COMMENT North Korea and the Genocide Convention
By Robert Park
"Factionalists or enemies of class, whoever they are; their seed must be
eliminated through three generations." - Kim Il-sung (1972)
While it is certain that North Korea has committed a political and ideological
genocide which has claimed millions of innocent lives, it is often overlooked
that the North Korean regime has also in every aspect violated the United
Nations Genocide Convention, to which it is a state party.
Article 2 of the 1948 convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts
committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical,
racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing
serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting
on the group
conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole
or in part; imposing measures to prevent births within the group; forcibly
transferring children of the group to another group."
Genocide on national, ethnical and racial grounds
Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have fled to China to survive. The
majority are women, 80% of whom are sex-trafficked or sold into forced
marriages. Yet even if the North Korean woman is married to a Chinese national
the Chinese authorities will still repatriate every North Korean refugee they
can find per a 1986 agreement with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea
(DPRK), in contravention of its obligations under the UN Convention Relating to
the Status of Refugees and its 1967 protocol.
The DPRK continues to systematically and brutally exterminate every child
believed to be fathered by non-North Koreans (usually Chinese or
Chinese-Koreans) through infanticide and forced abortions. According to the US
State Department, "The reason given for this policy was to prevent the birth of
half-Chinese children."
Thousands of babies have been killed on national, ethnical, and/or racial
grounds; not one has been spared. This unwavering policy of elimination
corresponds with the regime's obsession with racial purity, and the intent to
destroy half-Chinese babies is clear and incontestable.
Ethnic infanticide and forced abortions qualify as two of the acts which
constitute genocide: killing members of a group and attempting to prevent group
births.
Genocide on religious grounds
Before the division of Korea, the North was considered to be the center of
Christianity in East Asia with millions of believers; 25-30% of the population
in Pyongyang was Christian.
Today, North Korea is internationally recognized as the worst violator of
religious freedom in the world and true religious belief is not tolerated.
Christians are either publicly executed or forcibly transferred to
concentration camps where they are systematically starved, tortured and worked
to death along with their entire families to three generations, including
non-religious relatives and children.
The cruelty and barbarity occurring in these camps has no parallel in the world
today. In 2002, the National Association of Evangelicals stated that North
Korea is "more brutal, more deliberate, more implacable, and more purely
genocidal" than any other nation in the world.
Every method that constitutes genocide as outlined in the Convention is being
utilized by the regime to destroy its indigenous religious population through
the widespread practice of public executions, systematic use of torture,
deliberate deprivation of food and medicine in concentration camps, persecution
of the children of religious believers, and the forcible transfer and
imprisonment of children.
Inhumanity that has no precedent
In May of this year, Amnesty International released a report and satellite
images which indicate that the "mass political prison camps" in North Korea
have grown dramatically over the last ten years. Most of the prisoners are held
in areas known as "Total Control Zones" from which they will never be permitted
to come out. 100% of the prisoners in these areas are being exterminated for
perceived political offenses; in other words they have committed no crime
whatsoever.
Ahn Myong Chol is a former guard and one of the first witnesses to focus
international attention on the mass atrocities taking place in the camps. He
told MSNBC in 2003:
They trained me not to treat the prisoners as human
beings. If someone is against socialism, if someone tries to escape from
prison, then kill him. If there's a record of killing any escapee, then the
guard will be entitled to study in the college ... Beating and killing is an
everyday affair.
Kwon Hyok is the former head of security at
North Korea's Prison Camp 22. He was the first to disclose to the world about
the extensive use of gas chambers and the conducting of medical experiments on
prisoners, including children in the "Total Control Zone". Hyok told BBC in
2004, "It would be a total lie to say I felt sympathy for the children dying
such a painful death... In the society and the regime I was under, I just felt
they were enemies; so I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all."
About one-third of the over 200,000 innocent human beings in North Korea's
camps today are children condemned as guilty-by-association according to Kim
Il-sung's 1972 proclamation.
In reference to the atrocities being committed against North Korean children, N
C Heiken, director of the film Kimjongilia, who is of Jewish background,
said to the Daily NK in June:
The most shocking thing is that there is
such a thing as a totally closed prison camp, and that a child could be born in
this camp with no hope to ever leave it. Essentially, that child is being
raised as a slave or an animal, and I think that is the most debased thing I
have ever heard of in the history of humanity.
During talks in
July between the US and the DPRK as expected, there was no allusion to the
"issue" of arbitrary killings, mass starvation, the enslavement of children, or
heinous and systematic torture taking place every day in North Korea's prison
camps. Likewise the six-party talks since its inception in 2003 has not
included even the mere mention of the term "human rights" in any one of its
sporadic meetings, while innumerable North Koreans have been exterminated in
absolute silence.
Yet this is much more than a human-rights issue. This is genocide.
Robert Park is a human-rights activist and missionary who was detained in
North Korea from December 2009 to February 2010.
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