The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps
Prisoners’ Testimonies and Satellite Photographs
PART TWO
DETENTION FACILITIES AND PUNISHMENTS FOR NORTH KOREANS FORCIBLY REPATRIATED FROM CHINA
Introduction The second part of this report examines testimony from former North Korean prisoners and detainees about the system of interrogation, detention, forced labor, and extreme punishment that Koreans who are arrested in China experience following their repatriation to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).
The system of severe repression that awaits North Koreans forcibly repatriated from China is, in some ways, a separate phenomenon from the lifetime and long-term imprisonments that characterize the kwan-li-so (political penal-labor colonies) and kyo-hwa-so (prison-labor camps). It is a shorter-term detention/punishment system, which includes do-jip-kyul-so (provincial detention centers) and ro-dong-dan-ryeon-dae (labor-training centers). However, it is related to the kwan-li-so and kyo-hwa-so in that it uses the same brutal forced-labor practices. The long-term imprisonment and short-term detention facilities are both characterized by below-subsistence-level food rations and very high levels of deaths in detention. And both, along with the police jails and interrogation centers that feed them, are administered by the In-min-bo-an-seong (People’s Safety Agency) police, which runs the kyo-hwa-so, and the Kuk-ga-bo-wi-bu (National Security Agency police), which runs the kwan-li-so.
Most basically, the detention/punishment system for forcibly repatriated North Koreans is an outgrowth of the North Korean approach for dealing with petty criminals convicted of what would be considered, in other countries, misdemeanor offenses or petty infractions. The offenders are incarcerated in short-term provincial or sub-provincial detention facilities, where they are further punished with forced labor. However, many of the “minor” offenses in the DPRK would not normally be considered criminal elsewhere: leaving one’s village or traveling within the country without authorization, not showing up at one’s designated worksite, or leaving the country — a right guaranteed in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (to which the DPRK is a State Party).
Estimates of the number of North Koreans who fled famine conditions in the DPRK in the middle and late 1990s by crossing the border into China run as high as 200,000 to 300,000 persons — whole families searching for food, as well as individuals sent to seek work in order to send money back to the rest of their family. Once in China, North Koreans try to blend into communities of the two million or so ethnic Koreans, who have resided for centuries alongside the Han Chinese ethnic majority in the part of northeast China once known as Manchuria.
In addition to the ethnic Korean-Chinese, there are also large numbers of South Koreans working, studying, or traveling in northeast China, which is serviced by direct flights from Seoul: businessmen; students studying traditional medicine (among other subjects); tourists (Mount Paekdu, a famous mountain considered to be the source of Korean civilization, abuts the North Korea–China border); famine-relief project workers; and ministers and missionaries serving and proselytizing among the Korean populations in China. Also, South Korean TV, radio, movies, pop-music videos and recordings are all easily accessible in northeast China.
There is also a great deal of cross-border commerce between North Korea and China, some of which is officially organized by and through North Korean state enterprises or state import-export companies. As the North Korean production system broke down in the 1990s and people no longer were being paid at their assigned work places, large numbers of North Koreans took to buying and selling various goods across the border. Technically, private cross-border buying and selling by North Koreans is illegal.
Periodically, police in China sweep through areas where undocumented North Koreans work and reside, and arrest and deport the migrants and refugees. Some suspect that the frequency and intensity of these sweeps has intensified in recent years, following international publicity about the situation of North Koreans in China, including dramatic attempts by desperate North Koreans to seek asylum in various embassies and consulates there. Others, including some of the repatriated North Koreans caught in these sweeps, believe that the increase in arrests preceded the publicity and have been occasioned instead by Chinese desires to stem a Korean refugee flow and by North Korea’s desire to limit contact between North Koreans and the South Koreans in China.
Foreign famine-relief workers on the Chinese side of the border have observed the Chinese police buses and vans transporting deportees to North Korea. But the buses and vans often have curtained windows, and an accurate count of the deportees, even when witnesses have observed the deportations, is not possible. Neither the number of forcibly repatriated Koreans nor trends over time can be confidently estimated.
Though it is not presently possible to know the number of forcibly repatriated North Koreans, it is possible to know what happens to those who are repatriated. Having been exposed to the relative freedom and prosperity in China, and completely alienated by their brutal mistreatment after being handed back to the North Korean police, many of those who survive their mistreatment flee back to China upon their release from detention and recovery from detention-related illnesses and injuries. A small number of those North Koreans who have fled the DPRK a second, or even third, time have obtained asylum in South Korea, usually after a harrowing, months-long trek south through China and then further south through Southeast Asia, before flying to Seoul. Some defectors go through Mongolia or Hong Kong. The stories of some of these individuals are told on the following pages.
Most of these former detainees are recent arrivals in South Korea and still have family members in North Korea. For these reasons, those giving testimony must remain anonymous, but their experiences can be simply summarized: Upon repatriation to North Korea they are detained in a jail or detention/interrogation facility. In Korean, a police jail is called a ka-mok. Both the regular police, the In-min-bo-an-seong (People’s Safety Agency), and the Kuk-ga-bo-wi-bu (National Security Agency) political police, have such jails in the provinces along the North Korea–China border. Some of the former detainees use the word ku-ryu-jang, meaning a temporary detention place or facility, often inside a police station.
Whether they took place in a ku-ryu-jang or ka-mok, and whether they were conducted by the In-min-bo-an-seong police or the bo-wi-bu police, the interrogations described by former prisoners all followed a pattern clearly outlined by Former Detainee #22, a young man originally from Kaesong. Essentially, the authorities ask: “Why did you go to China, where did you go, and what did you do in each place?” And then, more ominously: “Did you meet any South Koreans?” “Did you go to a Christian church?” “Did you watch or listen to South Korean TV or radio?” and “Were you trying to go to South Korea?” All the former detainees interviewed for this report firmly believed that an affirmative answer to the latter questions would result in execution or their being sent to a kwan-li-so or kyo-hwa-so, so they initially denied any contact with South Koreans or Christians while in China. Their denials were not considered credible by their interrogators, who attempted to starve and beat admissions out of the detainees. Some of the former prisoners interviewed for this report stuck to their denials; others, broken by hunger and torture, admitted that they had met South Koreans or gone to a Christian church service. One interviewee said she was in such pain that she begged her jailers to kill her to end her suffering.
Usually after several weeks of interrogation, the detainees were sent to short-term detention-labor facilities called in Korean jip-kyul-so and ro-dong-dan-ryeon-dae. None of the former detainees interviewed for this report mentioned any kind of trial or judicial process before being sent to these hard-labor detention/punishment facilities. Jip-kyul-so literally translates as a “gathering place.” A do-jip-kyul-so is a provincial detention center. In practice, these are short-term hard-labor detention facilities for those serving up to six month sentences. Several interviewees reported that both the regular police and the political police run jip-kyul-so detention centers for small-time or “smallcrime” persons as well as for North Koreans forcibly repatriated from China. Jip-kyul-so are characterized by hard labor, such as construction work or brick-making, and subsubsistence food rations, the combination of which causes large numbers of deaths in detention (even given the shortness of the sentences) and large numbers of “sick-releas-es” (the idea being that gravely ill prisoners will either die at home, thus reducing the number of deaths in detention, or recover at home before returning to the jip-kyul-so to complete their sentences).
Ro-dong-dan-ryeon-dae literally translates as “labor-training corp” or “labor-training camp,” sometimes abbreviated in English by South Korean human rights activists as “LTC.” The LTCs are even shorter-term jip-kyul-so, set up to accommodate the overflow from the established detention centers caused by the large numbers of Koreans forcibly repatriated from China. One interviewee described the LTCs as localized “feeder” facilities for the jip-kyul-so. Another interviewee described the LTCs as a “not-in-the-statute-books” response to the burgeoning numbers of North Koreans traveling without authorization, working at enterprises other than their assigned occupations at idled state production facilities, or fleeing to China in response to famine conditions in Korea. One interviewee stated that it was becoming the practice to have separate facilities for Koreans forcibly repatriated from China because the returnees were telling the common “light crime” criminals in the jip-kyul-so about the “freedom and prosperity” in China. The LTCs seem to be sub-provincial facilities, where various labor or production functions are not performed on-site, but where mobile forced-labor brigades spend nights. The LTC detainees are made to march rapidly, or jog slowly, it is variously said, to their various and changing worksites — chanting political slogans or singing what they describe as “silly songs” of praise to Kim Jong Il as they move along.
Worst of All Apart from the torture during interrogation, and the high levels of deaths in detention reported by the former detainees, repatriated pregnant North Koreans thrown into the interrogation-detention system face ethnically-motivated infanticide and forced abortions, a particularly reprehensible phenomena of repression described in more detail on the following pages.
All refugee accounts reported the same objective proclaimed by the North Korean prison and jail authorities for these atrocities: preventing women who became pregnant while in China from giving birth to “half-Chinese” babies, meaning babies that are half ethnic Han Chinese, China’s majority ethnic group. Indeed, some of the North Korean women who fled to China had married or were trafficked to (sold, or provided for involuntary or quasi-voluntary “arranged marriages”) ethnic Chinese men. Other North Korean women who fled to China had married or taken up with Korean-speaking citizens of China of Korean ethnic origin. But this potential distinction seemingly made no difference. North Korean women who were pregnant when they were repatriated were compelled to have abortions, or their babies were killed immediately after birth.
Eight eyewitnesses or persons with firsthand accounts of ethnic infanticide were interviewed for this report. The accounts of ethnic infanticide occur in only three places: Sinuiju, Onsong, and Chongjin. Sinuiju and Chongjin are large port cities in north North Korea on the west and east coasts, respectively. Little information is presently available on the extent to which this practice is carried out elsewhere along the North Korea–China border, except for Onsong. But Chongjin and Sinuiju are the main population centers from which the largest number of “second-time” North Korean escapees would come. And the stories are too similar in too many details to be coincidental.
WITNESSES AND TESTIMONY WITNESS: CHOI Yong Hwa, Provincial Detention Center, South Sinuiju South Sinuiju
Detention Center CHOI Yong Hwa is a shy and soft-spoken twenty-five-year-old woman from Hoeryong, North Hamgyong Province. She spent two months (May and June 2000) in the do-jip-kyul-so provincial detention center in South Sinuiju, North Pyong-an Province, across the North Korean border from Dandung, China.
Choi had lived with her father and younger brother while working in a distribution center, but as the food situation in North Korea deteriorated between 1996 and 1998, and as the country’s distribution system broke down, she left that work to become a petty trader, mostly selling cuttlefish, in order to make enough money to provide food for her family. When the petty marketing did not generate enough money for food, she paid a trafficker 200 won to take her to China in 1998. She worked at a restaurant in Yanji, China, and then as a tour guide for visiting South Koreans in Dalian. Caught by Chinese police in Dalian, she was held for a month before being sent to Dandung, where she was turned over to North Korean police.
Interrogated by the bo-wi-bu (State Security Protection Agency) in Sinuiju, Choi convincingly denied meeting South Koreans in China. (She was also explicitly questioned about attending Christian churches in China.) Her interrogators threatened to send her to Jeonger-ri kyo-hwa-so in North Hamgyong Province, which she had heard about from a neighbor who had been sent there, but she ended up being sent to the do-jip-kyul-so provincial detention center in Sinuiju. After only ten days there, she became too ill to work, from malnutrition and exhaustion: she had been unable to sleep at night owing to infestations of maggots and lice in her sleeping quarters. Choi was released after serving two months, during which time two other detainees had died. Choi’s jailers simply did not want another death in detention.
Upon release, after regaining her health, Choi crossed again into China and made her way to Dalian. She traveled west by train to Beijing, and on New Year’s Day 2002, she took a train to Kunming. She was part of a group of five North Korean refugees who crossed into Myanmar (Burma) but were apprehended and turned over to the police in China, who fortunately released them after being persuaded that they were Korean-Chinese not North Koreans. After their release, they successfully made their way through Southeast Asia. Choi obtained asylum in South Korea in March of 2002 and was interviewed for this report in Seoul in August 2002.
TESTIMONY: South Sinuiju Do-jip-kyul-so (Provincial Detention Center) The South Sinuiju do-jip-kyul-so in North Pyong-an Province held roughly 100 detainees during Choi’s detention, most of them between twenty and thirty years of age, more of them women than men. The facility was primarily for North Koreans repatriated from China who had successfully avoided contact with South Koreans. Two cells were for men and women accused of minor crimes, and four cells held repatriated persons. Detainees performed supervised agricultural and construction work at off-site locations. Their work day began between four-thirty and five in the morning and lasted until seven or eight at night, with half-hour breaks for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Meals consisted of dried corn, which the prisoners would wet, and salted radish-leaf soup. The inmates were also allowed to eat grass and other plants while working outside the detention center. Still, nourishment was insufficient. During Choi’s two months in detention, two women who had been detained for three to four months died of malnutrition. Also during these two months, one female detainee was coerced into having sex with a guard.
Among the detainees were ten pregnant women, three of whom were in the eighth to ninth month of pregnancy. Choi and two other non-pregnant women were assigned to assist these three pregnant women, who were too weak to walk alone, in walking to a military hospital outside the detention center. The woman assisted by Choi was given a laborinducing injection and shortly thereafter gave birth. While Choi watched in horror, the baby was suffocated with a wet towel in front of the mother, who passed out in distress. When the woman regained consciousness, both she and Choi were taken back to the detention center. The two other non-pregnant women who assisted the two other pregnant detainees told Choi that those newborns were also suffocated in front of the mothers. The explanation provided was that “no half-Han [Chinese] babies would be tolerated.”
WITNESS AND TESTIMONY: Former Detainee #24, Provincial Detention Center, South Sinuiju Former Detainee #24 is a sixty-six-year-old grandmother from Chulan-kun, North Hamgyong Province. In 1997, her children were starving, so she fled to China with her husband, who was a former soldier, and five of her children. Two of her children were caught crossing the border, but the rest of the family lived in China for three years. Two of the children who made it with her to China were later caught and repatriated to North Korea, and her husband eventually died of natural causes. Afterward, she lived with her granddaughter in Yangji until they were apprehended by Chinese police while visiting Dandong.
Former Detainee #24 was eventually forcibly repatriated in a group of fifty North Koreans, some of whom were pregnant women, bound together by their wrists. They were taken, initially, for eighteen days to the Namindong bo-wi-bu (National Security Agency) police ku-ryu-jang in Sinuiju, who initially accused Former Detainee #24 of being corrupted by capitalism in China. She convinced them that she had gone to China only for food, so she was sent for one month to the do-jip-kyul-so in South Sinuiju run by the In-min-bo-an-seong (People’s Safety Agency) police. Though she had heard that Kim Jong Il had recently said North Korean repatriates should not be treated harshly, there were beatings.
Detainees were fed the usual steamed corn, and as it was midsummer, most prisoners were sent out to work in the rice fields. This grandmother was too old and weak for such labor, and as she herself had had seven children, she was taken in the mornings to a nearby medical building to help care for the pregnant detainees. She helped deliver seven babies, some of which were full-term, some of which were injection-induced abortions. All of the babies were killed.
The first baby was born to a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Lim, who had been happily married to a Chinese man. The baby boy was born healthy and unusually large, owing to the mother’s ability to eat well during pregnancy in China. Former Detainee #24 assisted in holding the baby’s head during delivery and then cut the umbilical cord. But when she started to hold the baby and wrap him in a blanket, a guard grabbed the newborn by one leg and threw it in a large, plastic-lined box. A doctor explained that since North Korea was short on food, the country should not have to feed the children of foreign fathers. When the box was full of babies, Former Detainee #24 later learned, it was taken outside and buried.
She next helped deliver a baby to a woman named Kim, who also gave birth to a healthy full-term boy. As Former Detainee #24 caressed the baby, it tried to suckle her finger. The guard again came over and yelled at her to put the baby in the box. As she stood up, the guard slapped her, chipping her tooth. The third baby she delivered was premature — the size of an ear of corn — and the fourth baby was even smaller. She gently laid those babies in the box. The next day she delivered three more very premature babies and also put them in the box. The babies in the box gave her nightmares. Two days later, the premature babies had died but the two full-term baby boys were still alive. Even though their skin had turned yellow and their mouths blue, they still blinked their eyes. The agent came by, and seeing that two of the babies in the box were not dead yet, stabbed them with forceps at a soft spot in their skulls. Former Detainee #24 says she then lost her self-control and started screaming at the agent, who kicked her so hard in the leg that she fainted. Deemed unsuitable for further hospital work, she was returned to the detention center until her release several weeks later.
Upon release, Former Detainee #24 returned to China but was again caught and this time repatriated to Hoeryong. Separated from her granddaughter, she became hysterical and started singing Christian hymns that she had learned in China, and ranting against Kim Jong Il for making Koreans leave their native villages while God took care of Korean people in China. Fortunately, her guards regarded her as a crazy old woman, not an enemy of the regime. Indeed, they took pity on her, even reuniting her with her granddaughter and helping the two of them to again cross the Tumen River into China. This time, she met some South Korean Christian relief workers who helped enable her and her granddaughter to make the trek through China to Southeast Asia. She arrived in South Korea in March 2001.
The interviewer had difficulty finding words to describe the sadness in this grandmothers’ eyes and the anguish on her face as she recounted her experience as a midwife at the detention center in South Sinuiju.
See satellite photograph of the South Sinuiju Detention Center on page 119.
South Sinuiju Detention Center
WITNESS: Former Detainee #1, Nongpo Provincial Detention Center, Chongjin Former Detainee #1 was born in 1967 in Chongjin, North Hamgyong Province. He served ten years as a radio operator in the North Korean military. Upon discharge, he became a low-level courier in business transactions between North Korea and China. In 1997, he was arrested in Yanji, where he had gone to collect money owed in return for goods imported from Japan and re-exported to China without North Korean authorization. Turned over to the bo-wi-bu (National Security Agency) police at Musan, he was interrogated for a day and then turned over to the In-min-bo-an-seong (People’s Safety Agency) police for a week of interrogation. He was then turned over again to the bo-wi-bu at Chongjin, who placed him in a police jail in Song Pyung district in Chongjin. There, for twenty days he was shackled and forced to kneel without moving whenever he was not undergoing additional interrogation sessions. During these multiple interrogations, Former Detainee #1 was questioned about listening to South Korean radio while in the military and accused of wanting to go to South Korea. He convincingly denied having listened to South Korean radio while in the North Korean military, even though he had. He completely denied allegations of espionage. And he did not disclose information about others involved in the unauthorized re-export scheme that the officials and staff of the state enterprise had organized.
Finally, Former Detainee #1 was sent to a do-jip-kyul-so (provincial detention center) at Nongpo. At one point, driven by hunger, he slipped away to his family home to get some food. Caught while trying to sneak back into the provincial detention center, he was beaten unconscious for having escaped. Emaciated from forced labor — making bricks — his legs became numb. He was unable to walk up or down stairs and unable to carry bricks. In fact, he reports that he was so “skin and bones” that he could not even sit. Unable to change clothes or bathe, he became covered with lice. As his jailers did not want him to die in custody, Former Detainee #1 was released in October after only two months in detention.
It took until May of the following year for Former Detainee #1 to recover movement in his legs. At that point, accompanied by his mother, he fled to China. They gradually made their way south through China and Southeast Asia, arriving in South Korea in March 2000. Interviewed for this report in August 2002, this former detainee still had scars on his shoulder and hip from the chemicals in the hot, newly fired bricks he was required to carry while in detention.
TESTIMONY: Nongpo Provincial Detention Center, Chongjin Nongpo, now sometimes also called Eunjung, is a sub-district of Song Pyung district in Chongjin, North Hamgyong Province. Nongpo held 120 detainees during Former Detainee #1’s imprisonment: roughly seventy men and fifty women. Some inmates were single. Some were married couples, but the husbands and wives slept separately in the different men’s and women’s cells, where roughly twenty persons slept head-to-toe in small rooms. Conditions were highly unsanitary, with many detainees covered with lice.
Most of the women detainees were held for up to six months for having gone to China. Some of the men detainees were also held for going to China, but most of them were held for “selling” state property. Detainees were required to perform hard labor: brick-making from morning to evening, in addition to agricultural work (planting and harvesting crops). The harsh chemicals used in making bricks left the detainees with bruised and sore hands. The freshly fired bricks were heavy to lift and exhausting to carry. Rations were extremely meager: salty, watery cabbage-leaf soup and small cakes made of wheat chaff. Evenings were occupied with group self-criticism and silent, motionless self-reflection. A criticism session would not end until detainees proclaimed their own or someone else’s wrongdoing. The detainees would make up wrongdoings to end the sessions. A typical day started at five in the morning with a thirty-minute jog to an agricultural worksite for two hours of farming work followed by a half-hour breakfast. Detainees then made bricks until noon, when they were given a half-hour for lunch. Lunch was followed by repair and work preparation until one. Then came six-and-a-half more hours of brick-making followed by a half hour for dinner. Dinner was followed by a self-criticism session, which lasted from eight until ten and was sometimes followed by interrogations. The work was so hard, with slow workers beaten with shovels, that the detainees wanted to be transferred from the detention-labor facility to a “real prison,” meaning a kyo-hwa-so.
Within his two months of detention at Nongpo, Former Detainee #1, witnessed, out of a total of 120 inmates, one public execution (a man who had sold cable in China), three deaths from malnutrition and related diseases, and one death from tetanus.
See sketch of Nongpo Detention Center on page 69 and satellite photograph on page 120.
WITNESS: Former Detainee #8, Chongjin Detention Center Former Detainee #8 is a thirty-three-year-old woman from Musan, North Hamgyong Province. She went to China in 1998 and married a Chinese citizen of ethnic Korean origin. Caught by Chinese police in May 2000, she was sent back to North Korea in June and interrogated by Onsong State Security Agency personnel, who asked her why and how many times she had left Korea and if she had met South Koreans or went to Christian churches while in China.
Satisfied that she had done neither of these things, while threatening her with death if she went to China again, they sent her for two months detention at the Chongjin jip-kyul-so. Upon release, Former Detainee #8 nevertheless went back to China. Believing it was unsafe to remain with her Korean-Chinese husband, she decided to try to get to South Korea. Starting her journey in late October 2001, she reached Seoul in mid-2002, having traveled to southern China and then through Southeast Asia.
TESTIMONY: Chongjin Detention Center, North Hamgyong Province Located in North Hamgyong Province, this provincial detention center held roughly ninety detainees — some thirty men and some sixty women — nearly all of whom had been repatriated from China. Detainees worked from six in the morning until seven in the evening on seasonal agricultural work or collecting firewood, on a diet of dried corn and radish-leaf soup. Detainees often worked for up to three months while waiting for local police to come to escort them back to their assigned places of residence. According to Former Detainee #8, women at the Chongjin jip-kyul-so were not hit by guards but men were, though “only” with fists, not clubs. However, upon entry, the women were asked if they were pregnant. If less than three to four months pregnant, the women detainees were subjected to surgical abortions. If more than four months pregnant, female detainees were given labor-inducing injections, after which it was believed by Former Detainee #8 that the babies were killed. During Former Detainee #8’s two months of detention, six women were forced to have abortions.
Reportedly, there was no interrogation at Chongjin jip-kyul-so. Instead there were nightly classes on North Korean rules and regulations, accompanied by nightime self-criticism sessions in groups of fifteen. If one member of the group of fifteen made some mistake or error during labor, or did something against the rules, the whole group would be punished.
WITNESS AND TESTIMONY: Former Detainee #9: Onsong Ro-dong-dan-ryeon-dae (Labor-Training Camp) and Chongjin Provincial
Detention Center A thirty-eight-year-old native of Shinpo, South Hamgyong Province, Former Detainee #9 was desperate for work in 1998, so he went to China and spent two years in Yanji and almost a year in Harbin before being caught by the Chinese police in June 2000. Deported to Onsong, he was jailed for ten days, during which time he convincingly denied having met any South Korean Christians while in China, even though he had. He was sent to the Onsong ro-dong-dan-ryeon-dae while awaiting transfer to the Chongjin jip-kyul-so. While again being transferred by train to a detention center in South Hamgyong Province, he escaped from his guards. He fled to China and then made his way down through southern China to Southeast Asia before gaining asylum in South Korea in January 2002.
In July 2000, when Former Detainee #9 was detained at the Onsong labor-training camp, run by the Onsong In-min-bo-an-seong (People’s Safety Agency) police, there were roughly seventy detainees: some forty repatriates from China and some thirty petty criminals. Detainees began work at half past four in the morning, cultivating crops. In the afternoons and evenings they did heavier labor — making bricks, sometimes until half past ten at night. At other times of the year, the detainees were sent to the mines, even though their detention was short-term while they waited to be transferred elsewhere. After he was transferred to the In-min-bo-an-seong (People’s Safety Agency) do-jip-kyul-so at Chongjin, Former Detainee #9’s labor assignment in mid-2000 was additional agricultural work. There was no bathing, brushing of teeth, or changing of clothes. He was still wearing the same clothes he was wearing when arrested in China. Food rations were the usual small amounts of boiled mashed corn and salty radish-leaf soup. Farm animals, he says, ate better.
The detainee population at the Chongjin detention center at that time was made up of thirty to forty men and fifty to sixty women. The guards would force the detainees to hit each other, a practice that Former Detainee #9 believed was designed to allow the North Korean authorities to assure the Chinese that the police were not beating the prisoners. There were no deaths in detention during his brief stay at Chongjin, though he mentioned that the petty criminals there, who had been detained longer, complained that those who died at the center were not given proper burials. Former Detainee #9’s biggest complaint regarded “the inhumane treatment of pregnant women.” He saw a group of ten taken away for mandatory abortions, and the women were returned to hard labor the very next day.
WITNESS AND TESTIMONY: Former Detainee #21, Onsong Ku-ryu-jang (Detention Facility) A thirty-eight-year-old native of Kangwong Province, Former Detainee #21 formerly worked at a state-run fertilizer factory. But production slowed and then stopped completely in 1997. Without work and running out of food, she and her husband fled to China in January 1999. They were caught by the Chinese police and repatriated to North Korea in August. She was held seven months for interrogation at the In-min-bo-an-seong (People’s Safety Agency) police ku-ryu-jang at Namyang-ku, Onsong-kun, North Hamgyong Province.
At that time, the In-min-bo-an-seong jail at Onsong held about 130 detainees, forty to fifty of whom were women. Former Detainee #21’s husband was put in a men’s cell, and she was put in one of the women’s cells. Her husband was beaten so badly that he confessed their desire to go to South Korea, after which time he died in detention from paratyphoid, a lice-borne disease that results in acute diarrhea, leading, if not treated, to dehydration and death. Her husband was left medically unattended for three days in men’s Cell Block No. 8. She was beaten with sticks, and the police agents beat her head against cement walls until she screamed at them to get it over and kill her too.
According to Former Detainee #21, beatings were common and harsh. Detainees were beaten so badly that they confessed to things they had not done. Women were beaten on the fingertips. One woman who was very ill, near death, was made to stand up and sit down repeatedly until she collapsed and died. Among the fifteen women with Former Detainee #21 in Cell Block No. 2, there were two repatriated pregnant women: one, six months pregnant; the other, eight months. Both were taken out for abortions. Upon return, both women said that their babies had been born alive and then were suffocated in vinyl cloth.
After seven months’ detention at Onsong, Former Detainee #21 was transferred to Chongjin bo-wi-bu jip-kyul-so in Chongjin, where she was held for another three months. Following her release from Chongjin, she again fled to China, even more determined to seek asylum in South Korea.
WITNESS AND TESTIMONY: Former Detainee #25, Onsong DetentionCenter and Nongpo Detention Center A young woman in her mid-thirties, Former Detainee #25 was born in Saetbyeol-kun, North Hamgyong Province. In April 1998, when the food shortage in North Korea became extremely severe where she was living, she went to China to make enough money to buy corn. A year later, she was caught and repatriated to North Korea. She was sent first to the In-min-bo-an-seong (People’s Safety Agency) police jip-kyul-so provincial detention center for wirl-gyong-ja — “illegal border crossers” — at Onsong, North Hamgyong Province, for five weeks in the autumn of 1999, and then taken for the month of December to the Nongpo jip-kyul-so detention center in Chongjin City. When she was released from Nongpo, a local police officer escorted her back to her hometown. She was made to promise not to go to China again, but since there was no food at home, she waded across the icy Tumen River on December 31, 1999. She forded the icy stream because there were too many guards at the spots where the river was frozen. She lived in China for two years before going by bus and on foot down through China and Southeast Asia. She arrived in Seoul in June of 2002.
Onsong Jip-kyul-so (Detention Center), North Hamgyong Province At Onsong, during the time of Former Detainee #25’s detention, roughly 150 persons were held in two rooms. The detainees, who were assigned to make bricks, were told that they were not human beings but dogs and pigs. They were made to sing “silly songs” in honor of Kim Jong Il. Detainees were asked the usual question: had they met any South Koreans or Christians while in China? Two women confessed to having converted to Christianity while in China and were taken away by the police agents, who told the remaining women that the two Christian converts had been executed and that the rest of the women should consider themselves warned.
When she was first taken to Onsong, Former Detainee #25 thought she was looking at ghosts, the detainees were so skinny. She herself lost 5 kilograms (11 pounds) during the five weeks she was detained, being fed only half-bowls of corn soup.
Nongpo Jip-kyul-so (Detention Center), Chongjin City At the Nongpo jip-kyul-so in Chongjin, in December 1999, roughly 180 detainees were required to construct a fish farm outside the detention center. During the month that Former Detainee #25 was there, several detainees who had been arrested in China while seeking to enter Mongolia — presumed by North Korean officials, perhaps not incorrectly, as an attempt to reach South Korea rather than to work for food in China — were transferred. The Nongpo detainees were taken to Kyo-hwa-so No. 22, or “twotwo,” described in Part One. Another female prisoner, a former teacher who had also been in Mongolia, was beaten almost to death, and the next day was taken out either to die or else to be transferred to “two-two.” A four-year-old boy, who was imprisoned with his mother, died of malnutrition.
According to Former Detainee #25, almost eighty percent of the detainees at Nongpo jip-kyul-so were women, ten to twelve of whom were pregnant. The women were told they would not be allowed to leave the detention center still carrying “children of betrayers” in their wombs.
Nongpo Detention Center Former Detainee #25 observed that the pregnant women were denied food and water and were kicked in the stomach to induce bleeding. She saw several women taken away for abortion-inducing injections before they were brought back to Nongpo. Four babies were born in a room set aside for birthing. The babies were put in a wicker basket in an adjacent store-room, covered in vinyl cloth, and left to die.
WITNESS: Former Detainee #26, Nongpo Detention Center A native of Chongjin City, North Hamgyong Province, Former Detainee #26 is a mother of four and a grandmother of two. In the mid-1990s, her husband died of natural causes. As the family slowly ran out of money and food in the late 1990s, she sent two daughters to China for work, but they were caught by traffickers and sold to Korean-Chinese men. Former Detainee #26, along with her son and a grandchild, then went to China to try to rescue her daughters and reunite her family. She found her daughters in Wongchun and took them to Yangji, where they lived for a year and a half before being caught by the Chinese police in April 2002.
First repatriated to the Musan jip-kyul-so, this grandmother was sent next to the Onsong bo-wi-bu (National Security Agency) police jail. There, she was forced to kneel motionless for a day before being sent to the Onsong bo-wi-bu ku-ryu-jang (detention center) for “heavy interrogation.” (She believes that a whole family together in China was deemed a more politicized desertion than a single family member in China trying to earn money to support the rest of the family back in North Korea.)
She was then transferred to the Nongpo jip-kyul-so detention center, where after a month, a guard pushed her to the ground, breaking one of her ribs. She was sent home for forty days of “sick leave” in order for her rib to heal. However, after thirty days on leave, in June, she again crossed the Tumen River to look for her remaining daughter, who had not been caught in April and had remained in China. Within the month, Former Detainee #26 was caught again and this time repatriated to Hoeryong bo-wi-bu jail, where she was made to sit motionless for six days. Her next destination was the Onsong Sambong-ku bo-wi-bu police station, where she was heavily interrogated and threatened with being sent to Oro No. 22 prison-labor camp. She begged and bribed the guards, who sent her instead to the In-min-bo-an-seong jail for a week of solitary confinement in a dark cell (without windows or lights). After becoming ill, she was given a sick release.
After a week at home, she again fled to China in August 2001, where she remained in hiding until December. This time her luck turned, when she met a Korean-American missionary in Yangji who helped her join a group of nine persons on the “underground” land-route. After traveling through Beijing and Kunming, the group made their way through Southeast Asia. In June 2002, she reached Seoul and obtained asylum. When interviewed for this report in Seoul in November 2002, Former Detainee #26, who had suffered so much and tried so hard to help her family avert starvation and keep them together, was accompanied by her young granddaughter. Former Detainee #26’s daughter, the granddaughter’s mother, had been located in China and assisted in joining another group of North Korean refugees on the long overland trek to Thailand.
Unfortunately, she was caught crossing the Vietnamese border and turned over to the Chinese police. As of September 2003, her whereabouts were still unknown. TESTIMONY: Nongpo Detention Center, Chongjin According to Former Detainee #26, in May 2000, the Nongpo jip-kyul-so in Chongjin held roughly 75 men, 175 women, and a few orphans and teenagers. The women detainees were held in three rooms: one room for paratyphoid sufferers, one room for pregnant women, and the last room for 130 female prisoners, whose quarters were so cramped that there was not space for all of them to simultaneously lie down for sleep. Detainees were fed some 70–75 kernels of boiled corn per meal. In May 2000, twenty-eight women among the detainees were from three to nine months pregnant. Former Detainee #26 saw three eight-month-old fetuses aborted and seven babies killed. Several women from Cell No. 1 (see sketch below and satellite photograph on page 120), including Former Detainee #26, were brought over to Cell No. 3 to help deliver the babies. When the babies were born, they were placed face down on the ground. Some babies died right away; others lay there breathing longer. If any babies were still alive after two days, the guards would smother them in wet vinyl. The babies lying on the ground could be seen by the women standing at the front of the other cells. The guards would say that the mothers had to see and hear the babies die because these babies were Chinese.
39 While the “right to leave” is an internationally recognized human right, there is no corresponding “right to enter” vis-à-vis another country, control over which remains within the sovereign power of states.
40 For more information on the situation of North Koreans in China see “A Field Survey Report of the North Korean Refugees in China,” Dr. Christine Y. Chang, The Commission to Help North Korean Refugees (CNKR), December 1999, Seoul (www.nk-refugees.or.kr), and “The Invisible Exodus: North Koreans in the People’s Republic of China.” Human Rights Watch report, (New York, N.Y.: Human Rights Watch) Vol. 14, No. 8 (E), November 2002.
41 Before 1998, these police were called the Sa-hoe-an-jeon-bu Social Safety Agency.
42 Generally speaking, the Kuk-ga-bo-wi-bu administer the kwan-li-so, and the In-min-bo-an-seong administer the kyo-hwa-so.
43 Some North Koreans interviewed for this report used ka-mok and ku-ryu-jang more or less interchangeably, with ku-ryu-jang having a somewhat more generic connotation.
44 Three of the former prisoners interviewed for the first part of this report were sent to a kwan-li-so or a kyo-hwa-so, following their post-repatriation interrogations.
45 The eyewitnesses of ethnic infanticide interviewed for this report are themselves former detainees who fled North Korea a second time and were granted asylum in Seoul. A Belgian NGO, Human Rights Without Frontiers, interviewed several former North Korean detainees still hiding in China and obtained testimony of baby-killing at Hoeryong (www.hrwf.net).
46 Some former prisoners referred to this detention center as Nongpo, and some referred to it as Chongjin. Nongpo is a section of Chongjin City. Some former prisoners referred to it as a provincial detention center, and some referred to it as a detention center. The author has tried to preserve each reference according to the way in which each former prisoner referred to this facility. For ease of reference, each visual image of this facility is referred to as Nongpo Detention Center.
|
