by Ralph Hassig
Most North Koreans whose names appear in the police registers as members of the hostile class pursue their lives in much the same way as members of the wavering class. Until 2002, in good times they received state rations of food and clothing. In bad times they were the first to have their rations cut, but, then again, during the famine period almost no one outside of the core class received rations. Since 2002, when food rationing ended and government jobs became useless, hostile-class members’ prospects have not been much worse than those of the wavering class. Still, hostile-class members are unlikely to be accepted at a university; nor can they receive permission to reside in Pyongyang. To foreigners, living in Pyongyang may not seem like a great privilege, but among North Koreans the capital city is considered such a special place that people boast about knowing someone who lives there.
Disabled people cannot reside in the central districts of Pyongyang, presumably because their presence would sully the country’s image. One former North Korean says her father was informed by the local party secretary that his daughter, who walked with a limp, would have to leave the city. When the father objected to sending his daughter to live with relatives, he was told that the only alternative was to move the entire family.20 The daughter was sent to live in a small town where she was teased so badly by the other children that she withdrew from school. After three years, the family bribed a local official to let the girl live with her grandmother on the outskirts of Pyongyang, but she was required to stay off the streets.
Members of the hostile class work on agricultural communes and in the factories and mines. The less fortunate have no jobs and no houses. The least fortunate are interned in prison camps. In lean times between harvests, members of the hostile class are the first to take to the road and wander around the countryside or cross over to China to look for food. A pitiable segment of the hostile class includes the children whose parents have died or abandoned them. These kotchebi (“swallows”) travel from town to town and haunt the marketplaces and train stations looking for food. On September 27, 1998, Kim Jong-il ordered that they be rounded up and placed in “9/27” camps, typically unused factories and warehouses. There they receive little care, and most soon escape, only to be caught again. Kotchebi frequently turn to petty crime, sometimes forming small gangs of thieves and pickpockets.
In the former Soviet Union, numerous political, ethnic, occupational, and religious groups—in addition to the unfortunate kulaks, whose only crime was to have a bit more money or property than their neighbors—were assumed to be hostile to the regime. Likewise, in North Korea anyone with family ties to Japan, South Korea, or China automatically falls under suspicion because they can get resources (and information) from outside the country and are consequently not as dependent on the regime as ordinary North Koreans.
Although most members of the hostile class pose no threat to the regime, if disloyal cadres were allowed to rise to positions of authority, they might then pose a danger to Kim. Thus, to be on the safe side, the regime banishes or imprisons anyone suspected of being different or disloyal. The treatment of the hostile class follows the medical model in that its members are assumed to have the capacity to infect others and must therefore be quarantined or eliminated.
Because the Kim regime has always considered itself to be engaged in a warlike confrontation with the United States, it is concerned not only with regime security but with national security as well. Parallels can be seen in other countries that feel threatened. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the George W. Bush administration took extensive homeland security precautions, including drawing up lists of possible terrorists and their supporters, classifying airline passengers according to the level of threat they were presumed to pose, and broadening surveillance of the general public. In North Korea, classification and surveillance systems are more comprehensive and efficient than in the United States, and their use is motivated more by fear of an attack directed at the regime than at the population or national infrastructure.
The Law
The North Korean criminal code, together with the entire justice system from judges to juries to attorneys, is a tool of the party. People detained by the police cannot consult with an independent lawyer—because all lawyers work for the state. Sometimes those accused of political crimes are not even told what crime they allegedly committed.
North Koreans from all three political classes know and fear the words “to the mines” or “to the Aoji coal mines.” People are sent to prison for many reasons. Police officers from the Ministry of People’s Security (MPS) investigate ordinary crimes, which are as common in North Korea as in other societies, although rarely reported in the press. Criminal suspects are entitled to a trial, but like the trial presided over by the King and Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland (“Sentence first—verdict afterwards,” says the queen, who by the end of the day has sentenced two witnesses to death), the legal proceedings are perfunctory because the accused are presumed guilty. This is to be expected when the prosecution is an arm of the party, which claims to be infallible.
Public executions are occasionally staged as a warning to lawbreakers, although they seem to be less common in the 2000s than in the late 1990s. Defectors have described many such executions, which are usually carried out by firing squad in a stadium or field on the outskirts of the city and often involve several convicts. According to announcements made at the executions, the capital crimes include espionage, smuggling, selling narcotics, stealing metal wire, stealing or butchering cattle, human trafficking, murder, Christian worship, distributing South Korean videos, listening to foreign radio, and using Chinese cell phones.21
A more perverse form of legal folderol is applied in cases of political crimes, that is, when someone is accused of transgressing one of the Ten Principles. If there is any trial at all, the accused is charged with one of the loosely defined articles of the criminal code. For example, Article 67, one of the ambiguous “Crimes against the State and the People,” stipulates that anyone who commits a crime of “suppressing our people’s movement for national liberation under the rule of imperialism or struggle for national reunification or a crime of selling Korean national interests out to imperialists, shall be sentenced to more than 10 years of hard labor correction. In case the circumstances are grave, he shall be sentenced to an indefinite term of labor correction, death, and confiscation of property.” Often the procedural steps leading up to imprisonment (i.e., arrest, trial, conviction, and sentencing) are dispensed with entirely. The victim (one can hardly refer to the person as a defendant) and in many cases the immediate family are abducted by State Security Department (SSD) agents and taken to a concentration camp, where they can expect to spend the remainder of their days. SSD officers have even been reported to summarily execute individuals in public.22
One North Korean woman who was tried and convicted of a political crime but later escaped to South Korea has recounted the following experience: She was a county-level party bureaucrat in charge of distributing cloth to make jackets for party officials. The cloth was in short supply, so she provided each official with only enough material for one jacket, although the head of the local security agency asked for twice as much. She believes that due to her failure to comply with his request, she was arrested and charged with embezzlement. She thinks her arrest was also part of a power struggle between the local party office and security agency. In any case, she was imprisoned and tortured for seven months before agreeing to plead guilty—to save her husband and son, or so she thought. The trial, which was held in public so as to make an example of her, lasted only a few minutes—just long enough for her to confess to the charges and receive a sentence of thirteen years in prison. The attorney appointed to defend her never said a word; nor were her husband and son allowed to attend the trial (unbeknownst to her, they had already been banished).23
These days, most North Koreans are guilty of at least a few “crimes of undermining the economic management order,”
including engaging in “individual commercial activities” (Article 110) and “pocketing money or objects by doing illegal work or transport” (Article 120). One former railway inspector, who obtained his position by bribing railway officials, says he served ten years in a prison camp for extorting money from train passengers, an everyday occurrence.24 Because many people lack the necessary documents to travel within the country, they simply bribe railway inspectors to let them stay on the train. The bribes thus collected amount to many times the inspector’s annual salary. According to the former railway inspector (who told his story to a fellow prisoner, who later escaped to South Korea), he and a fellow inspector confiscated three kilograms of gold bullion being illegally transported by a gold dealer. In this case, however, the dealer was working for a high-ranking party cadre and a senior security officer. When the dealer informed his sponsors about what had happened on the train, the train inspectors were themselves arrested for embezzlement. Only by bribing the court officials were they able to negotiate “lenient” sentences of ten to fif-teen years, which for most people is equivalent to a death sentence.
Some people are sent to the camps simply because they have said something directly or indirectly derogatory about the system or the regime. This is why people only voice complaints to family members and close friends. But occasionally people lose their temper or say something after drinking too much alcohol and find themselves charged with being “verbal reactionaries.”25
The Prison System
If North Korea’s political prisons were as secure as one would expect them to be, outsiders would know very little about them because, before they are released, North Korean prisoners are required to sign a statement promising never to discuss their prison experience.26 The North Korean government’s official position is, “There can be no ‘concentration camp’ in the DPRK as it is a man-centered society where man is valued most.”27 Occasionally, however, political prisoners are released—usually to their own surprise—and a few, such as the former party official mentioned above, manage to defect and tell their stories to the outside world. Several former prison-camp guards have also defected and identified some of the camps they served in from satellite photographs.28 Sensitive to the bad publicity, the North Korean government has closed some of the camps and presumably relocated their inmates.
In recent years the most widely cited estimate of the number of political prisoners in North Korean camps is two hundred thousand, almost 1 percent of the North Korean population.29 This may not seem like a large number considering that almost the same percentage of the American population is in prison, but this estimate does not include the ordinary prison population; in any case North Korean prison conditions are exceptionally harsh. Even people imprisoned for only one or two years are treated so badly that some of them die before completing their sentences.
North Korea has several kinds of detention centers. The Ministry of People’s Security (the police) in every town and city has a local jail, or gamok, where prisoners are held for initial interrogation, often accompanied by beatings and torture. Defectors also speak of local interrogation or collection centers called guryujang, which are sometimes a separate part of the local jail. Prisoners whose cases warrant further investigation or punishment are transferred out of these jails within a few weeks. Those convicted of minor offenses are sent to local labor-training camps, or jipkyulso, to perform up to six months of very hard labor. At both the local jails and the labor-training camps, prisoners are beaten, work for long hours, and receive so little food that they rapidly lose weight.
North Korea operates two kinds of long-term prisons. Criminals who have committed felonies, which may be as minor as stealing food, are sent to the MPS’s “reeducation centers,” or gyohwaso, some of which are prison buildings surrounded by high walls, barbed wire, and guard towers. Larger prisons consist of one or more villages surrounded by barbed wire and located in remote mountain valleys. Prisoners who attempt to escape from the village must walk through miles of mountainous country, which is impossible for many inmates because by the time they arrive at the prison, they are already weak from starvation and beatings. Prisoners captured trying to escape are beaten so badly that they cannot stand and then dragged into camp to be executed by hanging or firing squad in front of other inmates, who may be forced to kick or throw stones at the corpses.
Former prisoners comment that upon arriving at the prison camp they were first impressed by the walking skeletons, many hunched over and limping, wearing dirty rags; very soon new prisoners come to look the same way. The daily prison diet consists of at most five hundred grams (two cups) of corn, potatoes, or cabbage. Resourceful prisoners supplement their diet with rats, snakes, insects, grass, and tree bark. Prisoners work in coal, gold, stone, copper, iron, or gypsum mines and logging camps for ten hours or more a day, seven days a week, with a half dozen holidays a year, including the birthdays of the two Kims. Prison factories make cement, bricks, glass, textiles, shoes, bicycles, and furniture. Because safety measures are lacking, workers are frequently maimed or killed on the job, especially in the mines. One former political prisoner reported that some are even forced to live down in the mines.30 Prisons also operate farms to feed inmates and produce crops for the Public Distribution System.
Prisoners have little access to medical facilities. Those who are severely ill or injured may be sent to the prison sanatorium to die or back to their homes in order to save the prison the burden of having to bury them. If they should recover at home, local officials will return them to prison. The “reeducation” that prisoners receive is the same education that all North Koreans receive: evening study of the works of the two Kims. Prisoners are told they are guilty of failing to repay Kim for his benevolence and are not worthy to live, but through hard work they may redeem themselves.
Bad as conditions are in the gyohwaso prison camps, they are better than in the political detention camps, or gwalliso (“control and management centers”). No dictatorship can do without its political prisons to isolate critics of the regime. When the communists took control of the northern half of Korea, landowners, those who worked with the Japanese occupation authorities, and religious leaders were classified as antistate elements and sent to the first political camps. After the Korean War, captured soldiers were added to the camps. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Kim Il-sung conducted purges to eliminate potential political rivals, and these people also ended up in the camps. After the 1966–1970 countrywide political classification, an estimated fifteen thousand “antirevolutionaries,” along with seventy thousand of their family members, were sent to the camps. By the 1970s Kim Jong-il was sending people to the camps on his own initiative as he consolidated his position in the leadership succession. In the 1990s, some of the North Koreans who had lived in or visited other socialist countries before their communist governments collapsed were sent to the camps to prevent them from “contaminating” their fellow citizens with knowledge about the outside world.
Immigrants and foreigners are two other groups who are sometimes sent to political prisons. Some of the ninety-three thousand Koreans (and their Japanese wives) who emigrated from Japan to North Korea in the 1950s and 1960s were imprisoned; certainly, almost none of them were ever allowed to return to Japan.31 The South Korean government believes that since the end of the Korean War, 3,795 South Koreans, mostly fishermen, have been abducted by the North and that over five hundred Korean War POWs (out of perhaps an initial twenty thousand) are still alive in prison camps.32 And then there are the occasional foreigners who imprudently choose to live as independent contractors in North Korea and run afoul of the regime. In 1967 the DPRK Ministry of Foreign Affairs hired two foreigners, Ali Lamada and Jacques Sedillot, to come to North Korea to translate the writings of Kim Il-sung into Spanish and French. Both were subsequently accused of spying and sent to prison camps. Thanks to the intervention of the Venezuelan and Romanian governments, the two were released in 1974. Lamada returned to tell his story,
but Sedillot died before he could leave Pyongyang.33
Gwalliso facilities are much like the village gyohwaso prisons, with each political camp, of which there are about a half dozen, housing anywhere from five to fifty thousand inmates deep in mountain valleys. Since agents of the SSD rather than the MPS run the political prison system, inmates and their families are often committed without formal arrest, trial, conviction, or sentencing. Security agents suddenly appear and abduct political suspects from their homes, often in the middle of the night. Neighbors, friends, colleagues, and relatives are never told what happened to the missing, and anyone foolish enough to ask risks investigation. The North Koreans have a saying: “They die without the birds [in the daytime] or the mice [at night] knowing.” Almost the only way out of political prison camps is suicide, which is a serious crime: families of prisoners who commit suicide are treated even worse than families of other prisoners, and prisoners who fail in their suicide attempts are tortured. Occasionally, a prisoner is released from a political camp, often for unknown reasons, and anyone who has sufficient money to bribe the right officials has a good chance of being released, or at least moved to a reeducation camp.
Because entire families are sometimes incarcerated, prison camps have schools where the young convicts are taught their lessons, including the all-important political lesson of worshipping the Kim family. Prisoners have no rights. Many die of beatings, starvation, and illness, but so far as we know, there is no accounting of their fates. Surviving for longer than a few months in a political prison requires a strong constitution, a certain amount of luck, and/or a family able to send food into the prison, some of which must be given to the guards. Some inmates survive for many years, but others, especially the young and the old, die within a year.