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Gulags, grievances and North Korea's
WMD
By Alan Boyd
SYDNEY -
Renewed allegations that North Korea maintains a vast
gulag of labor camps to suppress political dissent are
likely to harden US resolve as Pyongyang ponders a
return to stalled negotiations over weapons of mass
destruction.
The New York-based US Committee for
Human Rights in North Korea (USCHRK) claimed in a
damning report on Wednesday that as many as 200,000
people - including many who had been forcibly returned
from China - were being held in deplorable conditions in
isolated mountain enclaves. Drawing on satellite
pictures and testimony from former prisoners and guards,
the 125-page report is reputedly the most detailed study
ever made of the three dozen camps, which have been in
existence for half a century.
Tens of thousands
have died because of overwork, poor rations or
deliberate persecution, including scores of babies who
were aborted or put to death shortly after birth to
punish their mothers for seeking asylum in China, the
report charges.
"Both perceived wrongdoers and
up to three generations of their extended families are
'arrested' or, more accurately, abducted by police
authorities ... without any judicial process or legal
recourse whatsoever, for lifetime sentences of extremely
hard labor in mining, timber-cutting or farming
enterprises," the report stated. "The prisoners live
under brutal conditions in permanent situations of
deliberately contrived semi-starvation."
There
is little in the report that will surprise emigre groups
from North Korea, which have been chronicling
Pyongyang's appalling human-rights record for decades,
including the allegations of infanticide that have
attracted most media attention.
But its timing
has strengthened the hands of congressional hardliners
in Washington who are pushing US President George W Bush
to up the ante with Pyongyang and its chief defender
China when negotiators resume their dialogue over North
Korea's weapons of mass destruction.
An
independent pressure group, USCHRK, has no links with
the government or any international agencies. However,
its board includes influential former legislator Stephen
Solarz and three serving congressmen.
Other
high-profile members are Richard V Allen, who was former
president Ronald Reagan's security adviser in 1981-82,
Human Rights Watch founder Robert L Bernstein, Roberta
Cohen of the respected Brookings Institution, Jaehoon
Ahn of Radio Free Asia and Carl Gershman of the National
Endowment for Democracy.
The report's author,
David Hawk, is a human-rights investigator who, as
director of the Cambodian office of the United Nations
Human Rights Commission (UNHCR) in 1996 and 1997,
pursued efforts to bring former Khmer Rouge leaders to
justice.
Human rights are not a direct issue in
the US efforts to dismantle North Korea's nuclear
capability and other possible weapons of mass
destruction, but they cannot be divorced from the Bush
administration's bargaining position.
There has
already been a shift in this position away from the
moderate stance adopted by Bush's predecessor, Bill
Clinton. In April the United States co-sponsored a UNHCR
resolution with South Korea and Japan that censured
Pyongyang's human-rights record for the first time in
the global arena. Separately, a Senate judicial
committee has been probing the plight of released and
escaped prisoners who managed to reach South Korea after
an arduous and dangerous journey across the northern
border into China.
Washington is now playing up
the failure of North Korea to abide by a key condition
of the UNHCR resolution, that it allow monitors from the
UN or another neutral agency into its labor camps and
detention centers. Although it consistently denies
having any political prisoners, or indeed that there is
a policy of pursuing political dissidents, Pyongyang has
cited national-security interests for rejecting
independent verification.
"In essence, they
don't want the satellite photos to be validated. We must
also remember that most of these facilities are located,
or appear to be located, in areas close to China, and
the Chinese of course have their own reasons for not
wanting intense scrutiny of the border," said a
diplomat.
Pyongyang told the UN in 2001 that
torture was prohibited by law and forced labor "is never
used as a means of political coercion or social and
religious punishment". Furthermore, it said its
constitution guaranteed basic freedoms of speech, press,
assembly, association and religion.
Human-rights
groups contend that while North Korea is keeping the
shutters down, it has frequently responded to outside
pressure, especially when its global image was at stake.
In 1981, Pyongyang ratified two core treaties,
the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights. It has also filed detailed reports with
several UN compliance bodies.
"Despite the
obvious credibility gap, by submitting these reports to
the UN, North Korea has officially affirmed its
commitment to internationally recognized rights and
standards, and is providing benchmarks that can be used
to evaluate its actual performance," said Mike
Jendrzejczyk, the Asian director of Human Rights Watch.
"But getting access to North Korea to objectively
investigate and monitor human-rights conditions is a
huge problem."
China, the closest diplomatic ally
of North Korea, is viewed by many as the key to a more
enlightened approach, having set up the North Korean
camps with Soviet help during the early 1950s, shortly
after it established its own version of a political
gulag.
Beijing's interest now is more
self-centered: the thousands of North Koreans who are
breaching the border, usually at remote river crossings
and then seeking political asylum in foreign embassies,
pose a definite security risk.
Despite
diplomatic pressure by Washington and congressional
evidence that hundreds of returned North Koreans have
been executed, the Chinese are continuing to repatriate
many of those caught fleeing.
The Senate Foreign
Relations Committee is due to hear testimony on the
impact of the repatriations within the next week from
Hwang Jang-yop, North Korea's highest-ranking defector,
that could strain the delicate relationship with
Beijing.
According to Amnesty International, the
refugee crisis was aggravated by the opening in 1997 of
a string of temporary detention centers just inside
North Korea for homeless people fleeing the country's
devastating famine. Mostly sited in requisitioned
buildings along the border, the centers have acted as a
fulcrum for illegal migration because of lax security
and a "pattern of human-rights violations" that is
aggravated by severe overcrowding.
The detention
centers are part of a labyrinth of camps, serving as
many as eight different categories of common and
political prisoners, that are administered by the
People's Safety Agency (PSA) and the National Security
Agency (NSA).
Only a portion of this network,
comprising repeat offenders from the courts and
political detainees under NSA jurisdiction - all serving
life sentences - can be regarded in the strictest sense
as a gulag. Most PSA prisoners are on short punishment
terms, usually for trying to flee to China. But while
the notorious NSA, in effect North Korea's secret
police, is regarded as more brutal, the result is much
the same.
"Whatever the category, all the prison
facilities are characterized by very large numbers of
deaths in detention from forced, hard labor accompanied
by deliberate starvation-level food rations," the USCHRK
study reported, adding that few inmates survived for
more than one or two years.
(Copyright 2003 Asia
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