Posted on 02/20/2014 4:50:19 AM PST by NYer
Pyongyang, North Korea (LiveActionNews) — Yesterday’s United Nations Report on the human rights abuses in North Korea unveiled a level of depravity and cruelty unparalleled in modern society. The 36 page initial report and 372 page report of detailed findings also revealed the systematic murder and persecution of society’s most vulnerable – the unborn and the handicapped.
It is no secret that eugenics has been a core goal for many history’s most brutal dictatorships, and North Korea is no exception. So deep is the desire to eradicate any impurity from the population that no one with a handicap or disability is even permitted to live in the capital city of Pyongyang, even if that disability was acquired through injury or illness.
Families with infants born handicapped or disabled are physically removed from the city and relocated to rural areas where they are far less likely to come into contact with others or to be seen by visitors. Unfortunately, such removal also sentences families to a life of abject poverty with limited to no resources, simply for having an “impure” child.
One alternative sometimes offered to the family is to allow the government to take the child and to deposit him or her into a government-run institution for the disabled. One former high-level official interviewed by the UN Commission testified that government officials would routinely visit families who had a disabled child and urge them to turn the child over to the state. This meant agreeing to never see, or to seek out, the child again, and allowing him or her to be deposited into an unnamed government facility at a remote location. The state would then delete the child’s birth records and name from all family files, as if the child had never existed. So much secrecy surrounds the fate of these children that not even the UN Commission could discover how many of these facilities truly exist, though they estimate at least eleven. Essentially nothing more is known about what happens to these children after removal, though it offers a chilling explanation as to why North Korea’s last census report stated that only 3.4% of the population had a disability, despite the World Health Organization’s estimate that approximately 10% of the world population lives with one.
Other reports examined by the committee and additional testimonies revealed that infants with disabilities are routinely abandoned or killed on account of their handicap, while those who survive are often subjected to forced sterilization. And in a move reminiscent of Nazi Germany, the counsel notes “disturbing allegations of an island in South Hamgyong Province where gruesome medical testing of biological and chemical weapons has been conducted on persons with disabilities.” The counsel was unable to procure any first-hand accounts of this facility, but a former high-ranking Ministry of Public Security official reported being told, on two separate occasions, that certain arrested individuals were being transferred for use as medical experiments. As the report notes, further inquiry is of absolute necessity yet, due to the North Korean structure of government and complete control, it is possible that the depth of this horror will never be known.
In what should come as little surprise, the counsel also found “a widespread prevalence of forced abortion and infanticide,” mostly against women suspected of carrying a child fathered by someone of a different nationality. While the UN report noted that – on the whole – North Korea’s systemic abuse is founded more on ideological and religious grounds than those of race and nationality, they also found that a strong desire to maintain the purity of the North Korean race is a secondary motive for many human rights abuses.
The vast majority of forced abortions and infanticide occurs against women who were repatriated from China on the assumption that the woman is, or could be, carrying a child partly of Chinese descent. No inquiry is made as to the identity of the father, nor is any opportunity given to prove otherwise; pregnant women who may have conceived by a Chinese man are subjected to forced abortion as a matter of course, without exception. Where the pregnancy has progressed too far to allow for an abortion, or where the abortion attempt fails, the newborn infants are systematically murdered while the mothers are forced to watch or, in many cases, kill their own child.
Abortions themselves are carried out in a way designed to punish the mother for the conception, often by beating the women in the pelvic and abdominal region until a miscarriage results, or by forcing chemicals by hand into the vagina of the women to cause fetal death. Crude surgical abortions are also performed with sharp tongs, and often without anesthetic. As intended, the serious injury or death of the mother often results. The practice is so barbaric that Chinese guards who are holding a pregnant North Korean expatriate will sometimes allow the woman to procure an abortion at a Chinese hospital before being extradited.
Of women who are not given a forced abortion due to the late stage of pregnancy, most give birth to a stillborn child. Those who do not are forced to either suffocate their own child, or watch as their infant is killed before them. Sometimes, this will be done relatively quickly, by placing the infant in a bucket of water or by holding a wet cloth over their face, but often, the guards will simply lay the newborn face down on the cell floor so that it suffocates slowly and painfully, while the mother lies nearby, unable to rescue her own infant, who is often crying from the pain of slow suffocation.
One witness recalls:
“. . . there was this pregnant woman who was about 9 months pregnant. She worked all day. The babies who were born were usually dead, but in this case the baby was born alive. The baby was crying as it was born; we were so curious, this was the first time we saw a baby being born. So we were watching this baby and we were so happy. But suddenly we heard the footsteps. The security agent came in and this agent of the Bowibu said that… usually when a baby is born we would wash it in a bowl of water, but this agent told us to put the baby in the water upside down. So the mother was begging. ‘I was told that I would not be able to have the baby, but I actually got lucky and got pregnant so let me keep the baby, please forgive me’, but this agent kept beating this woman, the mother who just gave birth. And the baby, since it was just born, it was just crying. And the mother, with her shaking hands she picked up the baby and she put the baby face down in the water. The baby stopped crying and we saw this water bubble coming out of the mouth of the baby. And there was an old lady who helped with the labour, she picked up the baby from the bowl of water and left the room quietly. So those kind of things repeatedly happened.”
- Report of the Detailed Findings of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, 126.
Multiple witnesses testified to seeing these atrocities committed while guards decreed that the babies did not deserve to live because they were “not human,” while other witnesses explained that even conceiving a child of mixed racial descent causes the woman herself to be viewed as “less than human.”
Michael Kirby, chair of the UN investigative counsel, has sent a letter to Kim Jong-un stating that he and many others may be subjected to trial in the International Criminal Court, but as North Korea’s strong ally, China, occupies a permanent seat on the ICC and has already expressed that they support neither the investigation nor the findings, there is little hope that justice will even be attempted. This leaves the North Korean people in a world of suffering, the depth of which remains unknown.
Moral absolutes ping.
Where is the media coverage of these atrocities!
Why would that shock anyone? It’s North Korea!
Also, it sounds quite a bit like an abortion...
I'm in the end stretch of my life and believe some nations should be nuked. Sorry about the collateral damage, but just destroy them before they get nukes and destroy us. Want list?
Remember WWII? After the Allies devasted them, they have been good members of the world community.
ha -ha -
good one!
Media coverage against a crazy whacked out dictatorship?
Never happen-
Remember our highest state official says the Nork’s
are great people! (Dennis Rodman)
We should give them $5billion to help their “peaceful nuke program+- (Bill Clinton, Al gore)
They are a great people- (Bill Clintons brother -convicted
DRUG FELON!- throwing a concert for the Regimes behalf!)
news media?- nope, we are really in to Orwell’s 1984-
Ministry of Propaganda
They're too busy worshiping Barry & Moochelle to be bothered with minor little stuff like mass atrocities in North Korea. Besides, the Media believes white people, Christians, the TEA Party and Israel are real evil forces in the world.
“Progressive” approval. No doubt in my military mind that soebarkah envies the little butcher.
The power of North Korea’s “dear leader” is Obama’s wet dream.
I could only read partway down. I can’t stand this kind of sick, twisted horror. What the Evil One, the Power of This World does, when his wickedness is untrammeled.
“Where is the media coverage of these atrocities!”
Are you asking about the same media that says nothing about the murder of babies here in the US?
Obama is NO different. His efforts to stop “born alive” legislation are his hidden abortion agenda.
FactCheck.org said the following.
“Anti-abortion activists accuse Obama of “supporting infanticide,” and the National Right to Life Committee says he’s conducted a “four-year effort to cover up his full role in killing legislation to protect born-alive survivors of abortions.” Obama says they’re “lying.”
At issue is Obama’s opposition to Illinois legislation in 2001, 2002 and 2003 that would have defined any aborted fetus that showed signs of life as a “born alive infant” entitled to legal protection, even if doctors believe it could not survive.
Obama opposed the 2001 and 2002 “born alive” bills as backdoor attacks on a woman’s legal right to abortion, but he says he would have been “fully in support” of a similar federal bill that President Bush had signed in 2002, because it contained protections for Roe v. Wade.
We find that, as the NRLC said in a recent statement, Obama voted in committee against the 2003 state bill that was nearly identical to the federal act he says he would have supported. Both contained identical clauses saying that nothing in the bills could be construed to affect legal rights of an unborn fetus, according to an undisputed summary written immediately after the committee’s 2003 mark-up session.
Whether opposing “born alive” legislation is the same as supporting “infanticide,” however, is entirely a matter of interpretation. That could be true only for those, such as Obama’s 2004 Republican opponent, Alan Keyes, who believes a fetus that doctors give no chance of surviving is an “infant.” It is worth noting that Illinois law already provided that physicians must protect the life of a fetus when there is “a reasonable likelihood of sustained survival of the fetus outside the womb, with or without artificial support.”
I disagree with there premise and see Obama as supporting infanticide at early stages, at least. And doctors... CAN BE WRONG...sometimes.
I still don’t understand why we haven’t bombed the crap out of wherever the “leadership” lives in n korea...This is a holocaust right in front of us
You’re absolutely correct, sir/madam.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.