The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps
Prisoners’ Testimonies and Satellite Photographs
PART ONE
THE NORTH KOREAN GULAG I: KWAN-LI-SO POLITICAL PENAL-LABOR COLONIES
Introduction: Generations Imprisoned without Trial
North Korea’s kwan-li-so consist of a series of sprawling encampments measuring kilometers long and kilometers wide. The number of these encampments has varied over time. They are located, mostly, in the valleys between high mountains, mostly, in the northern provinces of North Korea. There are between 5,000 and 50,000 prisoners per kwan-li-so, totaling perhaps some 150,000 to 200,000 prisoners throughout North Korea. Both perceived wrongdoers and up to three generations of their extended families are “arrested,” or, more accurately, abducted by police authorities and deposited in the kwan-li-so, without any judicial process or legal recourse whatsoever, for lifetime sentences of extremely hard labor in mining, timber-cutting, or farming enterprises. The prisoners live under brutal conditions in permanent situations of deliberately contrived semi-starvation.
The kwan-li-so are usually surrounded at their outer perimeters by barbed-wire fences punctuated with guard towers and patrolled by heavily armed guards. The encampments include self-contained, closed “village” compounds for single persons, usually the alleged wrongdoers, and other closed, fenced-in “villages” for the extended families of the wrongdoers. Some of the camps are divided into sections called wan-jeon-tong-je-kyuk (total-control zones), where the sentences are lifetime, and sections called hyuk-myung- hwa-kyuk (best translated as “revolutionizing zones”), so-called “re-education” areas from which prisoners eventually can be released. In the total-control zones, if the families are together, only privileged prisoners are allowed to marry and have children. With the only known exception of Camp No. 18, prisoners have no correspondence or contact with the world outside the political penal-labor colony, except for news provided by newly arriving prisoners. The kwan-li-so are also sometimes referred to as teuk-byeol- dok-je-dae-sang-gu-yeok, which translates as “zones under special dictatorship.” The most strikingly abnormal feature of the kwan-li-so system is the philosophy of “collective responsibility,” or “guilt by association” — yeon-jwa-je — whereby the mother and father, sisters and brothers, children and sometimes grandchildren of the offending political prisoner are imprisoned in a three-generation practice. Former prisoners and guards trace this practice to a 1972 statement by “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung: “Factionalists or enemies of class, whoever they are, their seed must be eliminated through three generations.” According to the testimony of a former guard at Kwan-li-so No. 11 at Kyungsung, North Hamgyong Province, this slogan was carved in wood in the prison guards’ headquarters building. According to the testimony of YOON Dae Il, a former police official, the number of family members abducted and sent to the lifetime labor camps depends on the severity of the presumed political offense.
The other strikingly abnormal characteristic of the kwan-li-so system is that prisoners are not arrested, charged (that is, told of their offense), or tried in any sort judicial procedure, where they would have a chance to confront their accusers or offer a defense with or even without benefit of legal counsel. The presumed offender is simply picked up and taken to an interrogation facility and frequently tortured to “confess” before being sent to the political penal-labor colony. The family members are also just picked up and deposited at the kwan-li-so, without ever being told of the whereabouts or wrongdoings of the presumed wrongdoer.
The most salient feature of day-to-day prison-labor camp life is the combination of below-subsistence food rations and extremely hard labor. Prisoners are provided only enough food to be kept perpetually on the verge of starvation. And prisoners are compelled by their hunger to eat, if they can get away with it, the food of the labor-camp farm animals, plants, grasses, bark, rats, snakes — anything remotely edible. It should be noted that below-subsistence-level food rations preceded, by decades, the severe nationwide food shortages experienced by North Korea in the 1990s.
Many of the kwan-li-so involve mining for coal, iron deposits, gold, or various other ores, or logging and wood-cutting in the adjacent mountains. Prisoners undertake farm labor during planting and harvesting seasons. This back-breaking labor is often performed twelve or more hours per day, seven days per week, with time off only for national holidays (such as New Year’s Day and Kim Il Sung’s and Kim Jong Il’s birthdays, for example).
Except for the “revolutionizing zone,” in Kwan-li-so No. 15 Yodok, and possibly a section of Kwan-li-so No. 18, these camps do not feature “re-education,” as it is not anticipated that the prisoners will be returned to society. Punishment for rule infractions or working too slowly include further reduction in food rations, or detention within punishment cells that do not have enough space for a person to completely lie down or stand up, causing the loss of circulation and atrophy of legs and often leading to death within several weeks. The combination of below-subsistence-level food rations and slave-labor working conditions leads to large numbers of deaths in detention. Persons who try to escape and other major rule-breakers are publicly executed by hanging or firing squad in front of the assembled prisoners of that section of the camp. (The former guards say they feared and hated the public executions because, heavily armed as they were, they still worried that the rarely assembled inmates might riot.)
Former prisoners — mostly those from the “revolutionizing zone,” at Kwan-li-so No. 15 Yodok — and former prison guards report that upon arrival, they were struck by the shortness, skinniness, premature aging, hunchbacks, and physical deformities of so many of the prisoners. They also report that there were large numbers of amputees and persons disabled from work accidents, and persons with partial amputations owing to frostbite of the toes, feet, fingers, and hands.
Semi-starvation yields large numbers of informants among the prisoners, leading to a prison culture of distrust and hostility. Prisoners fight each other over scraps of food or over the clothing of deceased inmates. The camps feature the gamut of abnormal and aberrant human behavior that results from treating people like animals.
Kwan-li-so No. 15 Yodok Originally, the kwan-li-so were run by the In-min-bo-an-seong (People’s Safety Agency), regular police forces that are part of the Ministry of Interior (before 1998 called the Sa-hoe-an-jeon-bu, meaning Social Safety Agency). Except for Kwan-li-so No. 18 in South Pyong-an Province, administration of the prison-labor camps was taken over by Kuk-ga-bo-wi-bu (usually abbreviated as “bo-wi-bu”), variously translated as the National Security Agency, National Security Police, State Political Protection Agency, or State Safety and Protection Agency. This security force was created in 1973 and reports, according to former bo-wi-bu official Yoon Dae Il, directly to Kim Jong Il, not to the Ministry of Interior or Defense, and that took over running the kwan-li-so, except for No. 18. The outer perimeters of the kwan-li-so are patrolled by privileged members of North Korea’s army. The administrator and internal guards of the camps are bo-wi-bu officers.
There has been a gradual consolidation of the kwan-li-so, according to former guards and police officials. Originally there were more than a dozen, but several have been closed, for a variety of reasons — primarily for being too close in proximity to the China border — and the prisoners transferred to other camps. According to former police officials, there are now six kwan-li-so in operation. Four of these six were confirmed by persons interviewed for this report.
Virtually all of the prisoners in the kwan-li-so are victims of “arbitrary detention,” as defined by international norms and by the official deliberations of international authorities such as the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.
Who Are the Political Prisoners?
The pattern of incarceration of political prisoners in North Korea has followed a trajectory that should be familiar to students of communist rule: imprisonments of reactionaries were followed by waves of purges of the Korean Workers’ Party, the army, and the state bureaucracies; the camps then became economically productive dumping-grounds for elements of North Korea’s society that did not fit into the “Kim Il Sung nation.” Primitive prison-labor camps in North Korea initially were set up immediately after World War II, for predictable or potential enemies of the revolution: landowners, collaborators with the Japanese occupation, religious leaders, and some family members of those individuals who went south after the Soviet/American creation of northern and southern Korean areas. Following the Korean War, suspected collaborators with the American and South Korean forces were imprisoned.
As Kim Il Sung consolidated power, various factions of the Korean Workers’ Party, the state bureaucracy, and the army were purged and imprisoned. The highest-level Korean Workers’ Party official to defect to South Korea stated that “complete-control zones” were established after 1956 for “purged factionalists.” Korea scholar Charles Armstrong notes, “By the 1960s, the former Manchurian partisans [anti-colonial guerrillas, including Kim Il Sung] were at the apex of the power system in the DPRK, and those who had been aligned with the Southern Workers’ Party, the Soviets, and the Chinese in Yan’an had almost all been purged, executed, sent into exile, or otherwise eliminated from positions of power.” Other purges of the Party, the army, and state bureaucracy coincided with the development of the “cult of personality” around Kim Il Sung, and even more purges and imprisonment accompanied the feudal-dynastic succession of Kim Jong Il, the first son of Kim Il Sung’s first wife.
Also imprisoned were various categories of people who did not fit into the Party’s plan for the country, and those perceived as posing a threat to the regime should they remain in society. Included here were a large number of Japanese citizens of Korean ethnic descent whose families had been taken to Japan for forced labor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during the Japanese occupation of Korea, but who returned to North Korea in the 1950s and 1960s. They were later deemed to have been spoiled by their exposure to Japanese liberalism and capitalist prosperity.
When North Korea adopted a three-tiered seongbun — a political/class structure — of “loyal,” “wavering,” and “hostile” classes, divided, in turn, into fifty-one subcategories, and the entire population was registered into one of the fifty-one subcategories, some of those classified within the “hostile” subgroups are believed to have been imprisoned. (However, many of the “purged” North Korean officials noted above would have come from “good” seongbun family backgrounds.)
The seongbun system provides an important insight into the contemporary North Korean prison-camp system. As Professor Armstrong notes:
Social stratification had been one of the most enduring characteristics of Korean society before the twentieth century...The hereditary [emphasis added] three-tiered structure...that became explicit in North Korea from the 1960s onward was based on the actions of oneself or one’s ancestors during the colonial period and the Korean War. Such stratification was made possible by the careful categorization of all North Korean citizens by social strata beginning in 1946 and resonated with the three-class structure of yangban [scholar/bureaucratic aristocracy], commoner, and outcast/slave that dominated Choson [the feudal dynasty that ruled Korea for centuries prior to the Japanese occupation of Korea] society.
The “outcast/slave” characteristic is clearly apparent in the description of the lifetimesentence, “three-generation” kwan-li-so described in this report.
In the 1990s, imprisonment also befell some North Korean students and diplomats who had been studying or posted to the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe and had been exposed to the collapse of socialist rule. Also imprisoned were others who were perceived to be potential complainers and persons who purposely or inadvertently did not take proper care of photographs of the “Great Leader,” Kim Il Sung, or the “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong Il, or even of newspapers that contained photographs of the father and son. Some South Korean experts posit that these camps also became places where un-repatri- ated South Korean prisoners of war were dumped after the Korean War, as were a much smaller number of South Korean POWs who were captured by the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese during the American-Vietnamese war and turned over by the Vietnamese to North Korea. Also believed to have been placed in the prison system were a larger number of South Koreans, including many fishermen, who were captured or abducted by North Korea over the years, and a smaller number of Japanese citizens who were abducted from Japan by North Korea for various reasons.
How Do We Know?
In their 1972 textbook, Communism in Korea, Professors Robert Scalapino and Chong Sik Lee noted that two camps had been set up and named after the number of the proclamations that brought them into existence: one camp for perceived political wrongdoers and another camp for their families.
In 1974, the situation of the North Korean prison camps became known in international human rights circles when Amnesty International campaigned for the release of Ali Lamada, a citizen of Venezuela, and Jacques Sedillot, a citizen of France, both of whom had been recruited to work in North Korea by the DPRK Ministry of Foreign Affairs translating the collected works of Kim Il Sung into Spanish and French, respectively. Following the release of Ali Lamada, Amnesty published in 1979 his account of his imprisonment — to the interviewer’s knowledge the first English-language North Korean political-prisoner account to introduce the North Korean prison-camp system to an international audience. Lamada’s story of his imprisonment from 1967 to 1974, except for his nationality, is so remarkably similar to the stories of recently escaped North Koreans, it is worth recounting on the following pages as it establishes the similarity of the mistreatment of political prisoners over a thirty-year period. While imprisoned at Sariwon prison-labor camp, Lamada learned from guards and “orderlies,” who were privileged prisoners, some of whom had been held previously in other prison-labor camps, of some twenty other prison-labor camps holding, Lamada calculated, at that time roughly 150,000 prisoners altogether.
Over a number of years, a small number of North Korean defectors to South Korea provided information on the prison-camp system, which was collected by Republic of Korea government agencies, scholars, and specialists. The first major international human rights NGO report on North Korea, Human Rights in the DPRK (North Korea), was published in December 1988 by the Minnesota Lawyers International Human Rights Committee and Human Rights Watch/Asia. It outlined the camp system, albeit with very little corroboration by prisoner testimony, in the course of a review of the various provisions of the North Korean constitution and legal system.
Prisoner testimony started to emerge publicly in the mid-1990s, after two former prisoners from the “revolutionizing zone” of Kwan-li-so No. 15, often called Yodok, KANG Chol Hwan and AN Hyuk, escaped to South Korea via China in 1992 and published their prison memoirs in Seoul. In 1994, a former prison guard who had worked at four different prison-labor camps, AHN Myong Chol, defected to South Korea and was able to provide a great deal of firsthand information. In 1996, the Seoul-based Korea Institute of National Unification (KINU) began publishing annually a White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, which contains reporting that draws on the extensive interviews conducted by the South Korean government with all North Koreans provided asylum by the Republic of Korea.
In the late 1990s, as the production and distribution system in North Korea broke down, larger numbers of Koreans fled to China, primarily in search of food. Some of these food and/or asylum seekers had been imprisoned in either the kwan-li-so or the kyo-hwa-so. A number of those who fled to China, particularly after 2000, made their way to South Korea, and published accounts or interviews in South Korean journals or magazines.
An important development occurred in December 2002, when the weekly news magazine Far Eastern Economic Review published satellite photographs of Kwan-li-so No. 22 at Haengyong (also called Hoeryong) in North Hamgyong Province. Both the United States and South Korean governments have long had even better satellite photographs of the prison-labor camps. (When Kang Chol Hwan first came to Seoul in 1992, he was shown satellite photos of the Kwan-li-so No. 15 Yodok so precise that he was able to pick out his former house in the images.) But these intelligence agencies have never released their photographs to the press or public. John Larkin, a Seoul-based, Koreanspeaking then-correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, was able to obtain coordinates of latitude and longitude of Kwan-li-so No. 22 from old Soviet-made maps of North Korea on which, in consultation with former guard Ahn Myong Chol, Larkin was able to precisely locate the sprawling encampment at Haengyong. After Larkin obtained satellite photos from a commercial firm, Ahn was able to locate and identify buildings at the penal-labor colony.
WITNESSES AND TESTIMONY WITNESS: Ali Lamada: Sariwon, Hwanghae Province
As noted in the preceding section, Ali Lamada and Jacques Sedillot were recruited in 1967 by the DPRK Ministry of Foreign Affairs and placed in the Department of Publications to translate the writings of Kim Il Sung into Spanish and French, respectively. Lamada’s poetry and books were well known in the Spanish-speaking world, and he was an active member of the Venezuelan Communist Party.
Both Lamada and Sedillot were arrested in September 1967. Sedillot was accused of being a French imperialist spy. No charges were initially brought against Lamada. He was simply ordered and coerced to confess by means of solitary confinement in a 2meter by 1-meter by 3-meter cell (7 feet by 3 feet by 10 feet) in the Ministry of Interior for a year on below-subsistence-level food rations. During this time, he lost 22 kilos (more than 50 pounds) and his body became covered with sores.
After a year, Lamada was returned to his residence in Pyongyang and placed under house arrest but was picked up two months later and sentenced to twenty years of forced labor, purportedly for being a spy. He was driven some three hours from Pyongyang and thrown into a punishment cell in a prison camp, where, kept handcuffed for three weeks, he slept on the floor without blanket or mattress in freezing temperatures. Transferred to the main prison-camp buildings, he was locked in unheated rooms and suffered frostbite of the feet. His toenails dropped off, and his feet became covered with sores. From guards, he learned that the name of the prison camp was Sariwon, where some 6,000 to 8,000 prisoners worked twelve hours per day assembling jeep parts. A doctor told Lamada that there was a special section of the prison camp where 1,200 sick persons were held.
The government of Venezuela and the President of Romania intervened on behalf of Lamada, and both he and Sedillot were released in May 1974. But Sedillot died in Pyongyang of prison-related illnesses before he could return to France. Lamada recuperated in Eastern Europe before returning to Venezuela, where he published his account of his experience in the North Korean prisons and Sariwon prison-labor camp.
WITNESS: KANG Chol Hwan: Kwan-li-so No. 15 “Yodok” (1977–1987)
KANG Chol Hwan was born in Pyongyang in 1968. His Korean–Japanese grandfather, who made a fortune in Japanese pachinko parlors (pinball/slot machine casinos), and his Korean-Japanese grandmother, a stalwart supporter of Kim Il Sung’s Korean Workers’ Party, had voluntarily repatriated to Pyongyang to contribute to the building of socialism in North Korea. Gradually the bank accounts, cars, and furniture the family had brought with them to Korea were seized.
One day Kang’s grandfather simply disappeared without word or trace. Several weeks later, agents came to Kang’s father’s home, announced that the grandfather had committed an (unspecified) act of high treason, and took the entire family — except for Kang’s mother, who, coming from a high political family herself, was required to divorce Kang’s father at that point — to Kwan-li-so No. 15 at Yodok. Initially the family had no idea where they were. The sign above the entry gate said only “Border Patrol of the Korean People, Unit 2915.” Subsequently, they learned that they were in a guarded “village” surrounded by barbed wire and reserved for the families of ethnic Koreans from Japan who had voluntarily repatriated to North Korea. They also learned that they were in the rehabilitable section — that is, the “revolutionizing zone”— of a sprawling prison-labor camp. Three years later, they learned from a prisoner who had been transferred into Yodok kwan-li-so from Sengho-ri kwan-li-so, some forty miles from Pyongyang, that Kang’s grandfather had been at the Sengho-ri kwan-li-so.
Kang was imprisoned from age nine to nineteen in what is North Korea’s most wellknown political prison-labor camp. After being released without explanation in 1987 (Kang suspects that his grandfather had died), Kang lived in several places in North Korea. He eventually met up with another former prisoner, AN Hyuk, whom he had first met in Yodok, and the two of them fled North Korea, going to Yanji, Shenyang, Beijing, and finally Dalian, from where, in 1992, they went by boat to South Korea.
In Seoul, Kang co-authored with historian Pierre Rigoulot a superlative and ably translated prison memoir, Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, the first detailed account of a North Korean prison-labor camp to be published in the West. The book describes the horrible life at Yodok without losing the sense of puzzlement with which a young boy, subsequently a teenager, attempted to comprehend the perniciously bizarre situation in which he grew up. Today, Kang is a reporter for Chosun Ilbo, a large daily newspaper in Seoul.
WITNESS: AN Hyuk, Kwan-li-so No. 15 “Yodok” (1987–1989)
AN Hyuk was born in Manpo City, Jakang Province, in 1968 into a loyal party family. At the age of twelve, he received a government scholarship to a school for physical education. In 1986, when he was nineteen, after ice skating in Hysean near Mt. Paekdu on the Chinese border, An crossed into China largely out of curiosity. Arrested in China, he was repatriated to North Korea. He was detained for one year and eight months in solitary confinement in an undersized, underground cell in the Maram ku-ryu-jang (detention facility) at Yongsong, Pyongyang, and for another year and a half at the Daesuk-ri singles prison area at Yodok, one of the villages in the “revolutionizing” section of Kwan-li-so No. 15.
While at Maram, An was subjected to sleep-deprivation and compelled to sit motionless for days. He saw only forty other detainees but believes there were as many as 1,000. 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. An relates that when he was transferred to Yodok, the guards there told him that he had been sitting down for too long and that it was time for him to do some work. During his year and a half at Yodok, there were some 2,000 prisoners in the Daesuk-ri singles section of the prison camp.
At Yodok, An’s first labor assignment was construction work at a water-driven electricpower plant at the camp. His duties entailed breaking ice and wading waist-deep into a frozen stream to gather stones, and laying boards to re-channel the water. It was literally a “murderous” construction project, as scores died from exposure, and even more lost fingers and toes to frostbite. His next work assignment was cutting down and carrying from high mountains rare hardwood trees for export to Japan. Deaths resulted from injuries during this project as well. His last work project was gathering wild mushrooms in the mountains, also for export.
In 1992, An escaped to Seoul along with fellow former Yodok prisoner Kang Chol Hwan. In 1995, Chunji Media in Seoul published his Korean-language prison memoirs, Yodok List.
WITNESS: KIM Tae Jin, Kwan-li-so No. 15 “Yodok” (1988–1992)
KIM Tae Jin was born in 1956 in China, where his father worked in the Chinese military. He returned with his mother to North Korea in 1961. After reaching adulthood, he worked in a leather factory in South Pyong-an Province. In 1986, he went to visit relatives in China and stayed for eighteen months before being arrested, in July 1987. In mid-August he was repatriated to the Musan-kun In-min-bo-an-seong (People’s Safety Agency) detention center in Chongjin, where he was tortured during interrogation. After four months, he was transferred to the bo-wi-bu (National Security Agency) police ku-ryu-jang (interrogation facility) in Chongjin, where he was again tortured during interrogation and accused of treason, even though he had gone to China only to visit family. He was beaten, deprived of sleep, and forced to kneel or sit motionless for hours on end. Because Kim was not permitted to wash, the fleas and lice in the jail cells were as bad a problem as the torture and freezing cold temperatures.
In March 1988, Kim was sent to the hyuk-myung-hwa-kyuk (revolutionizing process zone) of the Daesuk-ri section at Yodok, where he was imprisoned for four years and six months, until April 1992. At Yodok, he farmed corn, cut trees into firewood, and made furniture.
After having spent eight months in confinement in provincial jail cells, Kim thought Yodok an improvement in that he was at least allowed to move around. But food rations were meager, consisting of steamed salty corn dishes — and this was before famine conditions afflicted North Korea. To stay alive, he ate plants and grasses, rats, snakes, and frogs. Kim saw deaths from malnutrition and related diseases “every week.” He also personally witnessed five public executions of persons who attempted to escape. While at Yodok, he was beaten and forced to endure a sit-down-stand-up punishment until he could barely sit up. Even though Yodok was a “living hell,” he still regarded these as the “golden years” for prisoners at Yodok compared with what longer-term prisoners told him about previous conditions.
After four and a half years, Kim was released. His wife divorced and denounced him. After five years, he became convinced things would never improve for him in North Korea and fled to China. He came to Seoul in June 2001 via Mongolia.
WITNESS: LEE Young Kuk, Kwan-li-so No. 15 “Yodok” (1995–1999)
LEE Young Kuk was born in 1962 in Musan, North Hamgyong Province, into a politically loyal family. During his ten years of compulsory military service, from 1978 to 1988, he became a bodyguard to Kim Jong Il and got to know the “Dear Leader” personally. After returning to his hometown in 1988, Lee was struck by the discrepancies between the lifestyles of the privileged in Pyongyang and the living conditions of the people of Musan. Still, from 1991 to 1994, he was sent to the Central Military College in Pyongyang, after which time he was posted to a senior party position in Musan District. Because of his privileged status, he had a radio capable of receiving KBS (South Korean radio) broadcasts. Soon he became disillusioned with the political indoctrination he had been taught at the Military College, and from the KBS broadcasts, he came to believe that South Korea had become a real democracy with real freedom.
In 1994, Lee fled to China hoping to defect to South Korea. However, he was discovered missing, and because of his personal knowledge of the “Dear Leader,” North Korean security agents chased after him. Entrapped in Beijing and wrongly thinking he was talking to a South Korean diplomat who could assist with his defection, Lee confessed his true opinions about the North Korean regime. Under the impression that he was being escorted to the South Korean Embassy, he was whisked instead into the Embassy of North Korea, where he was bound, drugged, and put on a plane to Pyongyang.
Lee was held in Pyongyang for six months in an underground detention cell by the bo-wi-bu (National Security Agency) police. He was subjected to kneeling torture (made to kneel motionless, not even turning his head, for hours at a time) and water torture (held down by five or six agents who poured water into his mouth and nose until he gagged and suffocated) and was severely beaten on the shins, eyes, ears, head, and mouth. Six of his teeth and one of his ear drums were broken. Years later, he still suffers doublevision in his left eye and his shins are still black and blue. Lee believes his torture was solely intended as punishment for having fled to China. While in Beijing, he had freely expressed unfavorable opinions about the regime, leaving no further information for the North Korean police to beat out of him.
Because other members of his family continued to serve Kim Jong Il — one of his cousins was one of Kim’s chauffeurs — Lee’s family was not punished along with him. In March 1995, Lee alone was sent to a singles camp in the hyuk-myung-hwa-kyuk (revolutionizing process) section of Yodok, where he quarried stones for fourteen hours each day for four years. Before his capture in Beijing, he weighed 94 kilos (207 pounds). While at Yodok, he also cut logs, cleared rocks, and farmed. Released from Yodok in January 1999, Lee weighed 58 kilos (128 pounds). Lee believes that when he was released, it was on Kim Jong Il’s personal intervention.
In April 1999, Lee again fled to China and reached South Korea in May 2000, smuggled aboard a ship from Dalian with three other North Koreans. Nearly two years passed before Lee was willing and able to tell his story. He had arranged during that time for an ethnic Korean in China to go to Musan to tell his parents that he was in Seoul, but his parents had either disappeared or were somewhere in detention. So, Lee decided to tell his story in South Korea, Japan, and the United States.
TESTIMONY: Kwan-li-so No. 15 “Yodok,” South Hamgyong Province
Yodok is the most well-documented kwan-li-so in North Korea, because, in addition to having a lifetime-imprisonment “total-control zone,” it also has a “revolutionizing zone,” which operates more like the kyo-hwa-so prisons, described later in this report, in that prisoners can be released back into the larger society. The four former prisoners profiled above were all in the “revolutionizing zone.” Their accounts of Yodok cover almost all of the years from 1977 to 1999.
Kang Chol Hwan, who entered Yodok in 1977, remembers a sign at the front gate of the colony reading “Border Patrol Unit 2915.” The colony is bound to the north by Mt. Paek (1,742 meters, or 5,715 feet, high), to the northeast by Mt. Modo (1,833 meters, or 6,014 feet, high), to the west by Mt. Tok (1,250 meters, or 4,101 feet, high) and to the south by Mt. Byoungpung (1,152 meters, or 3,780 feet, high). The valley is entered from the east by the 1,250-meter (4,101-foot) Chaebong Pass. The streams from the valleys of these mountains form the Ipsok River, which flows downstream into the Yonghung River, which flows into the sea near Wonsan City.
According to An Hyuk, Yodok, which is shorthand for Yodok-kun, an area of land measurement within a province that would be comparable to a district or county, is located in South Hamgyong Province. Yodok-kun contains twenty ri (also sometimes transliterated as “li” or “ni”), five of which comprise Yodok. The revolutionizing zones include Ipsok-ri (or Yipsok-ri), Knup-ri (or Gnup-ri) for Korean families from Japan, and Daesuk-ri (or Taesuk-ri), where An, Lee, and Kim were held in “singles” villages. Other sections include Pyongchang-ri, a punishment or detention area within the prison camp called Yongpyong-ri, a secluded killing area called Kouek, and other areas for prisoners serving lifetime sentences.
The whole encampment is surrounded by a barbed-wire fence measuring 3 to 4 meters (10 to 13 feet) in height. In some areas there are walls 2 to 3 meters (7 to 10 feet) tall topped with electrical wire. Along the fence there are watchtowers measuring 7 to 8 meters (23 to 26 feet) in height, set at 1-kilometer (0.62-mile) intervals, and patrolled by 1,000 guards armed with automatic rifles and hand grenades. Additionally, there are teams with guard dogs. Inside the camp, each village has two guards on duty at all times.
During An Hyuk’s year-and-a-half imprisonment, there were some 30,000 prisoners in the lifetime area, and 1,300 singles and 9,300 family members in the revolutionizing zone along with some 5,900 Koreans, including Kang’s family, who had voluntarily repatriated from Japan but were later judged not to fit into the “Kim Il Sung nation.” By the time of Kim Tae Jin’s release from Yodok in 1992, the number of persons in the revolutionizing zone had decreased to somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 because of releases of prisoners to society and because of larger numbers of transfers of prisoners to the lifetime-imprisonment zones.
According to Kang Chol Hwan, labor operations at the Knup-ri section of Yodok included a gypsum quarry and a re-opened gold mine (which was originally opened during the Japanese occupation of Korea), where some 800 men worked in groups of five. Assignments in these mines were considered the worst form of labor because of the frequency of work accidents there. The section for ethnic Koreans who had voluntarily repatriated from Japan also had textile plants; a distillery for corn, acorn, and snake brandy; and a coppersmith workshop. The prisoners raised rabbits for the lining of soldiers’ winter coats, worked on agricultural teams, and were periodically organized to look for hardwoods and gather wild ginseng in the forest hillsides.
During Kang’s ten-year imprisonment there were somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 persons in his village, and about one hundred deaths per year from malnutrition and disease, particularly from severe diarrhea leading to dehydration.
While Kang’s was a family village, sexual contact between men and women was not allowed, as it was thought this could result in another generation of counter-revolution- aries. Such contact did occur, of course, but, with two exceptions in ten years, all pregnancies were forcibly aborted. The involved men would be physically punished and the women would be humiliated by being compelled to recount their sexual encounters to the entire village.
Kang’s village was a “revolutionizing” village, so it included “re-education,” which basically consisted of readings from Rodong Shinmun, the Workers’ Party newspaper.
The singles area in Daesuk-ri was described by Lee Young Kuk as a valley 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) long by 0.5 kilometers (0.3 miles) wide next to a small 600–700-meter high(1,969–2,297-foot) mountain. During Lee’s imprisonment, the area held roughly 1,000 prisoners, of which only 50 were women. The women’s cells were heated, but the men’s were not, so men prisoners suffered from frostbitten ears and swollen legs during the winter months. Roughly 200 prisoners died each year during the four years when Lee was imprisoned, mostly from starvation and related disease. But there were always new arrivals each month.
Both areas within Yodok where Kang, Lee, An, and Kim were imprisoned, Knup-ri and Daesuk-ri, had public executions by hanging and shootings — and sometimes worse — for prisoners who had tried to escape or who had been caught “stealing” food. Lee witnessed one public killing of an attempted escapee, HAHN Seung Chul, who was tied and dragged behind a car in front of the assembled prisoners until dead, after which time the other prisoners were required to pass by and place their hands on his bloodied corpse. Another prisoner, AHN Sung Eun, shouted out against this atrocity, and he was immediately shot to death. Kim witnessed a public execution by firing squad after which the assembled prisoners were required to pass by and throw a stone at the corpse still slumped and hanging from the post to which the victim had been tied. Several women prisoners fainted as they were pressed to further mutilate the corpse. Kang witnessed some fifteen executions during his ten years at Knup-ri.
Nonetheless, according to Kang, prisoners who were brought to Yodok from other kwan-li-so said it was much better there than at their previous prison-labor camps. He reports that several prisoners committed suicide before they were to be transferred to other camps, where they feared they would just die a slow death.
WITNESS: KIM Yong, Kwan-li-so No. 14 and No. 18 KIM Yong was born in 1950 in Hwanghae Province. When he was seven years old, unbeknownst to him at the time, his father and older brother were executed as spies for the United States. To spare him the collective guilt attributed by North Korean officials to the families of political wrongdoers, Kim’s mother placed him in an orphanage under a false name. Kim grew up to become the Korean equivalent of a lieutenant colonel in the bo-wi-bu (National Security Agency) police. Like other military and security units and departments, his unit set up income-generating businesses, and Kim became a vice president in the Sohae (West Sea) Asahi Trading Company, which operated three fishing vessels exporting flounder and sole to Japan. As a hard-currency earner for the regime, Kim had access to dollars, foreign goods and culture, and a chauffeur-driven car. Unfortunately, Kim’s true parentage was discovered, quite by accident, after someone else turned up bearing his assumed name. He was arrested and interrogated for three months at the Maram bo-wi-bu detention/interrogation facility in the Yongsong district of Pyongyang and at another bo-wi-bu jail, called Moonsu, also in Pyongyang. The torture at Moonsu was particularly severe. Accused of deliberately infiltrating the security service, Kim was forced to kneel for long periods with a wooden bar placed behind and between his knees and calves. He was suspended by his handcuffed wrists from his prison-cell bars, and he was submerged up to his waist for long periods in tanks filled with cold water.
From 1995 to 1996, Kim was imprisoned in Kwan-li-so No. 14 at Kaechon-kun, South Pyong-an Province, where he worked in a coal mine. In 1996 he was transferred, he believes through the intervention of his supervisor at the Asahi Trading Company, to the adjacent Kwan-li-so No. 18, located on the other side of the Taedong River in Deukchang-ri, Bukchang-kun, South Pyong-an, where he primarily repaired coal trolleys. There, to his surprise — as he did not know if or where she was imprisoned — he was reunited with his mother, with whom he was allowed to live.
After Kim’s mother was crippled by camp guards for gathering edible weeds outside the village compound beyond the allotted time, she encouraged him to escape, even if it meant risking his life. And so he did, in September 1998, by hiding in a coal train bound for the Moonchan Refinery. He soon crossed the Tumen River into China and, in October 1999, came to South Korea via Mongolia.
Parts of Kim’s story were told (in Korean) in the May 2000 issue of the monthly magazine Chosun Wolgan, or Chosun Monthly. Adaptations of that article were published in English in volumes 16 and 17 — the Summer and Autumn 2000 issues, respectively — of Life and Human Rights in North Korea. Kim’s own prison memoir will be published in 2003. He is the only known escapee from the kwan-li-so to have escaped to and been given asylum by South Korea. He is the sole source of information about Kwan-li-so Nos. 14 and 18, but secrecy, of course, is part of the point of lifetime-sentence political prison-labor camps.
TESTIMONY: Kwan-li-so No. 14, Kaechon-kun, South Pyong-an Province
Operated by the bo-wi-bu (National Security Agency) police, Kwan-li-so No. 14’s location is designated as Kaechon-kun, South Pyong-an. According to Kim’s description, the camp location is in a mountainous area. The main part of the camp is near Kaechonkun, so the camp is sometimes called “Kaechon.” It encompasses an area some 40–50 kilometers (25–31 miles) long and some 30 kilometers (19 miles) wide, and holds some 15,000 prisoners.
Enterprises included mining, farming, and livestock-raising. The latter was considered the occupation of choice, as the prisoners had the opportunity to steal animal food and even pick through animal droppings for undigested grains. (Daily meals, according to Kim, were limited to 20–30 kernels of corn and watery cabbage soup.) When he first arrived at Kwan-li-so No. 14 and was assigned to coal mining at Mujin II Gang — that is, No. 2 Cutting Face, or a mine entrance — Kim was shocked by the skinniness and discoloration of the prisoners, who looked to him like soot-covered stickmen.
For two years, all Kim saw was the inside of his mine shafts, and the adjacent barracks, which contained six rooms with fifty persons per room sleeping on three tiers of wooden bunks. Fortunately, as this was a coal mine, the barracks were heated. Next to the barracks was an eating room/washroom, a sawmill, and a pumping station. The mining work was divided among tunneling/digging teams, loaders, tracklayers, railcar operators, and sawmill workers. The leader of Kim’s tunneling team was a former major general, KIM Jae Keun, who had been purged and sent to Kwan-li-so No. 14 for having sided with Kim Il Sung’s stepbrother Kim Pyong Il against the succession of Kim Jong Il. Men and women were segregated from each other. In fact, the only time Kim saw women during his two years of imprisonment was when all the workers were taken outside the mine area for road construction.
There were no public executions during this time at Kwan-li-so No. 14, but many prisoners died of malnutrition and disease, some twenty-five were executed by guards, and even more died from mining accidents. In one execution, a KIM Chul Min was executed for collecting, without authorization, ripe chestnuts that had fallen to the ground from a tree at the mine entrance. Another hunger-crazed prisoner, KAL Li Yong, died after having his mouth smashed by a feces-covered stick for having stolen a leather whip, soaked it in water, and then ate the softened leather.
TESTIMONY: Kwan-li-so No. 18, Deukchang-ri, Bukchang-kun, South Pyong-an Province
Located on the other side of the Taedong River from Kwan-li-so No. 14, Kwan-li-so No. 18 is something of an anomaly among the kwan-li-so in that it is run by the In-min- bo-an-seong (People’s Safety Agency) police rather than the bo-wi-bu (National Security Agency) police and is a much less strict and severe prison-labor colony. But it holds some 50,000 prisoners: the families of the presumed wrongdoers imprisoned in Kwan-li- so No. 14. Roughly 30,000 are organized into work teams. The other 20,000 are children and elderly relatives.
Labor projects at Kwan-li-so No. 18 included coal-mining, brick-making, and cementmaking, along with work in a glass factory and a distillery. Unusually, during Kim’s imprisonment at this kwan-li-so, the prison laborers were paid a token amount of 30 won a month — barely the cost of a pack of cigarettes. Families were allowed to live together, and privileged prisoners were allowed to marry and have children. There were also radio broadcasts, and copies of Rodong Shinmun, the Workers’ Daily, were posted at the entrances to worksites. Privileged prisoners were allowed outside the gates to collect herbs.
Kwan-li-so No. 18 also had a very small “revolutionizing zone,” for prisoners that were eligible for release back into society, and even a “liberation zone,” where a small number of prisoners were allowed to send and receive mail, go to the local market, and even receive a gift of liquor from the state on the occasion of Kim Il Sung’s birthday, apparently in recognition of their ongoing citizenship.
Prisoners at Kwan-li-so No. 18 did, however, die of malnutrition, disease, and work accidents. And there were public executions — dozens of them, according to Kim. Rulebreakers were shot. Attempted escapees were hanged.
WITNESS: Former Guard AHN Myong Chol, Kwan-li-so Nos. 11, 13, 26, and 22
Unlike the witnesses just described, who were released or escaped prisoners, AHN Myong Chol was a kwan-li-so guard. Ahn was born in 1969 in Hangwon, South Hamgyong Province. Ahn came from a good Korean Workers’ Party family, so for his compulsory military service, he became a bo-wi-bu (National Security Agency) police guard assigned, consecutively, to four different kwan-li-so: No. 11, at Kyungsun, North Hamgyong Province, from May to August 1987; No. 13, at Jongsong, North Hamgyong Province, from August 1987 to the winter of 1990, except for four months during this time when he was sent to the much smaller prison No. 26 in Pyongyang; and No. 22 at Haengyong in Hoeryong, North Hamgyong Province, from late 1990 to mid1994. Of the four places, as of December 2002, only Kwan-li-so No. 22 is still open and operational.
Ahn’s father worked at a public distribution center. During the famine, he was caught giving food to one of his neighbors and became labeled as a “reactionary element.” When Ahn learned of his father’s situation, he fled with his wife across the Tumen River into China. After he reached Seoul, he was interviewed by the monthly magazine Chosun Wolgan,or Chosun Monthly. Portions of the resulting article were published in English in Political Prison Camps in North Korea, by the Center for the Advancement of North Korean Human Rights, Seoul. Ahn’s Korean-language memoirs, They Are Crying for Help, was published by Chunji Media, Seoul, but the book is out of print and the publisher is out of business. In 1998, Ahn testified before the U.S. Congress. In December 2002, he was able to identify the buildings and grounds on several satellite photographs of Kwan-li-so No. 22 for publication in the Far Eastern Economic Review (December 12, 2002).
Ahn’s guard duties included making deliveries by truck to various parts of Kwan-li-so No. 22. This assignment gave him unusual mobility within the camp, even for a guard. He learned much from his conversations with other guards while making deliveries to various sections of the camp. His work at four of the camps provided him with comparative insights into the functioning of the kwan-li-so system. Also of interest is his guard training and indoctrination.
Ahn reports that the prisoners were referred to as “emigrants.” Great stress was placed on the harm and threat that “factionalists” posed to the revolution; how factionalism produces class enemies; how factionalists and class enemies have to be destroyed like weeds, down to their roots, through the yeon-jwa-je three-generation family-incarceration system; and how guards have to exercise their control duties so as to reveal to the class enemies the dictatorship of the proletariat. Like some of the former prisoners, Ahn recalls the shock he felt upon his first arrival at a camp, where he likened the prisoners to walking skeletons, dwarfs, and cripples in rags.
TESTIMONY: Kwan-li-so No. 22, Haengyong, Hoeryong, North Hamgyong Province
Also sometimes identified as Hoeryong, where the camp headquarters is located, the official designations for Kwan-li-so No. 22 are “Chosun People’s Security Unit 2209” or “Pueksan-ku Ministry of State Security.” No. 22 covers an area, according to Ahn, some 50 kilometers (31 miles) in length and 40 kilometers (25 miles) in width. There are roughly 1,000 guards and 500–600 administrative agents for 50,000 prisoners, the families of alleged wrongdoers.
Ahn reports that the annual agricultural production quotas for Kwan-li-so No. 22 were as follows: 400 tons of corn, 100,000 tons of potatoes, 50,000 tons of lima beans, and 10,000 tons of red peppers per year. The camp also grew Chinese cabbages, radishes, cucumbers, and eggplants, and had a distillery that produced soy sauce and whiskeys. No. 22 mined coal that was shipped to the Chongjin Thermal Power Plant and the Chongjin and Kimchaek Steel Mills.
Notwithstanding the agricultural production, Ahn estimates that 1,500 to 2,000 prisoners at Kwan-li-so No. 22, mostly children, died from malnutrition yearly. Executions were not public at the colony but were carried out at a site named “Sugol.” He estimates that there were ten executions per year, mostly in October, of people who had been caught eating from harvest foods. People were fed corn and potatoes, almost no vegetables, and no meat. The only meat in their diets came from the rats, snakes, and frogs they could catch. There were also deaths from beatings of prisoners who had not been meeting their production quotas. In fact, Ahn says, there were so many deaths from beatings that at one point the guards were warned to be less violent.
Only a few privileged prisoners were allowed to marry. Otherwise, sex was prohibited. Ahn is aware of one pregnant woman who was executed as a punishment for her pregnancy. Kwan-li-so No. 22 had a notorious detention barracks for prisoners who disobeyed camp regulations. Ahn was a guard nearby and heard the screams of the prisoners as they were beaten.
The prisoners at Kwan-li-so No. 22 were paid approximately 500 won per year. Youth at the colony received basic schooling in elementary reading, writing, and arithmetic. The camp also had nine holidays per year.
Closed Kwan-li-so WITNESS: Former Guard CHOI Dong Chul
CHOI Dong Chul is the son of LEE Soon Ok, whose story appears below. At the time of his mother’s arrest, Choi was a student at Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang. Prior to his mother’s arrest, when the family was still in very high standing within the Korean Workers’ Party, Choi fulfilled a portion of his compulsory military service, from February 1985 to June 1986, as a guard at Kwan-li-so No. 11 for families of political wrongdoers, located in Kyungsung, North Hamgyong Province. This is the same 15,000–20,000-inmate encampment where Ahn Myong Chol was a guard in 1987. Though Kwan-li-so No.11 was closed in 1989 and its inmates transferred to other political penal-labor colonies, Choi’s testimony, along with that of Ahn, provides an additional glimpse into the operation of North Korea’s kwan-li-so.
Both Ahn Myong Chol and Choi Dong Chul were guards at Kwan-li-so No. 11 at Kyongsong, North Hamgyong Province, from May to August 1987 and from February 1985 to June 1986, respectively. In this camp, some 20,000 family prisoners engaged in potato farming and logging. According to the KINU White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, Kwan-li-so No. 11 was closed in 1989.
Ahn Myong Chol was also a guard at Kwan-li-so No. 13 at Jongsong, North Hamgyong Province, from 1987 to 1990. No. 13 held some 30,000 prisoners, he estimates.
According to the KINU White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, Kwan-li-so No. 13 was closed at the end of 1990 because it was too close to the Chinese border, tempting prisoners to try to escape.
For one four-month period while he was a guard at Kwan-li-so No. 13, Ahn was briefly transferred to guard the much smaller political prison No. 26 at Hwachon-dong,
Sungho-ri district, Pyongyang. The KINU White Paper on Human Rights notes that No. 26 closed in January 1991.
The KINU White Paper also notes that Kwan-li-so No. 12 at Changpyong, Onsong, North Hamgyong Province, was closed in 1989, also because of its proximity to the border with China. Further, Kwan-li-so No. 27 at Chonma, North Pyong-an Province, was closed in 1990 for unknown reasons.
One of the anonymous former prisoners from one of the kyo-hwa-so prisons discussed in the next section of part one of this report was transferred to a kwan-li-so at Danchun, South Hamgyong Province in the mid-1980s. He reports that this camp closed Kwan-li-so No. 16 Hwasong in the late 1980s.
Other Kwan-li-so The KINU White Paper includes Kwan-li-so No. 16 at Hwasong, North Hamgyong Province, for the families of condemned, and Kwan-li-so No. 25 at Chongjin, North Hamgyong Province, for the condemned.
Professor HEO Man Ho of Kyungpook National University, Daegu, also reports a Kwan-li-so No. 16 at Cochang-ri, Hwasong-kun (located in North Hamgyong Province), containing about 10,000 “anti-revolutionary and anti-Party elements” held on charges of opposing the succession to Kim Jong Il, and adds that former Vice-Kwan-li-so No. 25 Chongjin Chairman of State KIM Dong Gyu is imprisoned there. Heo further notes a Suseong Edification Center in Sunam district, Chongjin City, run by the bo-wi-bu (National Security Agency) police; he reports that the center holds about 3,000 detainees and their families, including pastors and presbyters from South Hwanghae Province, and a Mr. HOE Taek, a Korean repatriate from Japan. However, no former prisoners or guards were accessible to provide first-person or eyewitness confirmation during the preparation of this report.
THE NORTH KOREAN GULAG II: KYO-HWA-SO LONG-TERM PRISON-LABOR FACILITIES
Introduction: Deaths in Detention
The Korean word transliterated phonetically as kyo-hwa-so translates as “a place to make a good person through re-education.” More commonly, kyo-hwa-so is translated as an “enlightenment,” “re-education,” or “re-socialization” center. Some of the former prisoners interviewed for this report used the term “ro-dong (labor) kyo-hwa-so,” meaning “re-education through labor.”
In theory, “re-education through labor” might be a more rehabilitative way to treat criminal offenders when compared with simply warehousing convicts to keep them off public streets for long periods. However, this theory bears no relation to the kyo-hwa-so described by the former North Korean prisoners interviewed for this report. According to these witnesses, the “educational” component at these facilities consisted mostly of forced memorizing of the speeches of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, and organized “selfcriticism” sessions. These sessions were often conducted in the evenings, and the exhausted prisoners were not allowed to return to their cells to sleep until they could recite the speeches. Prisoners, kneeling in front of their work-units and facing the prison officials, would frequently falsely confess to imaginary mistakes, which the prison officials or prison-group leaders could then “criticize,” so that the work unit could conclude the criticism sessions and go back to their overcrowded cells.
Kyo-hwa-so are run by the In-min-bo-an-seong (People’s Safety Agency), formerly called the Sa-hyo-an-jeon-bu (Social Safety Agency). Some of the kyo-hwa-so resemble large penitentiaries: a single large compound surrounded by high walls and barbed- or electri- fied-wire fencing and containing several buildings for manufacturing production, prisoner housing, and offices for guards and prison officials. Other kyo-hwa-so are large barbed-wire-enclosed encampments, located in the valleys of high mountains, composed of prisoner villages where prisoners engage in mining or lumber-cutting activities. In many aspects of day-to-day prison life, the kyo-hwa-so resemble the kwan-li-so described in the previous section of this report. The prisons are harsh “strict-regime” places (virtually no prisoner privileges) where prisoners are forced to do hard, often heavy, and often dangerous labor while being provided food rations insufficient to sustain even sedentary life (and where the provision of literally sub-subsistence food rations preceded the mid-1990s famine in North Korea). The combination of hard labor and below-subsistence-level food provisions results in rapid weight loss, industrial or mining work accidents, malnutrition-related diseases, and death. The largely doctor-less and medicine-less prison “hospitals” or “clinics” are essentially places where the sick and injured who can no longer work are sent to await death. Loss of life occurs at such high rates that many of the kyo-hwa-so are perceived by prisoners as death camps in that they expect to die before the completion of their sentences.
The primary — and substantial — difference between kyo-hwa-so prisoners and kwan-li-so prisoners is that the former are almost always subjected to a judicial process and, upon conviction, are given a sentence of set length, while the latter, along with their families, are simply purged and put away for life. In an important respect, kyo-hwa-so prisons and prison camps are, by design, correctional facilities for persons convicted of “heavy crimes,” the equivalent of what would be in the United States felony offenses. Indeed, some of the former prisoners interviewed for this report admitted that they had committed crimes for which they would be punished in a normal society.
But others sentenced to these prison-labor camps are convicted of offenses that would not normally be criminalized: private economic transactions not undertaken within an officially appointed work station, or offenses that are, in essence, political crimes. Some interviewed for this report were driven to engage in private economic transactions, including activities such as smuggling (trading goods across the North Korea–China border), because of the breakdown in the state-run production and distribution systems. Others were arrested and convicted due to power struggles between the North Korean Communist Party functionaries that staff the production/distribution facilities and police units that were dissatisfied with their share of goods and/or bribes in a collapsing social setting that is endemically corrupt.
Further, it should be noted that while a state has the right to deprive persons who commit crimes of their liberty, it does not have the right to deprive prisoners of food or medical treatment. Indeed, states have a responsibility to feed those who, upon trial and conviction, have been deprived of their liberty and temporarily removed from civil society. And this does not mean the state can squeeze work out of prisoners without feeding them, only to release them to return home to die from their prison-acquired illnesses and diseases. Duly convicted criminals lose their right to liberty but not their right to life.
WITNESSES AND TESTIMONY WITNESS: LEE Soon Ok, Kyo-hwa-so No. 1
LEE Soon Ok was born in 1947 into a privileged and stalwart Korean Workers’ Party family. Her grandfather had fought in Kim Il Sung’s Manchurian army against the Japanese occupation of Korea. Her son was enrolled in Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang, open only to children of the elite. Trained as an accountant, Lee rose to become a supervisor in the No. 65 Distribution Center in Onsong, North Hamgyong Province, which distributed Chinese-manufactured fabrics to party and state officials. She was arrested in 1986 in what she believes was a power struggle between the Workers’ Party, whose members run the nationwide distribution system, and the public security bureau police, who were not satisfied with the amount of goods being provided to them by the distribution centers. She was charged with theft and bribery and held for seven months in the Onsong bo-wi-bu (National Security Agency) ka-mok (jail), where she was tortured severely because she refused to confess to the allegations against her. Then, upon her expulsion from the Party, she was transferred to an In-min-bo-an-seong (People’s Safety Agency) provincial interrogation center, where she was held for another seven months and further tortured.
To escape even further torture and threats against her family members, Lee ultimately agreed to sign a confession. Afterwards, she was given a public trial and sentenced to fourteen years at Kyo-hwa-so No. 1, located at Kaechon, South Pyong-an Province, where, among other things, the prisoners manufacture garments. Though she originally worked in the ordinary sewing lines, she was eventually transferred because of her accounting and managerial experience to the administrative office of the prison, where she had the opportunity to observe and learn a great deal more about how the prisonlabor camp was run.
After her release, in February 1994, Lee and her son fled from North Korea to China, eventually arriving in South Korea in December 1995 via Hong Kong. Once in South Korea, she wrote a prison memoir, Eyes of the Tailless Animals: Prison Memoirs of a North Korean Woman, which names numerous persons who died under torture in the jails of Onsong and from various mistreatments at Kaechon prison labor camp. Lee’s testimony for this report was drawn from her published prison memoir as well as from a personal interview.
TESTIMONY: Kyo-hwa-so No. 1, Kaechon, South Pyong-an Province
Located in the corner of a valley surrounded by mountains in Kaechon, South Pyong-an Province, Kyo-hwa-so No. 1 is a prison complex holding, at the time of Lee’s imprisonment, some 6,000 prisoners. A high wall with an electrified-wire fence surrounds the complex, which includes prisoner dormitories, a large two-story factory, and office buildings for guards and prison officials.
The other prisoners at the time of Lee’s imprisonment included actual criminals, citizens convicted of not obeying government rules, and Lee reports, some 250 Korean women who had voluntarily repatriated from Japan in November of 1987. Some women, reportedly, were housewives convicted of stealing food for their families as the North Korean production and distribution system started its decline.
Prisoners were supposed to get rations of some 700 grams (25 ounces) per day consisting of corn, rice, and beans. Instead, the guards ate the rice and beans, leaving each prisoner with only some 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of corn per meal, or a meager 300 grams (11 ounces) per day. Constant and severe hunger was the norm, and the dehumanizing environment led the prisoners to fight each other for scraps of food.
The primary prison-labor occupations at Kyo-hwa-so No.1 during Lee’s imprisonment were garment and shoe manufacturing. Shoemaking was considered by the prisoners to be the worse of the two occupations because of the hard labor involved in cutting and sewing leather and because of the toxic glue used in the shoes. The garment factory initially made army uniforms but later produced bras for export to the Soviet Union, doilies for export to Poland, hand-knit sweaters for export to Japan, and paper flowers for export to France.
The women’s garment factories were organized into various departments: fabric cutting, sewing lines, machinery maintenance, and facility services, for example. Most departments had some 250 to 300 members, and each department had a supervisor, recordkeeper, and messenger. The departments were organized into units of fifty to sixty prisoners, and each unit divided into work teams of five to seven prisoners, with one prisoner assigned to be the work-team leader. Each work team did everything as a group: eating, sleeping, even toilet breaks. Newcomers had difficulty adjusting to the group toiletbreak regimen. Initially unable to contain themselves, these prisoners would have to remain sitting at their sewing line work-stations in their soiled clothing.
The whole group would be punished for the infraction of one of its members, a common infraction being the failure to meet individual — or group — production quotas. The most common and immediate punishment was reduced food rations. Frequently the threat of reduced food rations drove the women prisoners to work through constant pain. In winter, hands and fingers numb from cold were prone to accidents from the sewing needles and scissors. Mindful of their production quotas, prisoners continued at their work-stations, doubly fearful that their dripping blood would soil the garments they were sewing. Repeated infractions led to transfer to the prison’s shoe factory. Even more severe punishment included prolonged solitary confinement in a cell too small to allow for a person to fully stand up or lie down inside, leading to loss of circulation and severe pain.
In the prison dormitories, eighty to ninety prisoners slept head-to-toe in cells roughly sixteen by twenty feet square. In winter, sleeping side by side kept the prisoners warm, but in summer, the dorms were dreadfully hot and foul smelling. The prisoners preferred to sleep, if they could, under their sewing machines in the factory, on floors dusty with cotton fiber.
The bodies of prisoners who died in detention were simply dumped in the mountains like dead animals, non-burial being culturally offensive to Koreans. Prisoners were also offended by being cursed or kicked by persons younger than themselves, another cultural offense. Missing stitches, or soiling or spoiling garments, in the sewing factory commonly resulted in kicks or slaps. Several years of below-subsistence-level food rations coupled with hard labor and brutal treatment apparently caused spinal columns and ligaments to weaken. Numerous physical deformities followed, and many women prisoners developed “hunched backs.”
In addition to deaths from malnutrition-related diseases and the tiny “punishment cells,” there were public executions in front of the assembled prison population — usually of men who had broken under pressure and cursed or defied the guards, but also of women who had been overheard expressing complaints. The other prisoners were required to file by the executed corpses, a practice that caused some prisoners to lose composure, scream, and act out. Many of these prisoners were then punished with solitary confinement. The solitary-confinement cells would be filled following the public executions.
Predictably, the prison conditions and labor system resulted in high rates of industrial work accidents and epidemics of paratyphoid (dehydration resulting from severe and prolonged diarrhea). The small number of women who came into the prison pregnant were forced to have injection-induced abortions.
Kyo-hwa-so No.1 also featured weekly self-criticism and propaganda — literally, “re-civi- lization” — sessions. Prisoners were required to memorize and recite Kim Il Sung’s New Year’s Day speech for that year. Those who could not do the memorization were punished. One man who refused to memorize and recite the speech was publicly executed. These “re-civilization training programs” included listening to radio broadcasts in which North Korea criticized the political imprisonment of student radicals and labor protesters in South Korea. These broadcasts struck the prisoners as odd, as the offenses for which the South Korean protesters were being jailed were capital offenses in North Korea.
WITNESS: JI Hae Nam, Kyo-hwa-so No. 1 JI Hae Nam was born in 1949 in Namun-ri, Hamhung City, South Hamgyong Province. At one point, she worked as a Korean Workers’ Party propaganda cadre, visiting factories to explain party policy and exhort factory workers, sometimes through patriotic work songs, to meet their production quotas. But after the 13th Party Congress in 1989, her faith in the Party began to waver. A decade of hardship began shortly thereafter.
At the time, a North Korean TV show mocking former South Korean President PARK Chun Hee featured one of Park’s concubines singing an apparently popular South Korean pop song, “Don’t Cry for Me, Hongdo” (or, Younger Sister). Ji was taken with the song and its melody and memorized it. On a lunar calendar holiday coinciding with Christmas day, December 25, 1992, Ji and four other women had an evening song party in Hamjun-kun, South Hamgyong Province, at which Ji taught the song to the other women. Overheard by neighbors, reported to the authorities, and arrested for singing a South Korean song, Ji was taken first to the In-min-bo-an-seong (People’s Safety Agency) jail in Hamjun-kun for fifteen days, and then to the In-min-bo-an-seong police jail in Myungchun-kun in North Hamgyong Province. During her pretrial detention, she was beaten and sexually abused by a detention-facility guard. Mortified at her mistreatment by the young guard, who was in his early twenties, Ji tried to commit suicide by swallowing pieces of cement.
The other four women at the song party were sentenced to eight months of forced labor. During the investigation of Ji’s role as the song leader, the charge of stealing food rations, technically falsifying documents to get more food rations than she should have, was added to the charge of disrupting the socialist order — “Article fifty-something,” she recalls. She was sentenced to three years of rehabilitation-through-labor at the woman’s prison Kyo-hwa-so No. 1 at Kaechon, South Pyong-an Province.
After serving two years and two months of her three-year sentence, in September 1995, Ji, along with fifty other “light crime” prisoners, was released on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japanese occupation. She returned to Hamjun-kun but, as an ex-convict, felt that doors were closed to her. As the economy deteriorated, she was unable to make ends meet as a peddler and resorted to selling her blood at transfusion centers. Hungry and disillusioned about her future prospects, she fled to China in September 1998, but she was almost immediately caught by a trafficker and sold to a physically deformed Chinese man who locked her up as a “sex toy” for seven months before she was able to escape. She then made her way to Weihai, where she worked in a restaurant and saved what little money she could. She eventually teamed up with six other North Koreans in China and stole a boat to try to get to South Korea by sea, but the engine broke down. The boat filled with water on rough seas and had to be towed back to shore by Chinese fishermen. Shortly thereafter, Ji and her fellow Korean escapees stole another boat and again set out to sea, but this boat was intercepted by the authorities and the amateur sailors turned over to Chinese border guards.
Taken to the Tandong detention center in China, Ji was forcibly repatriated to North Korea and sent to the bo-wi-bu (National Security Agency) police ka-mok (jail) in Sinuiju, where there were twenty-five women and thirty men — all tal-bukza (“escaped North persons”). While in this bo-wi-bu jail, she was beaten with broom sticks, forced to kneel for hours at a time, and made to do the “stand-up-sit-down” exercise to the point of collapse, usually after thirty to forty minutes. Some of the younger women were kept in solitary confinement and sexually abused, Ji reports. After a month, she was sent to the Sinuiju jip-kyul-so (detention center), but a week later, on December 25, 1999, she was released as part of a larger pardon for persons repatriated from China.
Fearing she would be constantly watched and possibly re-arrested, Ji made her way to Musan, and in January 2000, crossed the frozen Tumen River back into China. This time her luck had turned. She found work in a company managed by a South Korean. Then she met a South Korean pastor who assisted a group of North Korean refugees, including Ji, in making their way to South Korea. The group went from Weihai to Beijing to Kunming in southern China. Caught by the Chinese police near the Vietnam border, they successfully passed themselves off as Korean-Chinese and walked overnight over a mountain path into Vietnam. By train, by motorbike, and on foot they made their way down through Southeast Asia and on to Seoul, where they obtained asylum. During her interview for this report, which lasted all afternoon in a human rights NGO office in Seoul, Ji spoke in rapid anger as she described the conditions of Kyo-hwa-so No. 1 at Kaechon. She laughed as she recounted her misadventures on the high seas in stolen, leaky boats that had almost no chance of actually crossing the West Sea (also called the Yellow Sea) to South Korea. And she fought back tears as she referred to the sexual harassments and violations she endured in custody and as a trafficked person. For the last question of the interview, the researcher asked Ji if she ever again sang the song, “Don’t Cry for Me, Hongdo.” Straightaway she replied, “Yes, and now without fear.”
TESTIMONY: Kyo-hwa-so No. 1, Kaechon, South Pyong-an Province
Surrounded by a 4-meter (13-foot) wall topped with barbed wire, Kyo-hwa-so No. 1 held roughly 1,000 women prisoners who made clothing and leather goods during Ji’s imprisonment. (Shortly before her arrival, hundreds of women had been transferred to another prison, she was told by other inmates.) The prisoners were divided into nine work divisions and smaller work units. Two work divisions made shoes and leather bags. Men from another prison were brought in to prepare the leather. As the leatherwork was the worst work, it was the repeat offenders and prison rule-breakers — some seventy to eighty women — who were assigned to the leather divisions. Ji’s offense was essentially political, but many other prisoners had been convicted of theft, fraud, murder, adultery, and prostitution. While most women worked in sewing lines, other work units were organized for cooking, construction, cleaning, maintenance, farming outside the prison compound, and a mobile “day-labor unit.” Each work unit was given a production quota that required hard, fast work. Talking was not allowed on the sewing lines, and “on a daily basis,” the women guards or wardens would kick or beat women prisoners who worked too slowly, in front of the other prisoners. Minor rule-breakers were given less desirable jobs or reduced rations. Worse offenders were placed in tiny punishment cells where they were unable to lie down or stand up.
Working hours were from eight in the morning until six in the evening, followed by hour-and-a-half unit-wide self-criticism sessions, both saeng-hwal-chong-hwa (daily-life criticism) and saen-gho-bi-pan (mutual criticism). There were incentives and rewards for the prisoners to spy and tattle on each other, and so the prisoners did. According to Ji, the theory of the prison was that with their strength and spirit broken by hard labor, the prisoners would repent through self-criticism and change their mentality.
The most salient characteristic of this prison was the inadequate food rations. Each day, prisoners were given a palm-sized ball of cornmeal and some cabbage-leaf soup. According to Ji, seventy percent of the prisoners suffered from malnutrition, and during her two years of imprisonment, a fifth of the prisoners — namely those without nearby families to bring them extra food — died of starvation and malnutrition-related disease.
WITNESS: Former Prisoner #6, Kyo-hwa-so No. 77 Former Prisoner #6 was born in 1960 in South Pyong-an Province. While in the North Korean military, he was a small operative in a scheme of his military unit that diverted to personal gain the profit from goods that had been imported to North Korea from Japan and then re-exported to China. Dismissed from the army after almost a year of military detention, he was convicted by a civilian “People’s Judiciary” in Dukchun and sentenced for two years to Kyo-hwa-so No. 77 near Danchun, South Hamgyong Province, a gold-mining labor camp where some 2,000 out of roughly 7,000 to 8,000 prisoners died from mining accidents, malnutrition, and malnutrition-related diseases during the two years Former Prisoner #6 was imprisoned there, in the late 1980s.
Former Prisoner #6 mined gold for three months and then spent six months in the prison “health clinic” before serving the remainder of his sentence working in the prison cafeteria. He was released in 1987. He later fled to China, where he lived for several years before arriving in South Korea in 2001.
TESTIMONY: Kyo-hwa-so No. 77, Danchun, South Hamgyong Province
According to Former Prisoner #6, there was a large prison-labor Kyo-hwa-so No. 55 at Chunma, South Hamgyong Province, but that camp was overcrowded, so a number of prisoners there were transferred to Kyo-hwa-so No. 77, a kyung jaebun (criminal reeducation prison-labor camp) located in the mountains between Daeheung and Geomtuk in North Hamgyong Province. During the time when Former Prisoner #6 was imprisoned, Kyo-hwa-so No. 77 held some 7,000 to 8,000 prisoners, all male, most of whom were serving three-year sentences.
The kyo-hwa-so was divided into units of 800 to 1,000 prisoners, and these units were divided into sub-units of 60 to 100 prisoners. In the unit of Former Prisoner #6, some 15 to 20 prisoners were persons imprisoned for going to China, but most were prisoners convicted of what would be criminal offenses in any country. About half of the prisoners who came into this unit were already malnourished and ill from below-subsistence-level food rations while under pre-trial and pre-sentence detention. At Kyo-hwa-so No. 77 the prisoners were fed daily only a small coffee-cup-sized ball of mixed corn, rice, and beans along with a watery salted-cabbage soup. (These below-subsistence-level food rations preceded the mid-1990s famine in North Korea.) The prisoners slept in wooden dormitories holding between 60 and 70 persons.
Most prisoners at Kyo-hwa-so No. 77 mined gold. Some of the mine-shafts dated back to the early days of the Japanese occupation of Korea in the early 1900s. Accessing the veins of mineable gold required descending and, later, ascending a wooden staircase 500 meters (1,640 feet) in length, using gas lanterns for light. Deaths from mining accidents were a daily occurrence, including multiple deaths resulting from the partial collapse of mineshafts.
Huge numbers of prisoners were so severely malnourished that after a short period of hard labor, they could no longer work in the mines and were sent to the clinic or “hospital” section of the prison camp. At times, this section would hold up to 1,000 prisoners. Some prisoners intentionally injured themselves to get out of the mines. Prisoners stayed at the clinic from one to six months, but the clinic was mostly a place to await death. During the detention of Former Prisoner #6, nearly a third of the prisoners died within their first month at the clinic. Sometimes, if a prisoner was near death, he would be released to die at home, in an effort to reduce the extremely high number of deaths under detention. Thirty to fifty new prisoners were brought in every week to keep the mine going.
The prisoners themselves considered Kyo-hwa-so No. 77 to be a death camp, in that they did not expect to live until the completion of their (typically) three-year sentences. Nonetheless, the sub-units had a lecture and self-criticism session once a week, on Saturday or Sunday before the evening meal, when prisoners would confess their wrongdoings and shortcomings. During these sessions, the entire sub-unit would stand except for the confessing prisoner, who would kneel in front of the group, facing the guards. Once every month there was a unit-wide criticism session to discuss production shortcomings.
There were public executions in front of the entire camp of persons caught trying to escape, steal from the prison warehouse, or inflict injuries on themselves. During public executions, the guards were very heavily armed.
WITNESS: YOU Chun Sik, Kyo-hwa-so No. 22
YOU Chun Sik was born in November 1963 in Onsong, North Hamgyong Province. Following completion of his military service, in which he held the rank of platoon commander, he worked for a construction company in Onsong. His long string of encounters with the North Korean prison and detention system began in 1996.
After food distribution ceased at his place of employment, You went to Kangwan Province to buy fish to sell to Koreans in China. He made “good money” and also began buying personal effects and selling them in China. Caught by the North Korean police, he was sentenced in January 1996 to six months’ hard labor Kyo-hwa-so No. 22 Oro at the Onsong In-min-bo-an-seong (People’s Safety Agency) ro-dong-dan-ryeon-dae (labor-training camp) for not working at his designated workplace, for unauthorized buying and selling, and for an old assault they dredged up from his military record. (You thinks he actually would have been given a longer sentence if not for his military-service record.)
In May 1995, with one month left to go in his six-month sentence, You was given a temporary holiday release. But he became inebriated during holiday festivities and was late returning to the labor-training camp. For this infraction, he was hung upside-down for three hours, and all of the other one-hundred-odd prisoners at the labor-training camp had to march past and hit him while he was hanging. Following his collective beating, You was taken to an In-min-bo-an-seong (People’s Safety Agency) ku-ryu-jang (detention center) and then sent in a group of nine prisoners to Kyo-hwa-so No. 22 (called “two-two” by the prisoners) in Oro-kun, South Hamgyong Province, for a oneyear prison term. All eight of the other prisoners in his entering group died of malnutrition and beatings from guards and other prisoners during You’s year-long sentence.
Released from Kyo-hwa-so No. 22 in September 1997, You fled to China that October. He worked in Shenyang for a South Korean company until February 2000, when he was caught by Chinese police and held in Shenyang for six weeks and then in a detention center in the town of Dandong, near the North Korean border, for another month. The Dandong police turned him over to the Sinuiju bo-wi-bu (National Security Agency) police, who held him in a ka-mok (jail) for six weeks of interrogation. You was accused of working for a South Korean company; fearing execution, he initially denied the accusation.
While in the Sinuiju ka-mok, You was kicked, beaten, and, along with five or six other prisoners in his cell, made to sit motionless under a surveillance camera for the whole day, except during meals. If the prisoners moved, they were beaten on the fingers. If observed talking, they were forced to slap each other. Only a few of the guards allowed the prisoners to stretch. You described the sitting-motionless torture as being more painful than the beatings.
You reports that the majority of the Sinuiju bo-wi-bu ka-mok detainees were women, most of whom were later sent to detention facilities in their hometowns. While You was detained in Sinuiju in mid-2000, seven newly repatriated women were brought in, four of whom were pregnant and shortly after taken away. He later met one woman from this group in China; she told him that the four who had been taken away were given forced abortions.
You finally admitted to his jailers that he had worked in China for a South Koreanowned company. He also convinced them all that the other employees were Chinese or Korean-Chinese, which seemed to matter to his jailers. He was taken to Pyongyang bo-wi-bu (National Security Agency) center for additional interrogations, where, he reports, other imprisoned persons were high-ranking officials and where there was no torture. After enduring two weeks of interrogation in Pyongyang, he was sent to a National Security Agency detention facility in his hometown of Onsong for the month of August. He was then transferred to the Onsong In-min-bo-an-seong (People’s Safety Agency) police jail for twenty days before being sent in October to the ro-dong-dan-ryeon-dae (labor-training camp) No. 55 in Youngkwang-kun, South Hamgyong Province, for a one-year sentence of hard labor.
You became so ill that in January 2001 he was released on temporary home sick-leave. Upon recovery, he was supposed to return to the labor-training camp to complete his term, but he crossed the Tumen River and fled to China instead. You recovered in Shenyang for two months and then made his way to Mongolia. He was caught by the Mongolian border police and held for three days without food, but was then released.
He went to Ulan Bator, and with the help of South Koreans at the consulate there, was able to board a plane to Seoul on May 20, 2001.
TESTIMONY: Kyo-hwa-so No. 22, Oro-kun, South Hamgyong Province
Work in 1996 at Kyo-hwa-so No. 22, consisted mostly of carrying rocks to a nearby river and constructing stone embankments that would allow a hydro-electric station to generate electricity. Eight hundred to 1,000 men and up to 100 women labored there while serving unusually short (for kyo-hwa-so prisoners) sentences of one to two years. As at other kyo-hwa-so, there was, You reports, a very high turnover rate at Kyo-hwa-so No. 22, owing to the high rate of deaths in detention. You entered prison in a group of nine prisoners. Within the year, he was the only one of the nine who had not died from malnutrition, forced labor, and beatings by guards and other prisoners. (The prisoners were organized to beat each other, most commonly by prison work-group or subgroup leaders, who would beat other prisoners if they worked too slowly or walked too slowly to or from their worksites.)
Prisoners were provided several spoonfuls a day of powdered corn mixed with wheat along with salted cabbage-leaf soup. Those who died of malnutrition were, mostly, prisoners whose families did not visit them to bring extra food. Of twenty persons in Cell No. 7 at the kyo-hwa-so, four died of malnutrition within a year. Other overcrowded cells held up to sixty or seventy prisoners, often with two persons sharing one blanket. The cells
were categorized by offense or the number of convictions. Prisoners at Kyo-hwa-so No. 22 had been sentenced for theft, assault, fraud, gambling, or opium addiction. There were no public executions at Kyo-hwa-so No. 22 during You’s year there, although there were suicides and attempted suicides by prisoners seeking to end their suffering.
WITNESS: Former Prisoner #3, Kyo-hwa-so No. 3
Former Prisoner #3 was arrested as a young man for assault and battery. After what he described as a fair trial, he was convicted for a crime he admits he committed and was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. He served from the early/middle 1980s to the early/middle 1990s at three separate prison facilities, including Kyo-hwa-so No. 8 at Yongdam, Kanwon Province; and Kyo-hwa-so No. 3 in Sinuiju, North Pyong-an Province.
At Yongdam Kyo-hwa-so No. 8, some 3,000 prisoners manufactured bicycles, but most of the prisoners were transferred to a kwan-li-so in Danchun, South Hangyong Province to mine and kiln-fire stones to be used in steel-making furnaces. At Danchun, prisoners died daily from the fumes emanating from the kilns and heated stones. After two years, when additional stockpiles of stones were no longer needed, many prisoners, including Former Prisoner #3, were transferred to a prison-labor camp in Sinuiju, Kyo-hwa-so No. 3, where the prisoners made clothes.
After his release from the Sinuiju kyo-hwa-so in the early/middle 1990s, Former Prisoner #3 carefully planned an escape from North Korea. He fled to China in 1998, slowly made his way down through Southeast Asia, and arrived in South Korea in August 2000.
TESTIMONY: Kyo-hwa-so No. 3, Sinuiju, North Pyong-an Province
As of the early 1990s, some 2,500 male prisoners were being held in Kyo-hwa-so No. 3 in Sinuiju, North Pyong-an Province, a city on the North Korean border with China recently in the news as the cite of a future “free-enterprise zone.” The inmates made prison uniforms and mined stones and gold. Some of the inmates were arrested for border crimes — visiting and/or smuggling goods to China. However, most were ordinary convicted criminals. Rations were meager: only some 450 grams (16 ounces) per day of rice mixed with beans. Many prisoners died in the winter from malnutrition, scabies and other skin diseases, and paratyphoid. Prisoners were beaten by guards. Other infractions and mistakes resulted in longer prison sentences. Those who attempted and failed to escape, or who initially succeeded in escaping but were caught, were brought back for public execution, after which their corpses would be displayed for a day.
WITNESS: Former Prisoner #12, Kyo-hwa-so Hoeryong, North Hamgyong Province
Former Prisoner #12, a forty-three-year-old native of Chongjin, North Hamgyong Province, was a truck driver when he was involved in a fistfight in 1991. A day after the altercation, the other person involved died from injuries sustained during the fight. As a result, Former Prisoner #12 was tried, convicted, and sentenced to six to ten years imprisonment in a ro-dong-kyo-hwa-so (labor prison camp) located in a mountainous area roughly 40 kilometers (25 miles) from Hoeryong (sometimes also transliterated as Hwe Ryung) in North Hamgyong Province. Prisoners at the labor-training camp mined copper, logged, manufactured furniture, and did farming work. Because of his previous occupation, Former Prisoner #12 was made a truck driver and repairman, a prison job that provided much greater mobility within the prison camp than that afforded to most other prisoners.
Former Prisoner #12 did not protest his trial or conviction. While he had not intended to fatally injure the man he had fought, he admitted he had committed a crime for which he should be punished. He was imprisoned for four years, from 1991 to 1995. According to his testimony, so many prisoners died of malnutrition and related diseases in 1993 that prison officials allowed gravely ill prisoners home-leave in 1994 and 1995, to cut down on the number of deaths in detention. Former Prisoner #12’s weight declined from 80 kilograms (176 pounds) in 1991 to 35 kilograms (77 pounds) in 1995, though he admits that, knowing of the sickness-release policy, he did not engage in the frantic search for anything edible that characterized most prisoners’ camp experiences.
After returning to his home for two months to regain his strength, he fled to China where he lived among Korean-Chinese in Harbin for five years before going to South Korea by a dangerous ship route in 2000.
TESTIMONY: Kyo-hwa-so Hoeryong, North Hamgyong Province
Hoeryong kyo-hwa-so is located in a mountainous area of North Hamgyong Province associated with the town of Hoeryong, even though it is some 40 kilometers (25 miles) away. Former Prisoner #12 used the term ro-dong-kyo-hwa-so when describing the camp, because the roughly 1,500 prisoners there were required to do hard labor: primarily copper-mining, but also logging and furniture-making. Convicts reportedly labored from five in the morning until five in the evening, mining not all that much copper but suffering many accidents to get it. Every day after work there was a self-criticism session, which Former Prisoner #12 described as extremely petty, and at which time prisoners always had to find some mistake to confess.
Most prisoners at the camp were convicted criminals sentenced to anywhere from one to fifteen years, although in 1992, some “political prisoners” arrived. Some sixty prisoners shared a sleeping dormitory. The prison camp also had 1.5-meter by 1.5-meter (5-foot by 5-foot) “punishment cells,” where scantily clad prisoners were placed on one-quarter food rations for one week at a time. Confinement in the tiny punishment cells was an excruciatingly painful form of torture.
Prisoners were also organized and compelled to beat other prisoners who committed various infractions. The highlight of prison-camp life was the rare occasion when prisoners would be taken outside the prison walls for exercise walks, at which time they were able to eat plants and grass. The most salient feature of Hoeryong kyo- hwa-so was its death rate. Below-subsistence-level food rations coupled with harsh conditions and hard labor resulted between 1991 and 1995 in the deaths of onequarter to one-third of the inmates. So many prisoners died in 1993 that near-dead prisoners were allowed home-leave in 1994 and early 1995 to reduce the number of deaths in detention. Others were released in 1995 as part of an amnesty in honor of Kim Jong Il’s birthday.
WITNESS: Former Prisoner #19, Kyo-hwa-so No. 4
Former Prisoner #19 grew up near Danchun, North Hamgyong Province. In the mid-1990s, when North Korea’s production/distribu- tion system broke down and he was without employment or income, he set up a still to make and sell what he called “Chinese style” rice and corn liquor. Arrested in late 1996, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to a six-year term at Kyo-hwa-so No. 4. After working for three months there at a limestone furnace, he contracted a lung disease and was transferred to the prison-camp clinic. In those three months, his weight had dropped nearly 30 kilograms (66 pounds). Believing that he would not survive his six-year sentence and observing that, to reduce the number of deaths in detention, extremely sick prisoners were being sent home to recuperate, he drank dirty water. He developed chronic diarrhea as a result and was given a temporary sick release. Away from the limestone furnace, his lungs recovered, and after regaining fifteen kilograms (33 pounds), he fled to China instead of returning to prison.
TESTIMONY: Kyo-hwa-so No. 4, Samdeung-ri, Kangdong-kun, South Pyong-an Province
Kyo-hwa-so No. 4 is located in Samdeung-ri, Kangdong-kun, in South Pyong-an Province. During Former Prisoner #19’s detention there, some 7,000 convicts mined limestone and made cement in a factory originally built by the Japanese during their occupation of Korea. The prison camp was roughly 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) long by 1.5 kilometers (0.93 miles) wide and was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence.
All of the prisoners at Kyo-hwa-so No. 4 were men, most of them sentenced to anywhere from five to twenty years. The prisoners considered their sentences a cruel hoax, as they did not expect to live long enough to serve their time. Some prisoners mined limestone in the adjacent mountain. Others crushed the rocks. Still others fired the lime in large kilns. Work started at seven in the morning and lasted until five in the evening, except in the crushing and heating units, where work often continued until ten at night. All aspects of the work were hard labor in dangerous conditions with prisoners frequently suffering chest ailments and lung diseases from limestone dust.
Once a week there was an evening criticism session in groups of up to 500 men where the prison officials would criticize the prisoner called to stand in front of the group of prisoners. There were also lectures on Kim Jong Il and his policies.
Infractions were punished with reduced rations, nominally extended sentences, and detainment in miniature punishment cells. During the eight months that Former Prisoner #19 was held at Kyo-hwa-so No. 4, there were eight public executions in the prison. He did not recall the particular offenses of these eight executed persons, though he did cite the four types of persons who would be executed at the prison camp: prisoners caught trying to escape; prisoners caught after they escaped; persons who committed crimes while on “sick leave”; and prisoners who had committed capital crimes elsewhere and were brought to Kyo-hwa-so No. 4 for execution.
Food rations consisted of a mere 50 grams (under 2 ounces) per meal of mixed corn and wheat, plus cabbage-leaf soup. Former Prisoner #19 weighed 76 kilograms (168 pounds) upon his entry into the kyo-hwa-so. After three months, his weight had plummeted to somewhere around 45 kilograms (99 pounds). He was sure that most prisoners weighed less than 50 kilograms (110 pounds).
Prisoners slept head to toe on wooden floors in groups of 50 to 100. The unsanitary living conditions — there was no bathing or changing of clothes, and Former Prisoner #19 says he was able to wash only his face two to three times a month — led to Kyo-hwa-so No. 4’s particular idiosyncrasy: the cement dust in the prisoners clothing, commingled with dirt and sweat, would cause the tattered fabric to harden, resulting in skin abrasions and infections.
The most salient prison characteristic, however, was more common: exorbitantly high death rates. In Former Prisoner #19’s eight months there, of the eighty persons in his work unit, three prisoners died in work accidents, ten died of malnutrition and disease, and twenty were sent home on “sick leave” in order to reduce the high numbers of deaths in detention.
Prisoner’s sketch of Kyo-hwa-so No. 4 Kangdong.
WITNESS: Former Prisoner #28, Kyo-hwa-so No. 12
A young man in his early twenties from Chongjin City, North Hamgyung Province, Former Prisoner #28 has a straightforward story. As the food situation in North Korea deteriorated in the middle to late 1990s, he took to smuggling to stay alive and to provide food for the family with which he was living. Arrested in December 1997, he was held in a local jail for three months and then transferred to an In-min-bo-an-seong (People’s Safety Agency) ka-mok (jail) in Onsong. He was held at the ka-mok for another eight months before being sentenced to three years, including time served, to Kyo-hwa-so No. 12 at Jeonger-ri, North Hamgyong Province, for violating, he says, Penal Law 117, Article 2: illegally crossing the North Korea–China border and for illegally transporting money and goods.
Fortunately, Former Prisoner #28 was pardoned after serving only eight months, from December 1998 through July 1999. In August, he fled to China, making his way to Mongolia, where he joined a group of five North Koreans who made it to Seoul in October 2001.
TESTIMONY: Kyo-hwa-so No. 12, Jeonger-ri, North Hamgyong Province
Sometimes also called Onsong-kun kyo-hwa-so, although it is not located there, Kyo- hwa-so No. 12 at Jeonger-ri holds some 1,300 to 1,500 men, who mine copper and iron, cut logs, make bricks, and farm. The most salient features of Kyo-hwa-so No. 12, according to Former Prisoner #28, were the deplorable conditions and the high rates of deaths in detention. Out of twenty-three other prisoners who entered on the same day as Former Prisoner #28, only two survived. The rest died within eight months of arrival, from hard labor and sub-subsistence food rations — small mixtures of corn and beans, with rice added only on holidays. Former Prisoner #28 believes that eight hundred prisoners died while he was there — so many, according to what another prisoner told him, that the guards had to burn the corpses. Former Prisoner #28 says he weighed 50 kilograms (110 pounds) prior to his arrest and only 30 kilograms (66 pounds) upon his release from Kyo-hwa-so No. 12.
There were no “self-criticism” sessions at Kyo-hwa-so No. 12, but each night the prisoners had to gather at the gates around nine in the evening, at which time the guards would order one of the prisoners to recite the prison rules. Rule-breakers were beaten. Former Prisoner #28 witnessed two public executions of other prisoners who had tried to escape.
16 The 200,000 figure comes from a former guard, AHN Myong Chol, who previously worked at four different prison camps. YOON Dae Il, a former official of the bo-wi-bu National Security Agency, the police organization that administers the prison camps, says the 200,000 figure is “the minimum.”
17 See description of Kwan-li-so No. 18 below.
18 See White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, 2003, KINU, Seoul, 177–180.
19 Charles K. Armstrong. The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950. (Ithaca: N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), 241. Bracketed explanations provided by David Hawk.
20 See the story of KANG Chol Hwan below.
21 For more information on the seongbun citizen classification system, see Kim Il-Song’s North Korea, Helen-Louise Hunter, (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1999), Chapter One, 3–13.
22 Armstrong, op. cit. 72–73. Bracketed explanations provided by David Hawk.
23 See Prof. HEO Man Ho, “North Korea’s Continued Detention of South Korean POWs since the Korean and Vietnam Wars,” The Korean Journal of Defense and Analysis, Vol. XIV, No. 2, Fall 2002.
24 Cited in Human Rights in the DPRK (North Korea).Minnesota Lawyers International Human Rights Committee/Human Rights Watch, December 1988, Minneapolis/Washington, D.C., 103.
25 See pages 29–30 below.
26 Amnesty International Index: ASA 24/02/79.
27 The U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea has obtained satellite photographs of several additional prisons and concentration/slave-labor camps for inclusion in this report.
28 This account is drawn from “Ali Lamada: A Personal Account of the Experience of a Prisoner of Conscience in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” Amnesty International: ASA 24/02/79.
29 Kang Chol Hwan and Pierre Rigoulot. Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag. (New York, N.Y.: Basic Books, 2001); originally published in France as Les Aquariums de Pyongyang. (Editions Robert Laffont, 2000).
30 “Kun” may be translated as a large North Korean administrative unit.
31 “Ri” may be translated as a small North Korean administrative unit.
32 These figures come from pages 48–59 in An Hyuk’s Yodok List, translated into English in Life and Human Rights in North Korea, Volume 1, Autumn 1996, a publication of the Citizen’s Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea, Seoul, 18–19.
33 Ibid.
34 And thus might not be considered a kwan-li-so by some.
35 Paper on “Political Detention Camps in Relation to Socio-Political Change in North Korea” (p. 40) presented at the 4th International Conference on North Korean Human Rights and Refugees, 2003, Prague, Czech Republic.
36 Note: The KINU White Paper focuses on camps run by the 7th Bureau of the bo-wi-bu police and therefore does not count No. 18 as a kwan-li-so “management center,” as it is not run by the bo-wi-bu.
37 Published in Korean by Chunji Media, Seoul, in 1996, and in English by Living Sacrifice Book Company, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in 1999.
38 Lee Soon Ok was imprisoned at the same place as JI Hae Nam, whose testimony follows Lee’s in this report, and only several months apart. The two women were interviewed separately and did not know each other. Lee’s figures for the prison population at Kyo-hwa-so No. 1 include both male prisoners from a nearby prison and women prisoners.
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