The US committee for human rights in North Korea is reporting on one of thousands of individual rights violations taking place under the communist regime of North Korea.
North Korea detains up to 200,000 people in “slave” camps where torture and executions are routine and starvation is widespread, according to a report on the isolated state.The study by the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea told how pregnant women among thousands of North Koreans repatriated from China are forced to abort their infants or watch their babies killed after birth, in case the fathers are foreign.
“The Hidden Gulag - Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps” was compiled by David Hawk, a former UN human rights investigator, who has in the past reported on the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia and the ethnic massacres in Rwanda in the mid-1990s.
North Korea denies it has political prisoners. But the study, based on interviews with former inmates and guards who escaped North Korea, estimated there were between 150,000 and 200,000 people in dozens of camps.
It produced satellite photographs of the camps, and mines and industrial complexes where inmates are forced into “slave labour”.
Political inmates are detained for their perceived opposition to North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il or his father Kim Il-Sung, the North’s founder leader who died in 1994.
Some were imprisoned for tipping ink on a picture of one of the two Kims or not taking care of photographs of the two that every household in the nation of 22 million people must prominently display.
One woman’s crime had been to sing a South Korean pop song. Others were ethnic Koreans who returned from Japan but were considered to have been “spoiled by their exposure to Japanese liberalism and capitalist prosperity.”
Up to three generations of the family of each offender is also detained to ensure political purification.
The study said there was “a North Korean gulag of forced-labour colonies, camps and prisons where scores of thousands of prisoners – some political, some convicted felons – are worked, many to their deaths.”
The report said each camp has between 5,000 and 50,000 detainees and that “prisoners live under brutal conditions in permanent situations of deliberately contrived semi-starvation.”
Disgusting.
