North Korean Gulags
Time Magazine recently ran an article about the conditions with the North Korean labor camps. The conditions within these gulags continues to be absolutely disturbing. Here is a sample:
Constant hunger is a way of life for the prisoners–malnutrition and disease were rampant, well before famine plagued the nation in the 1990s according to former inmates. But if a detainee breaks the rules to get something to eat, their days in the camps will end. One day, says Kim Yong, ripe chestnuts fell from a tree at the entrance to Cutting Face No. 2, and a prisoner named Kim Chul Min stooped to pick a few of them up. Guards shot and killed him for his trouble. Kim Yong says that a friend of his was so desperate for food that he stole one of the prison guard’s leather whips, soaked it in water, and then tried to eat it. Guards beat him to death with a stick smeared with human excrement.
Here is the most disturbing trend seen in these camps:
Among the most troubling claims to emerge from former detainees is infanticide: according to several former prisoners, women who have become pregnant while in China are not uncommonly required to give birth while still in detention and then forced to watch as their own babies are killed. Hawk’s report contains eight eyewitness accounts–including one of a child suffocated with a wet towel in front of its mother’s eyes–and separately, TIME interviewed two women, who did not want to be identified, who claim to have seen either forced abortions or the murder of newborns.
This is pretty sickening and will continue until the world puts pressure on North Korea to end these barbaric practices. Awareness of the situation is on the rise, with the passage of the North Korean Human Rights Act in the US and increased awareness internationally due to the amount of defectors escaping the country. I believe in the next year North Korean human rights will become a major issue in conjunction with the six party nuclear talks, which would force South Korea in a position to do something about it because they cannot continue to turn a deaf ear to it and not suffer major loss of international prestige.
