Category: Prison Camps

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.”

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]

North Korea Gulag Nation -Part 2

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Early in the Bush administration, a U.S. spy satellite was assigned to shoot high-resolution pictures from space of one camp in mountainous northeastern North Korea. At first, officials were mystified: Where were the camp’s fences? They repeatedly ordered the satellite to expand the frame of its pictures. Finally, a senior administration official tells U.S. News, the perimeter was located, revealing a camp larger in size than the District of Columbia, with clusters of buildings that look like villages.

“If you look at a map of North Korea, it would not be just a dot on the map. It’s a perceptible portion of the map,” says the official. “There’s a general lack of understanding of how depraved the human-rights situation in North Korea is,” the official says, predicting that “the horrors that will come out” will rival those of Cambodia in the 1970s.

And yet, stories from the North Korean gulag receive surprisingly little attention in South Korea and elsewhere. The South Korean government has turned the spotlight away from the North Korean gulag. The South’s “sunshine policy” of reaching out to the North seeks to avoid confrontation with Kim Jong Il in favor of encouraging Pyongyang to open up to the world.

That hope doesn’t impress many human-rights activists. “The defectors are politically inconvenient,” says Tim Peters, the founder of Helping Hands Korea, a Seoul-based group that helps North Korean refugees make their way to the South. “They’re not consonant with the sunshine policy,” a tenet of which, he argues, is “Don’t offend the Kim Jong Il regime.” One result is public indifference. Young South Koreans, Peters says, “are woefully ignorant of the gulag in North Korea.”

But those who endured the camps are anything but indifferent. They describe a level of savagery that satellite photographs can never convey. Nor does the Orwellian terminology for the camps reveal much. Political prisons are called “management centers.” Those centers, in turn, are divided into two categories: “complete control zones,” with life imprisonment, and “revolutionizing process zones,” from where some inmates, principally family members, might eventually return to society. The prisoners are banally referred to as “resettlers.” Other camps, dubbed “re-education” places, lump together common criminals and political prisoners.

The horror of the North Korean gulag is compounded by the trivial offenses that can draw such punishment: listening to foreign radio, accidentally sitting on a newspaper photo of Kim Jong Il, or making a heedlessly candid remark. Most prisoners, recalls Ahn, “made one small mistake.”

One was arrested after singing a South Korean pop song titled, “Don’t Cry for Me, Younger Sister.” The unlucky woman, says David Hawk, a researcher for the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, learned the tune from watching a North Korean propaganda film but was nonetheless accused of disturbing the public socialist order. Often, individuals and even whole families are whisked away from their homes in the dead of night and packed off to camps. Says Hawk, a veteran of human-rights probes in Cambodia and Rwanda, “I don’t know of a country in the world today that’s as repressive as North Korea. I believe it’s the worst.”

The camps serve as a frightening, if mysterious, deterrent to anti-Communist activity. North Koreans receive few details about the gulag–but enough is known that parents see fit to warn their children to keep family opinions to themselves. “There were rumors that nobody can get out,” says Soon Young Bum, a 46-year-old fishing boat captain from North Korea who brought his family to freedom last August. Adds Benjamin Yoon, a leader of the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, “We call North Korea a prison state. It’s rule by terror.”

The camps also generate funds for a cash-strapped regime whose economy has shrunk by about half since 1990. Prisoners mine coal, harvest trees, and manufacture goods for export and domestic consumption–from snake brandy to bicycles. They gather the roots of plants used for traditional medicines, some destined for sale in Japan. The hot pepper sauce from Ahn’s camp at Hoeryong sits on the tables at Pyongyang’s Koryo Hotel, where westerners stay. Ahn likens the camps to Nazi-run Auschwitz. The survivors agree.

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North Korea Gulag Nation – Part 3

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As he sits in a smoky Seoul coffee shop and recounts his past, Lee, 40, can hardly believe his good fortune. Lee once worked at the heart of power in Pyongyang, a trusted agent for Kim Jong Il in the years before Kim succeeded his father, Kim Il Sung. The names “Kim Jong Il” and “Kim Il Sung” were carved on Lee’s pistol; he considered it “the greatest honor” to serve in Pyongyang’s security elite. Lee was isolated from his family, but he enjoyed the rare perks of good food and clothing.

It was not to last. When officials discovered that one of Lee’s cousins was a driver for Kim Jong Il, he was dismissed for security reasons because of possible collusion. He returned to his hometown and became an executive in the local branch of the Communist Party. But he was shocked to see people eating grass because of crippling food shortages. He began listening to South Korean radio–a grave offense–and in 1994 decided to defect. Lee made his way into China but was tricked by North Korean agents, who smuggled him back over the border. He says that only an order from Kim Jong Il spared him from death.

He was sent to the No. 15 prison camp at Yodok. A banner greeted unlucky arrivals: “You shouldn’t negotiate with class enemies.” Lee, like the other unfortunates, received a ration of 4.5 ounces of corn powder, a few cabbage leaves, and salt. His fellow prisoners included ex-military officers, professors, and others who fell under suspicion after living abroad. They toiled in coal mines, forests, and farm fields. Beatings were routine: Lee rolls up his pants to show the grayish-brown scars on his right leg, reminders of blows from long wooden sticks. He lost most of the sight in his right eye, his teeth were broken, and blood still oozes out of his left ear at times. Of the 1,000 people in his prison unit, he says, about 200 died every year. “It was beyond my imagination. The officers treated prisoners not even like animals but like bugs. They stepped on them,” he says.

But Lee was luckier than most. He was released without explanation in 1999–his weight having fallen from 207 to 119 pounds–and returned to his home village. But he became frightened when rumors circulated that he was a South Korean agent, and he decided to flee through China again–this time successfully. Lee now runs an organic food store.

Kang Chul Hwan is also a veteran of the No. 15 camp at Yodok. Now 34, Kang had a comparatively privileged start in life. He lived in a comfortable Pyongyang apartment assigned to his grandparents, pro-regime Communists of Korean descent who had returned from Japan. In grammar school, he considered himself one of Kim Il Sung’s “little soldiers,” a member of the Pupils’ Red Army, marching with fake machine guns. But when his grandfather came under suspicion–for reasons still unknown–Kang, along with his family, was packed off on a truck to Yodok at the age of 9. From then on, he says, “I can’t believe what happened to me.”

The young Kang was ensnared in a signature feature of North Korea’s political prisons: guilt by family association. Kim Il Sung, say human-rights monitors and former prisoners, declared that three generations of a political enemy’s family can be jailed–without trial. Political rehabilitation is possible in principle, but apparently few endure the years of harsh treatment. Kang and other camp survivors say that sexual intercourse is forbidden (though some women are forced to have sex with camp guards). Women who become pregnant would swallow poison or take falls in attempts to abort. Otherwise, the fetuses are killed–sometimes by the camp doctors, themselves prisoners. Asserts Kang, “The government’s policy was to extinguish all the seeds of all the political prisoners.”

Kang says he nearly died of malnutrition. Survival depended on finding food beyond the meager diet of corn and salt, so he and others laid traps for snakes, rats, and bugs–eaten cooked or raw, if need be. Hunger dictated. “I wanted to eat anything,” he recounts matter of factly.

Ultimately, though, Kang was also one of the lucky ones. He says he wasn’t beaten severely, and part of his sentence was served on relatively light duty at a recycling center for shoes and clothing. At age 19, he was released on Kim Jong Il’s birthday. Five years later, in 1992, he escaped the country, helped by ethnic Koreans living in the borderlands of northeastern China. Now, Kang is a reporter for the Seoul newspaper Chosun Ilbo. His life experience is now his professional beat: North Korean affairs.

Another graduate of the prisons, Lee Soon Ok, had a rougher time of it. She had handled accounting and managerial work at a party distribution center. But when she rebuffed a security chief who demanded an extra jacket, Lee’s fate was sealed. She was accused of embezzlement and disobeying party policy. The result: seven years at the No. 1 prison camp at Gaechun. “My family was split apart in one day,” she says grimly.

At the camp, Lee was tapped to supervise production of exported goods: artificial silk flowers bound for France, handmade wool sweaters for Japan, decorative needlework for Poland. Suits and dress shirts were sold through Hong Kong, getting their origin labels there, before shipment to Europe. If quotas were missed, Lee says, she faced torture. Guards stepped on her head, knocking out teeth and skewing the left side of her face. During one beating, her left eye started to pop out of its socket. She pushed it back in with her fingers. Her arms were injured after she was hung in chains from a ceiling. Even now, she has difficulty sitting or standing for long periods.

In interrogations aimed at forcing a confession, Lee, now 56, was also subjected to water torture. She says guards force-fed her water by pushing the spout of a canister into her mouth. They laid a wooden plank across her abdomen–and pressed down, forcing water out through her mouth, nose, and bladder. “It feels like your intestines are exploding. There’s no way even to describe the pain you feel,” she recalls, with no trace of emotion.

Tears well up, however, when she ponders why a true believer in the system like herself was punished. “I believed that Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il were basically gods,” she says quietly. “I was so loyal to the party, and I don’t know why they put me through this.”

Lee won release in 1993, apparently for her success in meeting production quotas, she says. The earnings had gone into a fund to celebrate Kim Il Sung’s 80th birthday the previous year. By then, though, Lee was in no mood to celebrate. “As soon as I got out of prison, I decided I didn’t want to live in that hell,” she says. Lee fled with her son in 1995. She converted to Christianity, having marveled at jailed Christians who refused to renounce their faith in the face of torture and execution. Lee moved to an apartment block on the outskirts of Seoul. Still, she is plagued by feelings of guilt about those left behind. Her new life’s mission is to expose the terrors of the camps. “I want the world to know how evil Kim Jong Il is,” she says. “The world needs to put more pressure on North Korea.”

“It was a system to kill us.” Lee Young Kook, jailed after trying to flee North Korea.

—An US News and World Report article by Thomas Omestad

Kang Chol Hwan on the plight of North Koreans

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Kang Chol Hwan is a former North Korean prisoner and author of The Aquariums of Pyongyang.

The plight of North Koreans today, Kang says, is “very similar to that of Jews during World War II. Hitler and Kim Jong Il are very similar,” he says. “The methods of killing are different, but everything else is the same. When I see photos of the Jewish genocide, my heart just breaks.”

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and member of the North Korea Freedom Coalition, suggest a more accurate parallel would perhaps be Joseph Stalin — “he built the gulag.”

“Stalin, ultimately the worst dictator probably of the 20th century, said that one death is a tragedy and that a million deaths is a statistic.

“Take the power of one girl, Anne Frank, whose name, for so many millions around the world, is more than just a statistic from the Nazi Holocaust. I’m not making a direct comparison between Anne Frank and Mr. Kang, but I am saying that having someone as a symbol is enormously important.”

[From “A View From Inside” by Grace E. Jang, published in KoreAm Journal]

North Korea Prisoner Nation – Part 1

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Dr. Norbert Vollertsen, a physician from what was East Germany, had the unique experience of working in hospitals in North Korea from July 1999 through December 2000. Following is a Wall Street Journal article by Dr. Vollertsen:

A human tragedy of hellish dimensions continues in North Korea. For nearly a decade, an unknown number of North Koreans, possibly as many as 300,000, have defected to China. These brave men, women and children risk their lives to flee the mass starvation and brutal oppression brought upon them by Kim Jong Il’s Stalinist regime. Sadly, Beijing’s official policy has been, and remains, to arrest the refugees and forcibly return them to North Korea, where they face imprisonment, torture and in some cases execution.

Until recently, these refugees’ stories and China’s practice of refoulement, or forced return, went largely untold. Mercifully, this is beginning to change. Now, action by human-rights campaigners from around the world –including my own small efforts– helps some of these refugees to seek asylum, and to publicize their brutal treatment at the hands of Chinese and North Korean officials. President Bush is right to call the regime in Pyongyang “evil.”

I know, because I have seen the evil with my own eyes. From July 1999 to December 2000, I traveled with the German medical aid group, Cap Anamur, and gained access to some of the country’s most secretive regions. What I witnessed could best be described as unbelievable deprivation. As I wrote for this newspaper in April 2001, “In the hospitals one see kids too small for their age, with hollow eyes and skin stretched tight across their faces. They wear blue-and-white striped pajamas, like the children in Hitler’s Auschwitz.”

While western critics denounced President Bush’s decision to include North Korea in the Axis of Evil, the long-suffering people of North Korea cheered it. I know: refugees have told me. They know how Ronald Reagan’s description of the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire” was an early and important step toward its collapse. Moreover, the Axis of Evil remark proved prescient after North Korea’s confession that it had a large, covert nuclear-weapons program. More and more high-ranking defectors have told us that Kim Jong II’s government is in a desperate situation, much closer to collapse than the outside world knows. This, they say, is why he needs the fear of nuclear annihilation to win concessions from the West, prop up his regime, and subjugate his own people.

One must remember that the famine in North Korea is not a natural disaster, but a man-made one. The North Korean dictator uses food as a weapon against his own people, keeping them weak and dependent on the state. From 1994 to 1998 (the most recent reliable data the outside world has), at least two million North Koreans perished from starvation and related diseases. Nearly 50% of all North Korean children are malnourished to the point that it threatens their physical and mental health.I worked in North Korea for 18 months until I was deported in late 2000, for publicly denouncing the regime for its human-rights abuses and failure to distribute the massive amounts of food aid to the people who needed it most. After leaving, I knew the only way I could help the people of North Korea was to tell the world what I had witnessed and work to free the 23 million people who remain prisoners in their own country.

In 2001, I interviewed several hundred North Korean defectors in Seoul, as well as near the Chinese-North Korean border, plus in several other locations where they were hiding. Many of them had spent years in concentration camps and spoke of mass executions, torture, rape, murder, baby killing and other crimes against humanity. Most were imprisoned for “anti-state criminal acts.”

During my interviews, I met with many human-rights activists who had devoted their lives to helping the North Korean refugees. Hiroshi Kato, a Japanese journalist and organizer of Life Funds for North Korean Refugees, based in Tokyo; San Hun Kim, a South Korean former UN official and human rights volunteer; Chun Ki Won, a South Korean Christian missionary; and many others. We realized from our experience in the field in China that the North Korean defectors had risked their lives fleeing starvation and oppression.

In China, most of the refugees live in utterly primitive circumstances. They have little food, no medicine, and lack proper shelter. Many live in the woods, sleep in makeshift huts, and cook in holes in the ground. Those in urban areas are sold like slaves to Chinese businessman, and the young women are forced into prostitution.     Continued

Why do North Koreans flee North Korea?

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First question: Why would a North Korean defect their country, North Korea? Meet Lee, and hear her story via this Washington Post article:

Lee’s crime was that she was hungry. After years of meager rations in North Korea, the 22-year-old woman with curly hair left her peasant family’s home and slipped across the border into China, hoping to find something to eat. She was caught and sent back, handcuffed, to a North Korean prison camp — a world of cruelty.

She was worked to exhaustion, forced to run in her bare feet as she carried heavy bricks at a construction site. Her food was a bowl of watery soup every day with cabbage and a few rotten corn kernels.

There was no escape. “I didn’t feel anything,” said Lee, now 28 and safe after an escape that brought her to Seoul four months ago. Beaten, starved and assaulted by horrors, “you just don’t think about anything. You really have no fear of death. At that point, you’re just a machine with no emotion.”

The U.N. Commission on Human Rights condemned North Korea’s human rights record, answering years of demands by activists that the world confront the abuses.

The commission expressed “deep concern” about conditions in the country, including torture, public executions, political executions, use of political prison camps and selective provision of food.

The vote is a response in part to the harsher tone adopted by the Bush administration in dealing with North Korean abuses. Previously, the United States and other countries had been reluctant to push the human rights issue with the prickly North Korean government, arguing that it would have little effect.

But to the dismay of activists, South Korea and its new president, Roh Moo Hyun, a human rights lawyer, abstained from voting.

“South Korea should be ashamed that foreign countries are saying what we are afraid to say on behalf of fellow Koreans,” said Chun Ki Won, a South Korean Christian aid worker who has been jailed in China for his work helping North Koreans escape.

Human rights activists estimate there are about 200,000 prisoners in at least five large North Korean camps, some confined for trying to escape like Lee, others for political offenses that make it likely they will die in prison.

Rights activists were especially critical of South Korea’s position, saying they expected more from South Korea’s new government.

“It will go down as a stain on South Korea’s history,” said Tim Peters, director of Helping Hands Korea, which assists defectors. “There should be outrage toward the government here. Nothing can top the irony of a human rights Nobel laureate [former president Kim Dae Jung], followed by a human rights lawyer, and neither of them raising the issue of human rights.”

Roh, in a recent interview with The Washington Post, defended his position. “Rather than confronting the Kim Jong Il regime over human rights of a small number of people, I think it is better for us to open up the regime through dialogue,” he said. “I think this will ultimately bring broader protection of human rights for North Korean people as a whole.

“As in Iraq, I don’t think the North Korean human rights conditions can be changed by pressure from international public opinion,” Roh added. “If I bring up the human rights [issue], it will not help improve human rights conditions in North Korea. Rather, it will be an obstacle to bringing an ‘opening up’ or peace in North Korea.”

Lee saw the horror of those human rights conditions during her imprisonment in North Korea. The young woman cannot give her full name; her mother and three siblings still in North Korea would be in grave danger. Sitting in an activist’s office in Seoul, her pretty smile dissolves into tears at recalling her months in prison.

Each night, she said, the 160 women in the camp lined up, heads bowed, as a guard whipped those who had not worked hard enough and slammed the heads of others against the wall. Fifty women were packed into a tiny room, forced to sleep while sitting.

“You go to sleep, and the next morning the person next to you is cold, dead,” she said. “The older women would die right away.” She said that a fellow prisoner, desperate with hunger, bit off half the ear of a woman who had died, and put it in her pocket to eat later.

Two sisters who tried to escape were caught and brought back to the camp to serve as a lesson. Lee said they were forced to lift a heavy log until it fell, crushing them. Other prisoners were ordered to stomp on the sisters’ hands to break their bones. Finally the two women were strapped to a wall to be starved to death.

“After a week their bodies were gone. They had died,” said Lee.

Lee became so weak in the camp she was sent home to die. Instead, a trader carried her on his back across the river to China, where she recovered her strength. A Christian activist gave her false papers, and Lee lived illegally for four years in eastern China, despite regular roundups by Chinese authorities to force North Koreans back across the border.

She finally joined the long smuggling route, an “underground railway” for North Koreans, that took her to Mongolia and eventually to South Korea. Only when she was safe did she throw away the rat poison she planned to take if she was forced back to North Korea again.

Lee arrived in Seoul to find physical comfort, but also referred to the loneliness that many other defectors describe when they finally reach safety. After two months in South Korea’s reeducation camp, the government gave her an apartment and a monthly stipend. She is trying to learn secretarial skills and is contemplating life in a society where her accent and communist education set her apart.

“I thought when I came to South Korea everything would be happy. But I realize that’s not true. I didn’t know where to go or how to behave,” she said.

She is sending money back through the smugglers’ route so her mother and siblings can buy food in North Korea. “If my family is hurt, all my hope would be gone,” she said.

“To be honest, sometimes I try to forget that happened to me,” she said. “Now I realize how revolting it was. There, I was just numb. It’s human to try to forget it.”