Life in a North Korean Labor Camp: 'No Thinking ... Just Fear'
SEOUL,
South Korea -- An orphan who was caught trying to escape from North
Korea told NBC News how he was "treated like an animal" in one of the country's notorious labor camps.
The head of a United Nations panel on Monday said atrocities committed by North Korea against its own people were "strikingly similar" to those perpetrated by the Nazis
during World War II and released a 400-page report which shed new light
on the camps. American missionary Kenneth Bae is currently imprisoned
in North Korea after being sentenced to 15 years of hard labor on charges of trying to overthrow the state. The conditions he is being held in remain unclear.
The U.N. report came as
no shock for Hyuk Kim, who was a homeless 16-year-old when he was
arrested by state security in 1998 trying to cross the border into China
in search of food. He was sent to North Korea's Jungeori Labor Camp
after being ordered jailed for three years.
“At
Jungeori, there was no sense of being human, if you thought you were a
human being, you couldn't live there,” said Kim, who is now aged 33.
“You were like an animal. You do the hard labor you were ordered to do,
that’s it. No thinking. No free will. Just fear.”
As his 4-foot, 9-inch frame withered away, Kim became obsessed with just one thing: food.
“Because
you were so hungry, you thought about food and how to get more of it
all the time,” Kim recalled. “Sometimes you got lucky and you were able
to catch a rat or two as a snack, which you'd skin, dry the meat out and
eat, usually raw. If you tried to cook the rats, the guards would smell
the meat or fire, catch you and beat you mercilessly.”
In Jungeori, breakfast was served at 7 a.m. and consisted usually of a handful of cornmeal and 50-90 soya beans.
Inmates would toil until
noon, when they were given lunch of more soya beans and cornmeal,
before working again until 6 p.m. or 7p.m. However, some teams would be
expected to work as late as 9 p.m. each day.
Dinner
was typically served at 7:30 p.m. and the rest of the evening would
then be dedicated to what qualified as the only entertainment available
to prisoners: learning and memorizing the rules and regulations of the
camp.
“If one prisoner got one
word wrong, the entire team had to stay up until everybody got it all
correct,” Kim said. If night study went well, prisoners would go to
sleep each night at 10 p.m.
Conditions
were horrific with as many as 50 people crammed into one room, each one
having just enough space to lie huddled together, person-to-person
inside.
One way to secure extra
food was through barter. Cigarettes in Jungeori were the most valuable
item to trade, with prisoners scrapping them together by surreptitiously
lifting half-smoked butts belonging to the prison guards off the ground
and consolidating the remaining tobacco into new cigarettes.
The
trade was fraught with risk though, as being caught making or smoking
these contraband cigarettes would also lead to severe beatings from the
guards.
Kim recalled he did not
dare to look ahead to a day when he would walk free from the camp. To
think that far ahead was to invite death.
“If
you thought about when you'd leave the camp each day, you were usually
among the first to die,” Kim said. “Psychologically, you cannot fully
adapt to camp life if your thoughts are stuck only on your release.
Jobs
at the labor camp were assigned by the prison guards based off of an
opaque rubric that included your hometown, physical health, occupation
outside of the camp and whatever influential connections you may have
outside the camp.
Truckers and
drivers in the real world were assigned to the auto mechanic team,
builders would be assigned to construction units inside the camp, while
stout men from mountain regions were assigned to logging units. Farmers
would be sent to till the harsh soil of nearby fields while others like
Kim were assigned to a unit that moved packages and supplies to and from
the Jungeori railway station to the prison.
The lucky few managed to find their way onto kitchen duty, where they could sneak in extra bits of food during their shifts.
During
his time at Jungeori, Kim and his fellow prisoners watched three men be
executed for attempting to escape camp and a fourth shot for being
caught eating stolen food. Others simply succumbed to wounds suffered
from beatings by the guards.
Kim, who was eventually
released after around eight months, arrived in South Korea in September
2001. In recent years, he has served as a lecturer for a local
Unification Education Committee in the country’s southern province of
Chungnam. Kim is one of the few defectors who will speak publicly about
their experience in the camps.
Although Kim's stint at
Jungeori was over a decade ago, recent defectors who’ve left similar
labor camps have told him that conditions have only worsened. One female
defector who arrived in South Korea in 2010 told Kim that the number of
soya beans rationed out each day at her camp has dropped below the
paltry amount he received.
Recent images of Bae, who has been held by North Korean authorities since November 2012 after being found guilty of “hostile acts” against the state, also provide hints of conditions inside the camps.
The
Choson Sinbo, a North Korea-friendly newspaper, released photos showing
Bae’s daily routine, which starts every morning at 6 a.m. and consists
of eight hours of “work” broken up with half-hour “rest” periods.
According to the schedule, work ends for Bae at 6 p.m., allowing him two
hours at night for “cultural rest” before lights out at 10 p.m.
Previous
video disseminated out by Choson Sinbo – a publication put out by a
North Korean Residents Association in Japan – shows a solitary Bae at
work hoeing farmland and conducting interviews from a windowed room with
heating and a fan – comforts that seem at odds with the tough conditions described by Bae and North Korean camp escapees.
KYODO / Reuters file
“There are many types of
labor and prison camps in North Korea, but I’ve never heard of any that
looked as idyllic as this one,” says Barbara Demick, an American
journalist based in Beijing and author of "Nothing to Envy: Ordinary
Lives in North Korea." “For most people, time at a North Korean labor
camp is like a death sentence because of low food rations and extremely
harsh working conditions.”
Demick
added: “I spoke to a North Korean defector just last month who came out
of a labor camp and she said her sleeping conditions were so narrow she
couldn’t stretch out her legs. She was imprisoned for the fairly minor
offense of crossing the border into China, not the much more serious
charges laid against Bae.”
Amnesty International late last year released satellite imagery that showed expanded labor camps in North Korea in which an escapee claimed prisoners were forced to dig their own graves before being killed by guards.
It
is likely that Bae is being held under special conditions as a result
of his American nationality. In a video released last week, Bae notes
that he had been treated “fairly” by his guards and had been granted
time to watch television each night at the labor camp, though its
antenna had been broken for a few weeks.
The free time has also given the devout Christian “more time with the Lord, with the Bible.”
Until now, American officials have been flummoxed in their attempts to free Bae. A reported second scheduled trip last week by Ambassador Robert King to secure Bae’s release was scuttled by North Korea after it refused to issue a visa. At the request of Bae’s family, Reverend Jesse Jackson has also offered to travel to North Korea to secure his release.
Ed Flanagan reported from Beijing.
Culled from NBC News
No comments:
Post a Comment