10 Brutal North Korean Secrets

Good reminder on the brutality of the Kim Family Regime.

V/R

Dave

10 Brutal North Korean Secrets

ANDREW HANDLEY AUGUST 26, 2013

HTTP://LISTVERSE.COM/2013/08/26/10-BRUTAL-NORTH-KOREAN-SECRETS/

If the Kim family had their way, the entire world would think North Korea was a beautiful paradise and that every one of its leaders was a blessing sent straight from heaven. Needless to say, North Korea’s media has a slight penchant for bias, and thanks to their strict tourism policy (anyone can visit as long as they’re already in the country), it’s difficult to get a firm grasp on what actually goes on inside the borders of this closed, totalitarian state. But thanks to a few daring undercover journalists who snuck in, along with gruesome reports from defected North Koreans who snuck out, we’re getting a better picture of how the cogs turn behind the veil of this great propaganda machine. And it’s not pretty.

10Labor Camps

North Korea currently operates about 16 labor camps—massive compounds scattered across the mountainous terrain and enclosed by electrified barbed wire fences. It’s estimated that somewhere around 200,000 prisoners are held in these camps at any given time.

The prison cities are often compared to the Gulag camps of Soviet Russia—forced labor camps in which prisoners are held in brutal working conditions and executed for crimes as petty as stealing a few kernels of corn. Prisoners are usually a mix of defectors, traitors, and ex-politicians who ran afoul of the government—a fairly easy thing to do.

9Three Generations Of Punishment

North Korean law dictates a “three generations of punishment” policy: If you commit a crime, your children and grandchildren will carry the stains of your sin and be punished accordingly. That means that if your grandfather committed a crime, you get to bear the full brunt of his punishment. As mentioned above, this usually leads to entire lives spent inside prison camps. One of the worst offenses that a North Korean can commit is attempting to leave North Korea, which can justify either immediate execution or an extended sentence in one of their labor camps.

Criticizing the government, no matter how slightly, is also considered a treasonous offense. Simply learning about other cultures warrants a death sentence. Recent smuggling between the border of North Korea and China has allowed some people to get DVDs of Western movies—which are illegal. The North Korean National Security Agency has begun raiding villages in the north of the country by shutting off the electricity to a whole village then storming into houses and checking which DVDs are stuck in the DVD player.

8Insurance Fraud

The North Korean economy is, in all measurable aspects, completely failing. Exports are virtually nonexistent due to their reluctance to interact with foreign markets, as well as the fact that they struggle to feed everyone living within their own borders. The current population of North Korea is about 25 million, and the average GDP per person is about $500 (for comparison, in the US it hovers around $50,000).

To supplement their ailing economy and bring in more money, North Korea has been known to turn to international crime. One of these crimes is global insurance fraud: They’ve conned Western insurance companies out ofhundreds of millions of dollars. Brought to light in 2009, it turns out that the North Korean government had been taking out huge insurance policies on property and equipment, then claiming that it had been destroyed.

In 2005, several of the world’s largest insurance companies, including Lloyd’s of London, took North Korea to court over an alleged helicopter crash with a $58 million insurance policy. When North Korea’s state-run courts “reviewed” the case, they announced that it was a legitimate claim. The insurance companies settled because their contract was subject to North Korean law, which is a bit like playing “I win” with a toddler.

7Arms Dealing

Insurance fraud aside, the United Nations has also accused North Korea of selling illegal weapons and nuclear technology to the highest bidder, which usually means countries in Africa and the Middle East. For example, in 2012, the UN seized a North Korean shipment heading to Syria which contained nearly 450 graphite cylinders meant for use in ballistic missiles. In 2009, shipments to both Iran and the Republic of Congo were caught in transit—one had 35 tons of missile components, and the other contained Soviet-era tanks.

According to UN sanctions, North Korea has been banned from trading or selling missile technology, but North Korea came right back out and said that it’s actually the sanctions that are illegal, and they can do whatever they want. It’s hardly a surprise then that North Korea’s arms trade isn’t slowing down at all. Like the insurance fraud, it’s a much needed source of revenue for the government—although according to Blaine Harden at the Washington Post, the majority of that money goes into Kim Jong Un’s personal stash rather than toward food for his people.

(Continued at the link below)

HTTP://LISTVERSE.COM/2013/08/26/10-BRUTAL-NORTH-KOREAN-SECRETS/

Some South Korean POWs still trapped in the North, 60 years after armistice

As we look at our own controversy with the US Joint Prisoner of War and Mission in Action Accounting Command (JPAC) we should note that the Republic of Korea has had their own Soldiers held as POWs in north Korea for some 60 years.  Another indication of the inhumanity of the Kim Family Regime (as if anyone needed more proof).

V/R
Dave

Some South Korean POWs still trapped in the North, 60 years after armistice

By Chico Harlan, Published: July 13

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/some-south-korean-pows-still-trapped-in-the-north-60-years-after-armistice/2013/07/13/0e094914-e54e-11e2-aef3-339619eab080_story.html

SEOUL — Sixty years ago this month, a 21-year-old South Korean soldier named Lee Jae-won wrote a letter to his mother. He was somewhere in the middle of the peninsula, he wrote, and bullets were coming down like “raindrops.” He said he was scared.

The next letter to arrive came days later from the South Korean military. It described a firefight in Paju, near the modern-day border between the North and South, and said Lee had been killed there in battle. His body had not been recovered.

“We never doubted his death,” said Lee’s younger brother, Lee Jae-seong. “It was the chaos of war, and you couldn’t expect to recover a body.”

But Lee was not dead. Rather, he had been captured by Chinese Communists and handed to the North Koreans, who detained him as a lifetime prisoner, part of a secretive program that continues 60 years after the end of the Korean War, according to South Korean officials and escapees from the North.

Tens of thousands of South Korean POWs were held captive in the North under the program, penned in remote areas and kept incommunicado in one of the most scarring legacies of the three-year war. South Korean officials say that about 500 of those POWs — now in their 80s and 90s — might still be alive, still waiting to return home. In part because they’re so old, South Korea says it’s a government priority, though a difficult one, to get them out.

Almost nothing was known about the lives of these prisoners until 20 years ago, when a few elderly soldiers escaped, sneaking from the northern tip of North Korea into China and making their way back to South Korea. A few dozen more followed, and they described years of forced labor in coal mines. They said they were encouraged to marry North Korean wives, a means of assimilation. But under the North’s family-run police state, they were designated as members of the “hostile” social class — denied education and Workers’ Party membership, and sent to gulags for even minor slip-ups, such as talking favorably about the quality of South Korean rice.

When the war ended with a July 27, 1953, armistice agreement that divided the peninsula along the 38th parallel, about 80,000 South Korean soldiers were unaccounted for. A few, like Lee Jae-won, were presumed dead. Most were thought to be POWs. The two Koreas, as part of the armistice, agreed to swap those prisoners, but the North returned only 8,300.

The others became part of an intractable Cold War standoff, and the few POWs who have escaped say both Koreas are to blame. The South pressed the North about the POWs for several years after the war, but the issue faded from public consciousness — until the first successful escape of a POW, in 1994. The North, meanwhile, has said that anybody living in the country is there voluntarily.

South Korea took up the POW issue with greater force six years ago, as it became clear that a lengthy charm offensive — known as the Sunshine Policy — wasn’t leading the North to change its economic or humanitarian policies. During a 2000 summit with Kim Jong Il, South Korean President Kim Dae-jung didn’t even bring up the issue. But by 2007, the South was talking about the POWs in defense talks. And by 2008, under conservative President Lee Myung-bak, South Korea offered aid to win the prisoners’ release.

But with relations between the two governments badly frayed, the countries haven’t discussed the issue since military-to-military talks in February 2011.

“Time is chasing us,” said Lee Sang-chul, a one-star general at the South Korean Ministry of National Defense who is in charge of the POW issue.

But without North Korea’s cooperation, Lee said, the South has little recourse to retrieve its soldiers. Lee said that, realistically, the POWs have only one way to return home: They have to escape.

Hopes that withered

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/some-south-korean-pows-still-trapped-in-the-north-60-years-after-armistice/2013/07/13/0e094914-e54e-11e2-aef3-339619eab080_story.html

Tortured, beaten, starved: life in a Korean gulag

Good to hear from our good friend Greg Scarlatoiu who knows a thing or two about Human Rights in north Korea.

V/R

Dave

Tortured, beaten, starved: life in a Korean gulag

• Date 18.06.2013
• Author Esther Felden
• Editor Sarah Berning
• http://www.dw.de/tortured-beaten-starved-life-in-a-korean-gulag/a-16889451

HUMAN RIGHTS

Tortured, beaten, starved: life in a Korean gulag
Thousands of people are worked and tortured to death in North Korean gulags every year. Executive Director of the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea Greg Scarlatoiu tells DW about their living conditions.

As many as 200,000 people are believed to be locked up in North Korean gulags. But that's just an estimate. How difficult is it to get reliable information?

The information that we have comes from former prisoners and former guards, for example, Shin Dong-Hyuk, the hero of the escape from Camp 14, a young man who was born in the gulag and lived there until the age of 23 when he managed to escape. Mr. Ahn Myong-Chol was a prison guard at Camp 22 in Hoeryong and a driver at the camps. He was there between 1990 and 1994. He is the one who reported that prisoners had been used for human experimentation inside the camps. This information comes not only from former prisoners and guards but also from former employees - North Korea's internal intelligence agencies, the agencies that manage the camps. For example, the number that you mentioned between 150,000 and 200,000 has been confirmed by former officials of North Korea's state security department who defected to South Korea and who were debriefed by South Korean intelligence. Also, the information that we get is cross-checked with satellite imagery. It is amazing to see how the information provided by former prisoners can actually be identified. They identify the structures there, they can recognize, for example, their sleeping quarters, a building that was used as detention and interrogation facility. So these are the means that we have at our disposal.

So how big would you say is the part of the overall picture that is still unknown or guess work?

Well, I would say that we have a fairly clear idea. There are things we know for sure: that the camps exist, the population of the camps is between 150,00 and 200,000; massive human rights violations happen at these facilities, that we know for sure. We also know there are different types of facilities and that the level of seclusion might be different; there are facilities called "total control zones." People who are held there have no chance of getting out. Those are very rare occurrences. So we know many things for certain. There are also things we don't know for certain. We know that the death rate inside these camps is absolutely astounding. Every witness you talk to has seen someone die next to him or her. It almost seems that some of the work units inside the camps lose a third or half of their members due to forced labor, induced malnutrition, torture, beatings - due to the horrifying conditions inside the camps. So we know that the death rates are high but what we don't know for sure is whether new arrivals, new prisoners, make up for the number of those who have died. So in other words, if 2,000 prisoners die at a given camp during one year, we're not sure if 2,000 new prisoners are brought to the camp. And that would have a direct impact on the number of prisoners being held there. The number that we still work with is 150,000 to 200,000. Some of our colleagues in South Korea have signaled that due to the astoundingly high death rates at the camps, the number might have declined. But we are not sure and in the process of verifying the information. We know that these abuses are terrible but probably we have barely scratched the surface. The number of witnesses we've talked to is very limited. One day, we will learn the full truth about these facilities and it will be terrible.

What kind of torture is applied to the prisoners?

(Continued at the link below)

• http://www.dw.de/tortured-beaten-starved-life-in-a-korean-gulag/a-16889451

North Korea expanding gulags, satellite images show

No surprise but the international community does need to keep the pressure on.  And this is another indicator of the statement that Mr. McCreary made in NightWatch today:

 Those analysts who hoped that a younger, western educated Kim would be more modern and progressive have proven to be far too optimistic. Kim Jung Un's regime is more severe than that of Kim Chong-il.

V/R
Dave 

North Korea expanding gulags, satellite images show

North Korea is expanding its network of camps for political prisoners, apparently to meet demand for a growing gulag population, according to new satellite images.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/9894275/North-Korea-expanding-gulags-satellite-images-show.html

By Julian Ryall, Tokyo

9:06AM GMT 26 Feb 2013

Analysis of images by the Committee for Human Rights in North Koreaindicates that the size of Camp No. 25 alone has increased 72 per cent and perimeter guard posts, which numbered 20 in 2003, had increased to 43 in 2010.

The camp is believed to house some 5,000 prisoners, in conditions that human rights groups have described as "deplorable."

The detailed pictures, provided by DigitalGlobe, a US-based commercial satellite image company, also show the perimeter fence has been extended by around 4,600 feet, agricultural plots have been rearranged and a new gateway has been constructed.

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Based on the images and information from defectors, the human rights group believes North Korea is being forced to expand its prison network for a number of reasons, one being the purges conducted by Kim Jong-un of senior members of his father's administration out of concern that they pose a threat to his power base.

As well as these individuals, their families and bureaucrats that supported their roles in the previous administration are being sent to prison camps.

In addition, patrols have been stepped up along North Korea's border with China to capture defectors, while Chinese authorities are also cooperating in returning North Koreans who make it over the border but are caught in China.

A third explanation that is being put forward is a consolidation of the regime's gulag system.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/9894275/North-Korea-expanding-gulags-satellite-images-show.html

Is There a New Gulag in North Korea?

Good to see the great work of Curtis Melvin recognized here. There is certainly no better open source imagery analyst than Curtis.

V/R

Dave

• January 21, 2013, 5:54 PM

Is There a New Gulag in North Korea?

http://blogs.wsj.com/korearealtime/2013/01/21/is-there-a-new-gulag-in-north-korea/

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By Evan Ramstad

NK Econ Watch.com/Google Earth

An image from Curtis Melvin’s Google Earth file shows the potentially new prison camp on the left (west) side of the far larger — and well-known — Camp 14.

Has North Korea built another gulag?

The possibility has been raised by the sharpest of the eagle-eyed students of satellite images and maps who look for changes in the closed-off country, Curtis Melvin, who detailed his findings this weekend on his blog.

First off, Mr. Melvin notes that his observation is completely speculative.

When Google Earth uploaded new images of North Korea on Friday, Mr. Melvin, who we first profiled in 2009, went through his normal practice of updating his file of places and sites.

The latest release of images on Google Earth included the prison camp that became internationally famous in the past year – Camp 14, which was the home of the only known defector to have been born in a prison camp, Shin Dong-hyuk. His story wasskillfully told by journalist Blaine Harden in the book “Escape From Camp 14” last year.

Next to one of the borders of Camp 14, Mr. Melvin found a new, uninterrupted line of fencing and traced it in a circle. It may be an addition to the existing camp, or a new camp, or a compound of a different nature that must somehow be closed off.

(Continued at the link below)

http://blogs.wsj.com/korearealtime/2013/01/21/is-there-a-new-gulag-in-north-korea/

Ignoring North Korea’s gulags

Interesting that the Washington Post chooses to print this Op-ed on inauguration day.  The final three paragraphs sum things up:

No one suggests military action makes sense in the case of North Korea. But as Pillay noted last week, “the spotlight is almost exclusively focused on [the] DPRK’s nuclear program and rocket launches . . . While these, of course, are issues of enormous importance, they should not be allowed to overshadow the deplorable human rights situation in DPRK, which in one way or another affects almost the entire population and has no parallel anywhere else in the world.” 

Both Democratic and Republican administrations have consistently declined to focus substantial diplomatic efforts on improving the human rights and humanitarian situation in North Korea, for fear that doing so would drive Pyongyang from talks about its weapons programs. Yet if the United States won’t act decisively to end the widespread abuses of the world’s most brutal regime, who will? 

When the North Korean regime collapses and its crimes are fully exposed, historians will surely conclude we had enough information to act sooner. Now is the critical moment for President Obama and the United States to take action — and give the North Korean people hope that the world has not forgotten them.

V/R

Dave

Ignoring North Korea’s gulags

By Jared Genser, Sunday, January 20, 7:16 PM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ignoring-north-koreas-gulags/2013/01/20/7c0c1958-6328-11e2-9e1b-07db1d2ccd5b_story.html

Jared Genser is an attorney and serves as pro bono counsel to the International Coalition to Stop Crimes Against Humanity in North Korea.

As Americans celebrate President Obama’s second inaugural and Martin Luther King Jr. Day — events that symbolize the power of human freedom and perseverance against oppression — for many others such freedom is a distant dream. Among the most repressive countries in the world, North Korea holds as many as 200,000 people in the vast gulag system known as the kwan-li-so. Under the guilt-by-association system established during the dictatorship of Kim Il Sung more than 50 years ago, real and imagined dissenters and as many as three generations of their relatives are punished to eliminate “the seeds” of bad families. Those imprisoned have almost no hope for release, and it is nearly impossible to escape the camps, meaning these people are almost guaranteed to die as prisoners. Over the past few decades, hundreds of thousands have perished, the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea estimates.

But for the first time in recent memory, there is reason to hope that the world might finally take notice. In a clarion call for action, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Navanethem Pillay, last week urged the establishment of an independent international inquiry into the mass-atrocity crimes taking place in North Korea.

In the gulag, prisoners are subjected to backbreaking labor, torture, sexual violence and severe malnutrition. Men, women and children are forced to labor in dangerous work environments for up to 16 hours per day. They are given meager rations of corn gruel for food and often eat rats or pick through animal waste for survival. Even though illnesses such as pneumonia and tuberculosis run rampant in the camps, no medical treatment is available. Instead, prisoners are forced to work while sick, and those who are no longer physically able to work are sent to sanatoriums to die. Those who do not abide by the stringent camp rules are tortured or executed. The gulag is a systematic and organized network of concentration camps whose ultimate purpose is to starve and work its prisoners to death. The world also has yet to know the fate of numerous Japanese, South Korean and other foreign nationals abducted by North Korea over the past several decades.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ignoring-north-koreas-gulags/2013/01/20/7c0c1958-6328-11e2-9e1b-07db1d2ccd5b_story.html

(north Korea) Marked for Life; Coercion, Control, Surveillance, and Punishment; The Hidden Gulag

As I have said Bob Collins' report on Songbun should be mandatory reading for any policy maker or strategist and anyone dealing with north Korea.  Good to see Foreign Affairs recognizing the good work of the Committee for Human Rights in north Korea.

V/R

Dave

Marked for Life; Coercion, Control, Surveillance, and Punishment; The Hidden Gulag

Robert Collins

Ken Gause

David Hawk

Reviewed by Andrew J. Nathan

January/February 2013

Article Summary and Author Biography

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138688/robert-collins-ken-gause-david-hawk/marked-for-life-songbun-north-koreas-social-classification-syste

The Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea produces valuable research that sheds light on life in the “hermit kingdom.” These three recent reports reveal North Korea’s extraordinary system of repression. Collins describes the institution of songbun, under which each North Korean citizen is assigned “a heredity-based class and socio-political rank over which the individual exercises no control but which determines all aspects of his or her life.” Fifty-one subcategories are clustered into three classes, defined by their level of commitment to the regime: core, wavering, and hostile. Access to jobs, housing, medical care, and even marriage depends on one’s class status. Members of the lower classes are not allowed to live in relatively prosperous cities, such as Pyongyang. The regime directs foreign aid to the “core” group, while the lower groups—perhaps up to 80 percent of the population—suffer from famine and a high risk of political imprisonment.

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http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138688/robert-collins-ken-gause-david-hawk/marked-for-life-songbun-north-koreas-social-classification-syste