Rights Group Exposes Conditions in North Korean Prison Camps

The New York Times ^ | October 22, 2003 | JAMES BROOKE

[sarcasm]

EOUL, South Korea, Oct. 21 — A new report on human rights in North Korea says hundreds of thousands of prisoners work in often life-threatening conditions in at least 36 camps hidden in isolated valleys and mountains of the closed Stalinist country.

Torture, meager rations and the imprisonment of entire families are routine, according to the report, which draws on the accounts of 30 former prisoners and prison guards, including several North Koreans who were later among the tens of thousands who have fled to China to escape famine and repression.

In a new step, satellite photographs are matched with information from recent prisoners in the 125-page report, to be released on Wednesday by a private, nonpartisan group based in Washington.

"All the prison facilities are characterized by very large numbers of deaths in detention from forced, hard labor accompanied by deliberate starvation-level food rations," charged the report, "The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea's Prison Camps."

It was written by David Hawk, an American human rights investigator who spent a decade chronicling Cambodia's genocide, and was commissioned by the private U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.

The report comes as the Bush administration seeks to devise a policy toward North Korea, which claims to be processing material for nuclear weapons and is thought by American intelligence services to possess at least two atomic bombs.

The administration is pressing China to stop repatriating escapees from North Korea, and next week the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is to hear testimony from Hwang Jang Yop, North Korea's highest-ranking defector. Next month, Amnesty International is to release a report focusing in part on what it says is North Korea's use of international food aid as a political weapon.

Many of Mr. Hawk's informants have been interviewed by The New York Times and other American newspapers. The camps they describe range from closed labor camps where prisoners serve life sentences to detention centers that the report says were created to punish migrants repatriated from China.

Eight survivors of the repatriation camps said mortality rates there were very high.

Seven of the labor camps were identified in satellite photos provided by two Denver-based companies, DigitalGlobe and Space Imaging.

American officials have declined to release photos of labor camps in North Korea, saying they do not want to reveal precisely what spy satellite are able to detect.

North Korean labor camps, the report says, are designed along Soviet lines, relying on forced labor for economic production. Emulating their Soviet mentors, the North Koreans maintain strict secrecy over the camps, apparently trying to minimize foreign condemnation and internal unrest.

"The North Korean camps were built according to a Stalinist model, and they continue to be run that way," Anne Applebaum, author of "Gulag: a History" (Doubleday), writes in an introduction to the report. "As in Stalin's time, North Korea's leadership doesn't want anyone to know any of these details, since such revelations not only will damage their foreign reputations but put their own regimes at risk."

The report quotes former prison guards, including Ahn Myong Chol, who worked at four camps, as saying that inmates were unusually thin, short and aged-looking, and that "large numbers" were amputees or disabled by work accidents.

Lee Young Kuk, a former guard for the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, reported that during his five years in labors camps in the late 1990's his weight dropped from 207 pounds to 128. Other former prisoners reported similar weight loss, Mr. Hawk said.

An Hyuk, a North Korean student who said he was forcibly repatriated from China in 1987, worked at Yodok Camp No. 15, where he said his first job was to wade waist deep into an icy river to gather stones and build a water diversion channel, Mr. Hawk reported. Scores of people died from exposure, or lost toes and fingers to frostbite, the report says.

Kim Tae Jin was also a prisoner at Yodok in the late 1980's and saw deaths from malnutrition and related diseases every week, the report says.

Work with livestock was considered a plum job, because "the prisoners had the opportunity to steal animal food and even pick through animal droppings for undigested grains," the report says, citing the experience of Kim Yong, a trading company executive imprisoned in the mid-1990's in penal colony No. 14. Mr. Kim, now 53, is to speak of his experiences on Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington.

The report says that as in the Soviet Union, many inmates were common criminals but others were members of the elite deemed to have opposed Kim Jong Il's rise to power.

Still other inmates were ethnic Koreans from Japan, or North Koreans who had done something as simple as singing a South Korean song, the report says.

Forced labor in the camps includes mining coal, iron and gold, quarrying stones, cutting logs, building hydroelectric dams, growing corn and making cement and bricks, the report says.

The report says torture, including use of tiny isolation cells, and beatings are common. But food deprivation appears to be the main technique to control inmates.

"Prisoners are provided only enough food to be kept perpetually on the verge of starvation," the report says.

In the late 1990's, camp administrators gave out too little food for prisoners to survive, and annual death rates soared to as high as 33 percent at one camp, Kyo-Hwa-So Hoeryong, the report says.

To lower mortality rates, prisoners on the verge of dying were increasingly sent home "on medical leave." Some of the former prisoners cited in the report recovered after such medical releases and then escaped to China, Mr. Hawk wrote.

In statements before the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, North Korean officials have repeatedly denied that there are human rights violations in their prison system.

In April the commission approved a resolution on North Korea for the first time, expressing "deep concern about reports of systemic, widespread and grave violations of human rights" and citing "the existence of a large number of prison camps and the extensive use of forced labor." South Korea, which is following a policy of easing tensions with the North, abstained.