A reminder of the evil rampant in N. Korea - as testified to in a US Senate hearing:
PRISONS BY KIM
Forced labor, summary execution & medical torture in North Korea by George Gedda
It was 1987, and Ahn Myong-chol was a fresh-faced 18-year-old. As part of his military obligation in North Korea, he was assigned as a trainee guard at a prison camp in North Hamyong province. The experience of entering the camp for the first time hit him with the force of a rock slide. The area swarmed with dwarfs wearing the rags of slaves. "Are these humans?'' he asked himself. "Or are they animals?''
For a time, he thought the dwarfs he saw were actually South Korean beggars who are often depicted on North Korean television. "They were walking skeletons, nothing but skin and bone,'' he recalled years later. "This frightened me.''
Ahn estimated that the inmates-not South but North Koreans-averaged about 4 feet 11. Their faces were covered with cuts and scars where they were beaten, he said. Most had no ears because they had been beaten off. Beatings around the head left many inmates with only one eye or one eye turned around in its socket. Some had crutches, some walked with the aid of tree limbs. The inmates, regardless of circumstance, had one thing in common: all were required to work.
For seven years, Ahn served as a guard at several of North Korea's myriad prison camps, witnessing the brutal treatment to which inmates, from children to the elderly, were subjected.
Finally, in September 1994, no longer able to stand being a cog in North Korea's machinery of repression, Ahn escaped. He received permission to drive a truck out of the camp where he was working to purchase supplies. Seizing on the opportunity, he headed for the northern border and crossed the Tumen River to safety in China. To have been caught would have meant death. He then settled in South Korea. With him, he brought an account of the earthly hell of North Korean prison camps, places where the innocent die from bullets to the head, sledgehammer blows, starvation, disease, or overwork. They are places where prisoners are buried alive or left to the mercy of attack dogs.
It is a disquieting irony that much less public attention is given to rights abuses in North Korea than, say, to China, a society that is relatively open nowadays and where the abuses are far less severe. Indeed, repression in China is a constant subject of public discourse despite significant improvements from a generation ago when China was a closed society and abuses could be carried out on a massive scale without notice-or criticism; North Korea today is roughly where China was three decades ago.
The visit of former President Jimmy Carter to Pyongyang in 1994 illustrates the degree to which countries that are highly repressive but also closed can escape outside censure. Carter, the American president most identified with human rights, went there during a period of high tensions over North Korea's nuclear program. When he departed North Korea, he did not mention the human rights situation but did comment on the degree to which North Korean people "revered'' their leader, Kim Il-sung, the architect of the North Korean gulag. Carter apparently was unaware of the countless North Koreans who Kim condemned to the massive prison system that he had created.
For a North Korean to qualify to be a prison camp inmate, the charge need not be serious. Such a fate awaits those who omit the obligatory honorific (Great Leader, or Dear Leader) in referring to Kim, who died in 1994, and his son, Kim Jong-il. The father and son have been North Korea's only rulers for more than half a century.
Ahn's testimony, as well as that of a handful of other North Korean defectors with direct knowledge of that country's gulag, has attracted only minimal international attention. The Clinton administration has said virtually nothing about the rights situation there, except in the State Department's annual report on human rights conditions worldwide, because it does not want to detract from its effort to induce Pyongyang not to become a greater military menace to northeast Asia than it already is.
A difficult negotiation would become even more difficult if the administration added human rights concerns to its agenda with North Korea. Meanwhile, massive quantities of U.S. food aid pour into the country to make up for drought, flooding, and system-induced shortages.
In some cases, if the State Department must pull its punches on human rights issues because of political constraints, the void can be filled by private rights groups. But such is not the case with North Korea. Amnesty International, in a June report on global rights conditions, offered scant coverage of North Korea's prison conditions, partly because of a lack of solid information. (The sections in Amnesty's report on France and Germany were longer than the one on North Korea.) So far as is known, only five North Koreans with first-hand knowledge of North Korean prison life have ever defected. Four of the five provided full accounts of their experiences. Without their testimony, the inter-national ignorance of the prison camps, home to as many as 200,000 North Koreans, would be almost total.
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Congress has shown little interest in the issue. It was not until last April 22 that Congress had ever held a hearing on it. The hearing, convened by Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyo., was the culmination of a year-long campaign by the Virginia-based Defense Forum Foundation to persuade lawmakers that the issue warranted legislative attention. But the hearing generated little interest; no senators besides Thomas showed up and the media presence was scant.
Ahn flew to Washington from South Korea for the hearing, joined by two other North Koreans, both former prison camp inmates who defected to South Korea. In their testimony and in other written materials made available at the hearing, they described their experiences.
Lee Soon-ok, 51, was a manager of a commodity supply station and was arrested on trumped-up charges in 1986. She was imprisoned first at a provincial detention center for 14 months and then for six years at a prison camp where she performed hard labor.
At one point, she was subjected to water torture. "They used a special kind of kettle that could be inserted into your mouth,'' she says. ''Once it is inserted, you cannot resist it or pull it out of your mouth because you are all tied up. They poured water in my body and I found my abdomen swelling because of all this water. When my abdomen became enlarged, they put a board on top, and people stepped on it so the water would come back out. The pain is beyond anything anyone can describe. Because of that water torture, I sustained a lung injury and later suffered from tuberculosis.'' At other times, she was forced to stand on ice in subfreezing temperatures, causing frostbite and loss of toenails. She also suffered permanent scars when she was forced into a heated brick-making kiln.
The hearing also received testimony from Kang Chul-hwan, who was imprisoned at age nine with other family members for allegations made against his grandfather. This was part of the official policy of exterminating three successive generations of so-called class enemies. "Children in concentration camps seeking relief from hunger eat anything ... rats, frogs, snakes, or earthworms,'' Kang said. "Rats are especially favored as a precious source of meat.'' On one occasion, Kang said security agents exposed hundreds of dead bodies when they were bulldozing a hill to plant crops. Inmates were ordered to dig a pit big enough to dump all the corpses. From age 16 on, Kang's tasks included carrying and burying dead bodies. He said inmates competed for the assignment because it meant extra corn noodles for the evening meal.
In testimony Ahn submitted, he described other types of abuses. At one camp where he worked, inmates slated for execution were placed under heavy rocks, attracting cows, hawks and wild pigs. "I've seen what remains of bodies after the animals feast on them,'' he said.
At one camp, inmates work at a coal mine as part of a forced labor campaign. There was an inmate hospital nearby that almost never had drugs. The standard treatment for victims of crushed limbs at the mine was amputation-without anesthesia. "To silence the patients' screams, rags often would be stuffed in their mouths,'' Ahn said.
Camp inmates are sometimes subjected to sadistic medical experiments. The medical staff does this to gain the surgical experience neglected by their training.
"Each military medical officer had conducted at least 50 experiments on living people,'' Ahn said. "I heard their brave stories many times, how they opened up some hapless inmate free from medical flaw and cut out his liver or some other organ. So common was the knowledge of these practices that the camp guards universally believe that medical experiments create most of the camp's numerous cripples, many of whom are missing arms or legs,'' he said.
Attack dogs assigned to prison camps are trained to kill, Ahn said. "They don't bother security personnel or their families but become fierce predators at the sight of an inmate. Dogs killed two women inmates at Camp 13 in July 1988. They consumed all the flesh, leaving nothing but bones. I was right there and saw it all. The Ministry of State Security fed two 15-year-old boys to the dogs in May 1991. It is considered nothing to feed an inmate to the dogs.''
During his testimony, Ahn said that as a former prison guard, he felt uncomfortable sitting at the same Senate hearing room table with two former prisoners.
"Thinking of the sufferings of the other two witnesses in this room had to undergo, I cannot even look them in the face,'' he said. "I would at least be partially relieved of my guilt if they took revenge on me. In grim reality, I was a wrongdoer and they were victims. Even as a wrongdoer, I could not under-stand why the inmates were treated worse than mere animals. I will have to remain a sinner for the rest of my life to the two compatriots in this room and also those kept in concentration camps in the northern half of my country.''
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George Gedda is the State Department correspondent for the Associated Press and served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Venezuela from 1962 to 1964.
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