China has hunted down and arrested a North Korean defector who revealed the first documentary evidence of Pyongyang's chemical and biological experiments on political prisoners, said his supporters yesterday.
Kang Byong-sop, 59, was seized on the Chinese-Laotian border with his wife and youngest son, aged 25, last month after escaping from North Korea with proof that the Stalinist regime is killing political prisoners by experimenting on them with biological and chemical weapons. . . .
Mr Kim believes it was no coincidence that the senior border official was present. He is convinced that the Chinese authorities, alerted to the potential value of their prey, had been offered "a considerable financial inducement" to find Mr Kang.
"Mr Kang is easy to identify," Mr Kim said. "He has to walk bent almost double after interrogation in North Korea. On one occasion his back was broken and on another he was dropped on his head, snapping his neck."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/mai...2.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/02/12/ixportal.html
"I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. The parents, a son, and a daughter." The speaker is Kwon Hyuk, a former North Korean intelligence agent and a one-time administrator at Camp 22, the country's largest concentration camp. His testimony was heard on a television documentary that aired last week on the BBC. "The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save the kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing."
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/02/08/an_auschwitz_in_korea/
David Hawk, who investigated Pol Pots crimes for the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) recently investigated North Korean labor camps and forced labor prisons on behalf of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. The report, The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Koreas Prison Camps, focuses on exile and defector interviews. All have first hand knowledge. All were guards or inmates or workers at the camps. There is physical evidence too documents and reconnaissance photos confirm the accounts. It is physically sickening to read.
I've summarized it below. If you don't trust my version of it, then go read the whole report, and know that evil exists. Do me a favor though - don't try to turn this into some "Bush lied" contest. It's not about that. It's about something horrifying that most of us would rather not look at; which we could do something about if we gave a damn.
So enough of the preaching from me. Go ahead, read my summary of the report. Or read the whole thing if you have the stomach for it.
The Committee is a non-partisan non-governmental organization. It was formed in 2002 to conduct independent research on human rights abuses in North Korea. The board members are reputable citizens, including Congressmen, think tankers and respected NGO officials.
All of the prison forced labor camps are divided into one of three categories. Two hold political prisoners, mainly (political penal labor colonies), with scattered felons. The other type holds misdemeanants, those who failed to escape North Korea, and other political prisoners.
The political penal labor colonies hold prisoners either indefinitely, or for a fixed term of years.
The misdemeanant/escapee mixed camps are generally used for terms of fixed duration, but they are exceptionally brutal, even by North Korean standards. The death rate is shockingly high; as many as one in five prisoners in all the camps die, or are murdered by the guards / administrators each year. You do the math as to the actuarial table, for a prisoner sentenced to a typical five year term. Some escapees have reported a 4/5ths deathrate among their cadre.
The prisoners call all three types of prisons death camps. The deaths result partly from starvation (among an already chronically malnourished North Korean populace). Many deaths result at the hands of other inmates, who are encouraged to beat individual inmates as punishment, and to prey on each other, James Clavell King Rat style. Beatings by guards and literally unbelievable working conditions cause many other deaths.
For prisoners in the misdemeanant and penal labor colonies with fixed terms, there is little or no due process. Kangaroo courts are normal. Based on eyewitness testimony, 150,000 to 200,000 prisoners seem to be imprisoned under the political prisoner classification.
Prisoner labor typically involves mining, logging, textile manufacturing, farming, or other industrial projects performed under dreadfully harsh conditions," exacerbated by planned, intentional starvation within the camps.
Misdemeanor and political offenses are often caused by famine conditions things like stealing food or buying it on the black market. Hunger is a common theme in the report. Any unauthorized eating grass or grubs from an exercise area (which thwarts the planned starvation) may be punished with imprisonment. Famine related offenses are so common, that a network of informally established, locally operated and mostly undocumented local forced labor camps are established on an ad hoc basis to deal with famine related crime. The number of prisoners held in informal camps is unknown. They are impossible to document accurately at this time.
The treatment by guards is standard prison fare for persons incarcerated in an insane hermit kingdom / police state. Interrogations are expectedly horrifically brutal. Beatings are the most common interrogation tool, and are severe enough that inmates usually beg to be killed. When the guards get tired of beating prisoners, they organize prisoners in working parties, the order the working parties to beat their fellow prisoners as punishment, or during interrogation.
One nifty method of torture, reminiscent of the preparation of Ka Gogi, (Bulgogi prepared with dog meat) involves hanging an attempted escapee upside down. All the inmates in the camp file by and beat the inmate severely.
Strangulation and suffocation by water are common means of punishment and torture, as are beating the fingertips and feet.
Famine offenses arent the only political charges. Contact with South Koreans or their culture (e.g. South Korean radio) results in a prison term, and given the conditions, usually results in death. Failure to be sufficiently zealous about Great Leader Kim Jong Il also lands one in jail. Many of the charges are fabricated.
The camps destroy families intentionally so. Kim Il Sung established a class and race structure when he gained power, and deemed certain races and classes superior or inferior. This political and racial/ethnic classification leads to an economic class structure.
Class isnt necessarily racially or ethnically based. Certain classes labor under the presumption that they are counter-revolutionary betrayers of the government, because members of the class are part Chinese or part Japanese, or their families were politically suspect. The government believes in a racial / genetic theory of guilt (in effect the same sound theory relied upon by a lot of people who want to apportion guilt and innocence, benefits and detriments based on race.)
It works in inverse as well. Three generations of a political prisoners family may be imprisoned, tortured and killed as punishment for the prisoners actions. Parents of the wrong ethnicity, or parents whose own parents or grandparents were politically suspect, implies guilt.
Racism and suspect class hatred led directly to the horrific forced abortion policies. Failed escapees who are women, who happen to be pregnant when repatriated, undergo forced abortion or infanticide. This is rationalized thusly: the hated Han (Chinese) race may have impregnated the woman; therefore their spawn must be wiped out. The regime shouldnt have to feed those born to the traitorous classes. The women themselves are exterminated just like male prisoners. Its thought that killing the children of the traitorous classes is one way of stomping out the traitorous classes.
Pregnant women even those pregnant by North Korean men - are given drugs to induce labor, and when the baby is delivered, it is thrown into a box to die, often with several other recently delivered babies. Occasionally, another female inmate will be forced to strangle a box full of delivered babies, which can range in gestational age from around four months, to full term. Participating in these actions appears to damage the mental health of such inmates. They simply break, there is no other term for what seems to happen to them.
Defectors report that the physical appearance of the prisoners is shocking. Amputations, hunchbacks and other deformities are common from malnutrition, frostbite, and harshly primitive working conditions. The prison culture has evolved into a bestial existence, with inmates turning on each other (and being encouraged to turn on each other) as informants or criminals, simply to live.
Forced labor textiles and industrial products from the labor camps are exported predominantly to the people the New York Times, John Kerry and Howard Dean remind us are our moral betters: France, Germany, and Russia, as well as to Poland.
So if you give a damn about it, if this bothers you, then do something about it. Write your congressman, write the president, contact the Committee, or even contact Amnesty International to get them pushing harder on this issue. Hell, I don't care, form a North Korean forced labor shanty town on your college campus. But whatever you do, even if you do nothing, don't just look away.
Evil may prosper when good men do nothing; but it especially prospers when good men can't even look at it and speak its name.
http://www.coldfury.com/Sasha/archives/004620.html#004620
