[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 69 (Tuesday, April 29, 2008)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3498-S3500]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              NORTH KOREA

  Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, the guard told the story of a father, a 
mother, a son, and a daughter who were stripped naked and led into a 
room together. The room was made of glass, ten feet wide, nine feet 
long, and seven feet high. Leading into the glass room where the family 
stood was a metal injection tube. Outside the room, a group of 
scientists waited with pens and note pads. The guard recalls that the 
gas began to flow through the tube into the glass room. At first, the 
gas collected along the floor. The family stood together in the middle 
of the room. Then, as the cloud of gas rose from the floor of the 
chamber, the son and the daughter began to vomit and then to die. The 
mother and father tried to save them. They stood as high as they could 
to gasp the last clean breaths of their lives, to breathe that air into 
the lungs of their children, and to preserve their lives for a few more 
moments. Soon, the parents, too, began to vomit and die. One by one, 
all four succumbed and collapsed into the cloud of gas. Eventually, the 
father, the mother, the son, and the daughter all lay dead on the floor 
of the gas chamber.
  The story I have just told you did not happen decades ago in Nazi 
Germany. It happened recently, and there is every reason to believe 
that things just like it may continue to this day, perhaps at this very 
moment. They happened in a country with which our diplomats are talking 
about granting full diplomatic relations and all of the mercantile and 
diplomatic privileges of membership in the civilized world.
  This story happened to forgotten people, in a forgotten part of a 
forgotten country. You have probably never heard of it, yet it is the 
scene of crimes against humanity whose scale and depravity rival those 
of Mauthausen, Tuol Sleng, or Srebrenica. The place is called ``Camp 
22.'' It lies in the far northeastern corner of North Korea.
  Camp 22 is not history than we can condemn from the safe distance of 
time. Yet too many of us refuse to confront it, perhaps because we are 
afraid that confronting the crimes of Camp 22 would also require us to 
confront its moral imperatives. We cannot say that we act according to 
our values when we invite mass murder into the community of 
civilization, with all of its diplomatic and mercantile privileges. It 
is to horrors like these that we must say ``never again,'' and mean it, 
and act.
  It is a massive place, perhaps hundreds of square miles in area. 
Former guards say that 50,000 men, women, and children are confined 
there. Camp 22 is a killing field where guards murder children for 
scavenging garbage to eat, where prisoners are publicly stoned to death 
and disemboweled, and where entire families are slaughtered for no more 
reason than to serve as examples for other prisoners. It is a place 
where torture, starvation, and disease kill 20 percent of the prisoners 
every year, and where children die because their parents are accused of 
thought crimes.
  Camp 22 is only one of an archipelago of concentration camps in North 
Korea. The U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea estimates 
that 400,000 people have been murdered in these camps. Survivor Kang 
Chol Hwan describes spending ten years in another camp, Camp 15, where 
each spring brought a grim new harvest of deaths from starvation and 
disease.
  The only people who have ever seen Camp 22 are its guards, its 
victims (none of whom has ever escaped), and the thousands of dead 
whose corpses and bones are strewn in its hills, fields, and ravines. 
Kim Jong Il's regime still denies that these camps exist. No foreigner 
has ever been permitted to go near them. Until North Korea allows us to 
go to the camps to prove or disprove these reports, we cannot know for 
certain what is happening there. Still, commercially available 
satellite imagery allows us to look upon Camp 22 for ourselves and 
verify what the survivors tell us in detail. Google Earth has made 
witnesses of us all. In these times, anyone with an Internet connection 
can look down into hell at Camp 22 and witness Holocaust Now.
  I would like to thank the Rev. Chun Ki Won, whom many have dubbed the 
``Schindler of the East.'' Reverend Chun himself has led hundreds to 
safety and himself spent nearly nine months in a Chinese prison when he 
was caught trying to get into Mongolia with a group of refugees. The 
floor charts of satellite photos I am about to show were vetted by 
refugees, both victims and guards, he is in touch with in Korea and 
elsewhere. They identified the details of these gulags and confirmed 
their existence.
  I want to show you Camp 22 today. I want you to see its fence lines, 
its gates, and moats. I want you to see the huts where its prisoners 
live, the coal mines where men are worked to death, and the forests and 
fields where the dead are discarded. I want you to be haunted by these 
things when you consider how we should deal with Kim Jong Il's regime, 
and when you are deciding what kind of a country we will be. I ask that 
you hear what I have to say while there is still time to stop this, and 
before our government surrenders the last pressure it may have to stop 
it. In Camp 22, it is forbidden to mourn the dead. Mourning them will 
not bring them back, but it may save others who still suffer.
  Using Google Earth's highest resolution, it is possible to trace the 
camp's circumference perhaps hundreds of square miles. Unfortunately, 
only the western half of the camp can be seen in publicly available 
high-resolution imagery. The alleged gas chamber is outside of this 
area.
  Tracing the camp's boundaries is not difficult. The camp is 
surrounded by electrified barbed wire fences from which vegetation has 
been cleared away. The sharp corners in the fence lines make them 
impossible to confuse with roads. At regular intervals, there are guard 
towers or distinctive guard posts.

[[Page S3499]]

  In North Korea, fence lines like these are the distinctive mark of 
concentration camps, with a few exceptions, such as Kim Jong Il's 
palaces, and certain nuclear sites. For example, there is the fence 
line of Camp 14, the so-called ``life imprisonment zone'' at the 
headwaters of the Taedong River, from which no prisoner is supposed to 
leave, dead or alive.
  Another camp that can be identified by its fenceline is Camp 15, made 
infamous by Kang Chol Hwan in his gulag memoir, ``The Aquariums of 
Pyongyang.'' Kang was sent to that camp at the age of nine. It was not 
until his release 10 years later that he learned why he and his family 
were sent there. His grandfather had come under suspicion for having 
lived for many years in Japan. Kang and his family were arrested one 
night and taken to Camp 15 in accordance with the North Korean doctrine 
that class enemies must be rooted out for three generations.

  Former guard Kwon Hyuk claims that the fences around Camp 22 are 2\1/
2\ meters high, and electrified with 3,300 volts of electricity. He 
also says the camp is surrounded by spiked moats in places. Photographs 
from Google Earth also reveal trenches, railroad gates, and guard 
posts. In some pictures, you can even make out what appear to be 
clusters of people in the camps.
  The farmers who live outside the gates of the camps cannot pretend 
not to know what goes on beyond the fence. One recent defector, who 
lived in this area, described living near Camp 22 to his English 
teacher, who wrote about them in the Washington Post. According to this 
young North Korean refugee, because food and alcohol are scarce in the 
countryside, the camp guards sometimes went to his house to drink, 
usually heavily. In their intoxication, the guards would confess to 
their sense of remorse.
  When American soldiers and news cameras reached the gates of Dachau 
in 1945, we and millions of men and women of conscience throughout the 
world made a simple, solemn promise: ``never again.'' Who among us 
today questions the righteousness of that promise? And who among us 
doubts that much of its meaning lies buried in the mass graves of Tuol 
Sleng, Rwanda, and Darfur? Why have we not done better? Perhaps the 
civilized world erred by making a promise it could not keep. We cannot 
solve all of the world's problems or suppress the worst impulses of 
humanity. Still, ``never again'' was, and is, a promise worth keeping 
if we read it as a promise, first, to speak the truth; second, to do no 
harm; and third, to find ways within our means to stay the hand of the 
murderer.
  We find ourselves in the possession of information not unlike that 
which was in our possession in 1943. Our government had aerial 
photographs of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald, too, and the accounts 
of the survivors were there for us to act on or disbelieve. Perhaps all 
of the evils of Camp 22 and these other camps are fictions. If that is 
so, let Kim Jong Il open them to the eyes of the world. Let him refute 
me and all of us who believe that it is beneath our nation to 
collaborate with evil of this depth.
  I am aware that some in Washington, including many in our State 
Department, would prefer to hear even less discussion of the atrocities 
in North Korea for the sake of a diplomatic process that has taken 
decades to get us nowhere. I was deeply ashamed this year when I read 
in the Washington Post of how our State Department's East Asia Bureau 
had tried to pressure the authors of this year's human rights country 
reports to airbrush the section on North Korea, invoking ``the 
Secretary's priority on the Six-Party talks'' and asking the authors to 
``sacrifice a few adjectives for the cause.'' Perhaps this diplomat was 
guided by a sincere but mistaken belief that there will be time to deal 
with North Korea's atrocities when its disarmament is negotiated first. 
For those who are suffering and dying in these camps, this year, there 
may not be a next year.
  With all due respect to Secretary Rice, I have come to doubt that our 
State Department is as serious about ending these atrocities as it is 
about pretending that we have progressed toward disarming North Korea. 
Why, more than 3 years after this Congress unanimously passed the North 
Korean Human Rights Act, are American consulates in China and other 
countries still refusing to let North Korean refugees in their gates? 
Under Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, who tells us that 
he intends to make human rights one of many issues to be addressed 
through a ``normalization working group'' within the six-party talks, 
now says that America can raise its objections to these atrocities ``in 
the context of two states that have diplomatic relations.'' Some of us 
had observed years ago that Ambassador Lefkowitz, our Special Envoy for 
Human Rights in North Korea, has been sidelined and silenced. Recently, 
we watched with embarrassment how he was treated when he dared to make 
the obvious connection between Kim Jong Il's malice toward his own 
people and his malice toward us.

  After all, the basis of any negotiated disarmament or peace must be a 
shared interest in the preservation of human life. What does it tell us 
that Kim Jong Il holds human life in such low regard as to run places 
like Camp 22, and then lie so flagrantly as to deny its very existence? 
What lessons can we take from the fact that he left two and a half 
million North Koreans to starve to death while he expended his nation's 
depleted resources on nuclear weapons and luxuries for himself and the 
elites? What does it tell us that, according to multiple witnesses, 
this regime kills newborn babies of refugee women returned from China 
in the name of protecting North Korea's racial purity? Does this regime 
value human life including North Korean life--as we value it? If not, 
isn't it reasonable to conclude that neither a desire for peace nor 
good faith will motive Kim Jong Il to keep this latest agreement?
  And finally, what does it tell us that China, the guarantor of that 
agreement and host for the six-party talks, green-lighted North Korea's 
nuclear test in 2006? Or that it has just announced a new plan to 
undermine the U.N. sanctions that followed that test by letting the 
regime's officials hold accounts in Chinese banks, in Chinese currency? 
Or that it has flagrantly violated the U.N. Refugee Convention for 
years by offering bounties to people who catch and turn in North Korean 
refugees, so that it can string them together like fish on lines, with 
wires through their wrists and noses, as it leads them back to the 
death camps and firing squads? Or that it has bullied the UNHCR into 
refusing asylum to North Korean refugees? And what do we have to say 
about China's efforts to cleanse its territory of North Korean refugees 
to ensure that this year's Olympic games will be free of the wretched 
refuse of its tyrannical satellite?
  Do not misunderstand my words. I am certainly not advocating war. 
After all, if we wish to rid the world of this repellent regime, we 
need only stop sustaining it. Kim Jong Il has already ruined North 
Korea's economy. He cannot sustain his misrule without the cash he 
receives from other nations, through aid, trade, and crime. Recent 
reports by economists and NGO's tell us that North Korea's regime has 
never been in greater economic distress, and that it has lost even the 
capacity to feed its elite. As Kim Jong Il shows stubborn contempt for 
our diplomatic efforts, we must relearn the lesson that diplomacy only 
influences evil men when it is backed by pressure. In the case of North 
Korea, the threat of economic pressure will gain power in the coming 
months . . . but only if we do not throw it away.
  Nor do I fail to grasp that our idealism must sometimes find ways to 
conform to our immediate interests. But those who say that America 
should stand only for its pecuniary interests and abandon its values 
have forgotten how America built the treasures it now seeks to protect. 
We have always been a nation of ideas of values. What else unites us? 
We differ in our ethnicities, faiths, and even in the climates and 
cultures of our vast country's regions. If our values no longer guide 
us, we are nothing more than another color on the chessboard, and we 
have ceased to be a beacon for the world's hopes, a model for its 
development, and a magnet for its talents. What a tragedy that would be 
for a nation that, as De Tocqueville said, is great because it is good. 
I do not say that we are perfect; after all, our tendency to revel in 
our own imperfections has made our society far more just and good. And 
with

[[Page S3500]]

greatness, and with goodness, come obligations to conform the pursuit 
of our interests to the pursuit of our values.
  Here is an occasion when our values and our interests both demand 
that Kim Jong Il be given a stark choice: transparency or extinction. 
Let us resolve that we will not allow Kim Jong Il to plunge North Korea 
into famine again this year. Let all nations of conscience join to deny 
the Kim Jong Il the means--through trade or unrestricted aid--to 
perpetuate his rule and his luxurious lifestyle while the North Korean 
people suffer and starve. America should stand ready to help the people 
of North Korea, if and only if we can verify that every last citizen, 
soldier, peasant, and prisoner--including the prisoners in Camp 22--can 
share equally in the aid we should offer generously. If Kim Jong Il 
refuses the just terms on which we must condition our assistance, then 
why should we extend the misery of his people by delaying his meeting 
with the ash heap of history? That is why I am resolved to oppose, to 
the last breath in my body, adding this country to the list of Kim Jong 
Il's benefactors and abettors until the prisoners of Camp 22 are fed, 
healed, housed, and freed.

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