Wrong-Thinkers and Splittists
"Through this vast system of unlawful imprisonment, the North Korean regime isolates, banishes, punishes and executes those suspected of being disloyal to the regime. They are deemed 'wrong-thinkers', 'wrong-doers', or those who have acquired 'wrong knowledge', or have engaged in 'wrong associations'.
"North Korea denies access to the camps to outsiders, whether human rights investigators, scholars or international media and severely restricts the circulation of information across its borders.
"North Korea's 2009 currency devaluation (whereby camp authorities were reportedly unable to purchase food in markets to supplement the crops grown in the camps) combined with bad harvests, resulted in the death of large numbers of prisoners after 2010."
Report, Committee for Human Rights in North Korea
The report relied on its data through a concentrated focus on Camp No. 22, a huge compound sprawling across 2,000 square kilometers. In geographic terms, its size twice that of the City of Toronto. According to the report, two camps have been closed in the past year. Despite which 130,000 unfortunates continue to be held in penal labour colonies within the country.
Guilty of a wide variety of offences, all of them utterly 'wrong'. Reminiscent, actually, of the reasoning of their great next-door neighbour who shields them from world opinion. China, North Korea's mentor-state, speaks a language somewhat similar of the dissidents, complainers, those who disrupt the invaluable 'harmony' that China so desperately seeks.
They are the contemptible 'splittists', like the Tibetans who continue to hope that one day they may be granted a measure of autonomy, and in their anxiety not to rouse the rage of Beijing against them so that the military will intervene, promising that it is not sovereignty they wish to recapture as a country of their own, which China denies them.
Unlikely they will ever achieve their goal and regain their independence. China will not loose its grip and has made every effort to water down their majority status in their own country which China has absorbed. Claiming Tibet always to have been part of China. A continual influx of Han Chinese has latterly been dispatched to remind the Tibetans by their presence that China rules.
So North Korea knows by example it can do no wrong. It imprisons those who whisper of another way of life other than mass starvation in the poverty-stricken country whose divine ruler Kim Jong Un -- from whose lightness of being the sun takes inspiration -- prefers to use whatever state treasury there is on refining nuclear technology and long-range missile delivery systems, to feeding his people.
And when food is scarce none can be wasted on those held in the penal labour colonies. It represents an efficiency, in fact. The government need no longer concern itself about the 'welfare' of those it imprisons and exacts labour from on starvation diets. When the diets become truly devoid of any form of nutrition, death takes the prisoners.
At Camp No. 22, in North Hamyong Province in the far northeast of the country the prison population miraculously shrank before the camp was closed. A severe food shortage resulted in little-to-nothing in the way of food passing into the camp to feed the undeserving hungry. Reports allege that the camp numbers dwindled from 30,000 to 3,000 inmates.
Labels: China, Human Rights, North Korea, Societal Failures
posted by Pieface @ Friday, September 06, 2013
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