Tag Archive: north korea

Drawings reveal horrific scenes inside North Korean prison

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Kim Kwang-il, 48, spent more than two years at a prison in North Korea where he was tortured, starved and witnessed the deaths of fellow inmates. Kim is one of the North Koreans who gave evidence in public hearings for the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea.

The UN on Tuesday released a damning report on North Korea’s inhumane treatment of prisoners, likening it to Nazi-era atrocities. It includes the testimony from more than 300 North Koreans, many of whom gave their evidence in secret.

Mr Kim was arrested by North Korean police in mid-2004 and charged with illegally crossing the border and smuggling. He had crossed the border to sell pine nuts. For this he was sentenced to six years in prison.

He defected to South Korea in February 2009 where he published a book about his time in detention. The book contained drawings made by professional artists based on his recollections of the torture he was subjected to and some of the horrific scenes he witnessed. One such drawing and description follows.

north korean prison tortureDescription of illustration: “This position itself is the torture. And additionally you are beaten up as well. If you did not give the right statement during the preliminary hearing, you get this kind of torture. You are beaten up, which leads to vomiting because you feel very uncomfortable inside. Sometimes you would vomit blood. … I was told to be in that position until my sweat would fill that one glass, that glass in front of me. You will never imagine what that’s like. … We are bound to stay in that position until the jailer feels that you have been tortured enough. …This is the pigeon torture. Your hands are bound back and if they tie you like this, your chest comes out forward and in this position you are tortured.”

You can read the testimony of Kim Kwang-il in full, along with the report itself on the UN website.

[The Age]

Charging North Korean leaders with crimes against humanity

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A new report from a United Nations panel, due to be released on Monday, found that crimes against humanity have certainly been committed in North Korea and recommends referring the situation for international action.

The report is the result of a year-long effort from a U.N. Commission of Inquiry towards the communist country’s human rights abuses, the first of its kind to take such a deep-dive into the subject. The resulting document provides “evidence of an array of such crimes, including ‘extermination,’ crimes against humanity against starving populations and a widespread campaign of abductions of individuals in South Korea and Japan,” the Associated Press reports.

Evidence gathered, the report will conclude, “create[s] reasonable grounds … to merit a criminal investigation by a competent national or international organ of justice.” Setting aside the unlikely event that a national court takes up the matter, the most likely venue for such an investigation would be the International Criminal Court, based in The Hague.

As North Korea is not a signatory of the Rome Statute, the ICC’s founding document, the Court doesn’t have the jurisdiction to act on the commission’s report. For that, the Prosecutor has to wait for a referral from the United Nations Security Council. While the Council has become more open towards such referrals than in the past, as in the case of Libya in 2011, the chances of North Korean leaders such as Kim Jong Un appearing at the Hague has one serious obstacle: China. Beijing is not only one of Pyongyang’s closest allies, they hold a veto on the Security Council on all substantive matters — including ICC referrals.

“The odds are close to zero,” David Bosco, an assistant professor at American University and author of a recently published book on the ICC, told ThinkProgress when asked about Beijing possibly allowing for such a referral.

Given Chinese — and likely Russian — disapproval, Bosco “[doesn’t] think there’s any chance” the ICC will be investigating the DPRK. “This is looking like one of those things that goes down the memory hole after a few months, unfortunately,” he concluded.

[ThinkProgress]

North Korean gulag torture methods

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Jung Kwang Il escaped from North Korea in 2004 after spending three years in the Yoduk gulag. He relates that North Korean gulag guards use a variety of torture methods. The one Jung endured was called the “pigeon” technique: Your two hands are tied behind your back, and you are chained to a wall in a manner that prevents you from either properly standing or sitting. Eventually, the backbone starts to almost force its way out the front of your body.

“There are no guards to hear you scream,” he says. Nor are there bathrooms. Sanitation consists of a worker coming by every few days to hose everyone down with a power spray.

In the summertime at Yoduk, workers are required to weed 1,100 square meters of farmland per day — with the 600g/day food allotment dispensed on a pro-rata basis: Finish half the job, and you get half the food.

“If a guard wants to kill someone ‘legitimately,’ it is very easy,” Jung says. “The worker is given work that he can’t finish, and then he gets less food, which makes him even less productive the next day, because he is starving. It sets off a [self-reinforcing] cycle of weakness and starvation. You can kill someone in two weeks through this method.”

During the winter, prisoners were put on firewood detail. Each was made to drag a tree about four meters long, and about 30 cm in diameter, a distance of four kilometers, up and down valleys, four trees per day.

To motivate a set of four workers, the guards would set out three rice cakes on a table, with the slowest worker arriving to an empty plate. It was a sort of horrible reality-show competition staged for the guards’ own entertainment.

Jung says he saw 60 or 70 people collapse and die on tree duty. Because the ground was frozen during the winter months, the corpses were thrown into a warehouse for burial in the spring. By that time, rats — or other, desperately hungry creatures who’d broken into the warehouse — had devoured much of them.

In summertime, inmates planted vegetables. The temptation to steal and eat the seeds was so intense that guards took the precaution of mixing them with ash and human waste before dispensing the seeds to prisoners. But many inmates are so hungry that they eat the seeds anyway, after doing their best to wash them. In this way, many who escaped death from starvation instead died from colitis and other waste-borne intestinal ailments.

US Congressmen appeal to Kim Jong-Un for Kenneth Bae release

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The last surviving members of the U.S. Congress to have served in the Korean War have sent a letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un asking him to release imprisoned American missionary Kenneth Bae.

“You have done the right thing by releasing a fellow Korean War veteran, Merrill E. Newman, to return home, you would be making further progress on the humanitarian front by freeing Kenneth Bae to reunite with his family,” stated a copy of the letter obtained by Reuters.

The congressmen, Democrat Charles Rangel from New York, Democrat John Conyers Jr. from Michigan, Republican Sam Johnson from Texas and Republican Howard Coble from North Carolina, are members of the House of Representatives.

kenneth bae North Korea January 2014
Kenneth Bae January 2014

Bae, 45, has been held for more than a year after being sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. North Korean authorities said the Christian missionary was trying to overthrow the state. Rangel invited Bae’s family to sit with him at President Barack Obama’s state of the union speech last month.

The letter was dated Tuesday and came as North and South Korea agreed to allow some families separated by the 1950-53 Korean War to hold brief reunions, despite a campaign by Pyongyang demanding that Seoul cancel planned war games with the United States.

In their letter, the four members of Congress urged Kim Jong-un to extend the reunion effort to Korean-Americans. “Nothing is more tragic than the separation of families and loved ones,” the letter stated. “We encourage you to also create a pathway to allow some 100,000 Korean-Americans to meet with their divided families in the (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) before too many pass away.”

[Reuters]

North Korea’s special forces comprise 200,000 soldiers

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The special operations branch of the Korean People’s Army is reported to comprise 200,000 soldiers, 60,000 specialized troops and 140,000 light infantry soldiers, according to the Seoul-based Chosun Ilbo.

General Walter Sharp, the former commander of the South Korean-US Combined Forces Command stated that the infantry soldiers are lightly armed and trained to infiltrate deep behind enemy lines to destroy key installations and engage in black ops.

Specialized troops could infiltrate South Korea on foot or through underground tunnels, General Sharp said. They are also able to land at major ports in the South with 130 hovercraft and 260 landing vessels. The North Korean air force’s 170 aging but operable low-flying AN-2 transport planes introduced from Russia and 130 helicopters can also be mobilized to deploy airborne troops as well.

The United States only has about 50,000 soldiers in its special forces, while South Korea has fewer than 20,000.

“The havoc-raising potential of North Korea’s special forces has grown as their numbers have increased and their training has shifted to terrorist tactics developed by insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan,” General Sharp told the Washington Post. “They are very capable, and they will employ these tactics.”

All members of North Korean special forces have been die-hard Kim family loyalists since the establishment of the unit, Sharp said, adding that to avoid capture when they are defeated, all soldiers are ordered to kill themselves.

[Source: Want China Times] 

Senior North Korean diplomat says Jang killed due to crimes against the country

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A senior North Korean diplomat has revealed new details about why Kim Jong-Un’s uncle was executed.

North Korea’s ambassador to the UK, Hyun Hak-Bong, said Jang Song Thaek “made anti-party, anti-government crimes, and as well he abused his power in hindering the national economy and hindering the efforts of the national economy and for improving people’s living standards.”

He claimed Jang had stolen more than 7.5 million dollars from the people in 2009 alone and been repeatedly pardoned by the party and Kim Jong-Un.

But he said that the party’s patience had run out with Jang, adding: “He made tremendous crimes against the government, against the people, against the country.”

[Daily Mail]

North Korean prisoners programmed to be informants

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As a 13-year-old in a North Korean prison camp, Shin Dong-hyuk overheard his mother and brother speaking. One word made him perk up — escape.

Knowing the rule, “Any witness to an attempted escape who fails to report it will be shot immediately,” Shin’s “camp-bred instincts took over,” as journalist Blaine Harden writes in “Escape From Camp 14.” Running out of the house and finding the school’s night guard, Shin did exactly what he had been raised to do — he ratted on his own mother and brother, explaining what he had overheard.

That night, he slept at the dormitory, not at home.

The next day, guards came and found Shin in the schoolyard. Handcuffed, blindfolded, pushed into a car and taken to an underground prison in Camp 14, he was confused why he, an informer, was being treated like this. Eventually, he realized that the night guard had taken all the credit for foiling his family’s escape plan — his mother and brother were both caught. Unable to trust the son of attempted runaways, guards held Shin in the underground prison for eight months, initially subjecting him to brutal torture and feeding him just enough tasteless food to survive his dark cell, which he shared with a kind old man.

Upon his release, he was handcuffed and blindfolded, then driven to a field near his childhood home — the same field where he had witnessed several annual executions for most of his life. A guard removed his handcuffs and blindfold and sat him down. Then, his mother and brother were dragged out and led to a gallows and wooden stake lodged in the ground.

Facing execution, his mother tried to catch his eyes, but he refused to look. As his mother hung, he felt at the time that she deserved death for endangering his life with the escape plan.

Tied to a wooden pole, his brother was next: Three guards each fired three shots, killing him instantly, which, Shin felt he also deserved.

[Excerpts from Jewish Journal article authored by Jared Sichel]

Methamphetamine in North Korea

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After the North Korean coal mine in Hoeryong, a hardscrabble mining town of 130,000 on the Chinese border, stopped paying salaries, Park Kyung Ok tried her hand hawking methamphetamine.

Park used to travel to another North Korean city, Chongjin, to buy meth, known as orum or ice, that she would carry back hidden in a candy box. She would sell it behind the counter at a bicycle parts store at the public market. Hidden among the spare parts were metal plates, burners and other drug paraphernalia.

She usually paid the equivalent of US$17 for a gram of high quality product, which she would then cut with cheaper meth and divide into 12 smaller portions to resell for a few dollars’ profit.

“It was just enough money that I could buy rice to eat and coal for heating,” said Park, who was interviewed recently in China and, like most North Korean defectors, used an assumed name.

North Koreans say there is little stigma attached to meth use. Some take it to treat colds or boost their energy; students take it to work late. The drug also helps curb appetites in a country where food is scarce. It is offered up as casually as a cup of tea, North Koreans say.

“If you go to somebody’s house it is a polite way to greet somebody by offering them a sniff,” said Lee Saera, 43, of Hoeryong, also interviewed in China. “It is like drinking coffee when you’re sleepy, but ice is so much better.”

Despite its draconian legal system, North Korea has long been easygoing about narcotics use.  With analgesics scarce, opium paste is commonly sold for pain relief. Marijuana (called “mouth tobacco”) is legal and frequently grown at home to be mixed in with rolling tobacco.

Through the 1990s, the North Korean government ran the production of opium, meth and other drugs for Office 39, a unit raising hard currency for late leader Kim Jong-il, according to narcotics investigators. But the North Korean government has largely gone out of the drug business, according to the US State Department’s 2013 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report.

North Koreans say meth then appeared on the streets around 2005 and that it came from Hamhung, the one-time center of the nation’s pharmaceutical and chemical industry, and thus a city filled with unemployed scientists and technicians. The industry then spread to Chongjin and the capital, Pyongyang.

What life is like in a North Korean prison camp

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Based on North Korean defector Shin Dong-hyuk’s experiences, families at Camp 14 get just two hours daily of electricity — from 4 a.m. to 5 a.m. and from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. They have no beds, tables, chairs or running water. They use a communal privy, the waste from which is used as fertilizer for the camp farm.

At Camp 14, Shin’s diet was corn porridge, pickled cabbage and cabbage soup, twice daily, for 23 years. There were no exceptions, except when the political police, the bo-wi-bu, withheld food as punishment.

As is true for most North Koreans, who live near starvation, almost anything at Camp 14 is viewed as edible. Shin and his fellow prisoners ate frogs, snakes, insects, rats —anything.

In the winter, when food is scarce, prisoners try to abate hunger pangs by not defecating, regurgitating and re-eating food — nothing is off limits, but none of it changes the fact of starvation.

One day, when Shin was 6, he was sitting in class when his teacher “sprang a surprise search,” digging through the pockets of all 40 students in class. The teacher found five kernels of corn, as Shin tells it, all of which belonged to a female classmate.

Ordering the girl to kneel in front of the class, the teacher repeatedly struck her head with his chalkboard pointer. After repeated strikes, lumps puffed up on her skull, blood poured from her head, and she collapsed, unconscious. Later that night, she died. The next day, the teacher was back in front of the class.

It wasn’t the first murder Shin witnessed, but it was the first informal one. Aside from the two or three annual executions that every prisoner has to watch at Camp 14, the bo-wi-bu have the green light to punish at will.

Unlike students in the rest of North Korea, prisoners are not fed the brainwash devised by the Kim regime of its own god-like benevolence. Rather, they are taught next to nothing. Shin believes children born in the camp were intentionally kept ignorant.

[Excerpted from Jewish Journal article authored by Jared Sichel]

Jang Song-thaek relatives also executed

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All relatives of the executed uncle of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, including children and the country’s ambassadors to Cuba and Malaysia, have also been put to death at the leader’s instruction, multiple sources said Sunday.

Jang Song-thaek, the once-powerful uncle, was executed last month on charges of attempting to overthrow the communist regime, including contemplating a military-backed coup.

“Extensive executions have been carried out for relatives of Jang Song-thaek,” one source said on condition of anonymity. “All relatives of Jang have been put to death, including even children.”

The executed relatives include Jang’s sister Jang Kye-sun, her husband and Ambassador to Cuba Jon Yong-jin, and Ambassador to Malaysia Jang Yong-chol, who is a nephew of Jang, as well as his two sons, the sources said.

All of them were recalled to Pyongyang in early December and executed, they said. The sons, daughters and even grandchildren of Jang’s two brothers were all executed, they said.

“Some relatives were shot to death by pistol in front of other people if they resisted while being dragged out of their apartment homes,” another source said.

Some relatives by marriage, including the wife of the ambassador to Malaysia, have been spared from executions and sent to remote villages along with their maiden families, according to the sources.

“The executions of Jang’s relatives mean that no traces of him should be left,” a source said. “The purge of the Jang Song-thaek people is under way on an extensive scale from relatives and low-level officials.”

[Yonhap News]