[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 57 (Thursday, April 19, 2012)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2540-S2542]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, today, Thursday, April 19, is Holocaust
Remembrance Day. Observances and remembrance activities are taking
place across the Nation in civic centers, schools, churches and
synagogues, on military bases and in workplaces.
As always, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum--created as a
permanent living memorial to its victims--is taking a leading role in
this annual observance.
We must never forget the horrors of the Holocaust, we must never let
the world forget, and we must never forget or neglect the Holocaust's
lessons.
Never forgetting means keeping alive the memory of those who suffered
and died in the Holocaust.
Never forgetting also means declaiming against crimes against
humanity that erupt in our midst, and on our watch.
As searing as the Holocaust's lessons are, the world is too easily
tempted to avert its eyes from heinous crimes committed by governments
and others against our fellow human beings. The community of nations
will always bear the shame of doing so little during the massacres on
the killing fields of Cambodia, and in the villages of Rwanda.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum itself has taken the lead
in shining a light on atrocities in our time in Darfur, and I commend
its Committee on Conscience for lending its unmatched moral authority
to the crusade to bring an end to the violence there.
In that spirit, our voices are also needed to expose the crimes
against humanity that are occurring behind the walls of the prison
camps of North Korea. More and more information now is coming to light
about the systematic, state-sponsored brutality that is being waged
upon some 200,000 people, according to the State Department, in those
camps. The fact of these prison camps is not new. But horrifying new
glimpses are now coming to light from those who have successfully
broken free and crossed the frontier to eventual freedom. Publicly
available satellite photos are helping to expose a system whose very
existence the North Korean government continues to deny.
A new report on these prison camps, authored by David Hawk, has been
released by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a U.S.-
based, private organization. It documents the imprisonment of entire
families, including children and grandparents for the ``political
crimes'' of other family members.
At the report's Washington release this month, a young man born to
prisoners--and thereby condemned to spend his entire life in one of
these camps--spoke about visiting the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum, every time he comes to Washington. Shin Dong-hyuk's harrowing
escape is detailed in a new book by Blaine Harden, a former Washington
Post reporter.
We have vital national security interests at stake in our dealings
with the North Korean regime, which has acquired nuclear weapons. I am
one
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who believes that we can fully and effectively pursue these interests
through diplomacy and other means, without having to mute our outrage
about human rights atrocities like these.
I welcome the strong comments about this report made by Robert King,
the United States human rights envoy for North Korea, who said that
conditions in North Korea's prison camps are worse than in the former
Soviet Union's gulag. I would hope that today's leaders of Russia and
China would voice similar outrage about these atrocities.
Social media and a powerful video recently brought the story of the
crimes of Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army to an audience of
millions of people around the world. Let us individually and together
similarly raise our voices against the crimes against humanity that are
taking place behind the walls and barbed wire of North Korea's labor
camps, where some one in four people die each year--starved to death,
or worked to death, or executed.
Let it not be said by future generations that though we knew enough,
we did not care enough to condemn and to lend our efforts to end this
brutal system.
Several news organizations have reported or commented on this new
information about North Korea's prison camps. I commend to the Senate's
attention two recent such writings. I ask unanimous consent that an
editorial, and a commentary by Fred Hiatt, both from the Washington
Post, be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Washington Post, Apr. 12, 2012]
Turning a Blind Eye to North Korea's `Hidden Gulag'
(Editorial)
While attention focused on North Korea this week ahead of
Friday morning's missile launch, hundreds of Americans,
Koreans, Japanese and others gathered in Washington to
examine a different aspect of life in that communist nation:
its ``hidden gulag.''
That was the title of an unprecedented conference organized
by the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK)
and the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of
Human Rights. The gulag is a network of labor camps that
houses 150,000 to 200,000 prisoners. They are generally
arrested for no crime, sent away with no trial, never again
allowed to communicate with anyone outside the camps, fed on
starvation rations and forced to work until they die. Other
than from one camp, according to South Korean expert Yoon
Yeo-sang, no one deported to North Korea's gulag is ever
released.
As noted by Blaine Harden, author of the recently published
book ``Escape from Camp 14,'' the North Korean gulag has
existed twice as long as did the Soviet network of labor
camps created by Lenin and Stalin, and 12 times as long as
Hitler's concentration camps. Yet, for the most part,
``Americans don't know anything about these camps,'' Mr.
Harden said. ``They don't know they exist.''
This is not, the title of the conference notwithstanding,
because the gulag is all that hidden, although North Korea's
regime continues to deny its existence. In fact, as David
Hawk said, a great deal is known about the camps, both from
the testimony of those who have escaped and from satellite
imagery. Mr. Hawk has just published the second edition of
his definitive survey, also called ``The Hidden Gulag,''
which draws on horrifying testimony from 60 former prisoners.
The reason for the ignorance is mostly political. The
United States, with a goal of keeping the peace and depriving
North Korea of nuclear weapons, has not made human rights a
priority. In South Korea, the gulag has been a political
football between left-wing politicians favoring warmer ties
with the North and right-wing politicians pushing a harder
line. China, North Korea's neighbor to the north and west,
abuses the human rights of its own population and does not
believe any country's freedom to abuse its population in the
same way should be interfered with.
China, in fact, is complicit in North Korea's abuses, since
it sends many defectors who have made it across the Yalu
River back into North Korea, where they face punishment or,
if they are repeat escapees, execution. North Korean women
who have become pregnant in China often are forced to abort
their children. ``In cases where the pregnancy is too
advanced, guards beat the infants to death or bury them alive
after they are born,'' writes Roberta Cohen, the chair of
HRNK.
Inevitably, there remains much that is unknown. It's
impossible to be confident of a population count for the
gulag, Mr. Hawk said, because it's not clear whether deaths
are outpacing deportations.
Enough is known, however, for indifference to be
inexcusable. As a first step, the United Nations could
establish a commission of inquiry to investigate crimes
against humanity taking place inside the prison camps. As Ms.
Cohen said, ``It is not just nuclear weapons that have to be
dismantled but an entire system of political repression.''
____
[From the Washington Post, Mar. 25, 2012]
North Korea's Dehumanizing Treatment of Its Citizens Is Hiding in Plain
Sight
(By Fred Hiatt)
With President Obama in Korea this week, we will hear a lot
about the dangers of North Korea's nuclear aspirations.
We're unlikely to hear about a young man named Shin Dong-
hyuk, who was bred, like a farm animal, inside a North Korean
prison camp after guards ordered his prisoner-parents to
mate. But Shin arguably has as much to teach about Korea's
past and future as about the cycle of negotiation, bluster
and broken promises over the nuclear issue.
``Shin was born a slave and raised behind a high-voltage
barbed-wire fence.''
So writes Blaine Harden, a former East Asia correspondent
for The Post, in a soon-to-be-published account of Shin's
life, ``Escape from Camp 14.''
Harden describes a closed world of unimaginable bleakness.
We often speak of someone so unfortunate as to grow up ``not
knowing love.'' Shin grew up literally not understanding
concepts such as love, trust or kindness. His life consisted
of beatings, hunger and labor. His only ethos was to obey
guards, snitch on fellow inmates and steal food when he
could. At age 14, he watched his mother and older brother
executed, a display that elicited in him no pity or regret.
He was raised to work until he died, probably around age 40.
He knew no contemporaries who had experienced life outside
Camp 14.
At 23, Shin escaped and managed, over the course of four
years, to make his way through a hungry North Korea--a
larger, more chaotic version of Camp 14--into China and,
eventually, the United States. He is, as far as is known, the
only person born in the North Korean gulag to escape to
freedom.
Improbably, his tale becomes even more gripping after his
unprecedented journey, after he realizes that he has been
raised as something less than human. He gradually,
haltingly--and, so far, with mixed success--sets out to
remake himself as a moral, feeling human being.
How is this tale even possible in the 21st century, the era
of ``Never Again,'' of the United Nations proudly (in 2005)
declaring that all nations have a ``responsibility to
protect'' civilian populations abused by their own
governments?
``Fashioning a comprehensive policy to deal with North
Korea's nuclear programs, its human rights abuses, and its
failed economy is hardly child's play,'' explains Victor Cha,
a Georgetown University professor, in his forthcoming book,
``The Impossible State.'' ``No administration thus far has
been successful at addressing one, let alone all three.''
Cha, who helped shape Korea policy on the National Security
Council under President George W. Bush, describes a nation
where schoolchildren learn grammatical conjugations by
reciting ``We killed Americans,'' ``We are killing
Americans,'' ``We will kill Americans.''
With 25 million people, it is a failed state in every way
but one, which is coddling the regime and a small elite that
resembles a criminal syndicate more than a traditional
bureaucracy. While cautioning that predictions are risky, Cha
argues that ``the end is near.'' The next U.S. presidential
term, he predicts, is likely to face ``a major crisis of the
state in North Korea, and potentially unification.''
When that happens, ``what is likely to be revealed is one
of the worst human rights disasters in modern times.''
Only, as both books make clear, it won't be much of a
revelation. Harden points out that North Korea's labor camps
``have now existed twice as long as the Soviet gulag and
about twelve times longer than the Nazi concentration
camps.'' They are easily identified in satellite photographs.
One is larger than the city of Los Angeles. Altogether they
house about 200,000 people.
They are visible, in other words, but people do not want to
see them, and Shin's story helps explain why.
It's no surprise that China, with its own gulag
archipelago, objects to any suggestion that a government
can't abuse its citizens as it pleases.
But South Koreans, living in freedom, also fear a North
Korean collapse--not only for the potential financial cost
but also because they sense how different their erstwhile
countrymen have become. Not all North Koreans live as stunted
a life as Shin did inside Camp 14, but generations of
isolation, propaganda and warped morality take a toll. And 20
years of post-Soviet experience have taught us that civic
virtues can be far more difficult to rekindle than private
markets or democratic forms.
When he watched his teacher beat a six-year-old classmate
to death for stealing five grains of corn, Shin says he
``didn't think much about it.''
``I did not know about sympathy or sadness,'' he says.
``Now that I am out, I am learning to be emotional. I have
learned to cry. I feel like I am becoming human.''
But seven years after his escape, Harden writes, Shin does
not believe he has reached that goal. ``I escaped
physically,'' he says. ``I haven't escaped psychologically.''
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