Category: Prison Camps

North Korea tourism with a Christian motive

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An American who was detained for nearly six months in North Korea said that he left a Bible in a nightclub hoping it would get into the hands of what he called the country’s underground Christian church. Jeffrey Fowle said he traveled to the country as a tourist but saw the opportunity as a way to follow the Christian mission “to carry the Gospel to all corners of the Earth.”

“I knew it was a risk, that I was taking a gamble, but I felt compelled to do that to aid the underground church in some small way,” Fowle said in an interview in his lawyer’s office. “I felt once I left the Bible somewhere that God would take it the rest of the way into the hands of some kind of Christian organization, and I’d be able to waltz out of country fat, dumb and happy, no problem,” he said. “But God had other plans.”

Fowle said he left the Bible — with his name in it — in a bathroom under a trash bin at a nightclub in the northern port city of Chongjin and hoped a Christian would find it. He chose that city and the nightclub in the belief there would be less security. He bought the Korean-language Bible before his trip.

Instead, his tour guide asked the next day if anyone had left a Bible there and he owned up to it. He was detained a few days later while going through customs before departure.

Fowle was taken to a hotel for about three weeks and questioned, then moved to another facility. He wrote a confession and answered questions about his motivations. He said authorities couldn’t believe he had acted on his own, but he made clear it was his own decision. He was treated well and was comfortable but was in his locked quarters 23 1/2 hours a day, he said.

He was allowed to speak in September to Western news organizations in five-minute interviews. He said he was given “talking points” for those interviews, meant to convey his “desperate situation.” He said he never considered going off script, although he did reject requests that he try to be more emotional and more demanding of the U.S. government.

Fowle said his release came as a surprise — he thought he was about to be taken to prison — and he was told by an American who helped escort him home that the North Korean government was responsible for his return.

U.S. officials are trying to win the release of two other Americans who are being held in North Korea, Matthew Miller and Kenneth Bae. Fowle said he had had no contact with either.

[The Columbus Dispatch]

Jeffery Fowle admits motive in leaving Bible in North Korean nightclub

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The American detained in North Korea for leaving a Bible in a nightclub said he did exactly what the communist country accused him of.

The 56-year-old said he planned to leave the Bible in North Korea long before he even traveled to the country, he told the Dayton Daily News. He was not necessarily there to proselytize, he said, but he was driven by his “strong motivation to help the Christians” in the area, he said.

He was kept in isolation and passed the time by writing letters to his family and watching North Korean state TV, he told NBC News. Despite being in jail, he said he was treated relatively well.  He was given hearty meals of rice, meat and vegetables. When he complained that his food was too spicy, the cook turned down the heat, he said.

Two Americans remain detained in North Korea. Both Kenneth Bae and Matthew Miller were convicted of crimes and sentenced to hard labor.

The religious motive for travel to North Korea

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Religion has provided a powerful impulse for some to cross the North Korean border.

North Korea officially guarantees freedom of religion, but outside analysts and defectors describe the country as militantly anti-religious. The distribution of Bibles and secret prayer services can mean imprisonment or execution, defectors have said. “It is one of the last frontiers to spread the Christian faith, so there are people who would take unimaginable risks” to evangelize there, John Delury, an Asia expert at Yonsei University in Seoul said.

A Bible in his hand, American missionary Robert Park walked into North Korea on Christmas Day 2009 to draw attention to human rights abuses and to call for the resignation of then-leader Kim Jong Il. Park, who was deported from the country in February 2010, has said he was tortured by interrogators.

In 2010, ex-President Jimmy Carter visited North Korea to win the release of imprisoned American Aijalon Gomes, who had been sentenced to eight years of hard labor for crossing illegally into the North from China.

Gomes … may have been emulating Park, said Jo Sung-rae, a South Korean human rights advocate who met with Gomes. Gomes attended rallies in Seoul calling for Park’s release before he was arrested.

Park later said he didn’t want others to repeat his actions. “I don’t want others to do this. I just hoped that this could galvanize people to action. Because this is a society that needs change now,” he told The Washington Post in February 2011.

[AP]

North Korean officials publicly executed

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North Korea has reportedly publicly executed up at least 50 people this year, including several party officials for watching soap operas.

According to South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS), Pyongyang has purged about 10 officials from Kim Jong-Un’s Workers’ Party for watching South Korean soaps. It is not known whether the most recent group of officials executed include six reported missing earlier this month.

The officials, who also faced charges of bribery and womanizing, were thought to be close to Kim’s executed uncle, Jang Song-thaek, Yonhap news agency reported.

In the eastern port of Wonsan, the authorities gathered 10,000 people in a sports stadium to watch the execution of eight people by firing squad, JoongAng Ilbo reported.

All television and media is under strict state control and access to the internet is limited but despite a harsh crackdown, banned foreign shows and films have been gaining popularity in recent years. Some are believed to be secretly streamed over the internet, while others are smuggled into the country on DVDs, video cassettes of memory sticks sold on the black market.

[The Independent]

UN’s Special Rapporteur to brief United Nations General Assembly

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This year, a scathing U.N. Commission of Inquiry report was published, cataloging North Korea’s abuses that the authors said amounted to crimes against humanity. It recommended prosecuting North Korea’s leaders at the ICC for such crimes including torture and extensive political prison camps.

A former security officer at one of North Korea’s political prison camps has described how detainees, suspected of disloyalty to North Korea, would have long needles driven underneath their fingernails and a pot of water and hot chili pepper poured into their noses to extract confessions.

Former prisoners talked about being beaten on their chest repeatedly until they vomited blood or being tortured while hung upside down in a report that detailed abuses by the regime.

Pyongyang will come under scrutiny again when the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in North Korea, Marzuki Darusman, gives a briefing at the United Nations General Assembly today.

[CNN]

Kim Jong Un had ankle surgery

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South Korea’s spy agency said Tuesday it has solved the mystery of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s 6-week public absence.

The National Intelligence Service told legislators that a foreign doctor operated on Kim to remove a cyst from his right ankle, according to Park Byeong-seok, an aide for opposition lawmaker Shin Kyung-min. The aide said the spy agency also told lawmakers in a closed-door briefing that the cyst could recur because of Kim’s obesity, smoking and heavy public schedule.

The agency also said North Korea has expanded five of its political prisoner camps, including the Yodok camp, which was relocated to the northwest city of Kilchu, according to Lim Dae-seong, an aide to ruling party lawmaker Lee Cheol-woo, who also attended the briefing. The spy agency believes the camps hold about 100,000 prisoners, Lim said.

He said the agency also believes that North Korea recently used a firing squad to execute several people who had been close to Kim Jong Un’s uncle, Jang Song Thaek, who was considered the country’s No. 2 power before his sudden purge and execution in December 2013.

South Korea’s spy agency had correctly predicted that Jang had been dismissed from his posts before North Korea officially announced his arrest.

[Newsmax]

North Korean prison camps “without any parallel in the contemporary world”

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The gulags of North Korea exist in a strange world between secret and unsecret. No one knows for sure how many thousands or millions are locked away in the camps, which officially do not exist, and information about what goes on there can be sparse. But we can watch the camps grow and contract from satellites, where they’re so plainly and publicly visible they’re labeled on Google Maps, and we are learning more all the time from the trickle of defectors and escapees who make it out of the Hermit Kingdom.

A United Nations report called the camps a human rights abuse “without any parallel in the contemporary world.”

North Korea operates four enormous labor camps for political prisoners — sprawling, city-sized facilities in the country’s frigid and mountainous north. Most inmates are sent for life as punishment for minor slights, or because a relative committed some offense. They are subjected to backbreaking labor, routine torture and starvation, constant fear of arbitrary execution, and conditions so squalid most do not survive past age 45.

These gulags — which are separate from the country’s more conventional prison systems — are thought to house 100,000 or more people, including many women and children. Often, entire families are sent away for one member’s offense, through two or three generations. Sometimes inmates will have no idea why they’re there, or will have never met the relative for whom they are punished with a life of torture and malnutrition.

Inmates are given not quite enough food to survive, forcing them to turn against one another — or curry favor somehow with the guards — to secure enough to eat. They are assigned brutally punishing work, such as coal mining without proper equipment or ventilation. Women and girls are subject to rape and molestation by guards.

Because the generations-long sentences mean that something to akin to families often form in the camps, inmates live with the fear that they will be tortured or killed for a family member’s crime — and are often forced to betray their own family to survive.

[Vox]

North Korean defectors describe life in prison camps

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Kim Hye-Sook, a defector from North Korea, was 13 when she was incarcerated in a prison camp together with her family. Over the years, her parents, brother, husband and children died of starvation or were involved in accidents.

Kim recounted to the UN the sufferings she and other prisoners suffered in the hands of their captors, including years of starvation, hard labor and torture. To indicate how bad food shortage is, Kim revealed that some women detainees had to eat babies to alleviate their hunger.

She shared that a family of 7 was allocated 7.5 kilograms of corn monthly, which when dried shrunk to 4.5 kilograms. Most of the time they ate only once a day, forcing them to eat mountain grass.

Another defector, Jung Kwang-Il, was quoted as saying, “I was starving so much so I said, ‘If you feed me well, I will confess my crime.’ As a result, I confessed and had a great meal.”

Upon hearing the harrowing experience of the North Korean detainees, Michael Kirbey, chairman of the UN Commission of Inquiry Report, which held a hearing at the UN headquarters in New York on Wednesday, recommended for the Security Council to bring the North Korean government to the International Criminal Court and face charges of crime against humanity.

He stressed, “We stand for the principles of the United Nations and we expect accountability for great crimes before justice. And that is the right of people of North Korea.”

[International Business Times]

Canadian couple held in near isolation in China

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A Canadian couple accused of spying near China’s sensitive border with North Korea have been kept separately in near isolation for more than 80 days and denied access to legal counsel, their son said on Friday.

Treatment of the couple, who are being held without charge at a remote facility in the border city of Dandong, has seriously strained China’s ties with Canada ahead of a planned visit by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper for a multilateral summit next month in Beijing.

Kevin and Julia Garratt were allowed to meet briefly for breakfast last week – the first contact they had with each other during their detention. “It’s not their physical health I’m concerned about, it’s more their mental health,” their son, Simeon Garratt, told Reuters by phone. “You put anybody in a situation like that for 80 days, where you can’t talk to anybody else and with no outside contact, and you don’t know what could happen. It’s not about food or water.”

Both Kevin and Julia were under 24-hour surveillance by two guards. Canadian consular officials visited every two weeks, Simeon Garratt said. They were frequently interrogated, he said, though the subject of the questions is unknown. Chinese authorities have repeatedly denied the family’s requests for access to legal counsel since the Garratts were detained August 4, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

The Vancouver couple had opened a cafe called Peter’s Coffee House in Dandong in 2008. State media has reported they are suspected of stealing national security secrets, but no formal charges have been laid and it is unclear what exactly they are accused of. It is unusual for foreigners to be charged with violating China’s state secrets law – a serious crime that is punishable by life in prison or death in the most severe cases.

Kevin Garratt told a congregation in Canada last year that he ran a prayer and training facility frequented by North Koreans, many of whom became Christians before returning to the isolated country.

[Reuters]

North Korean diplomats get an earful at the UN

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North Korean official Choe Yong-nam flew in to New York from Pyongyang to protest attempts by “hostile” elements, including America and Australia, to defame his country, but he was also forced to hear an earful about his country’s human rights record Wednesday.

In an extraordinary session at the United Nations, Choe and the UN ambassador from the Democratic Republic of North Korea (DPRK), Ja Song-nam, sat through a long session where the horrific human rights conditions in the repressive country were painstakingly detailed.

The most engaging speaker at the Wednesday session was Michael Kirby, a retired Australian High Court Justice who has led a UN-commissioned investigation into North Korea’s labor camps, its kidnappings and torture of dissidents and the policies that led to mass starvation in the country.

Last year Kirby was so shocked after hearing hundreds of testimonies from victims of the North Korean regime, that he proposed referring Pyongyang’s leaders, through the Security Council, to the International Criminal Court, where they could be tried for crimes against humanity.

For now, Australia, Botswana and Panama merely tabled a condemnation resolution at the Third Committee, which deals with human rights. But the Australian ambassador to the UN, Gary Quinlan [said] the Security Council path is still being considered as well.

But the most unusual feature of Wednesday’s UN session was that Pyongyang, often described as the seat of a “hermit kingdom,” decided to fully engage with the proceedings, answering criticism with verbal attacks on the critics.

Ambassador Ja gave a long formal answer to Kirby’s allegations, the North distributed a compact disc of materials to support his answers, and Ja and Choe patiently answered reporters’ questions afterward, speaking freely in fluent, plain English.

Choe said that his country has sent a letter of protest to the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, who happened to also be a former foreign minister of South Korea, which is still officially at war with its northern neighbor.

[Newsweek]