Category: North Korean refugee

North Korea home to at least 15 slave labor camps

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North Korea is a country half the size of the State of Oregon, and home to at least 15 slave labor camps comparable to Auschwitz.

Quoting the North Korea Freedom Coalition:

“According to the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, there exists a vast network of structured institutions for punishment in North Korea, including forced-labor colonies … along the North Korea-China border.

“Prisoners are brutally treated in these institutions with testimonies from North Korean defectors describing … torture, hard labor, starvation, forced abortions, infanticide, families of up to three generations imprisoned, detention without judicial process, public executions, chemical and medical experimentation on prisoners, and gas chambers, resulting in thousands of deaths. Comparisons have been frequently made to the Nazi concentration camps.

“For what crimes?… Virtually any state-defined crime such as: being a Christian, making a negative comment about the regime, failing to have a picture of Kim Il-Sung in their house and failure to keep it clean enough, traveling to China to look for food …”

North Korean Prison Camps and Detention Centers

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An estimated 150 thousand to 200 thousand persons are believed to be held in detention camps in remote areas [of North Korea], including for political reasons.

NGO, refugee, and press reports indicated that there were several types of camps, and separate camps reportedly existed for political prisoners. Using commercial satellite imagery to bolster their assertions about the existence of the camps and point out their main features, defectors claimed the camps covered areas as large as 200 square miles. The camps contained mass graves, barracks, work sites, and other prison facilities. The government continued to deny the existence of political prison camps.

The government considered critics of the regime to be political criminals. Reports from past years described political offenses as including sitting on newspapers bearing Kim Il Sung’s picture, mentioning Kim Il Sung’s limited formal education, or defacing photographs of the Kims.

Collective punishment reportedly was practiced in the past. Entire families, including children, have been imprisoned when one member of the family was accused of a crime.

According to refugees, in some places of detention prisoners were given little or no food and were denied medical care. Sanitation was poor, and refugees who escaped from labor camps continued to report that they were rarely able to bathe or wash their clothing, nor were they given changes of clothing during months of incarceration.

— Excerpts from a U.S. State Department’s Human Rights report, on North Korea

North Korean prison camps Total Control Zones

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German filmmaker Marc Wiese specializes in films about the atrocities of war and repression. His latest film, Camp 14 – Total Control Zone, is about Shin Don-Huyk, a young man who was born in a North Korean prison camp and who hardly knew anything about the outside world until he escaped and defected.

In painful interviews, Shin describes a life of extreme brutality. Prisoners at the camps are immediately shot for any infraction, sometimes on the whim of the guards. There is no hope of being set free. Most people are there for the merest perceived lack of respect for the government and authority. The recollections are grueling for Shin. He has no interest in seeing the finished doc, Wiese says.

And yet there is, for Shin now, but even for the prisoners in the camp, a strong will to live. “There is no logic. Life in the camp is so horrifying that you’d think as an outsider, like you and me, ‘why the hell would they want to survive?’ ” Wiese says. And yet, in the most inhuman conditions, that’s when the will to live remains primordial and unfailing.

Wiese says one day, he simply clicked on Google Earth, scrolled around North Korea, and immediately he found not only a city near the camp, but the camp itself. “I could see it! And I checked other camps. They are huge with 20,000 or 40,000 people in them. You can really see it on a regular personal computer. I was thinking .. just imagine in the Second World War if you could see, live, the concentration camps? That’s the reality today.”

Thousands of North Koreans expected to starve

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Information coming in from the grassroots network of Life Funds for North Korean Refugees (LFNKR) indicates that drought and starvation are seriously affecting South Hwanghae Province. The drought is wreaking havoc on the harvest, and threatening widespread starvation.

The Hwanghae region is the rice bowl of North Korea. It is important in providing rice for the military and the capital Pyongyang, but the regional government fears that they will not be able to carry out that function after two consecutive years of natural disasters.

The regional government has issued no official statistics on deaths. According to a Ministry of Agriculture official, however, who was sent to assess the situation, a low estimate would be twelve to thirteen thousand people starved between February and May, just in the Hwanghae region alone. Observers expect to see the number of victims continue rising indefinitely.

In order to address the problem, the government has ordered emergency rations. Although the Chairman of the Supreme People’s Assembly, Kim Yong-nam, visited Indonesia, Kampuchea, Laos and other countries to request food aid, results are still in question.

North Korea rolling out agricultural policy changes

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Several media outlets that employ North Korean defectors, including Washington-based Radio Free Asia, have reported that Pyongyang is rolling out agricultural policy changes that mark a significant break from the state-controlled economy.

Those measures, according to the reports, reduce the size of cooperative farm units from between 10 and 25 farmers to between four and six. The decrease is critical because it allows one or two households, not entire communities, to plan and tend to their own farms. Farmers still must hit production quotas, but they can keep 30 percent of their crops, up from less than 10 percent. They can sell the rest to the government at market prices, not state-fixed prices, and they can keep (and sell privately) anything exceeding the quota.

The changes do not apply to the entire country; they have been introduced in three rural provinces and took effect in July, according to reports.

It remains unclear what is driving the government to allow farmers more personal control. The North could be trying to wring more production from its farmers “out of necessity, not out of virtue,” because its centrally planned rationing system is broken, said Victor Cha, a former White House director of Asian affairs. If and when the North’s food shortages ease, he said, the country is likely to retreat.

“Having said that, the more time they have to do this and let the economy function on its own, the better off we all are,” Cha said. “You can say to farmers, ‘Okay, for six months, you can keep 30 percent,’ but the more times you do this, the harder it will be to pull back.”

Few foreign government officials or scholars on North Korea expect a big-bang economic makeover or official announcements about reform.

Rampant post-traumatic stress disorder among North Korean Refugees

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Rampant post-traumatic stress disorder among North Korean Refugees

Radio Free Asia reports that a study of post-traumatic stress disorder among North Korean defectors found that they reported certain traumatic events in North Korea with a high frequency.

Most commonly reported were: “witnessing public executions,” followed by “hearing news of the death of a family member or relative due to starvation,” “witnessing a beating,” “witnessing a punishment for political misconduct,” and “death of a family member or relative due to illness.”

The study, published in the international medical journal The Lancet, found symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in 29.5 percent of North Koreans in South Korea, compared with a rate of 56 percent found among North Koreans in China in a separate study.

Increasingly friendly relationship between North Korea and Iran

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Kim Yong-nam will attend the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Tehran, Pyonyang’s official news agency said. Yong-nam is the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly and has represented North Korea’s supreme leaders (both the late Kim Jong-Il and now his son, Kim Jong-un) in visits around the world.

The North Korean news agency also reported that an Iranian delegation had visited North Korea in July for “political negotiations and consultations on international developments.” That parley ended with both sides adopting a shared stand against “Western imperialism.”

The high-level relations between North Korea and Iran, both of which are under various international sanctions over their respective nuclear programs, may suggest an increasingly friendly relationship that could pose a grave threat to international security.

Despite the devastating impact on Iran’s economy (for example, its currency has plunged 40 percent since December), the sanctions have not led to any halting of Iran’s uranium enrichment program so far. Similarly, the U.N.’s sanctions on North Korea have also failed to dissuade Pyongyang from relinquishing its nuclear ambitions.

Without firm commitments by North Korea’s trading partners (i.e., China), the effectiveness of Western sanctions will be limited. (China does have incentive in preventing North Korea’s government from collapsing as that would likely trigger a huge influx of refugees across its borders.)

China accounts for 57 percent of North Korea’s total trade and has increased its trade volume with North Korea in 2010, according to Bloomberg. And now Iran also appears to be a major player in North Korea’s economy, to the dismay of U.N. and U.S. officials.

Concerns in the West are that a close relationship between North Korea and Iran would undermine, or at least weaken, sanctions placed upon these nations. And as China continues to build the two economic zones in North Korea, Western sanctions on North Korea could be neutralized.

A Tale of Two Korean Countries

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South Koreans who receive a letter from a long-lost relative in the North for the first time usually burst into tears out of pity at the plight of their relatives, says Kim Kyung-Jae of the Separated Family Union.

“Southerners think they know how bad the situation is there, but it’s a whole lot worse than it appears. Things that are trivial to us here in South Korea can be of great use there.”

“Relatives in the North ask us to send anything from rubber to used clothes, but what they want most is medicine for disease, mostly tuberculosis, and food to combat malnutrition.” Basic household items are also in demand. “Things that we have, like scissors and knives? They don’t have them,” said Kim.

The staff of the Separated Family Union try to bridge the gap using the postal systems of third countries or brokers. Brokers take about 30 percent commission if transferring money, and charge roughly $203 to deliver a 20-kilogram (44-pound) package through the Chinese post. Despite the high commission and the difficulties, families in the South keep sending packages because they make such a difference in the poverty-stricken North.

“The Northerners always send letters saying the small efforts and money we’ve put in here has made a big difference there,” said Kim.

Kim himself left the North in 1950, the first year of the Korean War, with all his brothers. But he had to leave his youngest sister behind. He was 19 and she was eight. “That’s the last time we saw or talked to each other until 1990, when I miraculously received her address (through an acquaintance allowed to visit the North) and we started exchanging letters,” said Kim.

“It’s unrealistic to hope the two Koreas will be unified while I’m alive,” he said. “But I long for freer communication between families because I want to help my sister and other families reunite.”

North Korean refugee operation endangered by US reporters

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Public outcry continues over journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee (both from California) who spent nearly six months confined in North Korea, resulting in the American government sending Bill Clinton to a country with which the U.S. has no formal relations to negotiate their release.

But the video footage that was confiscated during their arrest put the journalists’ subjects in danger far worse than their own.

Ling and Lee were reporting for the American cable news network Current TV on the human trafficking of North Korean women into China, where they serve as sex workers and are purchased as wives. As part of the story the journalists videotaped and interviewed pastors, volunteers, and residents of five secret shelters for the children of North Korean women trafficked into China.

When Ling and Lee’s footage was confiscated by the North Korean government, the women ended up exposing the identities of the children and pastors living at the Durihana Mission, as well as the people who helped North Korean refugees cross into China and brought them to the Mission.

The Chinese government shut down all of Durihana Mission’s shelters and deported some of the pastors, many of whom were South Korean or North Korean defectors. The pastors are saying Ling and Lee reported recklessly and weren’t careful enough with the sensitive information and footage they gathered.

News outlets and blogs say they have found evidence that the women intentionally crossed the border (after they were continually warned not to go near it), violating international law and putting the subjects of their footage in danger. Other people are upset because they say the women need to use their public statements as a way to bring more attention to the North Korean refugees. Thus far the women have only spoken out about journalists held captive in other parts of the world.

The Women’s Media Center reports that 80 to 90 percent of female North Korean refugees living in China are trafficking victims. North Korea treats refugees— whether they emigrated voluntarily or were trafficked—as criminal defectors. China treats them as illegal immigrants, and deports thousands per year. While a refugee is an emigrant who has fled their country for safety reasons, a trafficked person has been sold and forced to work for others in a new country. These people are vulnerable, and often refugees or immigrants pursuing what seem like work opportunities only to have their identification and rights taken away.

The North Korean bloodlines theory

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“Escape from Camp 14” is a book about Shin Dong-hyuk, who was born in a North Korean slave labor camp and lived to escape.

Competition for food in the camp was so intense that a child was beaten to death for having stolen five kernels of corn.

Shin viewed his mother merely as a competitor for food. He had experienced no love from her and so, when he betrayed her for trying to escape–an act that resulted in the execution of his mother and brother, which he witnessed–Shin felt no remorse until he escaped and came to the West.

The work was backbreaking and people like Shin accepted that their lives would be brief and painful–and full of hunger.

The book brings out that the North Korean leadership developed a theory based on bloodlines that contributes to keeping North Koreans in submision. According to this thinking, Shin deserved to be a slave laborer because he had a bad bloodline–i.e., his father had been deemed insufficiently loyal to the regime.

Shin’s escape came about almost as happenstance. He met another prisoner in solitary confinement who had been a government official, and who was desperate to escape to China, a country of which Shin was ignorant. When the time came, the older man was electrocuted and Shin walked over his body to freedom.

[The abovementioned book, “Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West”, is written by Blaine Hardin, a former Washington Post reporter]