It is embarrassing to suggest to someone that he has family members in jail. But we do. When believers go public in North Korea they can face death in a number of ways and places. One of the camps they might be forced to enter is this place, that some call the worst place in the world.
When North Korean Kim Hyun Hee, the North Korean pardoned in South Korea after being involved in the bombing Incident of 1987, and her family were on official business in Cuba her father once pointed to some land that was barely visible on the horizon. "That's America, Hyun Hee, the worst place in the world."
I have a different candidate for that description.
If Gehenna, or Hell, is the worst place in the universe from a Biblical point of view, then surely anything that is related to eternal torment must be the worst place on the earth. North Korea is a prison and a land of prisoners, where torment and deprivation have become a way of life. The "Gulag" within that nation is even more evil, and some say, the worst of the worst is the
HOERYONG CONCENTRATION CAMP
Here are pieces of the description given us by David Hawk in his Hidden Gulag:
Official name: Chosun People's Security Unit 2209.
Area covered: 30 x 25 miles! (750 square miles! That's more than half as big as Rhode Island, and 10 times bigger than Washington D.C.!)
Guards: 1000
Administrative agents: 500
Prisoners: 50,000
Nature of prisoners: The families of alleged wrongdoers.
Annual production quotas: 400 tons corn, 100,000 tons potatoes, 50,000 tons lima beans, 10,000 tons red peppers. Many other foods produced. Much coal also mined and shipped to Power Plants and Steel mills.
Estimated deaths from malnutrition (in spite of food produced): 1,500-2,000 (mostly children)
Public executions per year: 10
Reasons for executions: Stealing food to survive.
Basic diet: Corn, potatoes. Meat only from rats, snakes, frogs, if they could catch them.
Other deaths: From beatings if quota not met. For pregnancy. Sex/marriage forbidden. Beatings for camp regulations being disobeyed.
Pay for work: 500 won ($227.00) per year.
Education: Basics of reading, writing, arithmetic, (youth.)
Holidays: 9 per year, mostly Kim Il Sung related.
Hoeryong Camp is a Kwan-li-so
...that is, a political penal labor camp. Political prisoners are those in prison because of their perceived beliefs, whether political, religious, or whatever. Here is a listing of some of the descriptives that apply to such camps, and therefore to Hoeryong. These items are also classified as crimes against humanity, per the new book from Freedom House by David Hawk, Concentrations of Inhumanity.
Those who think wrong, along with their families, just "disappear" and wind up in "family camp."
There is no judicial process followed to deposit human beings in these camps.
Most prisoners are cut off from their families and friends and any contact with the outside world.
Prisoners must eat at a below-subsistence level.
No North Korean laws cover the kwan-li-so.
Prisoners are regularly subjected to beatings and/or more systematic torture.
Prisoners are often compelled to observe executions and to defile corpses of the just-executed.
Female prisoners are frequently raped by officials and guards of the prison.
There are high rates of death at these camps.
Pregnancies that occur are terminated by involuntary abortion.
Infanticide takes place if a child should somehow be born.
families do their own cooking using below-subsistence rations
meals supplemented by eating grass, snakes, frogs, rabbits, rats
kept on verge of starvation for control purposes
back-breaking labor: mining, timber cutting with shovels, pick-axes, hand-pushed carts filled with ore, carrying logs down from mountains. All while half-starved.
North Korean Stories: Witnesses of the Hoeryong Tragedy
A food factory produced soy sauce and cookies and bean paste. And here the women worked between 20 and 30 years old. The women are the sexual slaves of the security officers, they are forced to wear only white thin gowns and no underwear, they are not given underwear. They make all the beautiful women work here.
The prisoners go to the coal mine along this road, in carts pulled by cows. And while they are passing through here, I was instructed to beat a disabled person by my superior, and I had no choice but to obey.
Even in the small village there is an officers headquarters, and if any prisoner disobeys, then he can be beaten here, and the officers were armed, and they would kill prisoners here.
Not only here but all other places, even in the small hills they bury bodies. And when we cut the trees down, sometimes we find a buried body. Not only here, but all around here are buried bodies.
In the hills here, if there is some flat area, it is covered with graves. And if people start to farm there, they find bodies or bones.
This area is where there are the most densely buried bodies. There are graves all over here, and we can see the graves where there are no woods. There is no particular area to bury dead bodies, but they put them all in this general vicinity, and no one can cry. It is forbidden to cry, and there is no funeral ceremony, and the officers say, "The anti-revolutionary person has died, so there is no reason to cry."
I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,' he said. 'The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.'
Hyuk has drawn detailed diagrams of the gas chamber he saw. He said: 'The glass chamber is sealed airtight. It is 3.5 metres wide, 3m long and 2.2m high_ [There] is the injection tube going through the unit. Normally, a family sticks together and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners. Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass.'
He explains how he had believed this treatment was justified. 'At the time I felt that they thoroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault; that we were poor, divided and not making progress as a country.
'It would be a total lie for me to say I feel sympathetic about the children dying such a painful death. Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all.'
His testimony is backed up by Soon Ok-lee, who was imprisoned for seven years. 'An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners,' she said. 'One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it but to give it to the 50 women. I gave them out and heard a scream from those who had eaten them. They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes they were quite dead.'
Where is this place?
The camp is located some 12-15 miles outside the city of Hoeryong, a city that sits on the Tumen River, opposite China in the far northeastern province of North Hamgyong. The Chinese city across the river is Longjing. It is said that Kim Jong Il's mother, Kim Jong Suk, his father's first wife, was born in Hoeryong. But far more notoriety has come to the city by way of the reputation of this camp.
General Characteristics of Kwan-Li So physical locations:
located in the mountains in the remote interior
cover huge areas, miles long and wide
outer perimeters surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers
multiple thousands of prisoners
housed in scattered areas based on category of prisoner
families live in tiny shacks, sometimes multiple families to single shack
And there is much much more...
I refer you to the books mentioned above and the websites at the bottom of this page.
What can I do?
Need I say, PRAY? It may be the only effective measure at this time. Weep, and howl, and call out to the living God that these atrocities shall end!
Can you write a letter? Pour your heart out to persons in government positions, some of whom are listed below. Or write and encourage workers in the field who may be stationed in China or South Korea.
The United States Government:
Ambassador Christopher R. Hill
82 Sejong-no, Jongno-gu
110-710 SEOUL, KOREA
Government of South Korea
His Excellency Lee Myung-bak, President
Republic of Korea
1 Sejong-no, Jongno-gu
110-820, SEOUL, KOREA
Government of North Korea
Mr. Pak Gil-yon
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary
Permanent Mission of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to the UN
Older
Top
