- Voices from the North Korean Gulag
Editors’ Introduction
For years, reports have circulated of the existence of North Korean labor camps where vast numbers of political and other prisoners are subjected to appalling abuses. Reports by the Minnesota Lawyers’ International Human Rights Committee in 1988 and by Amnesty International in 1990, 1993, 1994, and 1995 have indicated as much. 1 The U.S. Department of State’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1997 contains extensive references to reports and allegations of camps for political prisoners in North Korea. 2
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Certainly, there is widespread international awareness that North Korea remains one of the most closed, rigid, and repressive political regimes in the world. The UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities adopted a resolution on 21 August 1997 expressing concern with “persistent and concordant allegations that grave violations of human rights are being committed” in North Korea, and called on the North Korean government to “ensure full respect” for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 3
To date, however, international public opinion has not been adequately informed of the scale and systematic character of human rights violations in North Korea. A key problem has been the lack of credible and specific information. That is changing, as a result of a growing number of defections from North Korea in recent years by former political prisoners and prison camp guards. While the closed nature of the North Korean regime makes it impossible to verify defector reports in detail, the eyewitness accounts and personal experiences of former prisoners and camp guards offer a shocking glimpse into a far-reaching system of terror, degradation, and slave labor that can only be termed a North Korean gulag. In May 1998, Journal of Democracy coeditor Larry Diamond conducted personal interviews in Seoul with former political prisoners and camp guards in North Korea and with activists of the leading South Korean civil society organization working [End Page 82] with these North Korean refugees, the Citizens’ Alliance to Help Political Prisoners in North Korea. They painted a portrait that he found consistent, credible, and compelling. Here are some of his findings:
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• The North Korean regime uses torture, imprisonment, forced confessions, and slave labor on a grand scale to silence even the slightest form of dissent or free inquiry, and to produce a wide range of products both for domestic consumption and for export.
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• The Seoul-based Center for the Advancement of North Korean Human Rights estimates that about 200,000 North Koreans are now being held in more than ten different prison camps in North Korea for such “crimes” as reading a foreign newspaper, listening to a foreign broadcast, complaining about the food situation, refusing an arbitrary request from an official, talking to foreigners, traveling outside North Korea without permission, or doing anything to “insult the authority” of the country’s dictator, Kim Jong Il. 4
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• Crumbling under the weight of a half-century of grotesque distortions...