David L. Chaplin II
Impunity Watch, Asia

SEOUL, North Korea – North Korean political prisoner camp is a place where public executions, death by starvation and torture are rampant.

Human Rights group, Amnesty International, conducted an investigation into this death camp. Amnesty held interviews with fifteen former inmates and prison guards, expressing their daily experiences in the camps and describing the lack of food, conditions of hard labor.

200,000 people are reported to held in these camps, which according to satellite imagery obtained by the Amnesty, are being built across central North Korea.

“North Korea can no longer deny the undeniable. For decades the authorities have refused to admit to the existence of mass political prison camps,” said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International Asia Pacific Director.

Satellite images show four of the six camps occupying huge areas of land and located in vast wilderness sites in South Pyongan, South Hamkyung and North Hamkyung provinces, and producing products ranging from soy bean paste and sweets to coal and cement.

As facilities expand common detainees include house prisoners accused of criticizing the leadership, those believed to be part of anti-government groups and even those caught listening to South Korean broadcasts.

“As North Korea seems to be moving towards a new leader in Kim Jong-un and a period of political instability, the big worry is that the prison camps appear to be growing in size.” reports Amnesty.

“Guilt-by-association” is reported to keep thousands confined to these camps.

Amnesty estimated that 40% of inmates die from malnutrition. And testimonials reveal that every former inmate at one camp had witnessed a public execution.

Conditions in these camps are very poor for children who are often tortured through inhumane living conditions.

One child was held for eight months in a “torture-cube-cell” so small it was impossible to stand or lie down.

Many witnesses say that other more common forms of torture include sleep deprivation, bamboo slivers under the fingernails, water-boarding and suspending prisoners whose feet and hands have been bound behind them.

One former inmate told Amnesty how he and his father were forced to witness the public execution of his mother and brother.

A former prison guard expressed how inmates would eat snakes, rats and pig feed for survival. In particular a former inmate told how she had picked, cleaned and eaten corn kernels from cow dung.

Education was limited or non-existent inside these camps; the youth are frequently worked until they collapse.

Aidan Foster-Carter, Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Sociology and Modern Korea at Leeds University in England, said: “It is difficult to get hard data (on North Korea) for obvious reasons, and it could be that the numbers of people in the camps are growing. What may be happening is that as part of the changing political situation the government has conducted a purge of people opposed to the succession (of leader Kim Jong ll by his son Kim Jong-un).”

In its most recent human rights report on North Korea, the U.S. State Department describes the country’s human rights record as “deplorable.”

Amnesty International believes an estimated 40% of inmates at Yodok, the prison camp, died from malnutrition between 1999 and 2001.

“These are places out of sight of the rest of the world, where almost the entire range of human rights protections that international law has tried to set up for last 60 years are ignored.”

“Hundreds of thousands of people exist with virtually no rights, treated essentially as slaves, in some of the worst circumstances we’ve documented in the last 50 years,” said Sam Zarifi.

Amnesty International is urging North Korea to close its prison camps and release political prisoners.

For more  information, please see:

CNN – Report: Torture, starvation rife in North Korea political prisons – 4 May 2011

Amnesty International – Images reveal scale of North Korean political prison camps – 3 May 2011

Arirang – Korea for the World, The World for Korea – 4 May 2011

Bangladesh News – North Korea jail camps ‘growing’ – 4 May 2011