THE REAL WORLD
North Korea's Gulags
Even babies aren't spared from Pyongyang's regime of torture and murder.
opinionjournal.com
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Wednesday, October 22, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
The latest hallucination of geopolitics has it that if only we can make North Korea's Great Leader Kim Jong Il feel safe from the fate of Saddam Hussein, maybe he'll stop testing missiles and making nuclear bombs. So the experts--whose ranks have now swelled to include, alas, even President George W. Bush--have been scrambling for ways to make Kim feel more secure.
Bad mistake. Even in the exquisitely complex realms of geopolitics, there comes a point at which right and wrong really do matter. Ensuring the safety of monsters is not only an invitation to even more trouble ahead, it is also wrong. Before Mr. Bush says another word about security for North Korea's regime, before any more policy makers suggest any more deals to gratify Kim Jong Il's deep appetite for his own ease and longevity, there's a report the entire civilized world needs to read--released today by the Washington-based U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. In landmark depth and detail, this report documents the filthiest of all Kim's backroom projects: North Korea's vast system of political prisons, which underpin Kim's precious security right there in his own home.
Not that North Korea's longstanding gulag has been a complete secret. Though Kim's regime denies its existence, and foreign observers have no access to it whatever, enough people have escaped North Korea in recent years to provide substantial testimony about conditions inside the country, and even inside the prison camps. A handful of defectors have told their tales to U.S. congressional committees, some have published books, and dozens have given interviews here and there. In the past year, as Kim's nuclear industry has bumped him up in the headlines, Western journalists have been piecing together damning portraits of Kim and his regime. Information has at last stacked up high enough to suggest that in North Korea, existence as a political prisoner is a particularly hideous business.
But the sources have been scattered. The picture has been murky. The 3,000 or so defectors who over the past decade or so have found asylum have almost all been funneled to South Korea, where the "sunshine" policy of appeasement shoves their awful stories into the shadows. In the West, the general sense has been that somewhere, in nameless places in that area of darkness called North Korea, faceless people may be suffering and dying. But individual accounts invite suspicions that North Korean defectors may be prone to exaggerate, especially given the excesses they describe of deliberately inflicted starvation and routine torture, execution and infanticide in the camps. Hanging over the entire scene is the question, how can we be sure?
This new report, titled, "The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea's Prison Camps," tells us how. It pieces together much of what we know from scattered sources already, and adds in-depth interviews with 30 North Koreans who have experienced the prison camps firsthand, some as prisoners, some as guards. And it sums up the findings--complete with a "Glossary of North Korean Repression" and a set of recommendations on how we might challenge North Korea's Kim on this absolutely indefensible, utterly inhuman aspect of his system.
Compiled by veteran human rights researcher David Hawk, who worked on documenting such events as the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s and Rwandan slaughter of the 1990s, this 120-page document provides the most thorough account yet of what Mr. Hawk described to me in a phone interview this week as an elaborate institution of grotesque abuse that even among the most terrible prison systems on the planet ranks as "the worst." (The report should be available this afternoon at hrnk.org
To map the system, Mr. Hawk, an American, spent substantial time over the past 15 months in South Korea, seeking out North Korean defectors with firsthand experience of Kim Jong Il's gulag. Experienced in probing for consistency and accuracy in stories of repression, Mr. Hawk, together with the U.S Committee on Human Rights in North Korea, painstakingly pieced together the ways in which the accounts most reliably tally with each other, and provide a broader picture.
He also asked the defectors to draw diagrams of the camps, which the committee then helped correlate with satellite photos of the areas described. The drawings and satellite imagery matched up, and former camp inmates were able to identify features of the camps, right down to the dormitories they had lived in, the buildings where they had been beaten or spent time in solitary confinement, in excruciating pain, locked in cells too small to let them stretch their limbs. They could pinpoint places where they had seen their peers murdered, or watched them die of overwork and starvation.
With this report, we can peer into substantial swathes of Kim Jong Il's slave camps, know what we are looking at, and understand far more precisely the horrors inflicted upon the inmates. Mr. Hawk notes that there is no way to calculate a clear total, or know just how many have died and been replaced by yet more prisoners. But current estimates of the number of political prisoners in the lifetime camps alone, run to between 150,000 and 200,000. The report includes a chilling warning that as more information comes to light, it will be important to keep close watch in whatever ways we can, lest Kim try to destroy the evidence by simply massacring all the prisoners.
The point here is not that everyone in the free world must master the intricacies and lexicon of the entire North Korean prison-camp system, but that we need to understand just how systematic, deliberate and cruel an institution it is--no accident of Kim's misrule, but a pillar of his totalitarian state, and of the much-discussed security of his regime. The structure has been faithfully inherited from Kim Jong Il's totalitarian father, Kim Il Sung, designed to routinely and utterly dehumanize, torment and destroy the inmates, while squeezing from them the kind of labor once favored in the Nazi or Soviet death camps. And the policy of starving prisoners, notes this report, "preceded, by decades, the severe nationwide food shortages experienced by North Korea in the 1990s."
This report highlights two Korean phrases that define the two major tiers of Kim's prison-camp system, and deserve to be learned in the West, just as we once had to absorb the term gulag to understand the Soviet system. The first phrase is kwan-li-so, which translates as "political penal-labor colonies"--to which political offenders are sentenced for life, without recourse, sometimes with three generations of their families, without even the show of a trial, and sometimes without even knowing why they are there. There are six or seven of these kwan-li-so, huge sprawling enclaves from which almost no one ever returns, and in which, explains Mr. Hawk, "the most salient feature of day-to-day prison-labor camp life is the combination of below-subsistence food rations and extremely hard labor."
The other phrase is kyo-hwa-so, which means "long-term prison-labor camps," to which both political offenders and common criminals are sentenced for specific terms, and where there is some pretense of "re-education through labor." But in these camps, recounts this report, "loss of life occurs at such high rates that many of the kyo-hwa-so are perceived by prisoners as death camps in that they expect to die before the completion of their sentences." Beyond that, there are the special detention centers--especially brutal--for North Koreans forcibly repatriated after trying to flee into China,
The report presents the grim individual stories of 30 defectors interviewed by Mr. Hawk in-depth, and culled from these, to further clarify the customs of the camps, is a long list of the tortures described. "Worst of all," as the report puts it, is a roster of stories detailing the routine murder of babies born to prisoners, as told by eight separate eyewitnesses. One common denominator is that when pregnant women are forcibly repatriated after fleeing to China, it is policy to murder their newborns, because they might have been fathered by Chinese men. One account describes babies tossed on the ground to die, with their mothers forced to watch. In another interview, a former prisoner, a 66-year-old grandmother, identified as "Detainee #24" to protect relatives still perhaps alive in North Korea, describes being assigned to help in the delivery of babies who were thrown immediately into a plastic-lined box to die in bulk lots. The report notes: "The interviewer had difficulty finding words to describe the sadness in this grandmother's eyes and the anguish on her face as she recounted her experience as a midwife at the detention center in South Sinuiju"--one of the sites shown in detail in the accompanying satellite photos.
There is far more in this report than can be summarized here. Inscribed in blood, etched in human agony, across the vast landscape of Kim Jong Il's gulag, his kwan-li-so, his kyo-hwa-so, is the basic character of this regime whose safety we now propose to ensure. We can no longer plead we do not know what is happening in North Korea's gulag. We ignore its message at our own peril. |
