Kamp Korea
The Eye-Opening Truth About North Korea’s Regime
by Faith McDonnell
I shut my eyes at the moment of the first execution. I could not watch the death of this poor refugee, who had been forcibly repatriated by the Chinese when he was discovered trying to escape from North Korea. When the second execution took place, I opened my eyes.
Sitting on Capitol Hill, watching a March 2005 secret film of public executions in North Korea, I was ashamed to do less than the hundreds of North Korean citizens summoned to learn their government’s lesson: “Criminals” did not deserve to live. The film, a courageous collaboration by dissidents and the Japanese media, gives the first-ever photographic evidence of the regime’s merciless treatment of those who try to flee.
Kim’s Hell
Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il cut off the country from the rest of the world, but now the testimonies and daring actions of defectors, refugees, and activists are exposing this totalitarian state. The same irrationality and evil that make the regime a danger to the national security of the United States have made it hell on earth for the North Koreans.
But word gets out. German activist Dr. Norbert Vollertsen was one of the first to mobilize American advocacy for human rights in North Korea. In 1999, volunteering as an emergency-room doctor in Pyongyang, he donated skin for a graft for a burn victim. The North Koreans rewarded him with a “Friendship Medal,” a car, and a V.I.P. passport, affording him the kind of access never given to those on state visits.
Vollertsen was undone when he saw the real North Korea: the country of mass starvation; villages with no sanitation or running water; no medical care; and orphanages full of dying children. Since that time, he has devoted his life to efforts to bring freedom to that country. He and other heroes regularly risk their lives helping North Korean escapees.
While all of North Korea—whose official name is the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea—can rightly be called a prison, an estimated 200,000 North Koreans now suffer in actual prison labor camps, and 400,000 have died in them in the last three decades. In 2003, the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea released The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps. The report includes groundbreaking high-resolution satellite photographs and the testimonies of dozens of former political prisoners and defectors. Details in the close-up photos correspond exactly with details from the witnesses.
Most inmates have been imprisoned for trumped-up political “crimes.” Such offenses include reading a foreign newspaper, singing a South Korean pop song, or “insulting the authority” of the North Korean leadership. Three generations of the family of the offender are also arrested and imprisoned, with no legal recourse or judicial process, according to North Korea’s “heredity rule.” Even offenders’ babies are “guilty” and are killed at birth.
All prisoners suffer unimaginable agony in the camps. The Hidden Gulag maintains that “the camps feature the gamut of abnormal and aberrant human behavior that results from treating people like animals.” Prisoners are deliberately semi-starved, yet expected to fulfill absurd quotas in mining, timber cutting, and other hazardous work.
Faith McDonnell is Director of the Church Alliance for a New Sudan (CANS) at the Institute on Religion and Democracy (www.ird-renew.org) in Washington, D.C.
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