NK Freedom Watch, No. 5

Courtesy of Freedom House (with a hat tip to the staff there), here. Portions of this issue read like an indictment, which mainly makes it painfully obvious how far away we are from seeing a real one.

The same methods of execution are applied to political criminals and economic criminals. When the death warrant is issued for a criminal, he is immediately cut off from all food supplies and his arms and legs are broken at the joints so that he may not take any desperate actions. He is then beaten with a club for a whole week until his body becomes inert like a living mummy. On the eve of the execution, the death-row convict is gagged with a bit or coiled spring so that he may not speak. Different prisons use different gagging methods; but the majority use bits. The convicts usually do not open their mouth, so the bit is forcibly pushed into the mouth, breaking the teeth and badly smashing the lips.

The recent conference in Rome produced a few statements from various Eurocrats, although the response from the main conglomerates of the Human Rights Industry clearly aren’t going beyond token gestures as North Koreans suffer and die by the millions. If just one of them could only land himself a cell in Gitmo, not only might he regain some body mass, even Kofi Annan might finally pay him some attention. In these times, gulag garb just doesn’t catch a sympathetic eye. Today, all the fashionable victims are wearing RDX and roofing nails.