[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 111 (Wednesday, July 22, 2009)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1876-E1878]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     NORTH KOREA'S HARD-LABOR CAMPS

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. FRANK R. WOLF

                              of virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, July 22, 2009

  Mr. WOLF. Madam Speaker, Monday's Washington Post featured a 
comprehensive piece by veteran reporter Blaine Harden headlined, ``N. 
Korea's Hard-Labor Camps: On the Diplomatic Back Burner,'' documenting 
the horrific nature of North Korea's gulag system, and the failure of 
this administration to raise this issue with the North Korean regime. I 
submit the article for the record.
  We have known for some time about the true nature of the cruel and 
inhuman system of labor camps maintained by the totalitarian regime in 
North Korea. And yet somehow, almost inexplicably, these horrific camps 
have failed to inspire collective outrage on the part of the West, and 
have been sidelined to the point of irrelevance in successive U.S. 
administrations' dealings with North Korea.
  The U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea published a report 
in 2003--six years ago--about these camps. It was written by David 
Hawk, quoted in Monday's article, and called The Hidden Gulag: Exposing 
North Korea's Prison Camps. It contains a full description of the 
camps, the worst of which are called kwan-li-so, which is translated as 
``political penal-labor colonies,'' and where, according to the 
Committee's report, scores of thousands of political prisoners--along 
with up to three generations of their family members--are banished 
without any judicial process and imprisoned, typically for life-time 
sentences of slave labor.
  The report also contains prisoners' testimonies and satellite 
photographs of the camps, whose very existence continues to be denied 
by the North Korean government, which is why the committee described 
the gulags as ``hidden.''
  Defector testimony, satellite images and in depth reporting have left 
no doubt about the camps' existence and the horrors of life there. The 
real question is what do we do about this abomination? What do we do 
about the regime that sustains and perpetuates this evil?
  Because North Korea possesses nuclear weapons and threatens not only 
to use them against neighboring countries but also to share nuclear 
weapons technology with such rogue states as Burma and Syria, the 
international community, the U.S. included, has tended to ignore the 
horrendous human rights abuses in North Korea in the interest of trying 
to negotiate through the so-called six-party talks an end to its 
nuclear program.
  But nothing has been achieved by these negotiations and North Korea 
has formally withdrawn from the six-party process.
  And so while efforts continue, the diplomatic process on the nuclear 
front appears to have reached an impasse.
  Frankly, I don't expect much to come from these efforts. The 
possession of nuclear weapons is simply too important to the North 
Korean regime, if only to deflect attention from its cruel and 
oppressive system of camps and the famine that it has brought upon its 
people at an estimated cost of anywhere from one to three million 
lives.
  Human rights activist and 2008 Seoul Peace Prize Laureate Suzanne 
Scholte recently wrote in the Korea Times that both the Clinton and 
Bush administrations ``intentionally sidelined human rights concerns, 
making them secondary to addressing North Korea's nuclear ambitions.''
  The young Obama administration appears to be in status quo mode, 
adopting the same failed approach.
  This approach hasn't succeeded in curbing North Korea's nuclear 
ambitions. And it hasn't brought relief to the thousands that languish 
in unimaginable conditions. A new North Korea framework is long 
overdue. Ignoring or downplaying the human rights situation for one 
more day is unconscionable.
  Ronald Reagan negotiated with the Soviet Union to reduce nuclear 
weapons throughout the 1980s, but that did not stop him from speaking 
about human rights, calling upon the Soviets to tear down the Berlin 
Wall, and predicting that communism would end up on the ash heap of 
history. His outspoken support for human rights had an effect, 
accelerating the demise of communism and, in the process, making it 
easier to resolve nuclear and security issues, since the main cause of 
Soviet aggressiveness was the communist system it was intended to 
defend and extend. Further it reminded those living behind the Iron 
Curtain that America was a friend, not an enemy, despite Soviet 
propaganda to the contrary.
  We should be doing the same thing with North Korea today.
  Just last week my good friend Carl Gershman, the president of the 
National Endowment for Democracy, spoke at the Korean Embassy's KORUS 
House in Washington about North Korea. His talk was titled, 
``Contending with the North Korean Dictatorship: A Perspective from the 
National Endowment for Democracy.'' Mr. Gershman acknowledged the 
diplomatic impasse with North Korea, but he didn't stop there. He said 
that in his view the North Korean totalitarian system was undergoing an 
inexorable process of erosion, marked by a sharply reduced ability to 
impose a complete information blockade on its population, increased 
traffic across the border with China, the growth of an exile population 
of defectors that has now reached 16,000 from almost zero less than a 
decade ago, and even local uprisings as the regime has tried to 
suppress informal markets that have emerged as a way to cope with the 
famine and economic hardship.
  He pointed out that what makes the North Korean system especially 
vulnerable is the existence just across the southern border of a free, 
successful and affluent South Korean society. For decades now the 
regime in Pyongyang has told its population that the people of South 
Korea live in hell while they live in a communist paradise. As the 
population learns that the truth is exactly the opposite, they will 
become increasingly restive, resentful, and rebellious, he noted.
  In his talk Mr. Gershman quoted from a report by a senior researcher 
for the Korea Institute for National Unification which spoke of the 
dormant reality of ``cracking the myth of permanent stability in North 
Korea'' and pointed to the ``danger of minor clashes to play a role of 
a primer for mass protest against excess of governmental 
indiscretion.''
  Mr. Gershman said that the NED, with the support of the U.S. 
Congress, would continue to support organizations in South Korea set up 
by North Korean defectors to reach back into North Korea by providing 
information to the people. He urged the U.S., in the absence of a six-
party process, to convene the other members of those talks (South 
Korea, Japan, China, and Russia) to discuss with them not just the 
security situation, but to prepare for a possible collapse in North 
Korea by considering now what would need to be done to aid the 
reconstruction of the country.
  I agree that this would be a good starting point for the 
administration as would appointing a special envoy on North Korea human 
rights as is mandated by Congress.
  Further, any future talks with the North Koreans, be it the six-party 
process or some other forum, must include human rights on the agenda.
  Additionally, the administration ought to be pursuing a policy which 
places a high priority on working with other countries in the region to 
champion the rights of North Korean refugees. China is among the 
biggest obstacles. Its current policy of repatriating North Korean 
refugees violates China's international treaty obligations. A grim fate 
awaits those who are returned to North Korea.
  Similarly, if North Korea continues to refuse U.S. food aid, the 
administration should urge those countries that do provide aid, which 
again includes China, to press for International Red Cross access to 
the camps and monitors from the World Food Programme to ensure that the 
aid goes to its intended recipients.
  Ultimately, we need to look forward. The North Korean regime will not 
be there forever to oppress its people. Just like the gulags and the 
regimes in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, that preceded it, this 
evil empire, too, will fall.
  In the meantime we must champion the rights of the people who wither 
under this regime. I'll close with the words of Anne Applebaum in the 
hope that they inspire the administration's approach to North Korea 
moving forward. She writes in the introduction of The Hidden Gulag, 
``This is not to say that

[[Page E1877]]

words can make a dictatorship collapse overnight. But words can 
certainly make a dictatorship collapse over time, as experience during 
the last two decades has shown. Totalitarian regimes are built on lies 
and can be damaged, even destroyed, when those lies are exposed.''

               [From the Washington Post, July 20, 2009]

       N. Korea's Hard-Labor Camps: On the Diplomatic Back Burner

                           (By Blaine Harden)

       Seoul.--Images and accounts of the North Korean gulag 
     become sharper, more harrowing and more accessible with each 
     passing year.
       A distillation of testimony from survivors and former 
     guards, newly published by the Korean Bar Association, 
     details the daily lives of 200,000 political prisoners 
     estimated to be in the camps: Eating a diet of mostly corn 
     and salt, they lose their teeth, their gums turn black, their 
     bones weaken and, as they age, they hunch over at the waist. 
     Most work 12- to 15-hour days until they die of malnutrition-
     related illnesses, usually around the age of 50. Allowed just 
     one set of clothes, they live and die in rags, without soap, 
     socks, underclothes or sanitary napkins.
       The camps have never been visited by outsiders, so these 
     accounts cannot be independently verified. But high-
     resolution satellite photographs, now accessible to anyone 
     with an Internet connection, reveal vast labor camps in the 
     mountains of North Korea. The photographs corroborate 
     survivors' stories, showing entrances to mines where former 
     prisoners said they worked as slaves, in-camp detention 
     centers where former guards said uncooperative prisoners were 
     tortured to death and parade grounds where former prisoners 
     said they were forced to watch executions. Guard towers and 
     electrified fences surround the camps, photographs show.
       ``We have this system of slavery right under our nose,'' 
     said An Myeong Chul, a camp guard who defected to South 
     Korea. ``Human rights groups can't stop it. South Korea can't 
     stop it. The United States will have to take up this issue at 
     the negotiating table.''
       But the camps have not been discussed in meetings between 
     U.S. diplomats and North Korean officials. By exploding 
     nuclear bombs, launching missiles and cultivating a 
     reputation for hair-trigger belligerence, the government of 
     Kim Jong II has created a permanent security flash point on 
     the Korean Peninsula--and effectively shoved the issue of 
     human rights off the negotiating table.
       ``Talking to them about the camps is something that has not 
     been possible,'' said David Straub, a senior official in the 
     State Department's office of Korean affairs during the Bush 
     and Clinton years. There have been no such meetings since 
     President Obama took office.
       ``They go nuts when you talk about it,'' said Straub, who 
     is now associate director of Korean studies at Stanford 
     University.
       Nor have the camps become much of an issue for the American 
     public, even though annotated images of them can be quickly 
     called up on Google Earth and even though they have existed 
     for half a century, 12 times as long as the Nazi 
     concentration camps and twice as long as the Soviet Gulag. 
     Although precise numbers are impossible to obtain, Western 
     governments and human groups estimate that hundreds of 
     thousands of people have died in the North Korean camps.
       North Korea officially says the camps do not exist. It 
     restricts movements of the few foreigners it allows into the 
     country and severely punishes those who sneak in. U.S. 
     reporters Laura Ling and Euna Lee were sentenced last month 
     to 12 years of hard labor, after being convicted in a closed 
     trial on charges of entering the country illegally.
       North Korea's gulag also lacks the bright light of 
     celebrity attention. No high-profile, internationally 
     recognized figure has emerged to coax Americans into 
     understanding or investing emotionally in the issue, said 
     Suzanne Scholte, a Washington-based activist who brings camp 
     survivors to the United States for speeches and marches.
       ``Tibetans have the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere, Burmese 
     have Aung San Suu Kyi, Darfurians have Mia Farrow and George 
     Clooney,'' she said. ``North Koreans have no one like that.''


                         Executions as Lessons

       Before guards shoot prisoners who have tried to escape, 
     they turn each execution into a teachable moment, according 
     to interviews with five North Koreans who said they have 
     witnessed such killings.
       Prisoners older than 16 are required to attend, and they 
     are forced to stand as close as 15 feet to the condemned, 
     according to the interviews. A prison official usually gives 
     a lecture, explaining how the Dear Leader, as Kim Jong Il is 
     known, had offered a ``chance at redemption'' through hard 
     labor.
       The condemned are hooded, and their mouths are stuffed with 
     pebbles. Three guards fire three times each, as onlookers see 
     blood spray and bodies crumple, those interviewed said.
       ``We almost experience the executions ourselves,'' said 
     Jung Gwang II, 47, adding that he witnessed two executions as 
     an inmate at Camp 15. After three years there, Jung said, he 
     was allowed to leave in 2003. He fled to China and now lives 
     in Seoul.
       Like several former prisoners, Jung said the most arduous 
     part of his imprisonment was his pre-camp interrogation at 
     the hands of the Bowibu, the National Security Agency. After 
     eight years in a government office that handled trade with 
     China, a fellow worker accused him of being a South Korean 
     agent.
       ``They wanted me to admit to being a spy,'' Jung said. 
     ``They knocked out my front teeth with a baseball bat. They 
     fractured my skull a couple of times. I was not a spy, but I 
     admitted to being a spy after nine months of torture.''
       When he was arrested, Jung said, he weighed 167 pounds. 
     When his interrogation was finished, he said, he weighed 80 
     pounds. ``When I finally got to the camp, I actually gained 
     weight,'' said Jung, who worked summers in cornfields and 
     spent winters in the mountains felling trees.
       ``Most people die of malnutrition, accidents at work, and 
     during interrogation,'' said Jung, who has become a human 
     rights advocate in Seoul. ``It is people with perseverance 
     who survive. The ones who think about food all the time go 
     crazy. I worked hard, so guards selected me to be a leader in 
     my barracks. Then I didn't have to expend so much energy, and 
     I could get by on corn.''


                          Defectors' Accounts

       Human rights groups, lawyers committees and South Korean-
     funded think tanks have detailed what goes on in the camps 
     based on in-depth interviews with survivors and former guards 
     who trickle out of North Korea into China and find their way 
     to South Korea.
       The motives and credibility of North Korean defectors in 
     the South are not without question. They are desperate to 
     make a living. Many refuse to talk unless they are paid. 
     South Korean psychologists who debrief defectors describe 
     them as angry, distrustful and confused. But in hundreds of 
     separate interviews conducted over two decades, defectors 
     have told similar stories that paint a consistent portrait of 
     life, work, torment and death in the camps.
       The number of camps has been consolidated from 14 to about 
     five large sites, according to former officials who worked in 
     the camps. Camp 22, near the Chinese border, is 31 miles long 
     and 25 miles wide, an area larger than the city of Los 
     Angeles. As many as 50,000 prisoners are held there, a former 
     guard said.
       There is a broad consensus among researchers about how the 
     camps are run: Most North Koreans are sent there without any 
     judicial process. Many inmates die in the camps unaware of 
     the charges against them. Guilt by association is legal under 
     North Korean law, and up to three generations of a 
     wrongdoer's family are sometimes imprisoned, following a rule 
     from North Korea's founding dictator, Kim Il Sung: ``Enemies 
     of class, whoever they are, their seed must be eliminated 
     through three generations.''
       Crimes that warrant punishment in political prison camps 
     include real or suspected opposition to the government. ``The 
     camp system in its entirety can be perceived as a massive and 
     elaborate system of persecution on political grounds,'' 
     writes human rights investigator David Hawk, who has studied 
     the camps extensively. Common criminals serve time elsewhere.
       Prisoners are denied any contact with the outside world, 
     according to the Korean Bar Association's 2008 white paper on 
     human rights in North Korea. The report also found that 
     suicide is punished with longer prison terms for surviving 
     relatives; guards can beat, rape and kill prisoners with 
     impunity; when female prisoners become pregnant without 
     permission, their babies are killed.
       Most of the political camps are ``complete control 
     districts,'' which means that inmates work there until death.
       There is, however, a ``revolutionizing district'' at Camp 
     15, where prisoners can receive remedial indoctrination in 
     socialism. After several years, if they memorize the writings 
     of Kim Jong Il, they are released but remain monitored by 
     security officials.


                       South's Changing Response

       Since it offers a safe haven to defectors, South Korea is 
     home to scores of camp survivors. All of them have been 
     debriefed by the South Korean intelligence service, which 
     presumably knows more about the camps than any agency outside 
     of Pyongyang.
       But for nearly a decade, despite revelations in scholarly 
     reports, TV documentaries and memoirs, South Korea avoided 
     public criticism of the North's gulag. It abstained from 
     voting on U.N. resolutions that criticized North Korea's 
     record on human rights and did not mention the camps during 
     leadership summits in 2000 or 2007. Meanwhile, under a 
     ``sunshine policy'' of peaceful engagement, South Korea made 
     major economic investments in the North and gave huge, 
     unconditional annual gifts of food and fertilizer.
       The public, too, has been largely silent. ``South Koreans, 
     who publicly cherish the virtue of brotherly love, have been 
     inexplicably stuck in a deep quagmire of indifference,'' 
     according to the Korean Bar Association, which says it 
     publishes reports on human rights in North Korea to ``break 
     the stalemate.''
       Government policy changed last year under President Lee 
     Myung-bak, who has halted unconditional aid, backed U.N. 
     resolutions that criticize the North and tried to put human 
     rights on the table in dealing with Pyongyang. In response, 
     North Korea has called Lee a ``traitor,'' squeezed inter-
     Korean trade and threatened war.


                           An Enforcer's View

       An Myeong Chul was allowed to work as a guard and driver in 
     political prison camps

[[Page E1878]]

     because, he said, he came from a trustworthy family. His 
     father was a North Korean intelligence agent, as were the 
     parents of many of his fellow guards.
       In his training to work in the camps, An said, he was 
     ordered, under penalty of becoming a prisoner himself, never 
     to show pity. It was permissible, he said, for bored guards 
     to beat or kill prisoners.
       ``We were taught to look at inmates as pigs,'' said An, 41, 
     adding that he worked in the camps for seven years before 
     escaping to China in 1994. He now works in a bank in Seoul.
       The rules he enforced were simple. ``If you do not meet 
     your work quota, you do not eat much,'' he said. ``You are 
     not allowed to sleep until you finish your work. If you still 
     do not finish your work, you are sent to a little prison 
     inside the camp. After three months, you leave that prison 
     dead.''
       An said the camps play a crucial role in the maintenance of 
     totalitarian rule. ``All high-ranking officials underneath 
     Kim Jong Il know that one misstep means you go to the camps, 
     along with your family,'' he said.
       Partly to assuage his guilt, An has become an activist and 
     has been talking about the camps for more than a decade. He 
     was among the first to help investigators identify camp 
     buildings using satellite images. Still, he said, nothing 
     will change in camp operations without sustained diplomatic 
     pressure, especially from the United States.


                       Inconsistent U.S. Approach

       The U.S. government has been a fickle advocate.
       In the Clinton years, high-level diplomatic contacts 
     between Washington and Pyongyang focused almost exclusively 
     on preventing the North from developing nuclear weapons and 
     expanding its ballistic missile capability.
       President George W. Bush's administration took a radically 
     different approach. It famously labeled North Korea as part 
     of an ``axis of evil,'' along with Iran and Iraq. Bush met 
     with camp survivors. For five years, U.S. diplomats refused 
     to have direct negotiations with North Korea.
       After North Korea detonated a nuclear device in 2006, the 
     Bush administration decided to talk. The negotiations, 
     however, focused exclusively on dismantling Pyongyang's 
     expanded nuclear program.
       In recent months, North Korea has reneged on its promise to 
     abandon nuclear weapons, kicked out U.N. weapons inspectors, 
     exploded a second nuclear device and created a major security 
     crisis in Northeast Asia.
       Containing that crisis has monopolized the Obama 
     administration's dealings with North Korea. The camps, for 
     the time being, are a non-issue. ``Unfortunately, until we 
     get a handle on the security threat, we can't afford to deal 
     with human rights,'' said Peter Beck, a former executive 
     director of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North 
     Korea.


                        A Family's Tribulations

       Kim Young Soon, once a dancer in Pyongyang, said she spent 
     eight years in Camp 15 during the 1970s. Under the guilt-by-
     association rule, she said, her four children and her parents 
     were also sentenced to hard labor there.
       At the camp, she said, her parents starved to death and her 
     eldest son drowned. Around the time of her arrest, her 
     husband was shot for trying to flee the country, as was her 
     youngest son after his release from the camp.
       It was not until 1989, more than a decade after her 
     release, that she found out why she had been imprisoned. A 
     security official told her then that she was punished because 
     she had been a friend of Kim Jong Il's first wife and that 
     she would ``never be forgiven again'' if the state suspected 
     that she had gossiped about the Dear Leader.
       She escaped to China in 2000 and now lives in Seoul. At 73, 
     she said she is furious that the outside world doesn't take 
     more interest in the camps. ``I had a friend who loved Kim 
     Jong Il and for that the government killed my family,'' she 
     said. ``How can it be justified?''

                          ____________________