Category: Prison Camps

Ex-prison guard viewed North Korean inmates as subhuman enemies

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An Myeong Chul offers a rarely-heard voice from the other side of a prison network considered as merciless as those of Stalinist Russia or Maoist China. In the North Korean prison camps where Mr. An worked for eight years as one of the system’s feared, ruthless guards, Taekwondo was a weapon of subjugation.

“I remember practicing Taekwondo on the prisoners,” Mr. An said in an interview. “It was a way to control the inmates. For instance, if we had a high-ranking official visiting the prison camp, we would be told to show what we’ve learned and practice … Taekwondo on the inmate.”

Commanders drove home repeatedly that the inmates were enemies of the state, guilty of serious anti-regime crimes who deserved to be treated like scum, he said.

“If we were to help these prisoners in any way or be compassionate, we would be executed and our families as well, and we were given the right to kill any prisoner who attempted to escape,” he said. “I remember a colleague dragging a prisoner who was working in the field and executing this prisoner.”

Mr. An said he witnessed “a lot of deaths” of inmates, whether as a result of violence by camp authorities, starvation, overwork or accidents in workplaces like the coal mine where prisoners toiled at the notorious Camp 22.

In October, 1992, 300 of Camp 22’s 50,000 inmates died from an infectious disease they caught from a contaminated field mouse, he said. The prisoners were particularly susceptible to communicable illness, said the ex-guard, since they were fed the minimum amount of food needed to carry out their work tasks.

“The best way to put it is they were the slaves, and we were the slave owners.”

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Non-specific crimes result in North Korean prison camp

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An Myeong Chul worked for eight years as one of the feared, ruthless guards in one of North Korea’s prison camps. Mr. An eventually became curious about the prisoners he once viewed as sub-human, discovering that, far from being enemies, most were hapless victims of an often-indiscriminate dragnet.

About 90% were arrested in the middle of the night without knowing what they had done wrong, he said. “They would be told they were there to pay for the crimes of some distant relative that they had never met,” said Mr. An. “I saw even two-year-olds and four-year-olds sent to the prison camp, and what crime did these children commit?”

Then his own father came under suspicion after suggesting that blame for the famine wracking the country lay with top Communist leaders, not local officials as suggested by supreme leader Kim Jong-il. Knowing the kind of fate that awaited him for voicing dissent, the father killed himself by drinking poison, said Mr. An. His mother, sister and brother were arrested and dispatched to the gulag themselves, but he managed to escape Camp 22 and make it across the nearby Chinese border.

Helped on the other side by ethnic-Korean Chinese, he eventually wound up in South Korea.

He still regrets, though, that the search launched by both North Korean and Chinese agents after he ran led to 140 Korean refugees in China being sent back to the regime they had fled.

He has other regrets, too, about his years in the gulag. “I’m very sorry and apologetic for the fact I was part of that system.”

[National Post]

Mother of Kenneth Bae departs North Korea without him

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The mother of Kenneth Bae has left North Korea “more anxious than ever” to bring her imprisoned and ailing son home.

In a statement she released Tuesday, Myunghee Bae said she was able to visit her son three times and was relieved to see his health was improving.

Earlier this year, Bae, a Korean-American, was sentenced to 15 years in a North Korean labor camp for what the government called “hostile acts.” His family had not been able to see him for almost a year since his November 3 arrest in North Korea.

The North Korean government accuses Bae of setting up bases in China for the purpose of “toppling” the North Korean government, encouraging North Korean citizens to bring down the government and conducting a “malignant smear campaign.”

The country’s state media also says that Bae had planned what it called a “Jericho operation” to bring down North Korea through religious activities. They have suggested that Bae could have been sentenced to death, but avoided it through “candid confession of his crimes.”

Myunghee Bae, of Lynwood, Washington, said that she pleaded with the North Korean authorities to let her visit her son, and expressed gratitude for granting permission.

“I plead with our government to do everything in their power to secure my son’s release soon,” Myunghee Bae said Tuesday.

 

A horrific decade in a North Korean gulag

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In his frightening decade as an inmate of a huge North Korean prison camp, Kang Cheol-hwan could never be sure of exact numbers, but knew the statistics were chilling. Of the 35,000 or more prisoners at Yoduk camp, about 10% died every year, succumbing to malnutrition, mistreatment, overwork or a combination of lethal factors, he estimates.

“I myself almost died three times,” Mr. Kang said.  “And I remember burying with my own hands about 300 prison inmates.”

As one of the first defectors to speak openly on the topic, Mr. Kang helped draw the curtain on the Stalinist network of political prisons, designed to tamp down any hint of opposition. His 2001 memoir about the years in Yoduk, The Aquariums of Pyongyang, is now a standard text on the gulag.

The network of half a dozen camps, he said, is comparable to the gulags of Stalinist Russia and Mao Zedong’s China, but probably most similar to Hitler’s concentration camps, he argued, given the number of North Koreans who die behind their fences.The Nazi analogy would undoubtedly be debated by some, but testimony by Mr. Kang and others has provided mounting evidence of the camps’ brutality.

He was sent to Yoduk in 1977 at age nine, one of several relatives imprisoned after his grandfather was accused of being an agent of Japan, where the family had lived earlier.

The camp was divided into the total-control zone and the less-severe zone, where he was held. It was still “very harsh,” with forced labor from early morning to nine at night, torture rooms and “massive malnutrition,” Mr. Kang said.

“It actually depended on the prisoner themselves and how much effort they put into trying to survive — if they made an effort to catch insects or rats or snakes to supplement whatever food they were getting.”

Read full National Post article

 

Documentary on Shin Dong-hyuk and North Korean Prison Camp

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A recent documentary will soon shed more light on the horrors that happen inside the extensive network of prison camps in North Korea. “Camp 14: Total Control Zone” will follow the life of Shin Dong-hyuk, a North Korean who was born inside a camp, and endured torture and total control from sadistic guards inside the wire for 23 years. The UN recently likened conditions in these camps to Nazi war crimes.

In a previous interview with 60 Minutes, Shin said he was once sent to an underground torture center at age 13 when his mother and older brother were accused of attempting an escape. “They hung me by the ankles and they tortured me with fire.”

The Guardian adds: “Shin, who recently gave testimony before a UN commission, would rather not talk about the past, but he cannot be free of it. Physically, in the film, he is in Seoul. Mentally and emotionally, he is still back in camp 14. To date, he is the only known person to have been born in a total control zone camp and escaped, and some have questioned his story. “We made something like 15 lie detector tests with him,” says Wiese, who first read about the young Korean in the Washington Post. By now there can be little doubt of his veracity, or that his experiences weigh heavily on him.

“The producers wanted to shoot him talking in a studio, but that was “impossible”. “I had to build him a setting where he felt comfortable,” says Wiese. Instead, they worked in Shin’s home, in a bare space with bedding on the floor, similar to the way he lived with his mother, as a child, in the camp. Even then, ‘it was complicated for him’ “.

As one would expect, the trailer alone is harrowing. According to the film website, filmmaker Marc Wiese crafted the documentary from interviews with Shin as well as former camp guards and secret police, coupled with animated scenes of life inside.

[Business Insider]

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Unspeakable Atrocities in North Korean Prison Camps

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UN human rights investigators described torture, starvation, and executions in North Korean prison camps as part of UN Human Rights Council’s first report on violations in the country.

Michael Kirby, head of the UN inquiry, told Reuters that the report was compiled from testimony given by former inmates and North Korean exiles at hearings in Seoul and Tokyo.

The stories were chilling. Megumi Yokota was just 13 when she was abducted by North Koreans on her way home from school in Japan in 1977. She was one of 13 Japanese citizens abducted by Kim-Jung-Il in order to help train North Korean spies, and she later died in North Korean custody, her parents testified.

Other former inmates reported being arrested and tortured for infractions like watching Western DVDs and soap operas. One woman testified that she watched as a fellow inmate was forced to drown her own baby in a bucket of water.

North Korean diplomats have declared the report a “political plot.” China, Belarus, and Syria defended North Korea in the 90 minute debate in front of the UN Human Rights Council, denying the allegations as “politicized accusations.”

Japan, South Korea, and Western powers pressured the UN to investigate the long-rumored atrocities in order to prepare a case for criminal prosecution.

[TIME] 

North Korean refusal to cooperate with UN rights probe

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Not surprisingly, the head of a U.N. human rights probe says he can’t get answers from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un regarding harrowing testimony from victims of the enigmatic regime, including allegations of being forced to survive on vermin, drown babies and witness the execution of loved ones.

Michael Kirby, who heads the U.N. commission examining North Korea’s human rights record, said Tuesday that his July 16 letter to the leader hasn’t been answered, and the government has offered no evidence to contradict graphic testimony of human rights abuses.

Kirby, a former judge in Australia’s highest court, told the U.N. Human Rights Council that the commission it created in March nonetheless gathered testimony from dozens of victims, including defectors, and experts at public hearings in Seoul and Tokyo last month that has “given a face and voice to great human suffering.”

Overall, the testimony “points to widespread and serious violations in all areas that the Human Rights Council asked the commission to investigate. We heard from ordinary people who faced torture and imprisonment for doing nothing more than watching foreign soap operas or holding a religious belief,” said Kirby.

For example, he said, the commission heard from a young man imprisoned from birth, who said he lived on rodents, lizards and grass and saw his mother and brother executed.

It also heard from a young woman who said she saw another female prisoner forced to drown her own baby in a bucket, Kirby said, and a man who said he was forced to help collect and burn the corpses of prisoners who died of starvation.

The U.N.’s top rights official, Navi Pillay, reported to the Council that the U.N. had amassed evidence indicating that up to 200,000 people were being held in North Korean political prison camps rife with torture, rape and slave labor, and that some of the abuses may amount to crimes against humanity.

“The commission invited the authorities of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to attend the public hearings in Seoul and make representations, but received no reply,” Kirby said.

[AP]

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How North Korea describes its defectors and UN human rights probe

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According to Michael Kirby, who heads the U.N. commission examining North Korea’s human rights record, North Korea’s official news agency attacked the testimony of North Korean refugees “as ‘slander’ against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, put forward by ‘human scum.’ ”

In a June 19 dispatch, the KCNA news agency also denounced defectors as “wild dogs in human form” who had become “the main player in the confrontation farce under the patronage of the South Korean puppet group and brigandish U.S. imperialists.”

“An ounce of evidence is worth far more than many pounds of insults and baseless attacks,” Kirby told the 47-nation Council based in Geneva which is the U.N.’s top human rights body. “So far, however, the evidence we have heard has largely pointed in one direction — and evidence to the contrary is lacking.”

Later in the day, Kirby told a news conference that the commission plans to hold more hearings in London, New York and Washington, before giving a final report to the Council next March. He said the commission “is not a judge and is not a prosecutor,” so it remains to be seen whether specific people will be named for alleged crimes against humanity and other abuses.

North Korea’s U.N. envoy in Geneva, Kim Yong Ho, told the Council on Tuesday that his government will not cooperate with a probe and “totally rejects” its latest report.

The report is based on information “fabricated and invented by the forces hostile to the DPRK, defectors and rebels,” Kim said.

[AP]

Abducted South Korean escapes North Korea after 41 years

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A South Korean man abducted by North Korea has escaped and returned home after 41 years.

Choi Sung-yung of the Abductees’ Family Union said Friday that 68-year-old Jeon Wook-pyo escaped last month and returned to South Korea in early September.

Choi said Jeon was one of 25 crewmen on board two boats captured by North Korea in the Yellow Sea in 1972. Jeon was the only one of the crewmen to have successfully escaped.

South Korea estimates that more than 500 South Koreans have been kidnapped and detained by North Korea since the 1950-1953 Korean War that ended with an armistice.

The real North Korea as unfiltered by Dennis Rodman

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In The World According to Dennis Rodman, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, whom he just saw on his second trip to the country, is quite likable.

As Human Rights Watch puts it, Kim’s succession as supreme leader after the death of his father, Kim Jong Il, in December 2011, “had little impact on the country’s dire human rights record.”

People are still subjected to torture and thrown into prison camps based on political charges. Those who have managed to escape describe horror that includes beatings, starvation and executions.

In 2012, “Defectors continued to report extrajudicial killings, disappearances, arbitrary detention, arrests of political prisoners, and torture,” the U.S. State Department Human Rights Report says.

“The judiciary was not independent and did not provide fair trials. There continued to be reports of severe punishment of some repatriated refugees and their family members. There were reports of trafficked women among refugees and workers crossing the border into China. … The government made no known attempts to prosecute officials who committed human rights abuses.”

Meanwhile, much of the country starves. More than 25% of North Korean children under the age of 5 suffered from chronic malnutrition in 2012, according to the National Nutrition Survey of North Korea, a report backed by UNICEF, the World Food Program and the World Health Organization. The report also found nearly one in three women suffered from anemia.

CNN