generalspeaking

Dread Existence

"If we were to help these prisoners in any way or be compassionate, we would be executed and our families as well, and we were given the right to kill any prisoner who attempted to escape. I remember a colleague dragging a prisoner who was working in the field and executing this prisoner.
"The best way to put it is they were the slaves, and we were the slave owners.
"They would be told they were there to pay for the crimes of some distant relative that they had never met. I saw even two-year-olds and four-year-olds sent to the prison camp, and what crime did these children commit?"
"I'm very sorry and apologize for the fact I was part of that system."
An Myeong Chul, former North Korean Prison Camp 22 guard

"I myself almost died three times. I remember burying with my own hands about 300 prison inmates."
"It actually depended on the prisoner themselves and how much effort they put into trying to survive -- if they made an effort to catch insects or rats or snakes to supplement whatever food they were getting."
Kang Cheol-hwan, prisoner, Yoduk camp, North Korea

Himself now a survivor of North Korea's gulag -- within which an estimated 150,000 North Koreans are being held in various camps -- Mr. An and Mr. Kang, a former gulag prisoner, now campaign internationally against human rights abuses within North Korea. They experienced those abuses and know of what they speak, as witnesses and sufferers.

The Council for Human Rights in North Korea, a group they are members of, arranged a conference in Toronto at which three former prisoners spoke of their experiences. They represent North Korean defectors, people who fled the odiously repressive regime to find haven in South Korea. Most of those defectors are ex-prisoners; Mr. An is a relative rarity; a former prison guard.

Mr. An's father was a local Party official; his influence was instrumental in his son finding such a position viewed as favourable within the society. He spoke of "a lot of deaths" that he had witnessed resulting from violence, starvation, overwork, or accidents from the coal mines where the notorious Camp 22 prisoners worked. Prisoners so weak from starvation they succumbed to infectious diseases that became lethal to them.

About 90% of those prisoners, an inquisitively curious Mr. An discovered, were arrested in the middle of the night. They were given no information respecting the grounds for their imprisonment. Then came the time when his father blamed the famine wracking the country on top Communist leaders, and not the local officials who were held to be responsible by supreme leader Kim Jong-il, and his fate was sealed.

Knowing that, his father committed suicide, his mother, sister and brother were arrested and sent to the gulag, but he escaped and made his way across the border into China, and from there eventually to South Korea. Mr. Kang wrote a memoir of his years in Yoduk, The Aquariums of Pyongyang, in which he described conditions in the camps. For example, that 10% of the 35,000 or more people imprisoned at Yoduk, died every year.

They died of malnutrition, mistreatment, overwork, or a combination of all those factors. He too now lives in South Korea having successfully escaped from the dread life of an imprisoned, abused North Korean. He was only nine years old when he was first sent to Yoduk, one among several relatives imprisoned after his grandfather had been accused of being a Japanese agent.

He described the "very harsh" conditions with forced labour from early morning to nine at night, the torture rooms, and the prevailing "massive malnutrition", that took the lives of thousands of North Koreans. Kim Jong-un has continued in his father's tradition, and enlarged upon it. Under the new leadership purges result when powerful factions jockey for power; the losers go to the gulag.

Labels: Crimes, Human Rights, North Korea, Persecution, Poverty, Societal Failures

posted by Pieface @ Sunday, September 29, 2013