Communist Gulag in All Its Horror

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 8, 1999 | by Catherine Edwards

Prison camps run by Pyongyang are responsible for some Of the worst human-rights abuses, while the Clinton administration Maintains a `see no evil, speak no evil' policy.

Her captors tied her to a chair so she couldn't move, inserted a tube into her mouth and poured gallons of water down her throat. Her abdomen swelled until she thought she would explode. Then her torturers placed a wooden board across her stomach and, as they took turns jumping on the board, her pain was beyond description. Finally, she was pushed into a hot kiln. As she struggled to avoid being incinerated she suffered severe burns.

These were torture techniques used by North Korean officials to get Soon Ok-lee to confess to a crime before her trial. At the trial she would be sentenced to 13 years in a political prison camp. Soon had refused to pay a bribe to a local police chief.

Accounts of the communist gulag did not end with the return of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to post-Soviet Russia, for Soon has lived to report from her own experience that such a gulag is in full operation in North Korea.

The Center for the Advancement of Human Rights in Seoul, South Korea, estimates that there are more than 10 such camps in North Korea where 400,000 people already have been worked to death, while another 200,000 prisoners remain. Established by late North Korean president Kim Il-sung, 20 percent of those imprisoned in the camps have committed a crime, while 80 percent are family members or have been sentenced to hard labor, torture and brutal conditions for crimes they did not commit.

While these hundreds of thousands languish in government-run concentration camps, North Korea is demanding an apology from the U.S. Army for its alleged killing of 400 South Korean civilians at No Gun Ri during the Korean War when Communist forces were using civilians as human shields for their offensive. The Clinton administration has promised to investigate the events at No Gun Ri but, in its ongoing negotiations with North Korea, critics claim the administration has been appeasing the Stalinist regime. President Clinton recently lifted sanctions against North Korea in return for suspension of long-range missile testing during the talks.

Meanwhile, recent press reports from the official Korean Central News Agency, or KCNA, express the communist government's disapproval of the successful U.S. test of a missile-defense system in early October. Calling the downing of a missile simulating an attack on the United States a "perfidious act" North Korea said it will continue to build its military forces.

It is the same old belligerence. Fifty years ago the Communist North invaded South Korea. U.S. forces intervened to defend the South and drove the North's forces to the Chinese border, whereupon China assisted the North. An armistice eventually was signed establishing a military demarcation near the 38th parallel, the previous border. U.S. troops have been stationed there ever since; 37,000 are there today.

In 1994, North Korea agreed to halt efforts to produce nuclear weapons. According to the State Department, no further development has occurred. However, in August 1998, North Korea launched a long-range ballistic missile over Japan.

In November of last year former secretary of defense William Perry was appointed as special adviser to Clinton and the State Department to review U.S. policy toward North Korea. In the unclassified report released by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in early October, Perry made no mention of North Korea's deplorable human-rights record. Instead he recommended that the United States continue to ease sanctions and restore full diplomatic relations in return for North Korea's willingness to halt development of long-range missiles and nuclear warheads.

Chuck Downs, author of Over the Line: North Korea's Negotiating Strategy, says the report and the administration's policy toward North Korea are self-delusional. "It is an 11th-hour attempt of an administration that knows that half of its Cadillac is on the train track. North Korea will increase its leverage and allow the United States to convince itself it has done something good and will then knock our Cadillac off the train track."

Four days before the release of the Perry report, the KCNA editorialized that U.S. forces stationed in South Korea are "the source of all evils," and that they must be withdrawn from the Korean peninsula. The government news agency now claims that the U.S. Army, "the imperial aggressor," brutally massacred civilians at three more locations besides No Gun Ri during the Korean War.

Meanwhile, the situation in North Korea under the Communist regime is deplorable. Three defectors testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April, the first-ever Senate hearing on abuse of human rights in North Korea. Later that month the State Department blocked the release of a Voice of America radio editorial that detailed, from the accounts of defectors, the horrendous conditions inside the prison camps. The State Department memo said the editorial was "poorly timed and should be rewritten instead with an emphasis on the most recent round of four-party talks with the North Koreans and the efforts to promote peace and relieve tension in the peninsula."