by Ralph Hassig
A typical prison day begins at 5 a.m. and ends at 7 or 8 p.m., with half-hour breaks for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.34 Like inmates at reeducation camps, political prisoners work seven days a week at the same kinds of jobs. After completing their workday, they attend political study sessions until 10 p.m. The daily food ration is typically a palm-size ball of cornmeal with watered-down cabbage soup or just a handful of raw corn that prisoners can cook. It is impossible to survive for long on such rations, especially while engaging in hard labor, and those prisoners who do survive have learned how to forage for food and bribe the guards.
Prisoners live several to a room in unheated wooden barracks. If an entire family is incarcerated, they may be permitted to build a little hut from scraps of wood with a straw roof and a dirt floor. In winter, prisoners keep warm by huddling together; frostbite is common, resulting in amputated fingers, toes, and limbs. Some camps supply enough electricity to light a single bulb for an hour or two a day, but at other camps wooden torches provide the only illumination. Prisoners get a chance to wash their faces only a few times a month. They go to the bathroom in a hole in the ground; in prison cells, some of which are located underground, they use a can. They wear the same clothes they came into the camp with, and when these wear out, they appropriate the clothing of dead prisoners.
When approached by a guard, political prisoners must bow down to the ground or, in some prisons, get down on their knees. Infractions of camp rules, failure to complete work quotas, and similar offenses are punished by a reduction of food rations, which is an immediate threat to health because most prisoners live on the edge of starvation. Prisoners will do almost anything for a scrap of food, including stealing from other prisoners and failing to notify the guards when a fellow prisoner dies in order to eat his or her food ration for a day or two. Prisoners are also routinely enlisted to spy on each other, and as a consequence they are very careful when talking among themselves.
Prisoners are beaten by guards and by other inmates on the guards’ orders. A popular torture, especially during interrogations, is to force prisoners to kneel motionless for hours at a time, sometimes day after day. The slightest movement or utterance results in a beating. Women prisoners are sometimes forced to stand and squat repeatedly until they collapse. Every prison has its special detention cell where prisoners are beaten and starved more severely. Few survive the experience, which is used as a warning to others. One of the cruelest punishments involves locking a prisoner in a windowless box four feet on a side, too small for the prisoner to lie down or stand up in. Prisoners kept in the box for several weeks are permanently crippled if they survive the experience.
Explanations for the North Korean prison system’s pervasive cruelty can be found on several levels. At the cultural level, it should be remembered that North Korea is a collectivist society that values the community over the individual. Acting on behalf of the state, prison guards seem to have few misgivings about beating, torturing, and starving prisoners, who are seen as threats to the regime and the social system. Ostensibly for this reason, prison-camp inmates are not supposed to have sexual relations, and pregnant inmates are usually forced to have abortions.
To understand the brutal treatment of prisoners at the level of personal relations, consider that even under the best of conditions, prison guards can be cruel. In the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, a sample of normal American college students was randomly separated into guards and prisoners and then placed in a realistic replica of a prison; within days those students assigned to be guards took on some of the worst characteristics of real prison guards.35 North Korean prison guards are taught to look upon prisoners as animals. Prisoners are sometimes addressed by their first names, but male prisoners are more frequently addressed as “this son of a bitch” (ee ssaekkee) and “this bastard” (ee nom) and female prisoners as “this low-class bitch” (ee jaabnyon) and “this bastard” (ee nyon). It probably does not help that the gaunt, crippled, dirty prisoners come to look like wild animals. Guards who are too kind to prisoners are themselves punished.
One might ask why prisoners who recognize that they are slowly and painfully dying do not fight back. North Koreans in general—and this applies to prisoners—remind foreigners that any resistance to the regime meets not only with more punishment but brings punishment on the rest of the family, whether they are already in prison or not. Consequently, most prisoners see no way out and simply work until they die. According to defectors, occasionally a prisoner will attack a guard or go crazy from hunger and is then beaten and killed. Ahn Myong-chol, a former prison guard, says that he heard of a mass uprising of prisoners at the Onsong Camp in 1987. A prisoner turned on a guard who was beating him, and about two hundred other prisoners joined in, killing another guard and attacking the guard headquarters at the camp. Ahn, who was working at another prison camp, was told that when military reinforcements arrived, they surrounded the camp and killed about one-third of the estimated fifteen thousand inmates.36
Human Rights
The North Korean regime has been justly criticized for violating its citizens’ human rights. Yet, it is difficult to find a way to change the regime’s human rights policies because they are embedded in the structure of its dictatorial rule. Until the 1990s, little specific information was available to outsiders about human rights practices in North Korea, although the broad outlines of the situation were well-known. Inquisitive foreigners could not get into the country, and North Koreans could not get out. However, in response to the famine of the mid-1990s, defectors began to flee the country, bringing with them first-hand accounts of human rights violations. Despite this new information, foreign governments have put little pressure on the Kim regime to improve its human rights practices.
In a dictatorial communist society such as North Korea’s, the health, welfare, and security of the majority is supposed to take precedence over the rights of individuals, although in practice individual rights are curtailed to protect the leaders and the ruling party. According to the Leninist-Stalinist model, as adopted by North Korea, human rights policies are rooted in the contest between political classes, giving the revolutionary working class, as represented by the regime, the right and the duty to suppress and eventually eliminate the other classes. As Nodong Sinmun puts it, “We do not hide our class character in the human rights issue just as we do not conceal our loyalty to the party. It is our human right to provide workers, farmers, intellectuals, and the people of other strata with freedom and rights and to crack down upon a handful of class enemies violating the human rights of the popular masses. … We declare with pride that human rights can be ensured when we consolidate the socio-political organism in which the leader, the party, and the masses share life and death.”37
When criticized by foreign governments and international organizations for its human rights policies, the Kim regime has responded with a number of arguments. For example, it has asserted that human rights standards are culture specific: “All the countries of the world differ from each other in traditions, nationality, culture, history of social development; and human rights standards and ways of ensuring them vary according to specific conditions of each country. … The human rights standards in the DPRK are precisely what the Korean people like and what is in accordance with their requirement and interests.”38 The regime also insists that the most important right any people can enjoy is national sovereignty: “Today [2005], the lesson we once again learn from the United States’ atrocious human rights commotions is that human rights is precisely sovereignty, and the protection of human rights is precisely the defense of sovereignty.”39
North Korea even warned that the passage of the 2004 North Korean Human Rights Act in the United States was a hostile act and virtual declaration of war. The North Korean media have sought to invalidate American criticisms of the Kim regime’s human rights practices by claiming that the United States is the world’s foremost violator of human rights, although another country can hardly u
se the U.S. record on human rights, which is by no means perfect, as an excuse for its own human rights failings.40
Some people find it odd that the South Korean government has not pressed North Korea harder on the human rights issue or done more to work for the return of POWs and abducted South Korean citizens. After all, the South Korean constitution regards all Koreans, regardless of which side of the Demilitarized Zone they live on, as South Korean citizens, so there would seem to be a strong legal basis for taking an interest in the human rights of North Koreans. However, neither of the two South Korean presidents in office between 1998 and 2007 was willing to make an issue of North Korea’s human rights violations. In a 2000 BBC interview, several months after the inter-Korean summit, President Kim Dae-jung explained that he “would not press the issues of human rights and democracy at this early stage as it could be detrimental to building trust” between the two Koreas.41 In a 2003 interview with the Washington Post, Kim Dae-jung’s successor, Roh Moo-hyun said, “Rather than confronting the Kim Jong-il regime over human rights of a small number of people, I think it is better for us to open up the regime through dialogue. I think this will ultimately bring broader protection of human rights for North Korean people as a whole.”42
In recent years, the United Nations has become more vocal in expressing its concern about human rights abuses in North Korea. In September 1981 the DPRK joined Covenant A, the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, and Covenant B, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. After submitting its first periodic report to the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1984, the DPRK delayed submitting its next report until 2000. In 2003, the commission adopted its first resolution citing the DPRK for human rights violations on a broad range of issues. A second resolution, passed in 2004, requested the appointment of a special rapporteur to monitor the DPRK’s human rights situation, and beginning in 2005 this individual began making a series of reports, citing shortcomings in the following areas: “The right to food and the right to life; the right to security of the person, humane treatment, non-discrimination and access to justice; the right to freedom of movement and protection of persons linked with displacement; the right to the highest attainable standard of health and the right to education; the right to self-determination/political participation, access to information, freedom of expression/belief/opinion, association and religion; and the rights of specific persons/groups, including women and children.”43
A third commission resolution on North Korea passed in April 2005 recommended that the issue be taken up by the General Assembly, which adopted its first resolution concerning North Korean human rights (as part of a package of resolutions also concerning the Congo, Iran, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) in December 2005. The draft resolution was supported by eighty-eight countries and opposed by twenty-one, with sixty abstentions (including the ROK) and twenty-two absentees. Virtually all the world’s developed countries supported the resolution, whereas most of the countries that opposed the resolution had their own serious human rights problems, including Belarus, China, Cuba, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. Most African countries either abstained or were absent. Since 2005, the United Nations has continued to pass resolutions disapproving North Korea’s human rights policies. In 2006, the ROK voted in favor of the annual resolution, perhaps in part because its former foreign minister had just been elected as the incoming UN secretary-general and in part because North Korea had recently staged its first nuclear test. South Korea abstained in 2007, but under the new Lee Myung-bak administration, it not only voted for the resolution in 2008 but cosponsored it. The North Korean government has vigorously rejected all these UN resolutions, claiming that they are initiated by the United States “and its followers.” However, given the critical attention the North Korean media have shown these resolutions, the Kim regime is apparently concerned about the bad publicity the country is receiving in the international arena.
Every March, the U.S. State Department issues its annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, and every year it singles out North Korea as one of the countries with an especially poor human rights record. Adding to the pressure put on North Korea by international organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Refugees International, various American groups, such as the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and Freedom House, have lobbied for a stronger U.S. government response to human rights abuses. In 2004 the U.S. Congress passed the North Korean Human Rights Act, which was signed by the president. The act focused on three major issues: promoting human rights in the DPRK, establishing a framework to assist North Koreans inside and outside their country, and establishing a framework for protecting North Korean refugees. The act also called for the appointment of a special envoy on human rights in North Korea and authorized (but did not appropriate) $24 million to be used each year between 2005 and 2008 to support the act’s agenda. Unfortunately, the implementation of the act became caught up in political and bureaucratic squabbles, and it appears that none of the authorized money was ever appropriated. By 2007, the Bush administration was pushing harder for a negotiated solution to the North Korean nuclear issue, which required North Korea’s cooperation in the Six-Party Talks, and the U.S. government’s North Korean human rights campaign faltered.
Little Progress, Little Hope
No significant improvement in human rights can be expected under a dictatorial regime such as North Korea’s. Extralegal social-control mechanisms are a part of North Korea’s totalitarian society, fitting in with all the other parts, such as leadership style, ideology, economic practices, and military dominance. Nor can one expect that other governments will vigorously press North Korea on this issue. China is governed by a communist party that sympathizes with the North Korean Workers’ Party’s desire to hold on to power. In recent years, South Korea has extended economic and moral support to the Kim regime and, in any case, has no desire to welcome millions of North Koreans. Japan’s poor relations with both Koreas force it to keep its distance. The countries of the European Union are far away. The United States is preoccupied with fighting terrorism and ending the Kim regime’s nuclear weapons program. And the United Nations cannot take decisive action because most of its members agree with the Kim regime’s argument that the first principle of international relations is sovereignty. It is therefore up to the North Korean people to help themselves, if only by employing the “weapons of the weak” outlined at the end of chapter 6.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Defectors
The escape of hundreds of thousands of North Koreans to China and the arrival of over fifteen thousand of them in South Korea (by 2009) is an indictment of the Kim regime’s policies as well as a test for the South Korean government. Their disappearance from North Korean society and the information they take out with them are also threats to the Kim regime.
In Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, economist Albert O. Hirschman observes that when people are discontented with a situation that cannot easily be changed, their options are to voice a complaint or leave.1 Wise leaders prefer that discontented followers exercise their voice so that matters can perhaps be adjusted, although hearing bad news is never pleasant, and it is true that complaints can multiply among the discontented and cause their own organizational problems. Dictators rarely countenance complaints, and so far as we know, Kim Jong-il has never considered emulating Chairman Mao, who in a momentary lapse of political judgment proclaimed, “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.” The hundred-flowers policy was reversed within a few weeks, and Mao is better known for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s that attempted to impose his thought on a half-billion Chinese. In any case, Kim Jong-il has neither the economic nor political resources to satisfy his people, so letting them complain might not be such a good idea after all. Better to be the leader of a sick society than not a leader a
t all.
Discontented North Koreans try to leave—either physically or psychologically. Earlier chapters have described how North Koreans psychologically escape socialism by ignoring the Kim regime’s political and economic teachings. Tens of thousands of others have taken the more extreme step of fleeing the country, a course of action that is dangerous, but not as dangerous as voicing complaints.
Only a few thousand of the twenty-three million North Korean people have ever been allowed to legally emigrate or travel to another country. To protect the image that the country is a worker’s paradise, the regime has made it a treasonous offense to leave without permission. Only diplomats, contract workers, and foreign-currency-earning business agents are issued passports. Obtaining a permit to travel across the border into China is somewhat easier than getting a passport but still involves months of waiting and the payment of fees that are beyond the resources of most North Koreans.2 The only other alternative is to leave the country illegally.
Escape by sea is dangerous and rarely attempted. Trying to cross the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) into South Korea is suicidal. The least dangerous means of escape is to sneak into China or Russia, which merely involves eluding or bribing North Korean border guards and crossing the Yalu River (forming the western half of the border with China) or the Tumen River (forming the eastern half of the border with China and the short border with Russia). Thousands of North Koreans do this every year, but most border crossers spend only a few days or weeks in China trading goods before bribing the border guards again and returning home. Some choose to stay in China indefinitely, either living an underground existence as unregistered aliens among the two million Koreans who are legal residents of the Chinese border provinces or working their way on to a third country. Estimates of the number of North Koreans living illegally in China range between thirty and one hundred thousand, although during the 1990s famine, the number may have been as high as three hundred thousand.