Eagerly Awaiting Eric Sirotkin’s Fact Check

A year after President Obama’s inauguration, North Koreans continue to step forward to slander the Workers’ Paradise and act as willing agents of neocon propaganda about North Korea’s political rehabilitation system:

Life under the regime took its toll on Kim’s family. Her parents died of hunger at Yodok, she said. One son accidentally drowned there. Another was executed in 1989 while trying to escape from North Korea. Kim’s husband was taken to a separate camp, which she calls “a place with no return.” She never saw him again. “I spent years not knowing what the charge was,” said Kim, now 73, who was released in 1979. [L.A. Times]

Based on interviews with more than 370 defectors, including 17 who had been held in the gulags, the watchdog group concluded that the prisons — which were set up in the late 1950s and numbered 13 in the 1970s — have established team captains among inmates to pressure prisoners into doing even more labor. On Tuesday, comments by the three ex-prisoners, who were not cited in the recent report, included details on the Yodok gulag’s inner workings.

The former inmates said the North Korean regime often imprisoned the relatives of people it suspected of crimes, as in Kim’s case. They said that at Yodok, relatives of suspected criminals outnumbered the accused. The three said most of Yodok’s inmates had been detained by public security police and sent to the gulag without trial or explanation of their alleged crime.

“Even the beasts would be ashamed to be there,” she said, describing an existence in which prisoners had to get up at 3:30am, get to work in fields or forests or mines by 4:30 am and keep working until nightfall. “Parents and children die there,” she said. “We don’t have a coffin for the body.” [Don Kirk, Asia Times]

It’s remarkable how many North Koreans, including those who were once privileged members of its society, left their homes, livelihoods, families, “collective spirit,” and universal medical care to work dead-end jobs in Seoul by day and act as neocon propagandists by night.

Well, someone is lying here, anyway. Way back in 2003, Eric Sirotkin led a delegation from the National Lawyers Guild to North Korea, which issued a report called, “North Korea: The Grand Deception Revealed,” where Sirotkin wrote:

We were struck by the design of the DPRK criminal justice system. We even found in a bookstore the Criminal Procedures Act of the DPRK in English. Several principles seem quite progressive and reflect more of restorative justice, than retributive justice. The prime objective of the criminal justice system is rehabilitation or setting an example, not punishment. There is an element of the latter, as there are jail terms for crimes, but this is not the major thrust of their system. In fact, they have codified a process by which those affected by the decision or the conduct of the accused have a real role in the process and those that contributed to the delinquent act or were involved in educating the person (i.e. a parent or friend) have to be available in the process to receive a “lecture” from the court. Penalties include submitting the accused to “social” or “public education. Those arrested are required to have their families notified within 48 hours. A defense counsel is to be provided to represent the rights of the accused.

We were told that there was no death penalty and that the maximum penalty for any crime is 12 years, with the objective being to try to determine why the person committed the crime and to help that person become a productive member of society. A lack of a death penalty was seen by the delegation as a sign of a civilized nation. There appear to be labor camps where people work out their sentences. No effort was made to hide the presence of these camps. The U.S. media’s recent reports on the poor conditions, high mortality rate and lack of proper care or food, in the camps requires further investigation. In light of the false and exaggerated claims about starvation in the country in general, these reports must be viewed with a grain of salt. We will ask to visit these camps on future delegations.We asked about the penalties for crimes against the state and whether there was a separate system for those crimes. There is not, but provisions are made for crimes that present a “social danger. This seems consistent with a socialist society organized around the “common good,” but very general and could be subject to abuse. How it is applied remains to be discovered. However, the North Koreans we met with seemed professed to not understanding how someone would really formally challenge the decisions of the collective, as there is, according to them, an elaborate mechanisms for participation and input at various levels off society.

To my knowledge, Sirotkin has never retracted or apologized for his comments. In fact, he’s still at it:

The only possible conclusion I can draw from Sirotkin’s failure to retract his praise for North Korea’s death camps carbon-neutral rehabilitation facilities? It should be obvious: all of these alleged North Korea “witnesses” must be lying. Also, these are photographs of optical illusions.

Since Eric Sirotkin just might be reading this, I wonder if he can help us rebut this “grand deception” with his own observations from the inspections of North Korea’s “correctional” system he led us to believe, back in 2003, that he and the National Lawyers’ Guild would soon undertake. Oddly enough, I’ve scoured the internet and didn’t find Sirotkin’s report.

My comments are open to you, Eric.