New Reports Accuse N. Korea of Starving and Exploiting Kids

Barring a few privileged exceptions, the lives of children are dirt cheap north of the DMZ. Last year, UNICEF and the World Food Program reported that 40% of North Korea’s children are chronically malnourished.

The children in this video are mostly orphans; they’re homless kids known as “kotjaebi.” They began to appear on the streets of North Korean cities after the Great Famine killed or displaced many of their parents. They live by begging, stealing, foraging on trash, or getting by however they can. But to the North Korean authorities, they’re a nuisance, so there’s a new campaign to round them up and put them in detention camps, known at 9/27 camps after the date of a detention order personally signed by Kim Jong Il:

After hailing “ËœSocialist Revolutionary Climax’ in the New Year Commentary, North Korea reinforced its crackdown on Ggotjebi in Shinuiju in North PyongAn Province. The government of Shinuiju City, the Safety Agencies, the Socialist Youth League, as well as the General Federation of Trade Union are cooperating to crackdown on Ggotjebi. They are prioritizing this activity as an important means to uphold Kim Jong Il and Socialism.

9.27 Department (Order 1) is currently in charge of this activity. 9.27 Department was created by the Party, the Safety Agencies, and the Trade Unions. The Department is currently arresting 20-30 children a day in Shinuiju on average. The agents arrest the Ggotjebi as soon as they are seen in public, and send them to a jail (Gu-ho-so) specially created for them. Because of these crackdown efforts, the jail for Ggotjebi in Shinuiju is completely full.

Ggotjebi in this jail undergoes approximately 6 hours of forced labor in mines or farms. They do not receive their food ration if they do not work hard enough. Imposition of forced labor is in violation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and North Korea is a party state to this Convention. This jail is run by the Party or the Labor Union in the city. The laborers feed Ggotjebi with food that they confiscate from markets and from the street. [Open Radio for N. Korea]

The report does not specify where the kids are sent after the 6 hours of labor are completed, but previous reports about 9/27 camps describe them as places of long-term detention. As this 1999 Washington Post story reports, the food supply in those detention centers isn’t enough to sustain a child’s life:

As more children lose their parents to starvation, for example, North Korea is warehousing orphans in sparse detention centers called “9-27” camps. Named for the date Kim Jong Il created them, Sept. 27, 1995, the camps were reportedly Kim’s way of what he called “normalizing” society — that is, clearing raggedy orphans off the streets.

According to defectors and other witnesses, the camps have become prisons for unwanted children, some of whom are reportedly tattooed with a three-digit code that identifies where they are from.

The video smuggled out of North Korea late last year shows a 9-27 camp: a four-story building where soldiers live downstairs and children are housed on the top two floors — reportedly to keep them from jumping to freedom. On the tape, one young boy said he jumped from a third-floor window, breaking an arm, rather than stay in the camp, where he was not being fed. [Washington Post, Mar. 13, 1999]

Open Radio’s report coincides with a new U.N. report criticizing the regime’s treatment of these children, in typically mild U.N. fashion:

A further concern was information received that children had been subjected to severe ill-treatment while in detention, including street children (kkotjebis), children who crossed the border without permission and other children taken into custody of the police or other state agencies. Also, while noting efforts to provide support to foster care families as an alternative to institutionalisation, the Committee was alarmed that that many of the children placed in residential care were in fact not orphans and that a large number of children were customarily placed in residential institutions due to the lack of effective gate-keeping mechanisms or care alternatives. In that connection, it reiterated its previous concern that triplets, for example, were automatically institutionalized and that parents were not offered alternative solutions that would allow them to raise these children at home. The Committee was furthermore concerned about the situation of children whose parents were detained. [U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child]

The report also criticizes the regime for allocating insufficient resources to care for its children (due, no doubt, to more pressing national priorities — how many children do you suppose the regime could feed and house for the cost of launching one Taepodong?).

A third new report by a group of South Korean NGO’s adds further condemnation:

“Child labor and economic exploitation have become widely spread and a customary practice accompanying the worsening economic hardship of the country,” said their “Situation Report on the Rights of the Child in the DPRK (North Korea).”

Children in the poorest parts of the destitute state face the greatest difficulty in obtaining an education. The few textbooks available in their schools are usually works celebrating the North’s communist party and leaders, it said.

Children are often sent out to work at farms and factories or to scrounge for materials such as tin and wood that can be used by the state’s powerful military or sold by local authorities, said the report, based on interviews with about 50 defectors.

“Consequently, it seems illiteracy rates have increased and the overall level of academic achievement in North Korean youth has decreased in most areas except for Pyongyang and a handful of other areas,” it said. [Reuters]

Instead of an education, North Korean kids are indoctrinated with pablum about their Dear Leader, and not surprisingly, this waste of class time comes at the expense of reading and math. Their teachers, who are probably starving themselves, often sell the food they’re supposed to distribute to their students. A rise in illiteracy is an astonishing thing for a society that places such a high value on education.

But on the positive side, the report notes a decrease in the use of child torture by the police.

And this still isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a child who has the misfortune of being born in North Korea. The plight of North Korea’s elderly doesn’t sound much better. Which is to say nothing of how the handicapped are treated.