Category: Prison Camps

Don’t forget incarcerated American Kenneth Bae

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Kenneth Bae, an American man from Washington State, has spent more than nine months imprisoned in North Korea. That’s longer than any other American recently held there.

While the US has called for Bae’s immediate release, North Korean scholar Charles Armstrong explains part of the dilemma for US officials dealing with the situation. “They don’t want to encourage this type of behavior from North Korea,” said Armstrong, professor of Korean studies at Columbia University and director of the school’s Center for Korean Research. “They don’t want to be seen as giving in to pressure from the North Korean government, but there’s also a strong humanitarian interest in getting an American citizen released.”

Since 2009, North Korea has detained at least six Americans, then released them only after visits from prominent US dignitaries. Armstrong suspects that’s what the reclusive Asian regime is after.

Based out of China since 2006, Kenneth Bae traveled frequently to North Korea as a tour operator and Christian missionary. In November, he was arrested, then later convicted of “hostile acts” against the North Korean government. Details about his alleged crimes are still unclear.

“All I know is my brother is a good man,” his sister says.  “He has a huge heart to help people in the nation of North Korea. He is religious, and his religious convictions may have been overzealous and may have been deemed, and seen, as hostile against the state.”

His sister adds they try to stay hopeful, through the dark moments. One of the darkest came in May, when CNN aired a video of Kenneth in prison. He appears in a stained prison uniform, his eyes downcast and tearful. “He looks so sad and panicked,” his mother Myunghee Bae said. “He’s not my son I remember. He looks totally broken. It’s the worst moment of my life.”

From the video, Myunghee Bae noticed her son had lost a lot of weight. He’s since told her that his health is failing, possibly from diabetes-related complications.

In recent months, Kenneth Bae has been able to call home four times and send several letters.

KUOW 

 

An Orphan in North Korea

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Hyuk Kim lost his mother when he was 6, then his father when he was 11. After his father died, he lived with a group of six other orphan boys in North Hamgyong province, located at the northern most tip of North Korea.

“We started a fire together, but we still couldn’t sleep because it was so cold,” he said. “We just warmed ourselves with the fire at night and we mainly slept during the day when the sun was shining.

In the punishing winters, Hyuk and other orphans would break into sheds containing electric transformers near factories and markets to find a warm place to sleep.  “Many children accidentally end up touching the transformers while sleeping and die,” said Hyuk, who asked that his real name not be used for the safety of family members still in North Korea. As Hyuk dozed off each night curled next to a transformer, he would try to stay as still as possible — willing himself not to move in his sleep. “During the night, we needed to find food to eat. We sometimes stole food from others and gathered food from here and there.”

When something went missing in the neighborhood, the blame automatically fell on Hyuk and his friends, even when they had not been involved. The children would be taken to the police station and tied to chairs, he said. “The police would then automatically accuse us of stealing because they assume we would have stolen since we don’t have parents. They hit us, tie us up, and torture us. There was no one to defend us.”

Hyuk Kim fled North Korea in 2011, nearly a decade after becoming an orphan. Hyuk, now 21, attends Hangyeore Middle-High School in South Korea, where he sleeps in a bed inside a heated dormitory. The school serves three warm, buffet-style meals a day, and students can pile as much food as they’d like on their metal trays. The school, set up by the South Korean government, does not charge tuition.

Most North Koreans escape by crossing the river on the northern border to China. Some street children who flee to China become easy prey to traffickers, according to human rights activists. The girls are sold into the sex trade, or as wives for rural Chinese men. China sends back those escapees they catch, so defectors live in hiding — fearing they’ll be imprisoned and tortured back home.

 CNN

Interview with Kenneth Bae in North Korean prison

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The American citizen sentenced to 15 years in a North Korean labor camp, has appealed to the Korean authorities for forgiveness and asked the United States for help in securing his release in an exclusive interview from prison obtained Wednesday by CNN.

Pae Jun Ho, known as Kenneth Bae by U.S. authorities, was found guilty in an April 30 trial of “hostile acts to bring down its government” and planning anti-North Korea religious activities, according to the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

In the interview footage, his head was shaved and his face noticeably thinner than the previous photos of the Korean-American. Bae wore a blue prison garment streaked with sweat and dirt that bore the number 103. The interview is believed to be the first since Bae’s sentencing about two months ago.

Choson Sinbo, a pro-North Korean group based in Tokyo, was permitted to conduct the interview by North Korea. The edited footage, which runs less than eight minutes, was made available to CNN.

The timing of the Bae interview comes after North Korea proposed high-level talks with the United States last month. However, North Korea has stated before that Bae is not a “political bargaining chip” through KCNA.

“There is no greater priority for us than the welfare and safety of U.S. citizens abroad and we urge the DPRK authorities to grant Mr. Bae amnesty and immediate release,” said Brent Byers, spokesperson at the U.S. Embassy in South Korea. He added that the Swedish embassy in Pyongyang, which represents U.S. interests there, has met with Bae six times since his arrest.

In the interview, Bae sat in a room next to a door and a radiator. He calmly described his current prison life as eight hours of farm labor — which he had never done before — with a break in the middle of the day and lunch. He was also filmed clearing the fields, wearing black gloves and a hat as a guard stood watch nearby.

When asked if prison life was bearable, Bae replied, “Yes, people here are very considerate. But my health is not in the best condition, so there are some difficulties. But, everyone here is considerate and generous, and we have doctors here, so I’m getting regular check-ups.”

North Korean media has detailed the reasons why Bae was sentenced. Among the list of alleged crimes was 1) setting up bases in China for the “purpose of toppling the DPRK government,” 2) encouraging DPRK citizens to bring down its government and 3) conducting a “malignant smear campaign.” KCNA added that Bae had planned what it called a “Jericho operation” to bring down North Korea through religious activities. It suggested that Bae could have been sentenced to death, but avoided it through “candid confession of his crimes.”

Plight of North Koreans persists amid posturing

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As last week’s abortive meeting between the two Koreas illustrated, the region’s foreign policy often seems to be at the mercy of Pyongyang’s irrational whims.

But while diplomats debate ad infinitum, many of North Korea’s 25 million people live a nightmare. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International estimate that up to 200,000 North Koreans, some of them children, are imprisoned in camps modeled after the Soviet gulags, where they are subjected to torture and forced labor. Millions waste away in hunger, without freedom of expression or religion. Arbitrary arrests and public executions maintain order by instilling fear. The U.N. Human Rights Council has condemned North Korea’s “systematic, widespread, and grave violations of human rights.”

Many North Koreans are jailed after failed attempts to cross the Chinese border. Because the demilitarized zone dividing the Koreas is heavily fortified, North Koreans can only escape northward. After the new government gave a shoot-on-sight order to curb illegal crossings, the number of defectors was almost halved, to 1,500 last year.

For those fortunate enough to make it to China, the journey has only begun. In violation of international agreements, China routinely repatriates North Korean refugees. So defectors face a 3,000-mile clandestine journey to Southeast Asia to gain refugee status and entry to South Korea, where they are naturalized and given government stipends. While around 25,000 have settled there, more than 30,000 North Korean refugees live illegally in China.

Humanitarian organizations such as Liberty in North Korea (LiNK) and Helping Hands Korea facilitate their journeys. The Rev. Tim Peters, a North Korea activist, has compared the network to the Underground Railroad that once helped African-American slaves from the South reach the North. While these organizations make up a small bandage for the hemorrhaging, more relief may be achievable through diplomacy.

[The Philadelphia Inquirer]

UN fears for young North Korean defectors sent home

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Nine young North Korean defectors are at the center of a diplomatic storm. A war of words has broken out over the young refugees – all thought to be orphans – who the UN believes were sent back to their authoritarian homeland by China last week.

The UN said it was concerned about the return of the children to North Korea, where they could face severe punishment for having fled. Meanwhile, Beijing warned the UN against making “irresponsible remarks” about the young defectors.

The defectors, ranging in age from 15 to 22, were turned over by Laotian authorities to North Korean security agents, who flew them via China back to North Korea on May 28.

The refugees likely face harsh imprisonment in political gulags, torture, or execution. North Korea deems escaping from the country to be a political “crime of treason against the nation.” Under North Korean law, the minimum punishment is five years of hard labor.

It is unusual for Laos to have turned over the refugees so quickly to North Korea, as it is that Pyongyang sent nine security agents to escort them back to North Korea. South Korean officials commented that Laos had previously allowed refugees expressing a desire to travel to South Korea to do so after a few weeks’ hiatus.

North Korea may be seeking to disrupt the underground railroad by intimidating other defectors from attempting to escape. Up to 90 percent of North Korean refugees pass through Laos.

Tens of thousands of North Koreans are estimated to be hiding in northeast China, seeking to travel to South Korea via Mongolia or southeast Asian nations such as Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos.

Human rights activists argue that in allowing the transit of the North Koreans across China, Beijing “violates its commitments as a state party to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, its 1967 Protocol, and the 1984 Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment.” However, China denied knowledge of the refugees’ plight since they had been given valid travel documents by North Korean embassy officials in Laos.

Source: The Foundry

Kenneth Bae’s jail different than North Korean prison camp

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It’s bad for Kenneth Bae, but it could be worse, according to people familiar with the workings of one of the world’s most secretive and repressive regimes.

“These are not really camps like the political prison camps used for the North Korean people,” said Kang Chol-hwan, a survivor of North Korean gulags, who was sent to a prison camp at age 9 because his uncle had insulted the government. “If Kenneth Bae was really sent to a prison camp, he would not survive and that would not be good for the Kim regime.

“Normally a person dies in three years after being sent to a real camp,” added Kang, who was released from the Yodok prison in 1992 after enduring brutal conditions for a decade.

Andrei Lankov, a Seoul-based North Korea expert, said being held in a special camp actually bodes well for Bae.

“This prison will be isolated (no interaction with normal prisoners) and quite comfortable,” he said. “Had they said the guy is going to be in a “normal” prison camp, it would most probably mean he would never be allowed to get out alive!

“This statement indicates he has a fairly high chance of being released in due time,” Lankov added.

Experts said North Korea is likely planning to use Bae to leverage aid or concessions from the West, or simply in an effort to raise its stature by appearing to be humanitarian when it ultimately frees him.

“North Korea, by having a show trial and causing all this tension in the international media, will be preparing for big negotiations with the United States,” said Kang, who wrote about his experience in a memoir titled, “The Aquariums of Pyongyang.”

Bae was arrested in November and accused of trying to establish an anti-Pyongyang base in the North. But Bae’s friends say he worked as a Christian missionary in Dalian, a Chinese city near the North Korean border, and that he crossed the border to bring food to starving orphans.

Source: Fox

Life for a North Korean orphan

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Hyuk Kim, who asked that his real name not be used for the safety of family members still in North Korea, lost his mother when he was 6, then his father when he was 11. After his father died, he lived in North Hamgyong province with a group of six other orphan boys.

“We started a fire together, but we still couldn’t sleep because it was so cold,” he said. “We just warmed ourselves with the fire at night and we mainly slept during the day when the sun was shining.

In the punishing winters, Hyuk and other orphans would break into sheds containing electric transformers near factories and markets to find a warm place to sleep. “Many children accidentally end up touching the transformers while sleeping and die,” said Hyuk. As he dozed off each night curled next to a transformer, he would try to stay as still as possible — willing himself not to move in his sleep.

“During the night, we needed to find food to eat. We sometimes stole food from others and gathered food from here and there.”

When something went missing in the neighborhood, the blame automatically fell on Hyuk and his friends, even when they had not been involved. The children would be taken to the police station and tied to chairs, he said. “The police would then automatically accuse us of stealing because they assume we would have stolen since we don’t have parents. They hit us, tie us up, and torture us. There was no one to defend us.”

Hyuk Kim fled North Korea in 2011, nearly a decade after becoming an orphan. Street children who flee to China become easy prey to traffickers, according to human rights activists. The girls are sold into the sex trade, or as wives for rural Chinese men.

China sends back those escapees they catch, so defectors live in hiding — fearing they’ll be imprisoned and tortured back home.

Now 21, Hyuk attends Hangyeore Middle-High School in South Korea, where he sleeps in a real bed inside a heated dormitory. The school serves three warm, buffet-style meals a day, and students can pile as much food as they’d like on their metal trays. The school, set up by the South Korean government, does not charge tuition.

Source

 

The abandoned children of North Korea

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Yoon Hee was born in a village near North Korea’s sacred Mount Baekdu. At 8 years of age, she was abandoned by her mother and did what many abandoned North Korean children do — live on the streets, nearly freezing to death in the winters, begging for mercy, plucking grass for food and crying so hard at night only the pain in her face could stifle her tears.

One day, alone and 10 years old, she lay in the snow as the icy winter descended in North Korea. Eventually, Yoon Hee caught what she suspects was typhoid, leaving her in a hell of fire and ice. Although she lay in the snow about two weeks, no one offered help or food.

She tried to muster her energy to sit and wiggle her fingers and toes, but her hands and feet barely budged — they were frozen in place. She could no longer move. Surely, this was it, Yoon Hee thought. She prepared herself. “I am going to die.”

Yoon Hee would become yet another corpse rotting in the street — she had seen the frozen corpses on the roadside because no one bothered to bury bodies of strangers. A voice interrupted her feverish daze. A villager thrust money into Yoon Hee’s hand. Her voice was firm: “You have to survive.”

For a decade, Yoon Hee roamed the streets, slept in crevices and picked rice off the ground that people had dropped. “I appreciated every single grain of rice,” she said.

Every night, she had the same concern: “Where am I going to sleep tonight? How can I survive?”

Yoon Hee learned survival skills fitting of “The Hunger Games” — where to scavenge for food, where to sleep, how to stay warm, how to keep safe. She curled into a fetal position in a nook under the windows of houses.

In North Korea, homeless children like Yoon Hee are called “kotjebes,” or flowering swallows. Like the bird, these children are free to roam, unconstrained by the country’s societal norms.

Yoon Hee attempted her first escape into China in the wintertime, the river at the border frozen, paving the way for a quick escape. In China, she was caught three times by local police and each time, she was sent back to a North Korean prison. She was pummeled with fists, sticks and kicked, Yoon Hee said. But each time, she was released.

In early 2010, she escaped North Korea for the fourth time and eventually met an underground network of Christian activists and missionaries.

The plight of orphans who’ve escaped North Korea caught the attention of U.S. humanitarian groups, who’ve lobbied for years to pave the way for their adoption by Americans and others. In January, President Obama signed the North Korean Child Welfare Act of 2012. The law is aimed primarily at those orphans hiding in China and other countries. Those who make it to South Korea are provided an education, a path to citizenship and even a chance at adoption.

Source

 

North Korea’s prison camps outlive Stalin’s

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North Korean prison camps have survived twice as long as Stalin’s Soviet gulags, and much longer than the Nazi concentration camps. Another important difference is that they are still in operation today.

Shin Dong-hyuk has brought new insights into the secretive camps.  Shin, 30, is the only man known to have been born and to escape from a North Korean prison known as Camp 14. He was born in a “total control zone” where prison authorities wield complete power, where guards beat children to death with no hesitation.

The unflinching account from a defector revealed how he picked corn kernels out of cow manure to eat as he competed with his family for food at one of North Korea’s notorious prison camp.

He was also forced to watch his mother’s hanging and his brother’s execution.

The concept of “reward marriages” was unknown until Shin told his story. These are rewards dispensed by prison guards, who allow a male and female prisoner to have sex. Shin was a product of a reward marriage in the prison camp.

The reward marriage works as an incentive for prisoners, Shin said.

North Korea brands American missionary as subversive plotting to overthrow the government

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North Korea (DPRK) has painted a picture that imprisoned Korean-American Kenneth Bae is a subversive who was plotting to overthrow the government. A spokesman of the North Korean Supreme Court told state news agency KCNA that Bae “set up plot-breeding bases in different places of China for the purpose of toppling the DPRK government, from 2006 to October 2012 out of distrust and enmity toward the DPRK.”

The state news agency KCNA refers to Bae by his Korean name, Pae Jun Ho, and charges that he committed such hostile acts as egging citizens of the DPRK overseas and foreigners on to perpetrate hostile acts to bring down its government while conducting a malignant smear campaign against it. KCNA goes into detail on the “propaganda materials” Bae is accused of carrying, which reportedly included a 2007 National Geographic documentary “Don’t tell my mother that I am in North Korea” and a book called “1.5 billion in China and North Korea, the world’s last closed nations.”.

NK News describes him as “a trained missionary who was using his China-based tour company as a platform to bring missionaries into North Korea.” It is reported that Bae was dispatched to China as a missionary of the Youth With A Mission in April, 2006.

KCNA reports that Bae set up “plot-breeding bases disguised with diverse signboards in different parts of China for the past six years.”

As to the proclaimed freedom of religion in North Korea, a North Korean defector told the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, in a report on treatment of Christians in the country, that the few visible churches in North’s Korea capital city are an elaborate show.

“North Korea does have Christians and Catholics. They have buildings but they are all fake,” the defector said. “These groups exist to falsely show the world that North Korea has freedom of religion. But [the government] does not allow religion or [independent] religious organizations because it is worried about the possibility that Kim Jong Il’s regime would be in danger [because] religion erodes society.”

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