[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 4]
[Senate]
[Pages 5190-5191]
[From the U.S. 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 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

[[Page 5191]]

     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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