![]() Shin’s personal story, including an account of how he was forced to witness his mother and brother being publicly executed for trying to escape, is almost too horrible to be believed. The book has made Shin, whom the CBS news program 60 Minutes profiled in December 2012, the best-known North Korean defector and a voice to the world on behalf of the most oppressed and abandoned people in the most closed and isolated country on the face of the earth. His is the most compelling and influential memoir yet written about the camps. Since 2005, the UN has annually adopted a resolution on North Korea-most recently by consensus-expressing “very serious concern” at reports of “systematic, widespread and grave violations of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights,” as well as of “the existence of a large number of prison camps and the extensive use of forced labor.” Most recently, Navanethem Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, has called for the establishment of a commission of inquiry into the massive human-rights abuses reportedly taking place in North Korea.Īs important as all these developments have been, nothing until now has had as great an impact on public opinion as Escape from Camp 14, 6 a short but powerful new book that tells the story of Shin Donghyuk, the only person born and raised in North Korea’s prison camps to have escaped to tell what happened there-and what continues to happen every day. The documentation contained in these materials has helped to spur greater international criticism of North Korea. Other important studies have also appeared, such as Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea and Cholhwan Kang’s prison memoir The Aquariums of Pyongyang. 4 It is based on interviews with more than sixty former prisoners and contains more than forty high-resolution satellite photographs identifying not just the prison camps themselves-whose existence the regime continues to deny-but specific facilities within them, from prisoner barracks and guard towers to coal-mine entrances and execution sites. These include the second edition of The Hidden Gulag, HRNK’s pathbreaking report on the system of forced-labor concentration camps-called kwan-li-so-which hold as many as 200,000 inmates. A growing number of reports have been published on conditions inside North Korea, many of them issued by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK). Over the past decade, as tens of thousands of North Koreans have fled the oppressive and famine-stricken country, information about North Korea and its prison camps has begun to reach the outside world. He wrote an article comparing North Korea’s “system of concentration camps” to the Soviet gulag and calling Kim Jong Il “the world’s worst totalitarian dictator, a man responsible for the loss of millions of lives.” 3 organized dissident groups is almost impossible due to the regime’s tight control over the people and the vast and inhumane system of prison camps.” 2 Havel soon learned that North Korea was very different from communist Czechoslovakia. external supporters.” The South Koreans replied that the “formation of. In September 2002, when he met with a South Korean delegation visiting Prague to prepare for an international conference on human rights in North Korea, he told them, “Our country had the same problem of oppression on people’s ideas not too long ago, which makes us pay keen attention to the problems in North Korea.” Havel added that “even a small-sized opposition group can trigger big changes when spurred and aided by. Is China an open country compared to North Korea? And if China is nonetheless a dictatorship, which it is, what then is North Korea?Įven Václav Havel, the great Czech leader and freedom fighter, had difficulty understanding the real nature of the North Korean system. ![]() North Korea and its neighbor China are both called dictatorships and are rated “Not Free” by Freedom House, but North Koreans go to extreme lengths to escape to China. The North Korean system also is hard to understand because it is so different from ordinary autocracies. As Kim Jong Il (1994–2011), the son of dictator Kim Il Sung (1948–94) and father of current dictator Kim Jong Un (2011–), once said: “We must envelop our environment in a dense fog to prevent our enemies from learning anything about us.” 1 This strategy of concealment has also been served by North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program and missile launches, which have diverted international attention from the country’s internal problems and generated controversies that have overshadowed concerns about human-rights violations. ![]() Hiding what is happening inside North Korea is among the tools that the xenophobic communist regime of the Kim family uses in order to maintain its power.
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