Tag: slave labor

Of course North Korea is going to use child and slave labor, they will just be smart enough to not use it front of the cameras to give them plausible deniability.  The more slave labor they use, the more money that will be pocketed by the Kim regime to fund their nuclear program and extravagant lifestyle: 

North Korea’s economy – and construction industry, in particular – is built on slave labor. For decades, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children are dragooned into dolgyeokdae, literally “stormtrooper,” work crews for little or no pay, barely fed enough to survive and often forced to sleep in makeshift housing they built themselves, according to rights groups and reports by the State Departmentand others.
Today, South Korean President Moon Jae-in is talking boldly of building road and railway links inside North Korea as a first step toward European Union-style regional economic integration.
In September, Moon took his country’s business elite, including the head of the national railway company, to Pyongyang to persuade North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that the South was ready to invest as soon as U.N. sanctions are lifted.
But human rights activists are asking: Could Moon’s ambitious plans help undermine North Korea’s entrenched system of forced labor? Or will they inadvertently fuel and encourage that system?
“The South Korean government and companies chomping at the bit to get into North Korea need to consider the kind of reputational damage they will suffer if it’s found their investments are being supported by forced labor,” wrote Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division. “South Korea has so far been shamefully negligent in doing real due diligence on labor rights grounds for proposed projects in North Korea.”

Washington Post

You can read more at the link.

There are probably going to be many people surprised slavery exists in North Korea after reading this, but the gulags and forced labor of its citizens for regime projects has been going on for decades:

North Korea has the highest prevalence of modern slavery in the world, with 1 out of every 10 citizens victims under the practice, according to estimates included in a new report.

More than 2.6 million people live under modern slavery in the country, the 2018 Global Slavery Index found, with the vast majority forced to work by the state. The report also argued that the North Korean government had the weakest response to slavery out of all the countries surveyed, as the North Korean state itself is involved in forced labor both inside and outside of the country.

The report defines modern slavery as slavery itself, as well as human trafficking, forced labor, debt bondage, forced or servile marriage, and the sale and exploitation of children.  [Washington Post]

You can read more at the link, but remember this number does not include the near slave labor that were once employed at the Kaesong Industrial Complex.  Restarting the near slave labor project at Kaesong is one of the South Korean governments top priorities and why they want the US to drop sanctions against North Korea.

American elementary children go play dodgeball during physical education periods while in North Korea their elementary students are used to go break and haul rocks to repair a railway line:

Grafting in the blazing sun, Kim Jong-un ’s child slaves load heavy rocks into sacks as others mend railway tracks with hammers.

Taken out of lessons and forced to carry out back-breaking work, they toil for up to 10 hours a day.

The footage of North Korea ’s human rights abuses, uncovered by the Daily Mirror, will shock the world.

Yet in his palace hundreds of miles away, despot Jong-un enjoys a life of luxury and thinks nothing of enslaving innocents as young as five.

Michael Glendinning, of the ­European Alliance of Human Rights in North Korea, said: “The footage obtained by the Mirror is startling in its documentation of one of the worst abuses the North Korean state inflicts – child labour.”  [The UK Mirror]

You can read more and see the video at the link.

After all the inaccurate reporting by the Associated Press over the No Gun Ri issue in South Korea I keep a healthy bit of skepticism when reading an article like this.  There is probably some truth to this especially considering the sexual assaults against deaf students at the Gwangju Inwha School that were uncovered a few years ago.  However, how much truth there is to this story I just don’t know.  What I do find interesting is how in the Korean media little is being mentioned about this story that is making huge headlines in the US:

The 14-year-old boy in the black school jacket stared at his shoes, his heart pounding, as the policeman accused him of stealing a piece of bread.

Even now, more than 30 years later, Choi Seung-woo weeps when he describes all that happened next.

The policeman yanked down the boy’s pants and sparked a cigarette lighter near Choi’s genitals until he confessed to a crime he didn’t commit.

Then two men with clubs came and dragged Choi off to the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place.

A guard in Choi’s dormitory raped him that night in 1982 – and the next, and the next. So began five hellish years of slave labour and near-daily assaults, years in which Choi saw men and women beaten to death, their bodies carted away like garbage.

Choi was one of thousands – the homeless, the drunk, but mostly children and the disabled – rounded up off the streets ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which the ruling dictators saw as international validation of South Korea’s arrival as a modern country.

An Associated Press investigation shows that the abuse of these so-called vagrants at Brothers, the largest of dozens of such facilities, was much more vicious and widespread than previously known, based on hundreds of exclusive documents and dozens of interviews with officials and former inmates.  [Associated Press]

You can read the rest at the link.