The growing tensions over North Korea's nuclear weapons program are playing out on the international stage, but unknown thousands are struggling in anonymity to survive in the Hermit Nation's concentration camps.
This week, as President Obama and Japan's new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, pledged to pursue tougher actions at the U.N. Security Council over North Korea's recent missile and nuclear bomb tests, two escapees from North Korean concentration camps shared their stories at a human rights conference in Geneva.
"People think the Holocaust is in the past, but it is still very much a reality. It is still going on in North Korea," Shin Dong Hyuk told The Japan Times in a story published Friday.
Shin was born in Camp 14, one of five known concentration camps in North Korea. The 30-year-old escaped from the camp seven years ago, when he and another prisoner made a dash to a high-voltage security fence. The other internee was electrocuted; Shin escaped to China by scrambling over the dead man's body.
The Times reported as many as 200,000 North Koreans are enduring torture and starvation in the camps. But no one outside of the isolated country knows the total number of prisoners for sure because the repeated attempts of human rights organizations to extract information about the camps from Pyongyang have been rebuffed or ignored.
Here are some excerpts from the Times report:
"While Shin’s comparison with Nazi concentration camps, where the majority of the 6 million Jews who perished during the Holocaust were murdered, may seem extreme, another camp survivor, Chol Hwan Kang, agreed with the analogy.
"'Fundamentally, it is the same as Hitler’s Auschwitz,' Chol said, referring to one of the Nazi era’s most notorious death camps.
"With whole families in North Korea thrown into camps together and starving to death, he said that the 'methods may be different, but the effect is the same.'
"Chol, now 43, was sent to Camp 15 with his whole family when he was 9 years old to repent for the suspected disloyalties of his grandfather. He spent 10 years there before his family was released and later managed to flee to China and later to South Korea — the same route taken by Shin." ...
"After meeting Shin and hearing his harrowing account in December, U.N. human rights Commissioner Navi Pillay called for an in-depth international inquiry into 'one of the worst, but least understood and reported, human rights situations in the world.'" ...
"Shin, who says his father and grandfather were sent to the camp because two of his uncles apparently defected to South Korea, said he was expected to spend his entire life in them under a system that calls for up to three generations of family members of an accused to also be punished.
"'The birth of a baby is a blessed thing in the outside world, but inside the camp, babies are born to be slaves like their parents. It’s an absolute scandal,' Shin said.
"Both Shin and Chol described life in the camp as defined by hunger and violence.
"'Daily I saw torture, and every day in the camp I saw people dying of malnutrition and starvation. I saw lots of friends die and I almost died myself of malnutrition,' Chol recalled.
"Shin still carries the scars of his experience on his body. Resting his right hand on the table in front of him, he revealed the missing tip of his middle finger, which he says was chopped off by a prison guard as punishment after he dropped a piece of machinery in a factory."
No comments:
Post a Comment