Category: North Korean refugee

Shin Dong-hyuk’s escape from North Korean gulag

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As Shin Dong-hyuk crawled over his friend’s lifeless body, the 23-year-old North Korean could feel the electric current shooting through him. Luckily, for Shin, the two pairs of pants he was wearing, coupled with his friend’s corpse, shielded him for the most part from the deadly voltage pulsing through the barbed-wire fences.

Those fences had trapped him since his birth inside Camp 14, a North Korean prison on the Taedong River in the hills about 50 miles northeast of the capital city of Pyongyang. But on this frigid afternoon, Jan. 2, 2005, something happened at the camp that had never happened before — someone escaped.

Shin’s friend, Park Yong Chul, had made it to the fence first, pushing his upper body through the lowest two strands of electrified wire. The current, though, was so powerful that it glued Park to the fence, killing him within seconds.

As journalist Blaine Harden writes in “Escape From Camp 14,” the gripping account of Shin’s life in the forced labor camp, “The weight of his [Park’s] body pulled down the bottom strand of wire, pinning it against the snowy ground and creating a small gap in the fence.”

Shin crawled through that gap, but not before exposing both of his legs to the wire, incinerating his skin. In terrible pain, he ran down the mountain away from Camp 14, becoming the first known person to have been born in and lived his whole life in a North Korean prison camp, and then to escape.

By evening, after traveling a few miles, he had found a few ears of dried corn, some cotton shoes and a worn military uniform that would allow him to ditch his prisoner’s garb and avoid unwanted attention. Shin had no money but was trying to make his way 370 miles north, to the Chinese border, to freedom.

He was wary of running into police, but he was also thin and starving.

He blended perfectly into North Korea.

[Excerpt of Jewish Journal article, authored by Jared Sichel]

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View video clip of Shin Dong-hyuk

Auschwitz in North Korea

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Excerpts from a commentary on a cover story in Jewish Journal, by Rob Eshman:

auschwitz_north korea
Left: Children at Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II
Right: Children in an orphanage in North Korea during the 1997 famine.

On Jan. 27, we mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the day in 1945 when the Soviet army entered the Auschwitz concentration camp complex in Poland and freed the 7,000 remaining prisoners. The rescue came too late. About 1.3 million Jewish men, women and children were deported to Auschwitz and its satellite camps between 1940 and 1945. An estimated 1.1 million of them were murdered.

Auschwitz revealed the human capacity for unimaginable evil. It continues to teach us the consequences of looking away, of choosing not to know, or of knowing — as the Allied leaders did, as the neighboring Poles did, as many American Jews did — but deciding not to act.

Tens of thousands, or, by some estimates, as many as 200,000 men, women and children today live and die inside North Korean prison camps. Some from birth. They are subject to torture, rape and inevitable death.

Is it a stretch to compare what the North Korean regime is doing to its own people to what the Nazis did to the Jews? I don’t think so.

In Auschwitz and the other camps, one could argue, the ultimate purpose was annihilation, not imprisonment. But, as an eyewitness to the horror told our reporter, there is good reason to believe the North Korean regime fully intends to ultimately exterminate its prisoners.

The definition of “holocaust” is destruction or slaughter on a mass scale. Replace the label “Jew” with “dissident” or “undesirable” — does that make it better?

“The camps are a gruesome and powerful tool at the heart of a vast network of repression,” Rajiv Narayan, Amnesty International’s North Korea researcher, told the PBS series Frontline. “People are sent to the political prison camps without charge, let alone a trial, many of them simply for knowing someone who has fallen out of favor. Conditions are dire. Torture is rampant; there are reports that women are raped, and we know that public execution is commonplace. Many of the prisoners die of malnutrition and overwork in dangerous conditions.”

So, let’s be clear: “Never Again!” is happening right now. Read full article

Ways North Koreans are beginning to defy their regime

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In Secret State of North Korea documentary, FRONTLINE follows several North Koreans who are working to fight back against the regime. Some work outside the country to subvert the state, while others defy authority from inside, even secretly filming what life in North Korea is really like. Some of these acts of resistance include:

1. An increasing willingness to confront authority – Over the past few years, footage smuggled out of the country shows North Koreans protesting rules they think are unfair, for example a ban on women wearing pants (which was recently lifted). People also appear to be pushing the limits of private enterprise: A woman running an illegal bus service confronts an army officer who is trying to stop her.

2. Secretly filming what the government doesn’t want people to see – A network of North Koreans inside the country, equipped with handheld cameras, have been quietly documenting untold stories, like department stores filled with goods no one can buy.

3. Watching foreign television shows and films – It’s strictly prohibited to distribute or watch foreign TV shows and movies in North Korea. Kim Jong-un has reportedly sent security forces house-to-house searching for illicit DVDs and flash drives. But North Koreans — from party officials to teenage girls — keep watching them anyway, curious about the outside world.

4. Appearing on a talk show of defectors – Part current affairs, part talent show and part beauty pageant, On My Way to Meet You is a South Korean television show featuring young North Korean defectors. While it’s illegal to watch in North Korea, many people tune in anyway to see family and friends now living in Seoul.

5. Sending balloons full of cash – Even though the North Korean government officially considers the U.S. to be an enemy, American dollars are still accepted as currency. To help their fellow citizens, defectors now living in South Korea float balloons full of dollars over the border. One dollar can buy two days’ worth of food for a struggling family.

[PBS]  >>> Click to watch the Frontline documentary “Secret State of North Korea” <<<

 

South Korean activists send more propaganda-filled balloons into North Korea

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Activists in South Korea, including some North Korean defectors who were soldiers when they lived in the North, sent propaganda-loaded balloons over the border into North Korea on Wednesday, defying Pyongyang’s past threats of retaliation against the launches.

The helium-filled balloons were stuffed with DVDs and leaflets documenting human rights abuses in the North. They also contained 1,000 U.S. $1 bills and small USB drives loaded with the Korean-language version of Wikipedia.

Thor Halvorssen of the U.S.-based Human Rights Foundation, which helped organize the launch, called the balloons “controversial,” but said it is crucial North Koreans be allowed to access information the rest of the world already enjoys.

North Korea has lashed out at previous balloon launches, threatening to shell South Korea in response to such actions, which it calls deliberate provocation by Seoul that could lead to war. Seoul maintains that it has nothing to do with the launches.

>> Click to watch brief video of propaganda balloons being launched into north korea  <<

[VoA]

Continuing trend of less North Koreans fleeing their country

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More than 1 500 North Koreans fled to South Korea last year, maintaining a recent fall in the number of escapees that coincided with a clampdown by new leader Kim Jong-Un.

Five years ago the annual number of escapees was close to 3 000, but the number dropped sharply after Kim came to power in December 2011, following the death of his father Kim Jong-Il.

The number of North Koreans fleeing to the South, most of them via China slumped to 1 502 in 2012, while last year the figure was slightly higher at 1 516, Seoul’s unification ministry said.

Under Kim Jong-Un, the isolated state tightened border security and stepped up diplomatic campaigns to have refugees hiding in China repatriated.

The majority of refugees secretly cross the border to China before travelling to a neighboring Southeast Asian country, where they arrange to fly on to Seoul for resettlement.

China, the North’s sole major ally typically considers them illegal economic migrants and repatriates them despite criticisms from human rights groups. Many face severe punishment including, rights monitors say, torture and a term in a prison camp once they are sent back to the North.

[AFP]

South Korean ‘celebration’ on the second anniversary of Kim Jong Il’s death

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North Korea on Tuesday marked the second anniversary of Kim Jong Il’s death. Its political and military elite held a massive memorial in the capital Pyongyang, where they pledged their loyalty to his son and successor, Kim Jong Un.

Meanwhile, in South Korea, 10 defectors from the North held a very different kind of ceremony.

North Korean defector Chang Kweon stated, “I heard North Korea is holding a memorial event, but we’re here to celebrate his death.”

Later in the day, some 150 South Koreans marked the anniversary by protesting the Pyongyang regime. South Korean protestor Choo Sun-Hee was quoted saying, “We are holding this event to celebrate the death of Kim Jong Il. We also hold today’s event in the hopes that the depraved Kim Jong Un dies soon.”

[Reuters]

Rape and murder of female inmates in North Korean political prison camp

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A former security guard at the largest political prison camp in North Korea has spoken out for the first time about the rape and murder of female inmates at the facility.

Mr Lee, a former security official at Camp 16 in the 1980s and 1990s, revealed the horror of daily life for prisoners at the site near Hwaseong in North Hamgyong province, which is approximately 215 square miles. He broke his silence to tell Amnesty International about the methods used to execute prisoners incarcerated in the Soviet-style, hidden ‘gulags’.

According to Mr Lee, women were killed after being brutally raped. “After a night of ‘servicing’ the officials, the women had to die because the secret could not get out. This happens at most of the political prison camps,” he said.

He also told how detainees were forced to dig their own graves and were then killed with hammer blows to their necks.

Mr Lee witnessed prison officers strangling detainees and then beating them to death with wooden sticks at the camp.

[Daily Mail]

Challenging North Korean human rights policy

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There is no more vexing issue than the challenge of how to support the improvement of human rights in North Korea, a country that has consistently ranked at the bottom of international indices rating human freedom around the world.

The U.S. Congress passed the North Korea Human Rights Act almost a decade ago, the United Nations has appointed a rapporteur to examine the human rights situation inside North Korea for almost as long, and the Korean Institute for National Unification has published an ever-growing annual white paper on North Korean human rights since 1996.

This year the UN Human Rights Council appointed a Commission of Inquiry that has held public hearings in Seoul, Tokyo, London, and Washington, DC; the commission will report back to the UN Human Rights Council with its assessment and recommendations by spring of next year.

But the stream of North Korean refugee testimony to unspeakable atrocities and evidence of systemic abuses inside North Korea continues to grow.

[Council on Foreign Relations]

North Korea’s prison camps according to Shin Dong-hyuk

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One of the most powerful accounts of North Korea’s prison camps comes from Shin Dong-hyuk, the only known surviving escapee from Kaechon re-education camp 14, into which he was born in 1983.

Shin tells of guards lighting a fire under his back and forcing a hook into his skin to prevent him struggling, when he was just 13. He still bears the scars. His arms are deformed from being hung upside down; he suffers nightmares.

Shin’s story is especially remarkable because he had no comprehension of life outside the prison camp – he thought the world was like that.

Children beaten and starved, used as forced laborers, working in freezing conditions in threadbare clothes, surviving on grass and rats, seeing their parents killed, made to act as informers against their own families.

The prisoners are treated lower then animals, women routinely subjected to sexual violence and, if pregnant, their babies killed.

In 2005, at 23, urged on by an older prisoner, he miraculously escaped and now works with human rights groups such as Liberty in North Korea to expose these atrocities.

This back-from-hell defector puts all of us to shame for closing our eyes to North Korea’s persecution and control of its people for so long. His story must become as well known as The Diary of Anne Frank.

[Canberra Times]

North Korea detains 85-year-old California man

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On October 26, an 85-year-old American man, Merrill Newman, on an organized tour of North Korea was pulled off a plane in Pyongyang just minutes before it was to depart, the man’s son told CNN on Wednesday.

The U.S. State Department is working to resolve the matter with North Korea’s top ally, China.

North Korea has not publicly acknowledged it detained Newman. But the family believes the elder Newman’s military service during the Korean War may be related to his detention, his son said.

Park Syung-je, chairman of the Seoul-based Asia Strategy Institute, says Newman may have been arrested on espionage charges. As a Korean War veteran, Newman might have told his minders he fought against North Korea. They may have reported it, and it resulted in his detention.

In 1999, a South Korean woman named Min Young-mee was detained for six days after apparently saying the wrong thing on a tour to North Korea’s Kumkang Mountains. “I hope the two Koreas reunite soon so we can visit each other,” Min said. “North Korean defectors are living well in the South.”

A North Korean minder for the tour group reported her remarks to North Korean authorities. She wasn’t allowed to return home with her tour group. After a written apology for violating North Korean laws, she safely returned to the South.

Newman is the second American being held in North Korean. Kenneth Bae, an American citizen, was arrested in November 2012 and sentenced in May to 15 years of hard labor.

[CNN]