By Tien-Shun Lee
During his days in Seoul last year, human rights investigator David Hawk would become so drained from dredging out the painful experiences of former North Korean slave camp prisoners that he had to exercise off the emotional exhaustion at a local gym or drink away the refugees’ tortures at a bar.
“You don’t get desensitized. You have to be professional in the same way that a doctor deals with injury,” said Hawk, who presented some of his findings Jan. 30 at a meeting of Korean ministers and business leaders in Seoul Plaza, a Korean commercial center on Northern Boulevard in Flushing.
“You have to keep pressing questions even though it’s painful for the persons being interviewed to recall these terrible experiences that they’ve been through, even when they sometimes cry or choke up.”
Hawk, who worked with the United Nations to investigate the Rwandan genocide and Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge genocide during the 1980s and 1990s, said the human rights situation in North Korea is the worst in the world today, outside of situations involving armed conflict.
“In North Korea, the purpose is not to kill off the people. It’s to make them and their family members serve lifetime sentences of hard labor, to make them a slave labor force removed from society for the rest of their life,” said Hawk, who made three trips to South Korea between August 2002 and February 2003 as a consultant for a non-governmental organization called the Commission on Human Rights.
According to the testimony from more than 30 people who escaped from North Korea’s hard labor prison camps, called kwan-li-so, prisoners are kept on the verge of starvation and forced to perform back-breaking labor, such as mining for coal, iron and gold deposits, logging, wood-cutting and farming.
In English, slave labor camps are referred to as gulag, a term originally used by Russians to describe their country’s labor camps.
One North Korean refugee, An Hyuk, testified that he was detained for 20 months in solitary confinement in an undersized, underground cell in North Korea’s Maram detention facility after crossing over the border to China in 1986, largely out of curiosity.
“An was subjected to sleep-deprivation and compelled to sit motionless for days,” Hawk wrote in his report on North Korea’s prison camps, entitled “The Hidden Gulag,” which was released in Washington, D.C. in November. “Among those in nearby cells were prisoners detained for spilling ink on or failing to adequately dust photographs of Kim Il Sung, charges even the prison guards regarded as lacking seriousness.”
During Hyuk’s first labor assignment, he was required to break ice and wade into a frozen stream waist-deep to gather stones and lay boards in order to rechannel water for a water-driven electric power plant.
“It was literally a ‘murderous’ construction project as scores died from exposure, and even more lost fingers and toes to frostbite,” Hawk reported.
One North Korean refugee, Kang Chol Hwan, was seized by agents at the age of 10 and imprisoned with his entire family except for his mother in the political-penal labor colony of Yodok Kwan-li-so for acts his grandfather had committed, Hawk documented.
Hwan’s wealthy grandfather’s actions were viewed as crimes against former Korean dictator Kim Il Sung’s Korean Workers’ Party, and the grandfather was imprisoned in a different labor camp. Hwan’s mother, who came from a top political family, divorced Hwan’s father.
Hawk said North Korea is the only country he knows of in the world where people are imprisoned for acts a family member had committed up to three generations ago.
“Not even Stalin did it like that in Russia. Not even Mao did it like that in China,” said Hawk. “This is unique to North Korea, the practice of guilt by association.”
The practice of imprisoning generations of family members for wrongdoings of one family member draws from the Chosun Dynasty, which lasted for about 600 years before the Japanese occupation in 1910, said Hawk.
“Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il (Sung’s successor) have revived this practice from the late Chosun Dynasty,” said Hawk. “They are forming the new Kim Dynasty.”
Hawk estimated that there are 150,000 to 200,000 prisoners living in North Korea’s hard labor prison encampments. Some have committed acts considered actual crimes by U.S. definitions, while others have committed acts found offensive by the ruling political party. About 15,000 to 50,000 of the prisoners have been abducted without any judicial process, Hawk reckoned.
Since the mid- to late 1990s, Chinese authorities have captured many illegal North Korean immigrants and sent them back to their country. Those people are interrogated and face severe consequences, including shorter terms at forced labor camps, especially if they admit to having talked to South Koreans or having come into contact with Christians in China.
Hawk’s 120-page report includes satellite photos purchased from a U.S. company of 14 of the North Korean forced labor prison camps. The report was translated into Korean and published last week in Seoul.
“North Korea adamantly, vehemently, insistently denies that these prison camps exist,” said Hawk, who now lives in Manhattan. “It is our hope that this report in English and in Korean will provide the vocabulary to counter the claims of the North Korean officials.”
Reach reporter Tien-Shun Lee by e-mail at news@timesledger.com, or call 718-229-0300, ext. 155.
