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Carrying a Big Stick
Rethinking Our Policy of Appeasement
with North Korea
by Michael Whitcraft
Washington has just proposed a treaty
to officially end the Korean War.1
It is the latest carrot offered to appease North Korea’s
monstrous totalitarian regime in hopes that they will abandon
their quest to increase their nuclear weapons program.
The Korean War began in 1950 to contain
the communist regime which had invaded its southern neighbor,
disregarding the boundaries set up after World War II in
1948.
Though the signing of a 1953 armistice
ceased open conflict between the two Koreas, the war never
officially ended. Casualties were very high – 54,000
American deaths (roughly the same number suffered in Vietnam)
and 10 times that number for Korea and China. Positive gains
from the conflict have left much to be desired.
Certainly, South Korea was saved from communist
rule and the Soviet Empire received a much-needed warning
that in spite of being handed almost a third of Europe at
the end of World War II, the Free World was not going to
lie down in face of new communist expansion.
However, North Korea continued (and still
continues) to enslave over 20 million people in a harsh
regime of persecution, mistrust and utterly sub-human treatment.
The communist government has gone to great
lengths to conceal the full extent of this persecution.
A recent study made by David Hawk of the U.S. Committee
for Human Rights in North Korea, titled The Hidden Gulag
Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps2
sheds some light on the grisly reality of this modern-day
communist stronghold.
Kwan-li-so (Political Detention
Center)
The study uncovers a hidden system of huge
penal labor colonies, twenty or more miles long and ten
to twenty miles wide, in which 200,000 North Koreans toil
for up to fifteen-and-a-half hour days, on food rations
so meager that prisoners remain in a state of semi-starvation,
forcing them to forage for anything that could be considered
edible: snakes, rats and even grass. To date the North Korean
government denies the existence of the Kwan-li-so,
even though satellite photographs and eyewitness accounts
prove the contrary.
Semi-starvation
With hard work days, in some cases
exceeding 15 hours of manual labor, the body naturally requires
a healthy and substantial diet. However, in North Korea’s
gulags, daily food rations range from 16 oz of rice and
beans to only 20-30 kernels of corn and some watery cabbage
soup. One former inmate reports that the farm animals ate
better than he did.
The effects of hard labor coupled with
lack of sufficient sustenance has awful effects on the prisoner’s
bodies. One former detainee claims that the prisoners he
saw upon entering the prison camp looked like walking skeletons.
Many are incapable of sustaining these
conditions and die of malnutrition or other starvation-related
illnesses. In what Mr. Hawk named Kwan-li-so No.
15 “Yodok,” in the South Hamgyong Province,
one former prisoner Dang Chol Hwan estimated that 100 prisoners
out of a total population of 2,000-3,000 died each year
from malnutrition. In other prisons, the annual starvation-related
death toll soars to 200.
Former detainee Lee Young Kuk lost 80
pounds in the four years he spent quarrying stones for fourteen
hours a day. At another Kwan-li-so, former prisoner
#12 – who asked that his identity remain secret –
lost 100 pounds in four years, leaving him at a mere 77
pounds.
Psychological Torture
In addition to starvation, prisoners
must endure constant and intense psychological torture.
While this varies in degree and kind from prison to prison,
intense psychological punishment is administered at all
the detention facilities that the study describes.
One of the more shocking forms of psychological
torture is the so-called “collective responsibility”
(yeon-jwa-je). Under this system, the communist
regime imprisons up to three generations of a “malefactor’s”
innocent family members. A 1972 statement of Kim Il Sung
(North Korea’s “Great Leader”) is the
basis for this practice. In it, he stated: “Factionalists
or enemies of class, whoever they are, their seed must be
eliminated through three generations.”3
In addition to knowing that one’s
family members are suffering imprisonment, prisoners are
forced to witness public executions for the most frivolous
offenses.
Public Execution
In Kwan-li-so No. 14, Kim
Chul Min was executed because, driven by hunger, he collected
some ripe chestnuts that had fallen from a tree in the prison
compound.
When Kal Li Young stole a leather whip
and attempted to soften it with water to eat it, a guard
smashed his mouth with a feces-covered stick. He was also
executed.
In some cases, the prisoners are expected
to do more than just watch their companions’ deaths.
Former prisoner Lee Young Kuk reports on the execution of
an attempted escapee, Hahn Seung Chul, who was pulled behind
a car until his death, at which time the prisoners were
ordered to place their hands on his bloodied corpse. When
one prisoner, Ahn Sung Eun, shouted out in protest he was
shot to death.
Mr. Lee also witnessed a public execution
by firing squad, after which, the prisoners were obliged
to throw a stone at the deceased man’s corpse.
Criticism Sessions
Prisoners must also attend “criticism
sessions,” in which everyone in the prison is obliged
to confess their own faults and those of others. The sessions
do not end until every prisoner has confessed something.
In some prisons, there are small incentives to spy and report
on fellow prisoners.
In addition to criticism sessions, there
are reports of prisoners forced to beat each other. This
creates an atmosphere of distrust and resentment among the
prisoners, stifling the companionship which would otherwise
lighten the load of their torments.
Physical Torture
Prisoners of the Kwan-li-so are
not only submitted to psychological tortures, but physical
ones as well. Prisoners are beaten, stuffed into undersize
“punishment boxes” so small they can neither
sit nor stand. Others are submitted to water tortures, in
which they are repeatedly partially drowned. They are forced
to remain motionless for up to six days, hung up by their
wrists with their feet off the ground and obliged to stand-up/sit-down
to the point of collapse.
Forced Abortions
Perhaps the most heinous aspect
of North Korean gulags is their system of forcibly aborting
the children of pregnant women who are repatriated from
China. Ostensibly, this ensures that half-Chinese are not
born to a Korean mother.
Forced abortions are used only for those
women who are in the beginning stages of their pregnancies.
If the woman has almost come to term, labor is induced.
After birth, her child is murdered before her very eyes.
Some of these children are suffocated
with wet vinyl; others are discarded into a box that is
buried when full. These boxes are often buried with some
of their occupants still alive.
The number of such murders is high because
it is common for women to return pregnant from China. Some
are eager to marry only after escaping North Korea. Many
others are trafficked to ethnic Chinese men.4
Mr. Hawk relates the grisly details of
a 66 year-old woman incarcerated for trying to flee to China.
Deemed too frail to work in the prison’s rice fields,
she was taken to a nearby medical clinic to work as a mid-wife.
After helping deliver four children – two full-term
and two premature – they were discarded into a box.
The study then states:
Two days later, the premature babies
had died but the two full-term baby boys were still alive.
Even though their skin had turned yellow and their mouths
blue, they still blinked their eyes. The agent came by,
and seeing that two of the babies were not dead yet, stabbed
them with forceps at a soft point in their skulls. Former
detainee #24 says she then lost her self-control and started
screaming at the agent, who kicked her so hard in the
leg that she fainted.5
Concerning a different detention facility,
the study relates:
When the babies were born, they were
placed face down on the ground. Some babies died right
away; others lived longer. If any babies were still alive
after two days, the guards would smother them with wet
vinyl. The babies lying on the ground could be seen by
the women standing at the front of other cells. The guards
would say that the mothers had to see and hear the babies
die because their babies were Chinese.6
Carrying a Big Stick
North Korea has demonstrated that
it is unwilling to accept talks or reason. It is irresponsive
to appeasement and refuses to honor treaties.7
For the sake of its enslaved population, it is time to rethink
our policy of appeasement and take definitive steps to change
this evil regime whose collapse would be an essential key
to open the door of freedom to this nation which President
Bush did not hesitate to count as part of the “axis
of evil.”
To effect this, France and all other nations
of the free world that trade with North Korea should immediately
stop. Many of the goods made with the sweat of innocent
North Koreans who slave in these prison camps is sold to
countries eager to capitalize on cheap labor. Little of
this money ever reaches the poor prisoners whose monthly
pittance barely suffices to buy a pack of cigarettes.
Removing demand for these products would
increase the strain on North Korea’s already teetering
economy and greatly weaken its government. The United States
should use its influence to persuade these nations to institute
embargoes.
Second, the safety of the world and our
own safety depend on the immediate suspension of North Korea’s
nuclear weapons program. Not only does a nuclear North Korean
pose a threat to America, but they are far too willing to
subsidize their strained economy with terrorist dollars
in exchange for nuclear weaponry.
We should leave the bargaining table and
give North Korea an ultimatum. We should demand that they
cease their nuclear weapons programs outright. They have
already demonstrated their inability to keep the promises
we bought with oil that subsidized their teetering system,
on the verge of collapse.
We should bring every diplomatic effort
to bear on North Korea to immediately stop all human rights
violations. Together with Cuba, it should be the object
of a high-priority human rights campaign.
This is the least we can do to ensure
the peace and safety of North Korea’s citizens, and
our own. We are walking much too softly. It is time to bring
out the big stick.
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