Two human rights groups concerned with the fates of imprisoned North Koreans say they will release a series of satellite photos at the end of this month revealing details of concentration camps in that country. The groups, Democracy Network Against North Korea Gulag and The Society to Help Returnees to North Korea (a Tokyo-based NGO) -- which include former North Korean inmates and a camp guard as members-- are trying to raise awareness about the conditions in the secret camps.
One of the photos was put on display by the two groups Friday at a Tokyo news conference.
From all first-hand accounts, and there are few of those -- North Korea's concentration camps may be the worst present human rights abuse situation.
There are believed to be a dozen political prisons and as many as 30 remote concentration camps -- many using forced labor and some devoted to political re-education.
The Hudson Institute, a U.S.-based research organization, estimates that in recent years some 400-thousand people have died in these camps. Defectors from North Korea who previously had been sent to the camps, claim milions and millions have died in the camps since the late 1940s, but have no evidence to support their claim.
"As for food, we were given corn and a small amount of salt, so that in three months everyone suffered from malnutrition," says Kang Cheol-Hwan, who was interned in the Yodeok concentration camp for 10 years. He says he began serving his sentence when he was nine years old.
Kang recalls that in order to survive camp inmates eat snakes, frogs, cockroaches and rats -- whatever they can get their hands on to fill their stomachs. Those who don't eat such things, die fairly soon. And elderly inmates don't survive for longer than six months regardless of what they eat.
Kang, who defected to South Korea in 1992, said inmates were awakended at 5 a.m. and forced to work until 8 p.m. In some camps that was falled by hours of "political re-eduction."
One chilling aspect of political crimes in North Korea is that they transcend generations. That is, children and grandchildren can also be held responsible for the alleged crimes of their forebearers. Defectors say suspects face no trials and are removed from their homes at night, along with their
children.
Kang, now a reporter for a South Korean newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, recently visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which details the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps.
Kang says he was able to easily draw parallels between Nazi Germany and Communist North Korea. But in the case of the Pyongyang regime, he says, its focuses exclusively on killing its own people. And instead of toxic gas, the North Korean victims usually die due to harsh slave labor or starvation. But Kang adds that in the North Korean camps "I did witness (executions) eleven times."
At a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, Kang and others who survived the camps, speaking in Korean, said slave laborers are forced to harvest opium and timber and mine gold, all which can be exchanged for hard currency in open or clandestine international trade.
A former guard at four concentration camps for political prisoners says he was told to treat the inmates without mercy.
"I was told that the prisoners are bad people who betrayed (the regime) and should be handled viciously," Ahn Myong-Chol told reporters.
Ahn says he had a change of heart when he was transfered to truck driving duties. He then had opportunities to interact with inmates and began to realize they were not really guilty of any crimes. On his escape in 1994 he took with him two inmates but the pair -- who had gone into the camps before the age of four -- and spent more than two decades confined -- were caught and executed.
Both Kang and Ahn are in Japan on a nine-city tour appealing to the people and government here to put pressure from the oustide on the Kim Jong Il regime. They say it is impossible for a successful coup to be mounted internally.
Not much has been reported on this subject because little information gets out of North Korea. Management consultant T.W. Kang, based in Kawasaki, Japan, is among the small number of foreigners who have been permitted by Pyongyang to visit North Korea.
"I would say that the degree of how information is hermetically sealed in both directions, in and out of North Korean territory is beyond what you would probably ever see in any other part of the world. I mean it is really hermetically sealed," says Kang, who is a South Korean citizen. "Some of it is starting to leak out. But I think the rate at which this leak is happening is very, very, very slow. Slow and few and far between."
The key to any action on the human rights issue, according to Kang and other North Korea-watchers is actually China.
"More than 99 percent of the border between North Korea and the outside world -- the land border -- is with China," Kang says. "So unless China shows some kind of understanding in this thing it's not a straightforward exercise, from a diplomatic-political standpoint. Which I why, I think, you see a lot of NGO's and other organizations trying to find creative ways to address these issues."
China is not keen to pressure Pyongyang on this issue. At the recent six-way talks on North Korea, focusing on Pyongyang's nuclear weapons development, Beijing rebuffed attempts by Japan and others to have human rights -- including abductions of Japanese by North Korean spies -- addressed in the multi-lateral discussions.
South Korea also appears content with the status quo -- fearing a quick collapse of the Stalinist state on its northern border would devastate its economy -- and on a scale much more severe than what Germany grappled with after the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
2003.09.14
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