[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 3]
[House]
[Pages 3449-3450]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   STANDING UP FOR A FREE NORTH KOREA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the order of the House of 
January 31, 2006, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Stearns) is 
recognized during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Mr. STEARNS. Mr. Speaker, the North Korean regime has the worst human 
rights record in the world. Citizens are denied the most fundamental 
freedoms in classic Communist fashion, the economy results in shortages 
and an ever-present threat of starvation.
  Additionally, the regime has divided citizens into 51 classes. At 
least 7 million citizens, more than one-third of the population, are 
regarded as members of a hostile class, categorized as a potential 
threat to the existence of this regime. Members of this class are held 
in one of North Korea's 12 known prison camps. According to an MSNBC 
news report from January 2003, one of these prison camps is literally 
three times the size of Washington, DC. Meanwhile, the State Security 
Agency maintains at least 12 political prisons and about 30 forced 
labor and reeducation camps. There are also rumors of a series of 
underground camps. No one knows how many exist and, of course, how many 
prisoners are being held.
  These Stalinist-style gulags await any citizen, even children, who 
dare to commit such crimes as reading a foreign newspaper, singing a 
foreign pop song, listening to a foreign radio broadcast, or making 
statements that could be interpreted as an insult to the regime. The 
camps combine starvation, hard labor and brutal and irrational 
punishments. In one camp, former inmates claim prisoners work in such 
hard conditions that 20 to 25 percent of the 50,000 prisoners die every 
year.
  To leave North Korea without official permission is an act of 
treason. The Communist regime maintains a series of detention 
facilities along the border with the People's Republic of China for 
refugees forcibly returned. Pregnant women endure forced abortions or 
have their infants killed just after birth on the off chance that they 
were impregnated by Chinese men. Everyone is then interrogated to 
determine the extent of their exposure to the Free World, literally 
having the truth beaten out of them.
  This determines whether the regime sends these refugees to a gulag 
facing certain death or to a gulag facing likely death. The massive 
mechanistic prison camp system, combined with the outlawing of 
immigration, has led

[[Page 3450]]

many to refer to North Korea as ``the world's largest prison camp.'' 
Jasper Becker, former Beijing bureau chief for the South China Morning 
Post, has estimated that Kim Jong Il and his father, Kim Il Sung, are 
responsible for killing over 7 million Koreans, 3 million civilians in 
the Korean war, 3 million by deliberate famine, and at least 1 million 
more political prisoners either executed or worked to death.
  Mr. Speaker, even worse is the Free World's help that props up this 
regime. Since 1995, the United States has provided over $1.1 billion, 
about 60 percent of it for food aid. About 40 percent was energy 
assistance through the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Corporation, 
KEDO, a multilateral organization established in 1994 to provide energy 
aid in exchange for North Korea's pledge to halt its nuclear program. 
The Bush administration finally shut down the KEDO program earlier this 
year, long after North Korea had publicly violated the agreement that 
secured KEDO energy payments in the first place.
  Food aid to North Korea has also been an international humanitarian 
fraud. The Communist regime prevents donor agencies from operating in 
the country. The biggest suppliers of aid, China and South Korea, do 
little or no monitoring of what happens to the food that they supply to 
this country. The world's food and humanitarian aid rarely makes it to 
those suffering in North Korea. Instead, it has been used to feed Kim 
Jong Il's million-man army, almost 1 million people in his security 
forces, as a preference for the Communist Party elite. No such aid 
should be allowed against North Korea demonstrates tangible progress to 
freedom and transparency. Now some people worry about the risk of 
confronting and destabilizing a hostile and heavily armed power. These 
people should know that no good policy comes without risk.
  President Ronald Reagan did not coddle the Soviet Union, he did not 
offer to provide them the nuclear fuel they need to build nuclear 
weapons in the silly hope they would not build any. President Reagan 
took the struggle for freedom and democracy to the gates of the Soviet 
Union country itself.

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