North Korea Undercover (34 page)

¹
Tomiko Newson: ‘Journey into the heart of North Korea’,
Independent
, 13 April 2012.

²
David Hawk:
The Hidden Gulag: The Lives and Voices of ‘Those Who Are Sent to the Mountains
’, Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, Washington DC, 2012, http://www.hrnk.org/uploads/pdfs/HRNK_Hidden Gulag2_Web_5-18.pdf

³
Hawk, p154.

⁴
Raelyn Campbell of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: http://www.asanplenum.org/programme_detail/sessionSketchesDetail.asp?x=y&seq=660

⁵
Matthew McGrath:
NK News
website, 29 August 2013.

19

The Gulag Circus

The most arresting thing about our trip to the State Circusin Pyongyang wasn’t the clowns, creepy and unfunny as ever, or the high-wire act or the juggler atop five wibbly-wobbly chairs or the sequinned lady acrobat whizzing around above the audience inside a cardboard inter-continental rocket, but the audience itself. Ten thousand saw I at a glance, tossing their heads in sprightly dance, clapping in terrifying unison: officers of the Korean People’s Army, brown-uniformed, obedient to the core. Our minders had kept us away from the parade, but our trip to the circus was a healthy reminder of the power of the regime over the masses. Mad and bad and sad and silly as the government of North Korea is, it didn’t feel like a regime in imminent danger of self-destruction. Not once inside the DPRK did we see anindication of dissent, a suggestion that people were not enthralled with the regime. In North Korea everything stays the same.

Or does it? As the soldiers clapped in step and roared their approval when the acrobat lady popped out of the toy rocket, one
couldn’t help wondering: What do they really think? Do they buy it all?

The counter-argument is invisible and inaudible to us. But that does not mean, like Bishop Berkeley’s tree falling in the forest, that it doesn’t exist. That argument would be: a big number of people hate the regime with a passion; they know it tells lies about itself; they know that it stuffs itself with the finest food and wines while millions starve. And the proof of the existence of that counter-argument? The people in the gulag.

Satellite technology is a wonderful thing. From space, we can stare down and look at perimeter fences, huts, mine entrances and even sites of mass graves. To me, they look like fuzzy, small jagged-edged indications on a computer screen, but to a North Korean defector who served time in the gulag, it’s home.

The best overall guide to the punishment state inside the North Korean state is ‘The Hidden Gulag’, written by David Hawk for the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.
¹
Hawk details an enormous gulag system, with satellite photographs and testimony from former prisoners and guards. His latest, August 2013, estimate is that around 100,000 are locked inside the Kwan-Li-So, the political prison camp system. The phrase means ‘management place’. A second set of prison camps for ‘ordinary criminals’ – many of whom would never be imprisoned in the West – is called the Kyo-Hwa-So, literally ‘re-education facility’, more like apenitentiary. Jimmy the Gold-Smuggler ended up in the latter; the former sucks in political enemies of the regime.

The Kwan-Li-So gulag is hell on earth. Here, political prisoners
who have gone through the mockery of a trial or no trial a tall live behind barbed wire and electrified fences in the shivering cold of the mountains of north or north-central North Korea. Some starve to death; some are worked to death; some are tortured; some commit suicide. This leads to what Hawk calls ‘exorbitant rates of deaths in detention’. His estimate of the political gulag population has come down from around 200,000 a decade ago to 100,000 in 2013. This may be because of a relaxation of political persecution; or that a big fraction of that 200,000 are now dead. No one knows. The Red Cross is not allowed into the gulag; officially, the regime does not admit it exists.

Unluckily for the Kim dynasty, there are now around 20,000 defectors from the North in South Korea and around the world. Three defectors have written astonishing stories about their time in the worst layers of the gulag:
The Aquariums of Pyongyang, Escape from Camp 14
and
Long Road Home.
²

The Aquariums of Pyongyang
is the story of a boy who enters the gulag in 1977, when he is nine years old. When the lorry arrives at the camp, Kang Chol Hwan’s reaction to his fellow inmates is one of disgust: ‘How frightfully filthy they all were, dressed like beggars, their hair caked and matted with dirt.’ His grandfather had been a successful businessman in Japan of Korean origin; the family are lured home, and then their troubles begin. It’s a harrowing story of public executions, horror, insane cruelty and beatings. The grimmest is Kang’s description of a schoolmate arguing with their bully of a teacher. The teacher, clearly psychotic, beats him savagely and then dumps him into the septic tank.
The boy, half unconscious, cannot save himself and dies in the excrement.

Escape from Camp 14
tells the story of Shin Dong Hyuk, the only person born in the gulag for the invisibles, the lowest of the low, to escape. He survived by betraying his mother and older brother to the Bowibu. He watches them hang. You might think it is hard to sympathize with this monster, but his story is so harrowing, you do.
Long Road Home
is the story of Kim Yong, a North Korean lieutenant colonel in the National Security Agency who falls from grace and ends up in Camp 14, too. Hemanages to get out, then escapes to the South. Along the way, you read more than you might prefer about cannibalism. At Camp 14, Kim Yong worked more than 2,000 feet below ground, in a state of permanent hunger; the air was foul, the light a feeble glow-worm. One day a cave-in buried five prisoners alive. When the others managed to dig through to them, they were dead. The guards ordered the bodies to be wrapped in straw mats and removed, but two prisoners hacked off a leg and hid it in a shaft. ‘They came back to eat the raw flesh the following day.’ They were discovered, and shot.
³

All three books provide such intricate detail they build an unanswerable case that the gulag does exist.

Torture is routine, and has been a consistent feature of the gulag, from Ali Lamedas experience in 1967 to the present day. But the number of would-be defectors has shotup in recent years, and so, consequently, has the savagery of the regime’s gaolers.

Accounts of women victims suffering extreme torture are uncommon; accounts of them suffering rape and forced abortions, as set out in
Chapter 18
, all too common. There is an ocean of this stuff out there; I have only selected a few cases, virtually at random.

In 2005, Kim Seong Cheol ended up in the Bowibu prison in Onsong, in the far north-east of the country, bang next to China, and stuffed to the gunnels with‘border-crossers’, either caught on the North Korean side or sent back from China. The detention cell was so crowded there was nowhere to sit. If a prisoner did not comply with ‘exercise’ drills, sittingdown and standing up, repeatedly, they would make him stick his arms through the cell bars, tighten the handcuffs, and beat his hands with the iron rods used to clean their guns. The guards were wary of leaving bruises on faces. Once, Kim Seong was kicked in the eye. The bleeding was bad, so the guards sent him back to his cell. Receiving medical care or medicine was unimaginable.

While detained by the Inminboanseong, the People’s Safety Agency, the lower-ranking and theoretically less nasty security agency to the Bowibu, he witnessed aprisoner subjected to the strappado, a torture first used by the Spanish Inquisition, in which the victim’s hands are tied behind their back and then suspended in the air by ropes tied around the wrists. ‘Anyone,’ he said, ‘who would come back to the cell after having it done on them would be unable to speak and nearly dead.’
⁴

In South Korea I met Jung Gwang II, a shy, diffident man. He was born in Yanji, China, of Korean-Chinese stock. His family moved to North Korea when he was seven. Following military service in the North Korean army, Jung became a trader, selling high quality mushrooms to China. But hewent one better, and sold his fungi directly to South Korean traders, skipping the Chinese middlemen. In China, he rubbished the Kim dynasty to someone who turned out to be a North Korean snitch. On his return in July
1999, he was arrested at Hoeryong and ended up in an underground Bowibu torture interrogation. There, they tortured Jung to confess to spying for South Korea. He was beaten with a stick, they broke his teeth, scarred the back of his head. Tortures include the ‘sit/stand torture’ – where you ceaselessly have to stand and sit until you collapse – and the heading thenewspaper torture’, where a person is forced to maintain a position like he is reading a newspaper but without a chair. The worst was the ‘pigeon torture’. The victim’s legs and armsare tied together behind his back; the man’s chest is thrust outwards like a pigeon’s, the whole body locked, almost entirely immobile. After suffering this for hours, the muscles seize, and people fear permanent paralysis. During his time in the underground cells, two fellow prisoners died in detention. Jung’s weight fell from 75kg to 38kg (1651b to 841b, from 11 stone to 6). Underground, ‘no matter how much you scream, no one can hear you’.

In early 2002, he was transferred to Camp 15, Yodok. We looked at it through Google Earth.
⁵
Yodok has sixty-five fake reviews on Google Maps, from punters having a playful poke at tyranny. Even so, comments like: ‘Certainly not for the work shy and if you want to lose weight, this is the place’, fail to raise much of a smile.

In September 2013 Andrei Lankov made a bold and provocative claim, that human rights in North Korea had recently shown an improvement, moving from ‘being disastrous to being really bad.’
⁶
Lankov argued: ‘It seems clear that in the last fifteen or twenty years the general trend has been a lessening of repression.’ The rule of three generations of state revenge was over, he said, as the ‘family responsibility principle’ had been abandoned. Henoted,
too, David Hawk’s research that indicates the number of detainees in the gulag has dropped. Lankov’s claim prompted a strong rebuttal from Greg Scarlatoiu of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, who argued that, contrary to Lankov’s view, the fall ininmates may be due to fresh atrocities committed under Kim Jong Un. If the decline is true, he wrote: ‘The mainreason for the decline was the staggeringly high rate of death in detention, due to executions, severe malnutrition and concomitant disease, and work accidents. This hardly qualifies as indication of improvement of the human rights situation in North Korea.’
⁷
In the absence of any independent inspection of the campsit’s impossible to come to a conclusion on this matter, but the continued absence of scrutiny does not make one optimistic. A young dictator is more vigorous, and more unpleasant to live under, than an old dictator. Scarlatoiu notes the one statistic that the world can subject to scrutiny; the number of defectors arriving in South Korea fell from 2,706 in 2011 to 1,502 in 2012. That’s almost 50 per cent and that’s not a sign that life inside North Korea is improving under Kim The Third.

I asked Jung, how do they bury the dead in the winter when the ground is so cold? He replied: ‘No, we don’t bury them. We leave the dead bodies in a warehouse till April. We bury them in April. When we go to bury them, they are already rotten and totally decomposed. So they are shovelled like rubbish and buried.’

How many bodies in one hole in the ground?

‘Up to eighty people.’

That’s a big mass grave. One day, it can be dug up again, and, perhaps, the people responsible will answer to justice. That would be a circus well worth turning up to. One day...

¹
Hawk's ‘The Hidden Gulag' report for HRNK is available in printed format or as a PDF: http://www.hrnk.org/uploads/pdfs/HRNK_HiddenGulag2_Web_5-18.pdf An update was released in August 2013: http://www.hrnk.org/events/announcements-view.php?id=10

²
Kang Choi Hwan, Pierre Rigoulot:
The Aquariums of Pyongyang,
Basic Books, New York, 1995; Blaine Harden:
Escape from Camp 14,
Pan Macmillan, London, 2012; Kim Yong with Kim Suk-Young:
Long Road Home,
Columbia University Press, New York, 2009.

³
Kim Yong, p89.

⁴
‘Survival Under Torture, Briefing Report on the Situation of Torture in the DPRK’, Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, 2009, http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr

⁵
Dial ‘Yodok’ into Google Earth and it comes up as Yodok Concentration Camp.

⁶
http://www.nknews.org/2013/09/how-human-rights-in-north-korea-are-gradually-improving/

⁷
http://www.nknews.org/2013/09/are-human-rights-really-improving-in-north-korea/

20

God the Fat Boy Kim

Will he, won’t he, blow the world up?

At a restaurant one day, the television was on and viewers were treated to a series of colour photographs of the world’s youngest head of state. There wasplump-cheeked Kim Jong Un in his trademark short sides and floppy top haircut, sporting a long-length blue coat. The Young Leader was being shown around a military facility by three generals wearing flat circular hats, a little like the kepisworn by the French Foreign Legion but without the white flap at the back. Kim the Third gave OTSG while heinspected a funny large box and bits of machinery. ‘Military equipment,’ explained MrHyun, ‘so we can strike the White House with one blow.’

That was Mr Hyun’s catchphrase. He always delivered it with a swing of his fist and a smile on his chops. The next photograph was utterly bizarre. Two generals looked on as Kim Jong Un checked out two children’s slides, one blue, one red. The‘Military-First’ policy has created a parallel economy, where manufacturing children’s play equipment is as much a job for soldiers as guarding the DPRK from the American-bastards. The incongruity of a military inspection of children’s slides didn’t seem to bother the Young Marshal. May be he is the future, but on the basis of his generals showing him kiddy slides, he, too, looks locked in the past.