Posted on 01/17/2004 12:40:50 PM PST by Pan_Yans Wife
North Korean refugees repatriated by China tell of prison where new-born children are left to die. Richard Spencer reports from Seoul
There is a cell in Nongpo prison where they take the women whose babies are to be killed.
As in the other cells, the women are packed so tightly they can only crouch, squeezing together, for sleep. There is no room to lie down, so when one of the women goes into labour, the others stand up to make space.
They watch, but are not allowed to help, as the baby is born. One woman designated by the guards takes the baby and lies it face down on the floor.
Then the women sit again, including the bleeding mother, and the baby is left to die. If it cries for too long, more than a day or two, a guard smothers it.
No crying is allowed, by the mother or the other women. If any explanation is given, the guard says: "You should not have gone to China. This will teach you to have sex with Chinese men, to have Chinese babies."
Often, the regime of Kim Jong-il, North Korea's so-called Dear Leader, is treated as a comic opera. Television news pictures are of his extraordinary parades, where military hardware and ballroom-dancing couples in immaculate formation pay tribute to Kim and his late father, President Kim il-Sung.
Now, as its nuclear weapons programme is once again on the table, it is treated more seriously, as a potential negotiating partner.
Yet out of sight is a network of jails and labour camps containing hundreds of thousands of starving, dying people. Their offence may have been to allow a photograph of one of the Kims to get dusty. In many cases, they simply have the wrong relatives.
But Nongpo is a new type of prison. According to reports from North Korean refugees, it is a detention centre for escapers who have been caught in China and repatriated.
It is one of half a dozen such facilities and they specialise in short but particularly brutal punishment regimes. After being beaten and starved, prisoners are sent to work in fields and brick factories for 14 hours a day, until they collapse.
Since the late 1990s these prisons have refused to tolerate "foreign" babies.
Mrs Kim, 51, a grandmother and mother of four, first crossed the frozen river that divides North Korea and China to look for two of her daughters, who had already escaped. She discovered that, like many such women, they had been kidnapped and sold as wives to local farmers.
After she was caught by Chinese police, along with her granddaughter and 19-year-old son, she was sent to a series of prisons, ending up in Nongpo. "It was indescribable," she says. "Food rations were a handful of grains of wheat, three times a day."
There were 70 men, and about 200 women. The women were in three small rooms. The first was for healthy women, the second for the sick. Pregnant women, along with others such as Mrs Kim, were in the third.
"We all just squeezed together, sleeping in a sitting position, with our heads bowed down.
"In the month I was there, seven babies were born, one other was born prematurely and died immediately, and there were two abortions.
"When a baby was born, the mother wasn't allowed to scream. If she made any noise, the guard would come in and beat her.
"When the baby was born, the woman who took the baby would put it on its face. Then it would die. If you didn't kill the baby, you would be punished."
The women say the killing of babies is a conscious policy to prevent the soiling of North Korean "juche" - self-reliance - with foreign blood. This is despite the fact that the "blood" is that of Chinese, North Korea's only allies, without whose million dead in the Korean War it would not exist today.
The "abortions" witnessed by Mrs Kim were induced by the kicks of the guards. But another woman, Mrs Lee, 31, who was there before, said women were given abortion-inducing drugs and returned to the room to deliver.
She saw eight babies die in her 15 days there. She was released early after pretending to go mad.
Since arriving in South Korea she has met two women who were in Nongpo with her. They had not needed to pretend to go mad, she said. One has a form of hysteria that makes it impossible to stop laughing.
The "grandmother" selected to "receive" babies when Mrs Kim was there also went mad. "When she developed psychiatric problems, they let her out, saying she was a model prisoner."
By several accounts Nongpo was the worst of the prisons, at least during the period 1999-2000.
South Sinuiju detention centre at least had a medical facility in which to kill babies. Lee Yong-hwa was assigned to accompany a woman to a nearby army hospital to give birth. (As with the other women, this is a pseudonym: all have families in North Korea.)
There, a curtain was drawn while doctors in uniform delivered the baby. Miss Lee looked through the curtains as the baby was smothered with a wet cloth. "The woman passed out," she said. "When she recovered, she just cried and cried."
A report published before Christmas by David Hawk, a former United Nations official, recorded infanticide at one other detention centre, Onsong, and forced abortions at all these places and at Chongjin detention centre.
In all, Mr Hawk spoke to eight refugees who had first-hand evidence of the practice. Reports of baby-killing are a favourite way of blackening an enemy regime, and there is no infallible proof of their stories. But, he points out, their stories tally.
China has won praise for its role as middle man in talks on North Koreans nuclear weapons. But this cuts little ice with the refugees, who all demand an end to China's policy of sending refugees back to a terrible retribution.
China's greatest fear, which motivates both its policy on the nuclear issue and its unwillingness to allow a flood of refugees, is that North Korea will collapse.
Meanwhile, Washington's offer of a non-aggression agreement could, according to some analysts, give Kim Jong-il's regime another 10-20 years.
There may be little alternative to negotiations but Mrs Lee reckons there is also little point. "The North Koreans lie over and over. I think to get rid of North Korea there will have to be another war," she says.
She has a reason to want a swift resolution. Her two daughters, after she arrived in South Korea, left their Chinese husbands to try to join her.
They were caught on the border with Vietnam and sent back to North Korea. The last she heard, they were about to be sent to the camps.
But it will be cracked.........
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