Washington / NationalTurk – More than 150,000 North Koreans are incarcerated in a Soviet-style, hidden gulag despite the communist government’s denial it holds political prisoners, a human rights group reported Tuesday.
The U.S.-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea bases its report on interviews with 60 former prisoners and guards lived in North Korean prisoners. The report on North Korean prisoner camps include satellite images of what are described as prison labor camps and penitentiaries.
The South Korean government estimates there are about 154,000 prisoners in North Korea’s labour camps, while the US state department puts the number as high as 200,000. The biggest is 31 miles long and 25 miles wide, an area larger than the city of Los Angeles. Numbers 15 and 18 have re-education zones where detainees receive remedial instruction in the teachings of sweet North Korean leaders Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung, and are sometimes released. The remaining North Korean prisoner camps are ‘ complete control districts ‘ where ‘ irredeemables ‘ are worked to the grave.
North Korean prison camps report reveals dreadful insight on North Korea
The report on North Korean prison camps documents the alleged incarceration of entire families, including children and grandparents for the ‘ political crimes ‘ of other family members, and infanticide and forced abortions of female prisoners who illegally crossed into China and impregnated by men there, and were then forcibly repatriated or departed back to North Korea, the land of communism and mourning frenzy.
The Human Rights committee, a private, U.S.-based group, is holding a conference today in Washington, timed for north Korean capital Pyongyang’s celebrations to mark the centennial of the repressive communist and most secluded nation’s founder.
The self proclaimed U.S. envoy on North Korean human rights, Robert King, is due to address the conference, which takes place as the international spotlight shines on North Korea over its plans to launch a long-range rocket and, according to South Korean intelligence, a third nuclear weapons test.
“It is not just nuclear weapons that have to be dismantled,” stated Roberta Cohen, chairwoman of the committee’s board of directors, “but an entire system of political repression.”
The North Korean prison camps report revealed the camp system was initially modeled in the 1950s on the Soviet gulag to punish ‘ wrong thinkers ‘ and those belonging to the ‘ wrong political class ‘ or religious persuasion.
North Korean Prison Camps hold 150 -200 k human beings in bad conditions
It cites estimates from North Korean state security agency officials who defected to South Korea that the camp system holds between 150,000 and 200,000 people out of a total population of around 24 million. It urges North Korea to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross access, and to dismantle the camps.
The 200-page report described different kinds of detention facilities, including penal labor colonies where it says political detainees are imprisoned without judicial process for mostly lifetime sentences in mining, logging or agricultural enterprises.
You will have sex when we want with whom we want you to have sex with : Motto from a North Korean Prison Camp
The life inside the North Korean prison camps is based on fierce regulation that extend into the ‘ private lives ‘ of the inmates. Single men and women slept in dormitories segregated by sex. One rule of a certain camp read, ‘ Should sexual physical contact occur without prior approval, the perpetrators will be shot immediately.’ A reward marriage was the only safe way around the no-sex rule. Guards announced marriages four times a year. If one partner found his or her chosen mate to be unacceptably old, cruel or ugly, guards would sometimes cancel a marriage. If they did, neither the man nor the woman would be allowed to marry again.
The labor colonies are enclosed behind barbed wire and electrified fences, mainly in the north and north central mountains of the country, the report says, alleging high rates of death in detention due to systemic mistreatment, torture, execution and malnutrition.
North Korean prison camps belie North korean governments claims on political prisoners
North Korean prisoner camps report states former prisoners were able to identify their former barrack and houses, work sites, execution grounds and other landmarks in the camps via imagery available through Google Earth.
The committee informs the report’s findings contradict a December 2009 statement by North Korean government to the United Nations Human Rights Council that the political prisoner camps do not exist.
Greg Scarlatoiu, the committee’s executive manager, stated more than 30,000 North Korean defectors have now fled the country, up from just 3,000 a decade ago, so Pyongyang cannot hide the harsh reality of its political prison camps.
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Why is the world turning a blind eye to these horrible prison camps? Did we not say, “Never again!”?