With a GPN Timeline of Resolutions on Human Rights in North Korea
A report, addressing the suspected mass killings and other human rights atrocities, committed by the totalitarian regime of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, since its establishment in 1948
Yael Stein and Elihu D Richter
Information gathered from dissidents and refugees has given the West a fairly clear picture of severe human rights violations committed by North Korea's totalitarian regime, notably mass killing, using methods very similar to those of Stalin and Mao. North Korea’s human rights record is dismal but details about the secretive hermit state are not readily available. Mass killings and summary public executions are repeated major violations. Human rights abuses include arbitrary and lengthy imprisonment, torture and degrading treatment, poor prison conditions, prohibitions or severe restrictions on freedom of speech, the press, movement, assembly, religion, and privacy, denial of the right of citizens to change their government, and suppression of workers’ rights. Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They were left to an agonizing death, while scientists watched on and took notes. IF genocide results from human choice and bystander indifference, it remains for the outside world to put North Korea’s leaders on notice, that they will eventually face the same fate as the Khmer Rouge.
Threats of mass murder – violations of the most basic human right – the Right to Life
Between 1948 and 1987, during Kim Il-Sung’s rule, the world knew very little about what was going on behind the closed doors of Kim Il-Sung’s communist totalitarian regime. But gradually, more and more information gathered from dissidents and refugees has given the West a fairly clear picture of severe human rights violations committed by North Korea's totalitarian regime, notably mass killing, using methods very similar to those of Stalin and Mao.
Political scientist, R. J. Rummel, of the University of Hawaii, has proposed an inclusive word, democide, for all forms of mass killing. Demo stands for people, as in the word democracy, and cide for killing, as in homocide or genocide. Rummel’s concern is that when we differentiate between different forms of mass killing—for example, when we distinguish between genocide, politicide and mass murder—the definition of any one category, however correct or useful it may be, may lead us to be unaware or forget that millions more of innocent human beings have been murdered by governments, and that a true picture must include all killings of masses of unarmed peoples by governments. In addition, Rummel is concerned with preserving the original definition of genocide as the killing of persons because of group membership. In order to provide an inclusive word for all mass killings by governments, Rummel has given us the concept of democide.
Based on calculations and assessments, R.J. Rummel estimates 710,000 to slightly over 3,500,000 people murdered between 1948 and 1987 (mid-estimate: 1,600,000, in what he calls the "North Korean Democide". He estimates 510,000 as killed during the Korean War other than those killed in battle (1950-1953).
Prisoners of War - Thousands were murdered by the North Koreans, and up to 50,000 prisoners were forced to join the North Korean military. Citing researchers Don Lawson and Robert Leckie, Rummel concludes that North Koreans killed some 10,000-18,000 South Korean and American Prisoners of War and forced 400,000 South Koreans into their army, who were then allocated the most dangerous tasks – of these, an estimated 225,000 were killed. Prisoners were later forced to work in concentration camps, and, of these, an estimated 265,000 were killed or died in the North Korean camps, at a rate of 6,700 prisoners per year.
Civilians - Besides those killed in war, the party imposed hard labor (corv×™e labor) on millions of citizens. Thousands or even tens of thousands of citizens were ordered to leave their homes for months at a time, to work on building projects in remote areas of the country. With very poor living and labor conditions, the death rate of this forced labor was as high as 20-30%. Others may have been executed for anti-party behavior or non-cooperation. Citizens considered "hostile" to the regime were punished by forced labor in labor camps, with a similar death rate. The estimates sum up to almost 1,000,000 hard laborers killed, over 25,000 a year.
Background
North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a highly centralized single party state, controlled rigidly by the communist Korean Workers' Party (KWP) since its establishment in 1948. A few minor political parties are allowed to exist in name only, but the government controls all activity. Media and News agencies are controlled and censored. North Korea is ranked second to last on the World Press Freedom Index. Highly secretive, it is known as the Hermit State. North Korea is defiantly solitary, run on a principle known as "Juche," a brand of Stalinism emphasizing national self-reliance.
In 2002, United States president George W. Bush labeled North Korea part of an "axis of evil," together with Iraq and Iran, and later as an "outpost of tyranny". In 2008, after North Korea agreed to nuclear inspection demands, the country was removed from the "black list" of state sponsored terrorism. The agreement was criticized by many. At the time, both US Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, expressed concerns and warned that if the terms were not met, there would be immediate consequences. Indeed, North Korea indeed has not met the terms of this agreement.
The country's constitution was created in 1948, and then revised in 1972, 1992, 1998, and again in 2009.
Kim Il-sung ruled North Korea from 1948 until his death in July 1994. Since then, the country has been ruled by his son Kim Jong-il. Both leaders have been using a cult of personality to enforce their rule. Kim Il-sung’s title was "Great Leader," and his son, Kim Jong-il, is "Dear Leader". Current reports confirm that Kim Jong-il has assigned his third son, 26 year old Kim Jong-Un, to be the next leader, establishing dynastic rule. The leader's son had taken up a low-level post at the National Defense Commission, and recently was promoted to the rank of general.
Economy on the Brink of Recurrent Famine
North Korea's economy declined sharply in the 1990s with the end of communism in Eastern Europe. Gross national income per capita is estimated to have fallen by about one-third between 1990 and 2002. There has been some restabilization since then, traced especially to renewed North-South Korean economic cooperation, but the practical effect on living conditions is modest.
During Kim Jong-Il's rule, in the 1990's North Korea suffered one of the worst famines of the 20th century, initially brought about by natural causes. It is estimated that, up to 1 million people, about 3 to 5 percent of the country's population, perished of hunger. Genocide scholars suggest that the mass famine was not random, and that the distribution of food was exploited for the regime's needs, withholding food from some populations who were not supporters of the regime and leaving them to starve – a Stalinist method well known and much used by USSR and by China in the past. Kim himself denied that the famine even existed.
Today North Korea appears to be near famine and mass hunger again. Renewed provision of aid is likely to lessen the scale and severity of famine compared to the 1990s, but hunger-related deaths have already been reported to occur.
According to researchers, in 2005, the North Korean government declared private trade in grain illegal, causing many families to lose an important source of food. The government confiscated grain in rural areas and sought to revive state-run quantity rationing systems, but did not succeed at large. It even threatened to expel the World Food Programme (WFP). Although most of North Korea's grain is produced domestically, production is dependent of fertilizer shipments from abroad, notably South Korea. South Korea had been supplying fertilizer to North Korea as part of renewed inter-Korean interaction (South Korea's Sunshine Policy). But since North Korea's nuclear tests in 2006, South Korea suspended these shipments of fertilizer. With global aid down following sanctions, there is again a shortage of food. The regime's weak economy makes it unlikely that it will be able to import commercial amounts of food. Floods in Southwest agricultural regions in August 2007 have worsened the situation substantially.
North Korea devotes a disproportionately large percentage of its gross domestic product to its military purposes, another factor contributing to its economic difficulties. It also reportedly exports know-how to other members of the axis of genocide, notably Iran and Syria. Reports say that currently, North Korean industry is operating at a small fraction of its potential capacity due to lack of fuel and spare parts.
In December 2009, North Korea redenominated its currency at a rate of 100 to 1 and implemented new laws, banning the use or possession of foreign currency, regulating consumption and controlling the market. Money belonging to private traders has been confiscated. Inflation has risen.
A former finance official, Pak Nam-gi, was reportedly executed by a firing squad in Pyongyang. Yonhap News reported that he was charged with treason for "intentionally ruining the national economy," and held responsible for the failed currency reform and the growing public unrest over the faltering economy. According to the report, many North Koreans believe he was made a scapegoat.
A UNICEF report from 2009, cited also by the World Food Programme (WFP), states that one third of North Korean women and children are malnourished. According to this report, the country will need almost 1.8 tons of food this year to meet the most basic food needs of 24 million North Korean population.
UNICEF reports high percentages of child mortality (55 /1,000 live births), chronic malnutrition among children under age five (37%) and malnutrition of pregnant women (32%). The suggested causes are prolonged poverty, under-resourced health systems, decaying water and sanitation infrastructure, inadequate caring practices for young children and pregnant women, and fragile food security. The report sums that 2 million children under age five and 400,000 pregnant women are relying on international aid.
North Korea’s major trading partners are China, South Korea, Singapore, India, and Russia.
Other Human Rights Violations
North Korea’s human rights record is dismal but details about the secretive hermit state are not readily available.
Mass killings and summary public executions are the major violations. Human rights abuses include arbitrary and lengthy imprisonment, torture and degrading treatment, poor prison conditions, prohibitions or severe restrictions on freedom of speech, the press, movement, assembly, religion, and privacy, denial of the right of citizens to change their government, and suppression of workers’ rights.
In 2003, NBC News revealed that North Korea’ s State Security Agency maintains a dozen political prisons and about 30 forced labor and labor education camps in remote areas of the country. Most information comes from defectors, refugees and escapees. The worst are in the far North of North Korea, near the borders with China and Russia. They assessed that in 2003, these camps held around 200,000 men, women and children accused of political crimes.
The investigation, which was assisted by US and South Korean officials, included interviews with former prisoners, guards and who had been working or imprisoned in one of these camps between the years 1987-1994. It revealed horrifying and shocking conditions in these camps. This information has been verified by additional sources, escaped prisoners and refugees.
Satellite photos provided by DigitalGlobe confirm the existence of the camps. These photos are available on NBC News website (first appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review). The photos show military-style arracks, and the camp is surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence, with landmines and man traps, and a battery of anti-aircraft guns close-by.
At least two camps, Haengyong and Huaong, are very large. These camps have been compared to the Gulags of Mao and Stalin. Reportedly, what are perhaps the most atrocious human rights violations in the world are happening behind these walls, possibly even today.
Many women and children are imprisoned in these camps, because in North Korea three generations of a dissident’s family can be jailed simply on the basis of a denunciation. A child could be imprisoned for years under appalling conditions and hard labor because of some political statement made by his grandfather, not necessarily outright anti-regime activism. For example, a former prisoner, Kang Chol-Hwan, now a journalist in South Korean newspaper and author of “The Aquariums of Pyongyang,” was imprisoned for almost ten years, since the age of 9, with his entire family, because his grandfather had made complimentary statements about Japanese capitalism.
The concentration camps have detention centers, specific spots where executions are decided on, and training and recreation areas for the guards.
Prisoners are held in these camps for years, moving from job to job according to their age and size. In general, the working conditions are described as such that 20-25% of the prison population did not survive the first year. For example, children might be forced to dig for clay or work in building sites, or people would work to exhaustion in giant pits.
In 1985, Oh Kil-nam, an opponent of the South Korean Government, living in Germany at the time, received an offer of a government job in North Korea and medical treatment of his wife's hepatitis. He agreed to the offer, despite his family's objections, and realized his mistake when on arrival he was led to a military camp. Oh was later sent back to Germany to recruit more students for North Korea, but following his wife's request this time, did not recruit any new people, but instead defected to the West and did not return. After he left, his family was sent to Camp No.15. They have reportedly been moved to a section of the camp where prisoners are made to work until they die. Nineteen years ago, Oh received some letters in his wife's handwriting and a recording of his daughters' voices. He doesn't know if they are still alive today. He blames himself for their suffering. In the 1990 Oh Kil-nam wrote a book requesting the release of his family, but to no avail.
A Washington Post report from Feb 2010 brings evidence, through a Seoul-based human rights group called "Democracy Network Against the North Korean Gulag," and evidence collected from former prisoners who saw the family. The report claims that according to the latest estimate by the South Korean government, about 154,000 people are being held in six large camps in North Korea. Public executions are common in the camp, along with beatings, rapes, starvation and the disappearance of female prisoners impregnated by guards. Prisoners have no access to soap, underwear, socks, tampons or toilet paper. Most inmates die by age 50, usually of illnesses exacerbated by overwork and chronic hunger.
Torture
Several dissident former prison-camp guards from different camps explained that the guards were taught to treat the prisoners as if they were not human beings. They were “encouraged and even rewarded” with prizes such as college tuition, for killing prisoners trying to escape.
Beatings and deaths were everyday events which the guards grew used to executing. Prisoners were tortured, sometimes their eyeballs would be taken out by beating, or salt would be applied to open wounds with exposed bones, to make the prisoners suffer.
Pregnant women were forced to abort their babies, by inserting salt water into the women’s wombs with syringes. If the babies were born, they would be killed immediately brutally. Prisoners mentioned that this was done “so that another generation of political dissidents will be eradicated.”
Some of the former prisoners mentioned testing of biological and chemical warfare agents on camp inmates.
One prisoner described an event in which a group of about 50 prisoners were given a leaf of cabbage to eat. “All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes they were quite dead.”
Glass “gas chambers” were also described. Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They were left to an agonizing death, while scientists watched on and took notes.
A BBC documentary interviews the former military attaché at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing, Kwon Hyuk (changed name), who was also the chief of management at Camp 22, which is thought to hold 50,000 prisoners. He described watching a whole family, parents and two children, being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. He said "the parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing." He also drew detailed diagrams of the glass chambers, including the gas injection tube.
The experiments were methodical, as is proven in documents smuggled by dissidents, for example a document dated February 2002: "The above person is transferred from ... camp number 22 for the purpose of human experimentation of liquid gas for chemical weapons."
Hyuk explained that everyone at the camps, including himself, had been taught to believe this treatment was justified. North Korea’s regime and society blamed these political prisoners for the country’s failing economy and all of its other problems. He said the prison guards were trained so as not to feel any sympathy towards these prisoners, even when watching children suffering a painful death.
Another source of evidence from 2004 is a man who defected to China, Kang Byong-sop, who claimed he was an engineer at a chemical factory where testing of chemical weapons on political prisoners took place. Kang was later detained in China when trying to cross the border to Laos, and was returned to North Korea. Later, at a press conference with his family in Pyongyang, Kang Byong-sop said that all the information he had given the west had been faked by his eldest son, who had escaped abroad, in order to make money from human rights organizations.
Abductions
North Korea has been involved in the abduction of foreign citizens. Citizens have been reportedly abducted from 12 different countries: South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Romania, China, Lebanon, Malaysia, France, the Netherlands, Singapore, Italy, and Jordan.
In 2002, Kim Jong-il acknowledged to Japanese Prime Minister, Koizumi, the involvement of North Korea "special institutions" in the kidnapping of Japanese citizens between 1977 and 1983, and said that those responsible had been punished. In October 2002, five surviving victims and their families were allowed to leave North Korea and resettle in Japan. Many other cases are unresolved. In October 2005, North Korea acknowledged for the first time having kidnapped South Korean citizens in previous decades, and noted that several abductees, as well as several POWs from the Korean War, were still alive.
In April 2010, an American citizen, an English teacher in South Korea, Aijalon Mahli Gomes, aged 30, was sentenced to eight years of hard labor and a $700,000 fine for illegally crossing the border to North Korea. He was the fourth American detained by North Korea for illegal entry in less than a year. Three other Americans had crossed into North Korea since March 2009. Journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee were held captive for five months and sentenced to 12 years in a North Korean labor camp. All were freed after diplomatic negotiations, including a visit by former President Bill Clinton.
In August 2009 activist Robert Park, an American citizen and a conscious Christian activist, was allowed to return home, some 40 days after he crossed the border into North Korea. Park had aimed to focus world attention on human rights in North Korea, in order to liberate the concentration camps. However, when he returned home, he was quoted saying that "His understanding of North Korea had been tarnished by ‘false propaganda made by the west.’"
Escapees
Tens of thousands of North Koreans have tried to flee to China, whether to escape political detention or in search of food and new opportunities. According to South Korea's Unification Ministry, more than 16,000 North Koreans have defected to South Korea since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, most of them in the past 10 years, with the number rising every year, estimated at around 2,800 people in 2008. Nearly two thirds of them are women.
Making contact with the outside world is considered the most dangerous crime to the regime of Kim Jung-iI. If people are caught trying to leave North Korea, they risk being shot on the spot, or arrested for indefinite periods and possibly eventually executed.
Defectors exit the country aided by smugglers and try to reach a safe haven. They cross the Chinese border, or pay smugglers to take them to Russia, Laos, Thailand or Vietnam. South Korean organizations help dissidents reach South Korea. If arrested by the Chinese police, the escapees are usually returned to North Korea, where they and their family members face the punishments listed above. Other embassies usually do not send the defectors back.
Some escapees are executed publicly. In such cases, party officials compel all the inhabitants of nearby villages, including children, to be present at the passing of the sentence. An undercover video, smuggled out of North Korea, reached CNN and brings evidence of such a public execution.
In the film, the death sentence is read out: “Those who go against their party and their people will end up with a fate such as this. They have been involved in the illegal act of aiding people to defect the country. They trafficked women across the border to China. We have to protect North Korea from the outside influence and build up a strong guard to keep these influences out.” Then, three policemen with rifles are seen from a distance, shooting a prisoner tied to a pole.
A Reuters report described a public execution of 15 North Koreans in Feb 2008 on charges of trafficking and movement out of the country.
North Korea reportedly has a kidnapping unit, which kidnaps and returns defectors and their helpers, under the direction of the head of the Conspiracy Research Office of the North Korean National Security Agency in North Hamkyung Province.
Human "Trafficking"
North Koreans who escape the country cross its long border with China, or escape by sea. According to reports, many of those caught by guards at the Chinese border, especially women defectors, face more suffering. Many women caught escaping North Korea are sold to slavery, "trafficked", for marriage or as live-in labor. If they escaped North Korea with children or other family members, they are often separated from them forcefully.
The Washington Post, June 2009, tells the story of several women who were sold for marriage in China and have eventually managed to escape to South Korea. North Korean former actress Bang Mi Sun, when crossing the Chinese border in 2002, was separated from her two children and sold into marriage three times. On her third escape, Chinese police arrested her and sent her back to North Korea, where the police maimed her left leg and sent her to a labor camp "for reeducation". In 2004 she succeeded to flee to South Korea.
Another North Korean woman defector, Kim Young Ae, was held in China for 8 years and forcefully married to 3 husbands. A child she had by the first man drowned in a creek; and her son by her third "husband" is being withheld from her by his Chinese family.
The National Human Rights Commission conducted a survey of 274 women defectors escaped from North Korea now living in South Korea. Nearly 20 percent of the women said that they had been forced into sexual favors or bribes when caught by patrollers at the Chinese border. According to the commission's report, data from the Unification Ministry last year showed that six out of ten North Korean female defectors who entered Hanawon from 2003 to August of 2008 were diagnosed with ovarian or cervical illnesses.
Healthcare
The WHO’s Director General Margaret Chan praised North Korea's healthcare system following her visit there in April 2010, and said there was no lack of professional care and that public health had moved forward. She stressed several challenges, such as malnutrition, low weight among newborns and anemia among pregnant women. But a new report by Amnesty International's Asia-Pacific chapter claims that healthcare provided in North Korea is grossly inadequate.
Citing data from the World Health Organization, the Amnesty report claims North Korea spends less on healthcare than any other country in the world – under US$1 per person per year in total. Based on interviews with 40 dissidents, and information given by medical colleagues from other countries, the report claims that the most basic necessities are missing from North Korean hospitals, such as clean sheets and sterilized hypodermic needles. Many people reportedly suffer from malnutrition and hunger, some claimed to have survived on grass and tree bark. North Korea is said to be fighting a tuberculosis epidemic, many patients having developed resistance to first-line drugs. Many drugs available in the past have now been removed from hospitals.
Despite North Korea's claim that its healthcare is free for all, the report says people must pay or bribe the physicians with food or cigarettes for checkups and pay cash for surgery or tests.
China as an Enabler
The Chinese have been an enabling partner to many of North Korea's human rights violations. Without such devout cooperation, many more defectors would have succeeded in escaping to freedom.
The Chinese police and border guards hunt for defectors, arrest them and force them back to North Korea, where they face either execution or life-threatening conditions and torture in prisons and labor camps.
For example, in October 2009, Reuters reported that a daughter and granddaughter of a South Korean prisoner of war who escaped the North ten years ago were arrested in Shenyang, China and returned to North Korea.
More than a passive bystander, China helps North Korea enforce its brutal policy and even whitewash some of its human right violations. For example, some products produced by prisoners in labor camps are later marketed globally, passing through Chinese companies on the way for "authentication".
What should be done
North Korea is a key actor in what has been called the Axis of Evil and today can be called the Axis of Genocide. This group of state perpetrators of genocide promotes repression of elementary human rights, and incites to hatred towards democratic states. This group includes Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. China and Russia serve as protectors and enablers. Venezuela, Cuba, and Libya are major accomplices.
We find it disturbing that these countries, as a group, often vote against pro-democratic resolutions at the United Nations General Assembly or UN Security Council, or initiate and vote in favour of anti-democratic resolutions.
GPN WGSR will examine and discuss this point and examine its operational implications for those concerned with preventing genocide in forthcoming issues.
Genocide: The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide specifies four categories of victims: those defined by national, religious, ethnic or racial status. It omits those categorized by political status. This omission was mainly the result of the former USSR’s pressure. The aim and indeed the result of this pressure was to exempt perpetrators of mass-murder of political groupings from prosecution for genocide, starting with the Soviet’s use of starvation to murder the Ukrainians. The Cambodian Tribunal has established a precedent for breaking this exemption — and its rulings therefore bear direct importance on measures to hold the North Korean leadership accountable for their crimes. Despite the omission, today there is enough evidence to indict North Korea's leader, and his party, for crimes against humanity – see table of resolutions.
Currently, the regime requires outside aid from the free world and possibly China to survive. Were it to disintegrate, one can expect upheavals and chaos dwarfing that seen in the Central Asian Republics and Eastern Europe in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union. This scenario is expected because there is so much more suffering, oppression and brutality in North Korea, a “pressure cooker”… The challenge is to foster a transition which will result in the end of totalitarian rule, removing the nuclear threat, feeding the population, and somehow or another providing some kind of stable rule. There are no easy answers to the question: How to go about doing this? China has not been constructive, as it fears the consequences of disintegration of North Korea – currently a rogue hermit state -- which means refugees, unrest, civil war, and terror, including possibly nuclear terror.
North Korea is currently trying to create a new image for itself. It participated in the World Cup competition. It has produced a government web site, (even though the general population of the country has no access to the internet), and is making attempt to foster international tourism.
It is impossible to call by cell phone from South Korea to North Korea, but Chinese handsets can be used to call into North Korea. These are available through Chinese smugglers. It is highly likely that many in its population know far more about what is going on outside its borders than the government wants.
IF genocide results from human choice and bystander indifference, it remains for the outside world to put North Korea’s leaders on notice, that they will eventually face the same fate as the Khmer Rouge.
Yael Stein MD is a researcher-team member of the World Genocide Situation Room, the website of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem of GPN. She has experience in Occupational Medicine, Epidemiology and Hospital Administration and is currently studying towards a PhD degree in Public Health at the Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Public Health and Community Medicine. Yael describes herself as a "goal-oriented, idealistic entrepreneur, seeking spiritual and ethical fulfillment" in her work; "I focus on making a difference."
Professor Elihu D Richter MD MPH is Editor and Director of GPN World Genocide Situation Room and Associate Director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem. He is Head of the Genocide Prevention Program at Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Public Health and Community Medicine and former head of the Unit of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. He has published and lectured on the use of public health models for the prediction and prevention of genocide.
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Threats of mass murder – violations of the most basic human right – the Right to Life
Between 1948 and 1987, during Kim Il-Sung’s rule, the world knew very little about what was going on behind the closed doors of Kim Il-Sung’s communist totalitarian regime. But gradually, more and more information gathered from dissidents and refugees has given the West a fairly clear picture of severe human rights violations committed by North Korea's totalitarian regime, notably mass killing, using methods very similar to those of Stalin and Mao.
Political scientist, R. J. Rummel, of the University of Hawaii, has proposed an inclusive word, democide, for all forms of mass killing. Demo stands for people, as in the word democracy, and cide for killing, as in homocide or genocide. Rummel’s concern is that when we differentiate between different forms of mass killing—for example, when we distinguish between genocide, politicide and mass murder—the definition of any one category, however correct or useful it may be, may lead us to be unaware or forget that millions more of innocent human beings have been murdered by governments, and that a true picture must include all killings of masses of unarmed peoples by governments. In addition, Rummel is concerned with preserving the original definition of genocide as the killing of persons because of group membership. In order to provide an inclusive word for all mass killings by governments, Rummel has given us the concept of democide.
Based on calculations and assessments, R.J. Rummel estimates 710,000 to slightly over 3,500,000 people murdered between 1948 and 1987 (mid-estimate: 1,600,000, in what he calls the "North Korean Democide". He estimates 510,000 as killed during the Korean War other than those killed in battle (1950-1953).
Prisoners of War - Thousands were murdered by the North Koreans, and up to 50,000 prisoners were forced to join the North Korean military. Citing researchers Don Lawson and Robert Leckie, Rummel concludes that North Koreans killed some 10,000-18,000 South Korean and American Prisoners of War and forced 400,000 South Koreans into their army, who were then allocated the most dangerous tasks – of these, an estimated 225,000 were killed. Prisoners were later forced to work in concentration camps, and, of these, an estimated 265,000 were killed or died in the North Korean camps, at a rate of 6,700 prisoners per year.
Civilians - Besides those killed in war, the party imposed hard labor (corv×™e labor) on millions of citizens. Thousands or even tens of thousands of citizens were ordered to leave their homes for months at a time, to work on building projects in remote areas of the country. With very poor living and labor conditions, the death rate of this forced labor was as high as 20-30%. Others may have been executed for anti-party behavior or non-cooperation. Citizens considered "hostile" to the regime were punished by forced labor in labor camps, with a similar death rate. The estimates sum up to almost 1,000,000 hard laborers killed, over 25,000 a year.
Background
North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a highly centralized single party state, controlled rigidly by the communist Korean Workers' Party (KWP) since its establishment in 1948. A few minor political parties are allowed to exist in name only, but the government controls all activity. Media and News agencies are controlled and censored. North Korea is ranked second to last on the World Press Freedom Index. Highly secretive, it is known as the Hermit State. North Korea is defiantly solitary, run on a principle known as "Juche," a brand of Stalinism emphasizing national self-reliance.
In 2002, United States president George W. Bush labeled North Korea part of an "axis of evil," together with Iraq and Iran, and later as an "outpost of tyranny". In 2008, after North Korea agreed to nuclear inspection demands, the country was removed from the "black list" of state sponsored terrorism. The agreement was criticized by many. At the time, both US Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, expressed concerns and warned that if the terms were not met, there would be immediate consequences. Indeed, North Korea indeed has not met the terms of this agreement.
The country's constitution was created in 1948, and then revised in 1972, 1992, 1998, and again in 2009.
Kim Il-sung ruled North Korea from 1948 until his death in July 1994. Since then, the country has been ruled by his son Kim Jong-il. Both leaders have been using a cult of personality to enforce their rule. Kim Il-sung’s title was "Great Leader," and his son, Kim Jong-il, is "Dear Leader". Current reports confirm that Kim Jong-il has assigned his third son, 26 year old Kim Jong-Un, to be the next leader, establishing dynastic rule. The leader's son had taken up a low-level post at the National Defense Commission, and recently was promoted to the rank of general.
Economy on the Brink of Recurrent Famine
North Korea's economy declined sharply in the 1990s with the end of communism in Eastern Europe. Gross national income per capita is estimated to have fallen by about one-third between 1990 and 2002. There has been some restabilization since then, traced especially to renewed North-South Korean economic cooperation, but the practical effect on living conditions is modest.
During Kim Jong-Il's rule, in the 1990's North Korea suffered one of the worst famines of the 20th century, initially brought about by natural causes. It is estimated that, up to 1 million people, about 3 to 5 percent of the country's population, perished of hunger. Genocide scholars suggest that the mass famine was not random, and that the distribution of food was exploited for the regime's needs, withholding food from some populations who were not supporters of the regime and leaving them to starve – a Stalinist method well known and much used by USSR and by China in the past. Kim himself denied that the famine even existed.
Today North Korea appears to be near famine and mass hunger again. Renewed provision of aid is likely to lessen the scale and severity of famine compared to the 1990s, but hunger-related deaths have already been reported to occur.
According to researchers, in 2005, the North Korean government declared private trade in grain illegal, causing many families to lose an important source of food. The government confiscated grain in rural areas and sought to revive state-run quantity rationing systems, but did not succeed at large. It even threatened to expel the World Food Programme (WFP). Although most of North Korea's grain is produced domestically, production is dependent of fertilizer shipments from abroad, notably South Korea. South Korea had been supplying fertilizer to North Korea as part of renewed inter-Korean interaction (South Korea's Sunshine Policy). But since North Korea's nuclear tests in 2006, South Korea suspended these shipments of fertilizer. With global aid down following sanctions, there is again a shortage of food. The regime's weak economy makes it unlikely that it will be able to import commercial amounts of food. Floods in Southwest agricultural regions in August 2007 have worsened the situation substantially.
North Korea devotes a disproportionately large percentage of its gross domestic product to its military purposes, another factor contributing to its economic difficulties. It also reportedly exports know-how to other members of the axis of genocide, notably Iran and Syria. Reports say that currently, North Korean industry is operating at a small fraction of its potential capacity due to lack of fuel and spare parts.
In December 2009, North Korea redenominated its currency at a rate of 100 to 1 and implemented new laws, banning the use or possession of foreign currency, regulating consumption and controlling the market. Money belonging to private traders has been confiscated. Inflation has risen.
A former finance official, Pak Nam-gi, was reportedly executed by a firing squad in Pyongyang. Yonhap News reported that he was charged with treason for "intentionally ruining the national economy," and held responsible for the failed currency reform and the growing public unrest over the faltering economy. According to the report, many North Koreans believe he was made a scapegoat.
A UNICEF report from 2009, cited also by the World Food Programme (WFP), states that one third of North Korean women and children are malnourished. According to this report, the country will need almost 1.8 tons of food this year to meet the most basic food needs of 24 million North Korean population.
UNICEF reports high percentages of child mortality (55 /1,000 live births), chronic malnutrition among children under age five (37%) and malnutrition of pregnant women (32%). The suggested causes are prolonged poverty, under-resourced health systems, decaying water and sanitation infrastructure, inadequate caring practices for young children and pregnant women, and fragile food security. The report sums that 2 million children under age five and 400,000 pregnant women are relying on international aid.
North Korea’s major trading partners are China, South Korea, Singapore, India, and Russia.
Other Human Rights Violations
North Korea’s human rights record is dismal but details about the secretive hermit state are not readily available.
Mass killings and summary public executions are the major violations. Human rights abuses include arbitrary and lengthy imprisonment, torture and degrading treatment, poor prison conditions, prohibitions or severe restrictions on freedom of speech, the press, movement, assembly, religion, and privacy, denial of the right of citizens to change their government, and suppression of workers’ rights.
In 2003, NBC News revealed that North Korea’ s State Security Agency maintains a dozen political prisons and about 30 forced labor and labor education camps in remote areas of the country. Most information comes from defectors, refugees and escapees. The worst are in the far North of North Korea, near the borders with China and Russia. They assessed that in 2003, these camps held around 200,000 men, women and children accused of political crimes.
The investigation, which was assisted by US and South Korean officials, included interviews with former prisoners, guards and who had been working or imprisoned in one of these camps between the years 1987-1994. It revealed horrifying and shocking conditions in these camps. This information has been verified by additional sources, escaped prisoners and refugees.
Satellite photos provided by DigitalGlobe confirm the existence of the camps. These photos are available on NBC News website (first appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review). The photos show military-style arracks, and the camp is surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence, with landmines and man traps, and a battery of anti-aircraft guns close-by.
At least two camps, Haengyong and Huaong, are very large. These camps have been compared to the Gulags of Mao and Stalin. Reportedly, what are perhaps the most atrocious human rights violations in the world are happening behind these walls, possibly even today.
Many women and children are imprisoned in these camps, because in North Korea three generations of a dissident’s family can be jailed simply on the basis of a denunciation. A child could be imprisoned for years under appalling conditions and hard labor because of some political statement made by his grandfather, not necessarily outright anti-regime activism. For example, a former prisoner, Kang Chol-Hwan, now a journalist in South Korean newspaper and author of “The Aquariums of Pyongyang,” was imprisoned for almost ten years, since the age of 9, with his entire family, because his grandfather had made complimentary statements about Japanese capitalism.
The concentration camps have detention centers, specific spots where executions are decided on, and training and recreation areas for the guards.
Prisoners are held in these camps for years, moving from job to job according to their age and size. In general, the working conditions are described as such that 20-25% of the prison population did not survive the first year. For example, children might be forced to dig for clay or work in building sites, or people would work to exhaustion in giant pits.
In 1985, Oh Kil-nam, an opponent of the South Korean Government, living in Germany at the time, received an offer of a government job in North Korea and medical treatment of his wife's hepatitis. He agreed to the offer, despite his family's objections, and realized his mistake when on arrival he was led to a military camp. Oh was later sent back to Germany to recruit more students for North Korea, but following his wife's request this time, did not recruit any new people, but instead defected to the West and did not return. After he left, his family was sent to Camp No.15. They have reportedly been moved to a section of the camp where prisoners are made to work until they die. Nineteen years ago, Oh received some letters in his wife's handwriting and a recording of his daughters' voices. He doesn't know if they are still alive today. He blames himself for their suffering. In the 1990 Oh Kil-nam wrote a book requesting the release of his family, but to no avail.
A Washington Post report from Feb 2010 brings evidence, through a Seoul-based human rights group called "Democracy Network Against the North Korean Gulag," and evidence collected from former prisoners who saw the family. The report claims that according to the latest estimate by the South Korean government, about 154,000 people are being held in six large camps in North Korea. Public executions are common in the camp, along with beatings, rapes, starvation and the disappearance of female prisoners impregnated by guards. Prisoners have no access to soap, underwear, socks, tampons or toilet paper. Most inmates die by age 50, usually of illnesses exacerbated by overwork and chronic hunger.
Torture
Several dissident former prison-camp guards from different camps explained that the guards were taught to treat the prisoners as if they were not human beings. They were “encouraged and even rewarded” with prizes such as college tuition, for killing prisoners trying to escape.
Beatings and deaths were everyday events which the guards grew used to executing. Prisoners were tortured, sometimes their eyeballs would be taken out by beating, or salt would be applied to open wounds with exposed bones, to make the prisoners suffer.
Pregnant women were forced to abort their babies, by inserting salt water into the women’s wombs with syringes. If the babies were born, they would be killed immediately brutally. Prisoners mentioned that this was done “so that another generation of political dissidents will be eradicated.”
Some of the former prisoners mentioned testing of biological and chemical warfare agents on camp inmates.
One prisoner described an event in which a group of about 50 prisoners were given a leaf of cabbage to eat. “All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes they were quite dead.”
Glass “gas chambers” were also described. Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They were left to an agonizing death, while scientists watched on and took notes.
A BBC documentary interviews the former military attaché at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing, Kwon Hyuk (changed name), who was also the chief of management at Camp 22, which is thought to hold 50,000 prisoners. He described watching a whole family, parents and two children, being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. He said "the parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing." He also drew detailed diagrams of the glass chambers, including the gas injection tube.
The experiments were methodical, as is proven in documents smuggled by dissidents, for example a document dated February 2002: "The above person is transferred from ... camp number 22 for the purpose of human experimentation of liquid gas for chemical weapons."
Hyuk explained that everyone at the camps, including himself, had been taught to believe this treatment was justified. North Korea’s regime and society blamed these political prisoners for the country’s failing economy and all of its other problems. He said the prison guards were trained so as not to feel any sympathy towards these prisoners, even when watching children suffering a painful death.
Another source of evidence from 2004 is a man who defected to China, Kang Byong-sop, who claimed he was an engineer at a chemical factory where testing of chemical weapons on political prisoners took place. Kang was later detained in China when trying to cross the border to Laos, and was returned to North Korea. Later, at a press conference with his family in Pyongyang, Kang Byong-sop said that all the information he had given the west had been faked by his eldest son, who had escaped abroad, in order to make money from human rights organizations.
Abductions
North Korea has been involved in the abduction of foreign citizens. Citizens have been reportedly abducted from 12 different countries: South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Romania, China, Lebanon, Malaysia, France, the Netherlands, Singapore, Italy, and Jordan.
In 2002, Kim Jong-il acknowledged to Japanese Prime Minister, Koizumi, the involvement of North Korea "special institutions" in the kidnapping of Japanese citizens between 1977 and 1983, and said that those responsible had been punished. In October 2002, five surviving victims and their families were allowed to leave North Korea and resettle in Japan. Many other cases are unresolved. In October 2005, North Korea acknowledged for the first time having kidnapped South Korean citizens in previous decades, and noted that several abductees, as well as several POWs from the Korean War, were still alive.
In April 2010, an American citizen, an English teacher in South Korea, Aijalon Mahli Gomes, aged 30, was sentenced to eight years of hard labor and a $700,000 fine for illegally crossing the border to North Korea. He was the fourth American detained by North Korea for illegal entry in less than a year. Three other Americans had crossed into North Korea since March 2009. Journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee were held captive for five months and sentenced to 12 years in a North Korean labor camp. All were freed after diplomatic negotiations, including a visit by former President Bill Clinton.
In August 2009 activist Robert Park, an American citizen and a conscious Christian activist, was allowed to return home, some 40 days after he crossed the border into North Korea. Park had aimed to focus world attention on human rights in North Korea, in order to liberate the concentration camps. However, when he returned home, he was quoted saying that "His understanding of North Korea had been tarnished by ‘false propaganda made by the west.’"
Escapees
Tens of thousands of North Koreans have tried to flee to China, whether to escape political detention or in search of food and new opportunities. According to South Korea's Unification Ministry, more than 16,000 North Koreans have defected to South Korea since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, most of them in the past 10 years, with the number rising every year, estimated at around 2,800 people in 2008. Nearly two thirds of them are women.
Making contact with the outside world is considered the most dangerous crime to the regime of Kim Jung-iI. If people are caught trying to leave North Korea, they risk being shot on the spot, or arrested for indefinite periods and possibly eventually executed.
Defectors exit the country aided by smugglers and try to reach a safe haven. They cross the Chinese border, or pay smugglers to take them to Russia, Laos, Thailand or Vietnam. South Korean organizations help dissidents reach South Korea. If arrested by the Chinese police, the escapees are usually returned to North Korea, where they and their family members face the punishments listed above. Other embassies usually do not send the defectors back.
Some escapees are executed publicly. In such cases, party officials compel all the inhabitants of nearby villages, including children, to be present at the passing of the sentence. An undercover video, smuggled out of North Korea, reached CNN and brings evidence of such a public execution.
In the film, the death sentence is read out: “Those who go against their party and their people will end up with a fate such as this. They have been involved in the illegal act of aiding people to defect the country. They trafficked women across the border to China. We have to protect North Korea from the outside influence and build up a strong guard to keep these influences out.” Then, three policemen with rifles are seen from a distance, shooting a prisoner tied to a pole.
A Reuters report described a public execution of 15 North Koreans in Feb 2008 on charges of trafficking and movement out of the country.
North Korea reportedly has a kidnapping unit, which kidnaps and returns defectors and their helpers, under the direction of the head of the Conspiracy Research Office of the North Korean National Security Agency in North Hamkyung Province.
Human "Trafficking"
North Koreans who escape the country cross its long border with China, or escape by sea. According to reports, many of those caught by guards at the Chinese border, especially women defectors, face more suffering. Many women caught escaping North Korea are sold to slavery, "trafficked", for marriage or as live-in labor. If they escaped North Korea with children or other family members, they are often separated from them forcefully.
The Washington Post, June 2009, tells the story of several women who were sold for marriage in China and have eventually managed to escape to South Korea. North Korean former actress Bang Mi Sun, when crossing the Chinese border in 2002, was separated from her two children and sold into marriage three times. On her third escape, Chinese police arrested her and sent her back to North Korea, where the police maimed her left leg and sent her to a labor camp "for reeducation". In 2004 she succeeded to flee to South Korea.
Another North Korean woman defector, Kim Young Ae, was held in China for 8 years and forcefully married to 3 husbands. A child she had by the first man drowned in a creek; and her son by her third "husband" is being withheld from her by his Chinese family.
The National Human Rights Commission conducted a survey of 274 women defectors escaped from North Korea now living in South Korea. Nearly 20 percent of the women said that they had been forced into sexual favors or bribes when caught by patrollers at the Chinese border. According to the commission's report, data from the Unification Ministry last year showed that six out of ten North Korean female defectors who entered Hanawon from 2003 to August of 2008 were diagnosed with ovarian or cervical illnesses.
Healthcare
The WHO’s Director General Margaret Chan praised North Korea's healthcare system following her visit there in April 2010, and said there was no lack of professional care and that public health had moved forward. She stressed several challenges, such as malnutrition, low weight among newborns and anemia among pregnant women. But a new report by Amnesty International's Asia-Pacific chapter claims that healthcare provided in North Korea is grossly inadequate.
Citing data from the World Health Organization, the Amnesty report claims North Korea spends less on healthcare than any other country in the world – under US$1 per person per year in total. Based on interviews with 40 dissidents, and information given by medical colleagues from other countries, the report claims that the most basic necessities are missing from North Korean hospitals, such as clean sheets and sterilized hypodermic needles. Many people reportedly suffer from malnutrition and hunger, some claimed to have survived on grass and tree bark. North Korea is said to be fighting a tuberculosis epidemic, many patients having developed resistance to first-line drugs. Many drugs available in the past have now been removed from hospitals.
Despite North Korea's claim that its healthcare is free for all, the report says people must pay or bribe the physicians with food or cigarettes for checkups and pay cash for surgery or tests.
China as an Enabler
The Chinese have been an enabling partner to many of North Korea's human rights violations. Without such devout cooperation, many more defectors would have succeeded in escaping to freedom.
The Chinese police and border guards hunt for defectors, arrest them and force them back to North Korea, where they face either execution or life-threatening conditions and torture in prisons and labor camps.
For example, in October 2009, Reuters reported that a daughter and granddaughter of a South Korean prisoner of war who escaped the North ten years ago were arrested in Shenyang, China and returned to North Korea.
More than a passive bystander, China helps North Korea enforce its brutal policy and even whitewash some of its human right violations. For example, some products produced by prisoners in labor camps are later marketed globally, passing through Chinese companies on the way for "authentication".
What should be done
North Korea is a key actor in what has been called the Axis of Evil and today can be called the Axis of Genocide. This group of state perpetrators of genocide promotes repression of elementary human rights, and incites to hatred towards democratic states. This group includes Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. China and Russia serve as protectors and enablers. Venezuela, Cuba, and Libya are major accomplices.
We find it disturbing that these countries, as a group, often vote against pro-democratic resolutions at the United Nations General Assembly or UN Security Council, or initiate and vote in favour of anti-democratic resolutions.
GPN WGSR will examine and discuss this point and examine its operational implications for those concerned with preventing genocide in forthcoming issues.
Genocide: The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide specifies four categories of victims: those defined by national, religious, ethnic or racial status. It omits those categorized by political status. This omission was mainly the result of the former USSR’s pressure. The aim and indeed the result of this pressure was to exempt perpetrators of mass-murder of political groupings from prosecution for genocide, starting with the Soviet’s use of starvation to murder the Ukrainians. The Cambodian Tribunal has established a precedent for breaking this exemption — and its rulings therefore bear direct importance on measures to hold the North Korean leadership accountable for their crimes. Despite the omission, today there is enough evidence to indict North Korea's leader, and his party, for crimes against humanity – see table of resolutions.
Currently, the regime requires outside aid from the free world and possibly China to survive. Were it to disintegrate, one can expect upheavals and chaos dwarfing that seen in the Central Asian Republics and Eastern Europe in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union. This scenario is expected because there is so much more suffering, oppression and brutality in North Korea, a “pressure cooker”… The challenge is to foster a transition which will result in the end of totalitarian rule, removing the nuclear threat, feeding the population, and somehow or another providing some kind of stable rule. There are no easy answers to the question: How to go about doing this? China has not been constructive, as it fears the consequences of disintegration of North Korea – currently a rogue hermit state -- which means refugees, unrest, civil war, and terror, including possibly nuclear terror.
North Korea is currently trying to create a new image for itself. It participated in the World Cup competition. It has produced a government web site, (even though the general population of the country has no access to the internet), and is making attempt to foster international tourism.
It is impossible to call by cell phone from South Korea to North Korea, but Chinese handsets can be used to call into North Korea. These are available through Chinese smugglers. It is highly likely that many in its population know far more about what is going on outside its borders than the government wants.
IF genocide results from human choice and bystander indifference, it remains for the outside world to put North Korea’s leaders on notice, that they will eventually face the same fate as the Khmer Rouge.
Yael Stein MD is a researcher-team member of the World Genocide Situation Room, the website of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem of GPN. She has experience in Occupational Medicine, Epidemiology and Hospital Administration and is currently studying towards a PhD degree in Public Health at the Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Public Health and Community Medicine. Yael describes herself as a "goal-oriented, idealistic entrepreneur, seeking spiritual and ethical fulfillment" in her work; "I focus on making a difference."Professor Elihu D Richter MD MPH is Editor and Director of GPN World Genocide Situation Room and Associate Director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem. He is Head of the Genocide Prevention Program at Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Public Health and Community Medicine and former head of the Unit of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. He has published and lectured on the use of public health models for the prediction and prevention of genocide.Click here for fully referenced article
The struggle about knowing and remembering the acts of genocide has a unique significance in the case of the State of Israel – a country of people who were the victims of the Holocaust. The ethos and the policy of the State of Israel since its creation have moved between two poles. On one hand is the wish to be "a light unto the nations," to support underdeveloped countries, to share progress in science and medicine, and to display the willingness of the new state to achieve its place among the family of nations based on universalistic values of peace and justice.
