of vision.

The family is “extremely concerned” about the situation and is pleading with the U.S. government to help Bae’s case, Chung said.

North Korea has so far showed no sign of budging on the case of Bae, who they call Pae Jun Ho, his Korean name.