The Hidden People of North Korea (41 page)

Bad as conditions are in the
gyohwaso
prison camps, they are better than in the political detention camps, or
gwalliso
(“control and management centers”). No dictatorship can do without its political prisons to isolate critics of the regime. When the communists took control of the northern half of Korea, landowners, those who worked with the Japanese occupation authorities, and religious leaders were classified as antistate elements and sent to the first political camps. After the Korean War, captured soldiers were added to the camps. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Kim Il-sung conducted purges to eliminate potential political rivals, and these people also ended up in the camps. After the 1966–1970 countrywide political classification, an estimated fifteen thousand “antirevolutionaries,” along with seventy thousand of their family members, were sent to the camps. By the 1970s Kim Jong-il was sending people to the camps on his own initiative as he consolidated his position in the leadership succession. In the 1990s, some of the North Koreans who had lived in or visited other socialist countries before their communist governments collapsed were sent to the camps to prevent them from “contaminating” their fellow citizens with knowledge about the outside world.

Immigrants and foreigners are two other groups who are sometimes sent to political prisons. Some of the ninety-three thousand Koreans (and their Japanese wives) who emigrated from Japan to North Korea in the 1950s and 1960s were imprisoned; certainly, almost none of them were ever allowed to return to Japan.
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The South Korean government believes that since the end of the Korean War, 3,795 South Koreans, mostly fishermen, have been abducted by the North and that over five hundred Korean War POWs (out of perhaps an initial twenty thousand) are still alive in prison camps.
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And then there are the occasional foreigners who imprudently choose to live as independent contractors in North Korea and run afoul of the regime. In 1967 the DPRK Ministry of Foreign Affairs hired two foreigners, Ali Lamada and Jacques Sedillot, to come to North Korea to translate the writings of Kim Il-sung into Spanish and French. Both were subsequently accused of spying and sent to prison camps. Thanks to the intervention of the Venezuelan and Romanian governments, the two were released in 1974. Lamada returned to tell his story, but Sedillot died before he could leave Pyongyang.
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Gwalliso
facilities are much like the village
gyohwaso
prisons, with each political camp, of which there are about a half dozen, housing anywhere from five to fifty thousand inmates deep in mountain valleys. Since agents of the SSD rather than the MPS run the political prison system, inmates and their families are often committed without formal arrest, trial, conviction, or sentencing. Security agents suddenly appear and abduct political suspects from their homes, often in the middle of the night. Neighbors, friends, colleagues, and relatives are never told what happened to the missing, and anyone foolish enough to ask risks investigation. The North Koreans have a saying: “They die without the birds [in the daytime] or the mice [at night] knowing.” Almost the only way out of political prison camps is suicide, which is a serious crime: families of prisoners who commit suicide are treated even worse than families of other prisoners, and prisoners who fail in their suicide attempts are tortured. Occasionally, a prisoner is released from a political camp, often for unknown reasons, and anyone who has sufficient money to bribe the right officials has a good chance of being released, or at least moved to a reeducation camp.

Because entire families are sometimes incarcerated, prison camps have schools where the young convicts are taught their lessons, including the all-important political lesson of worshipping the Kim family. Prisoners have no rights. Many die of beatings, starvation, and illness, but so far as we know, there is no accounting of their fates. Surviving for longer than a few months in a political prison requires a strong constitution, a certain amount of luck, and/or a family able to send food into the prison, some of which must be given to the guards. Some inmates survive for many years, but others, especially the young and the old, die within a year.

A typical prison day begins at 5 a.m. and ends at 7 or 8 p.m., with half-hour breaks for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
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Like inmates at reeducation camps, political prisoners work seven days a week at the same kinds of jobs. After completing their workday, they attend political study sessions until 10 p.m. The daily food ration is typically a palm-size ball of cornmeal with watered-down cabbage soup or just a handful of raw corn that prisoners can cook. It is impossible to survive for long on such rations, especially while engaging in hard labor, and those prisoners who do survive have learned how to forage for food and bribe the guards.

Prisoners live several to a room in unheated wooden barracks. If an entire family is incarcerated, they may be permitted to build a little hut from scraps of wood with a straw roof and a dirt floor. In winter, prisoners keep warm by huddling together; frostbite is common, resulting in amputated fingers, toes, and limbs. Some camps supply enough electricity to light a single bulb for an hour or two a day, but at other camps wooden torches provide the only illumination. Prisoners get a chance to wash their faces only a few times a month. They go to the bathroom in a hole in the ground; in prison cells, some of which are located underground, they use a can. They wear the same clothes they came into the camp with, and when these wear out, they appropriate the clothing of dead prisoners.

When approached by a guard, political prisoners must bow down to the ground or, in some prisons, get down on their knees. Infractions of camp rules, failure to complete work quotas, and similar offenses are punished by a reduction of food rations, which is an immediate threat to health because most prisoners live on the edge of starvation. Prisoners will do almost anything for a scrap of food, including stealing from other prisoners and failing to notify the guards when a fellow prisoner dies in order to eat his or her food ration for a day or two. Prisoners are also routinely enlisted to spy on each other, and as a consequence they are very careful when talking among themselves.

Prisoners are beaten by guards and by other inmates on the guards’ orders. A popular torture, especially during interrogations, is to force prisoners to kneel motionless for hours at a time, sometimes day after day. The slightest movement or utterance results in a beating. Women prisoners are sometimes forced to stand and squat repeatedly until they collapse. Every prison has its special detention cell where prisoners are beaten and starved more severely. Few survive the experience, which is used as a warning to others. One of the cruelest punishments involves locking a prisoner in a windowless box four feet on a side, too small for the prisoner to lie down or stand up in. Prisoners kept in the box for several weeks are permanently crippled if they survive the experience.

Explanations for the North Korean prison system’s pervasive cruelty can be found on several levels. At the cultural level, it should be remembered that North Korea is a collectivist society that values the community over the individual. Acting on behalf of the state, prison guards seem to have few misgivings about beating, torturing, and starving prisoners, who are seen as threats to the regime and the social system. Ostensibly for this reason, prison-camp inmates are not supposed to have sexual relations, and pregnant inmates are usually forced to have abortions.

To understand the brutal treatment of prisoners at the level of personal relations, consider that even under the best of conditions, prison guards can be cruel. In the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, a sample of normal American college students was randomly separated into guards and prisoners and then placed in a realistic replica of a prison; within days those students assigned to be guards took on some of the worst characteristics of real prison guards.
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North Korean prison guards are taught to look upon prisoners as animals. Prisoners are sometimes addressed by their first names, but male prisoners are more frequently addressed as “this son of a bitch” (
ee ssaekkee
) and “this bastard” (
ee nom
) and female prisoners as “this low-class bitch” (
ee jaabnyon
) and “this bastard” (
ee nyon
). It probably does not help that the gaunt, crippled, dirty prisoners come to look like wild animals. Guards who are too kind to prisoners are themselves punished.

One might ask why prisoners who recognize that they are slowly and painfully dying do not fight back. North Koreans in general—and this applies to prisoners—remind foreigners that any resistance to the regime meets not only with more punishment but brings punishment on the rest of the family, whether they are already in prison or not. Consequently, most prisoners see no way out and simply work until they die. According to defectors, occasionally a prisoner will attack a guard or go crazy from hunger and is then beaten and killed. Ahn Myong-chol, a former prison guard, says that he heard of a mass uprising of prisoners at the Onsong Camp in 1987. A prisoner turned on a guard who was beating him, and about two hundred other prisoners joined in, killing another guard and attacking the guard headquarters at the camp. Ahn, who was working at another prison camp, was told that when military reinforcements arrived, they surrounded the camp and killed about one-third of the estimated fifteen thousand inmates.
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Human Rights

The North Korean regime has been justly criticized for violating its citizens’ human rights. Yet, it is difficult to find a way to change the regime’s human rights policies because they are embedded in the structure of its dictatorial rule. Until the 1990s, little specific information was available to outsiders about human rights practices in North Korea, although the broad outlines of the situation were well-known. Inquisitive foreigners could not get into the country, and North Koreans could not get out. However, in response to the famine of the mid-1990s, defectors began to flee the country, bringing with them first-hand accounts of human rights violations. Despite this new information, foreign governments have put little pressure on the Kim regime to improve its human rights practices.

In a dictatorial communist society such as North Korea’s, the health, welfare, and security of the majority is supposed to take precedence over the rights of individuals, although in practice individual rights are curtailed to protect the leaders and the ruling party. According to the Leninist-Stalinist model, as adopted by North Korea, human rights policies are rooted in the contest between political classes, giving the revolutionary working class, as represented by the regime, the right and the duty to suppress and eventually eliminate the other classes. As
Nodong Sinmun
puts it, “We do not hide our class character in the human rights issue just as we do not conceal our loyalty to the party. It is our human right to provide workers, farmers, intellectuals, and the people of other strata with freedom and rights and to crack down upon a handful of class enemies violating the human rights of the popular masses. … We declare with pride that human rights can be ensured when we consolidate the socio-political organism in which the leader, the party, and the masses share life and death.”
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When criticized by foreign governments and international organizations for its human rights policies, the Kim regime has responded with a number of arguments. For example, it has asserted that human rights standards are culture specific: “All the countries of the world differ from each other in traditions, nationality, culture, history of social development; and human rights standards and ways of ensuring them vary according to specific conditions of each country. … The human rights standards in the DPRK are precisely what the Korean people like and what is in accordance with their requirement and interests.”
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The regime also insists that the most important right any people can enjoy is national sovereignty: “Today [2005], the lesson we once again learn from the United States’ atrocious human rights commotions is that human rights is precisely sovereignty, and the protection of human rights is precisely the defense of sovereignty.”
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North Korea even warned that the passage of the 2004 North Korean Human Rights Act in the United States was a hostile act and virtual declaration of war. The North Korean media have sought to invalidate American criticisms of the Kim regime’s human rights practices by claiming that the United States is the world’s foremost violator of human rights, although another country can hardly use the U.S. record on human rights, which is by no means perfect, as an excuse for its own human rights failings.
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Some people find it odd that the South Korean government has not pressed North Korea harder on the human rights issue or done more to work for the return of POWs and abducted South Korean citizens. After all, the South Korean constitution regards all Koreans, regardless of which side of the Demilitarized Zone they live on, as South Korean citizens, so there would seem to be a strong legal basis for taking an interest in the human rights of North Koreans. However, neither of the two South Korean presidents in office between 1998 and 2007 was willing to make an issue of North Korea’s human rights violations. In a 2000 BBC interview, several months after the inter-Korean summit, President Kim Dae-jung explained that he “would not press the issues of human rights and democracy at this early stage as it could be detrimental to building trust” between the two Koreas.
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In a 2003 interview with the
Washington Post
, Kim Dae-jung’s successor, Roh Moo-hyun said, “Rather than confronting the Kim Jong-il regime over human rights of a small number of people, I think it is better for us to open up the regime through dialogue. I think this will ultimately bring broader protection of human rights for North Korean people as a whole.”
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