The hidden gulag
Reports leak out of atrocities at North Korean labor camps
By Young Howard
May 15, 2005
* Horrific conditions and suffering make it the last worst place on Earth
Grandsons are condemned to life-long terms as slave laborers alongside their grandfathers, both equally helpless in the brutal surroundings. Prisoners are arbitrarily murdered by security guards. Women suffer from forced abortions at the hands of unlicensed doctors. Newborn babies are beaten to death. And sons and daughters are publicly executed in front of their mothers.
From 'Children of the Secret State'
/ Hardcash Productions
A starving child looking for food appears symbolic of the horrific conditions throughout North Korea. Of the 23 million people who live in the country, many go hungry.
This is not the story of an age of slavery from centuries past or of a survivor of Nazi Germany's Holocaust. It is what is happening at this moment inside the gulags of North Korea. The stories of gulag survivors are often too horrible to believe for the citizens of civilized countries. If one were to have the opportunity to speak with a survivor of a North Korean gulag, what they would reveal might be well beyond the threshold of the listener's imagination.
Chul Hwan Kang became the first of many defectors to follow when he arrived in South Korea in 1992 having survived detention in living hell. He served in the labor camp for political prisoners called "Yoduk" from the age of 9 to 19 for the sole reason that his grandfather was accused of criticizing the North Korean regime.
Kang recounts his experience as a young person in the camps stating that children would spend the day beginning at 6 o'clock in the morning working hard manual labor. The failure to accomplish the work quota may result in reduced food rations. At age 17, he was less than 150 centimeters tall (5 feet) and weighed about 40 kilograms (88 pounds). In fact, Kang's size was characteristic of all detained children, whose growth was universally retarded by continuous malnutrition and brutality. Girls were no taller than 145 centimeters by their late teens and were never cleaner than boys. With unkempt hair and lacking the nutrition critical to adolescent development, they did not look like girls, forced to become part of an androgynous and anonymous prison population.
Yong Kim, one survivor of the harshest of all the gulags, called "the complete control zone" of camp 14 in Kaechon of Southern Pyong-an province, witnessed a brutal murder by a security guard. Fortunately, for those still being detained to this day and the poor soul who was killed that day, he lived to tell of what he saw.
Graphic:
North Korean forced-labor camps
Fifty-three-year-old Chul-min Kim's job in "the complete control zone" was to drive trolleys for transporting coal. One day, he saw some chestnut burrs roll down the mountain slope and stop in front of his trolley. Chul-min, without realizing what he was doing, stopped on the tracks to pick up the chestnuts. A nearby security guard spotted Chul-min as he began to gather the nuts. On reaching Chul-min's bent-over back, the guard started kicking him and became increasingly violent, allowing his anger to mount. In no time, the hard soles of his boots were laying heavy blows to poor Chul-
min's head until finally, the guard drew a pistol from a pocket in his uniform. He then held down Chul-min's head with one foot and blew a hole in the forehead of the horrified victim.
Arbitrary murder is rampant in the camps. According to both Kang and Kim, thousands every year are brutally murdered or worked to death in each camp.
The testimonies on forced abortions and baby killings are numerous, and derive from acts witnessed in ordinary detention facilities as well as the gulags. According to "The Hidden Gulag," a report by the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, eight people testified to witnessing such acts.
Yong Hwa Choi assisted in the delivery of babies, three of whom, he reported, were promptly killed at the Sinuiju provincial detention center in mid-2000. Chun Sik You also reported that four pregnant women at the National Security Agency's police station in Sinuiju was the site of many forced abortions in mid-2000.
Graphic:
Kaechon prisoner housing
Kaechon, a mining camp of about 15,000 prisoners, is about 25 to 31 miles long by 19 miles wide. According to Kim Yong, one of the camp's survivors, daily meals consisted of 20 to 30 kernel of corn and watery cabbage soup. This image was provided by Space Imaging Asia, courtesy of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.
The concentration camp is a kind of closed town where a number of camps are linked together by a road. At least two of the camps, Hoeryong and Hwasong in Hamkyong Province, are larger in area than the District of Columbia. All the gulags are located in remote and desolate mountain areas to further their anonymity and isolation to foreigners and dissidents. Presently, there are six gulags known to the outside world where it is speculated that some 150,000 to 200,000 inmates are imprisoned.
The most striking feature of the gulag system is the philosophy of "guilt by familial association" or "collective responsibility" whereby whole families within three generations are imprisoned. This policy has been practiced since 1972 when Kim Il Sung, the founder of communist North Korea, stated "Factionalists or enemies of class, whoever they are, their seed must be eliminated through three generations."
Another characteristic of this oppressive policy is that those arrested are not detained, charged or tried in any sort of judicial procedure. The victim, along with his immediate family, is shipped off in the early hours of the morning to an interrogation facility. He is only permitted to bring the clothes on his back. The presumed offender is then tortured in order to make him "confess" before being sent to the political penal-labor colony. On arrival at the camp, the victim is issued a pick and shovel, simple cooking utensils and a used army blanket. All contact with the outside world is blocked: he is now a non-person; no question will be asked about him by friends or relatives.
Shortly after arriving at the gulag, it becomes immediately apparent that the most salient feature of everyday life is the combination of below-subsistence-level food rations and extremely demanding labor quotas.
Prisoners are provided just enough food to be kept perpetually on the verge of starvation. They are compelled by their hunger to eat, if they can get away with it, the food of the labor-camp farm animals, as well as plants, grasses, bark, rats, snakes and anything remotely edible. In committing such desperate acts driven by acute hunger the prisoners simultaneously incur the extreme risk of being detected by an angry security guard and subjected to a brutal, on-the-spot execution.
Not surprisingly, the prisoners are quickly reduced to walking skeletons after their arrival. All gulag survivors said they were struck by the shortness, skinniness, premature aging, hunchbacks, and physical deformities of so many of the inmates they saw upon arriving at the gulag. These descriptions parallel those provided by survivors of the Holocaust in infamous camps like Auschwitz.
Chol Hwan Kang recollects in his memoir "Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag":
"As prisoners eat rats in the camp, rats were almost depleted and became harder to find. The surviving rats are wary. Rat tastes strange and somehow unpleasant at first. The revolting taste, however, soon disappears. The children never lost opportunities to catch rats, as they watch so many other prisoners dying of undernourishment and pellagra. Rat is the only source of meat for prisoners for 10 or 20 years."
Another serious characteristic is that those detained are not actual political dissidents from the viewpoint of western society. Some people are arrested just because they used newspapers with a picture of the Dear Leader for toilet paper. Also among the dissidents are a large number of Japanese citizens of Korean ethnic descent who returned to North Korea in the 1950s and 1960s. When, in private meetings with their colleagues, they criticized North Korea for being no better than Japan, they were deemed to have been spoiled by their exposure to Japanese liberalism and capitalist property, and thus imprisoned.
In the 1990s, imprisonment befell some North Korean students and diplomats who had been studying or posted in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe and had been exposed to the collapse of socialist rule. According to Yong Kim, he saw some old white men in his gulag who he believed were American POWs from the Korean war of early 1950s. Also believed to have been placed in the prison system were a large number of South Koreans, including many fishermen, captured or abducted by North Korea over the years.
At this moment, the growing number of witnesses and mounting evidence that the gulag system is a means of extreme oppression of the Korean people should dwarf the habitual criticism of the accusations issued by Kim's regime. North Korea's government says that all the gulag stories have been fabricated by "imperialists and their puppets."
But among the witnesses are at least eight gulag survivors including two former guards who are known to the public. Recently, one defector group named "Democracy Network Against North Korean Gulags" has published the list of 617 peoples' names in the gulags. Photographs taken by satellite show the precise locations of four active gulags. More graphic than any witness account though is one courageous man's videotape taken from the outskirts of the Yoduk camp that was broadcast in February 2004 by Japan's Fuji television network.
The sadistic regime led by Kim Jong Il has developed and maintained all kinds of extreme terror machines in order to cruelly suppress any dissident opposition. They range from gulags and the forced abortion of babies of prisoners to public firing squads and execution by burning, though the latter is rare. During the extreme famine of the late 1990s when about 3 million people starved to death in North Korea, public executions were staged nearly every month in every town in order to prevent spontaneous uprisings by the local population, according to Jang Yeop Hwang, the former secretary of North Korea's ruling North Korea Workers' Party. On many occasions, some of the victim's family members came out before the executions and declared: "Though you are my son, you are a traitor and a puppet of imperialists. You therefore deserve your death."
In March, 2005, a video of a public execution in the northern part of North Korea was successfully smuggled out and viewed all over the world. One can see a wooden pole is being set up for the execution before the judge even completes his verdict. The entire process is finished in just 20 minutes with no chance for the condemned to appeal to a higher court or even to defend himself. As part of the execution ritual, stones are placed in the condemned man's mouth to prevent him from shouting criticism of the regime. His legs and arms were already broken. His crime was attempting to help North Korean people flee to China.
The situation is extremely bad for refugees in China, too. Back in the mid-1990s when defectors began emerging, many were captured, sent to gulags, and shot. Some were even killed at the border while being repatriated. In a few cases, they were kept in metal fetters or had their noses ringed so they could be pulled around like animals while being repatriated. Even though the treatment of refugees has been softened a little by international pressure in recent years, refugees may incur severe punishment as they are repatriated.
While all these atrocities are committed against North Korean people, Kim is obsessed only with developing nuclear weapons and making foreign currency through illicit trade such as drugs and falsified currency to support his evil regime. Indeed, he, himself, is a human weapon of mass destruction who has starved nearly 3 million people to death and imprisoned 200,000 persons in harsh gulag conditions.
North Korea itself at this point is like one giant gulag where all the population short of Kim and his inner circle are subject to various kinds of atrocities and torture from their beginnings to their tragic ends.
Howard, a pro-democracy activist from South Korea, is currently a Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, D.C. From 1999 to 2001, he assisted North Korean refugees along the North Korea-China border.
