New Report on the North Korean Gulag

G.I. Korea spotted this article in the San Diego Union-Tribune, quoting gulag survivor and Chosun Ilbo correspondent Kang Chol-Hwan, author of The Aquariums of Pyongyang. The author is none other than DailyNK’s own Young Howard, the same person who invited me to hear Ambassador DiTrani last night. Some excerpts:

Fifty-three-year-old Chul-min Kim’s job in “the complete control zone” was to drive trolleys for transporting coal. One day, he saw some chestnut burrs roll down the mountain slope and stop in front of his trolley. Chul-min, without realizing what he was doing, stopped on the tracks to pick up the chestnuts. A nearby security guard spotted Chul-min as he began to gather the nuts. On reaching Chul-min’s bent-over back, the guard started kicking him and became increasingly violent, allowing his anger to mount. In no time, the hard soles of his boots were laying heavy blows to poor Chul-min’s head until finally, the guard drew a pistol from a pocket in his uniform. He then held down Chul-min’s head with one foot and blew a hole in the forehead of the horrified victim.

Arbitrary murder is rampant in the camps. According to both Kang and Kim, thousands every year are brutally murdered or worked to death in each camp.

The testimonies on forced abortions and baby killings are numerous, and derive from acts witnessed in ordinary detention facilities as well as the gulags. According to “The Hidden Gulag,” a report by the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, eight people testified to witnessing such acts.

Yong Hwa Choi assisted in the delivery of babies, three of whom, he reported, were promptly killed at the Sinuiju provincial detention center in mid-2000. Chun Sik You also reported that four pregnant women at the National Security Agency’s police station in Sinuiju was the site of many forced abortions in mid-2000.

The photographs at upper right are of one of the many orphans, known as kkotjaebi, who roam North Korean streets scavenging for food. From “Children of the Secret State,” by Hardcash Productions, and which aired on the Discovery Times Channel (click for video clips).

The physical size of the camps is enormous. Two are larger than the District of Columbia, and consist of several towns connected by roads. All are in isolated mountain areas which make it difficult for anyone to get in or out to tell the tales of what happens there. But some have managed to escape.

Photograph from The Hidden Gulag by David Hawk.

The most striking feature of the gulag system is the philosophy of “guilt by familial association” or “collective responsibility” whereby whole families within three generations are imprisoned. This policy has been practiced since 1972 when Kim Il Sung, the founder of communist North Korea, stated “Factionalists or enemies of class, whoever they are, their seed must be eliminated through three generations.”

Survival in the camps is extraordinarily difficult:

Prisoners are provided just enough food to be kept perpetually on the verge of starvation. They are compelled by their hunger to eat, if they can get away with it, the food of the labor-camp farm animals, as well as plants, grasses, bark, rats, snakes and anything remotely edible. In committing such desperate acts driven by acute hunger the prisoners simultaneously incur the extreme risk of being detected by an angry security guard and subjected to a brutal, on-the-spot execution.

Not surprisingly, the prisoners are quickly reduced to walking skeletons after their arrival. All gulag survivors said they were struck by the shortness, skinniness, premature aging, hunchbacks, and physical deformities of so many of the inmates they saw upon arriving at the gulag. These descriptions parallel those provided by survivors of the Holocaust in infamous camps like Auschwitz.

Chol Hwan Kang recollects in his memoir “Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag”:

“As prisoners eat rats in the camp, rats were almost depleted and became harder to find. The surviving rats are wary. Rat tastes strange and somehow unpleasant at first. The revolting taste, however, soon disappears. The children never lost opportunities to catch rats, as they watch so many other prisoners dying of undernourishment and pellagra. Rat is the only source of meat for prisoners for 10 or 20 years.”

. . . .
At age 17, [Kang] was less than 150 centimeters tall (5 feet) and weighed about 40 kilograms (88 pounds). In fact, Kang’s size was characteristic of all detained children, whose growth was universally retarded by continuous malnutrition and brutality. Girls were no taller than 145 centimeters by their late teens and were never cleaner than boys. With unkempt hair and lacking the nutrition critical to adolescent development, they did not look like girls, forced to become part of an androgynous and anonymous prison population.

Equally bizarre are the arbitrary reasons people end up in the camps: the crime of having lived in Japan, crumpling a newspaper with a picture of Kim Il Sung, or being the grandson of someone who has.

When we talk about conducting diplomacy with this regime, it would serve us well to ask whether both forms of depravity–the North’s obsession to arm itself with WMDs and its mass murder of its own population–share a single pathology. The conclusion that they do suggests a single solution.