The Hidden Gulag

The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, founded in 2001 "to raise awareness  about conditions in North Korea and to publish well-documented research that focuses international attention on North Korean human rights conditions" has published a new edition (pdf) of its 2003 report, ‘The Hidden Gulag’:

The second edition of Hidden Gulag utilizes the testimony of sixty former North Koreans who were severely and arbitrarily deprived of their liberty in a vast network of penal and forced labor institutions in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) for reasons not permitted by international law.  This contradicts the formal December 2009 proclamation by North Korea to the United Nations Human Rights Council that the term ‘political prisoners’ is not in the DPRK’s vocabulary, and that the so-called political prisoner camps do not exist.

At the time of the research for the first edition of Hidden Gulag in 2003, there were some 3,000 former North Koreans who recently had found asylum in the Republic of Korea (ROK or South Korea) among whom were several scores of former political prisoners in the DPRK.  By the time of the research for the second edition in 2010 and 2011, there were some 23,000 former North Koreans who recently arrived in South Korea.  Included in this number are hundreds of persons formerly detained in the variety of North Korea’s slave labor camps, penitentiaries, and detention facilities.   Included in this number are several former prisoners who were arbitrarily imprisoned for twenty to thirty years before their escape or release from the labor camps, and their subsequent flight through China to South Korea.  This newly available testimony dramatically increases our knowledge of the operation of North Korea’s political prison and labor camp system....

In addition to the testimony and accounts from the former political prisoners in this report, this second edition of Hidden Gulag also includes satellite photographs of the prison camps.  The dramatically improved, higher resolution satellite imagery now available through Google Earth allows the former prisoners to identify their former barracks and houses, their former work sites, execution grounds, and other landmarks in the camps.  The report provides the precise locations — exact degrees of latitude and longitude — of the political prison camps that North Korea proclaims do not exist.

From the preface:

Upon receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, Czeslaw Milosz, a defector from communist Poland and author of The Captive Mind, observed that “those who are alive receive a mandate from those who are silent forever.” In publishing the first and second editions of Hidden Gulag, the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea has assumed that mandate. By means of these reports, it gives voice to those silenced in the remote labor camps and prisons of North Korea. 

There may be as many as 200,000 North Koreans locked away on political grounds behind barbed wire and subject to extreme cruelty and brutality. Many are “not expected to survive,” according to the State Department’s 2010 human rights report, in particular those incarcerated in the kwan-li-so (political penal labor colonies). Others are held in long-term prison-labor penitentiaries or camps, shorter-term detention facilities, mobile labor brigades and interrogation detention facilities. The vast majority are arbitrarily arrested with no reference to any judicial procedure and for “offenses” that are not punishable in most countries, namely listening to a foreign radio broadcast, holding a Protestant religious service, watching a South Korean DVD, leaving dust on Kim Il-sung’s picture, exiting the country without permission, expressing critical remarks about government policies, or having a father or grandfather who was a landowner or defected to South Korea or worked for the Japanese, thereby placing the family in a “hostile” category under North Korea’s social classification or songbun system.

Starvation food rations, forced labor, routine beatings, systematic torture and executions put the North Korean camps in the ranks of history’s worst prisons for political offenders. Originally modeled on the Soviet gulag, the North Korean camps have developed distinctive features of their own for which no terminology has yet been devised. Particularly horrifying is the incarceration of entire families, including children and grandparents, in order to isolate them from society and punish them because of their relationship to family members accused of political crimes. Rooting out “class enemies for three generations” was specifically ordered by Kim Il-sung, which at times has led to comparisons with Nazi death camps. An equally horrifying practice distinctive to North Korea is forced abortion regularly carried out and in the most brutal manner on women prisoners who illegally crossed the border into China, became pregnant by Chinese men and were forcibly repatriated to North Korea. In cases where the pregnancy is too advanced, guards beat the infants to death or bury them alive after they are born. Still another point of departure in North Korea is that all the residents of the kwan-li-so are denied any correspondence, visits or life saving parcels from family and friends. They are totally incommunicado. 

Estimates of the numbers who have died in the camps over the past 40 years have run well over one hundred thousand. The existence of the political prison camps, however, is soundly denied by North Korean officials. “We must envelop our environment in a dense fog to prevent our enemies from learning anything about us,” Kim Jong-il reportedly said. Human rights specialist David Hawk in his first edition of Hidden Gulag (2003) and now in its second edition (2012) challenges North Korea’s deliberate effort to hide the truth. With painstaking care he has unearthed and compiled evidence from the period 1970 to 2008 to demonstrate an extensive prison camp system hidden away in North Korea’s isolated mountains. Amassing satellite photographs and hand drawings of the different camps, testimonies from former prisoners and interviews with former guards, he has documented beyond a doubt the existence of penal labor camps and other political prisons. He has met with almost all of the former kwan-li-so prisoners who were either released or escaped to South Korea. Of the more than 23,000 defectors who have made the treacherous journey to the South over the past decade, hundreds are former prisoners. In telling their stories, they are making the world aware of the crimes and atrocities upon which Kim family rule has long been based.  

More at the Washington Post.