A small and very hungry girl is searched by her teacher, who finds five grains of wheat in her pocket.
The teacher beats her to death in front of her classmates.
A teenage boy witnesses the public execution of his mother and brother.
A man is made to help load the corpses of prisoners dead from starvation, put them in a pot and burn them. A mother is forced to drown her baby in a bucket.
Are these the accounts of witnesses to crimes against humanity in a concentration camp or torture chamber of the past? Something from Auschwitz, perhaps, or acts committed under Stalin or Pol Pot?
No, these are human rights violations committed in the 21st century in the modern day prison camp ludicrously named the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The horrors inflicted daily on up to 200,000 prisoners have not, as yet, penetrated the minds and hearts of most people.
North Korea’s camps have existed twice as long as Stalin’s Soviet gulags and 12 times as long as the Nazi extermination camps. Yet we’ve barely noticed. Read entire article here.
As published in The Sunday Age Dec 1 2013
Also as published in The Sun-Herald
3 Responses
I’m still amazed how few feminists ever raise the issue of treatment of women in Muslim countries, especially the Middle East and North Africa. It makes me sick when I read how they are treated and murdered on a daily basis. Our media do not report the truth of what happens for fear of offending Muslims. Well, Im over it. In Darfur, Islamists would raid villages killing the Christian men and then raping women and children and yet the media whitewashes it. Islamists were raping young girls and then inserting the machine gun into their vaginas before blowing them away. Even the massacre at the shopping centre in Kenya where again Islamic men raped women and children and then beheading them and throwing their heads off the roof of the centre. Again, no mention of these atrocities in our mainstream media.
I met Shin Dong-hyuk, and heard his incredible story in 2009, when my office, in co-ordination with a South Korean NGO – ‘Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights’, organised an international conference on North Korean Human Rights, at the Grand Hyatt in Melbourne. Shin Dong-hyuk, is the only known surviving escapee from Kaechon re-education camp 14, into which he was born in 1983. He had to be punished for the ”bad blood” of his parents whose lineage is politically suspect, a routine practice of the DPRK.
But it is not just camp prisoners who suffer in under this Stalinist-style regime. At our conference, the North Korea was described as having a caste system. The entire population is divided into three categories, the loyal categories, wavering categories, and hostile categories. These categories are then divided into 51 sub-categories. Once you are considered an enemy of the state, then you stay that way forever and you cannot ever get access to education, jobs, and health care, etc. During the conference I appeared on ABC Radio National with Professor Jae-Chun Won of South Korea’s Handong International Law School. The Professor gave a lucid, but chilling account of life in North Korea. A transcript of the interview can be viewed here – http://www.danbymp.com/headlines/1361-human-rights-in-north-korea.html.
At the time of the conference, the locations of North Korea’s prison camps became public for the first time, and my website was one of the first sites to make the maps (below) available for the world. After the holocaust many Germans said that they did not know that the concentration camps existed. While too few people are aware of North Korea’s camps, the information is out there. No-one can say that the information did not exist for all to see. I certainly hope that Mr Kirby’s commission of inquiry opens the eyes of the world to what is happening under the evil empire of the Kims.
Feminists living in the west as well as Feminists living in Egypt, Libya, and other Middle Eastern countries have consistently raised their voices protesting at embedded male violence being committed with impunity against women and girls living in these countries.
However, white male controlled western malestream media as usual ignores the work of these Feminists because it is essential white men’s propaganda continues to be viewed ‘as the definitive truth’ wherein white men claim ‘it is those men/countries over there committing these atrocities not our white western civilised countries!’
Some of the sadistic acts of male sexual violence being inflicted on North Korean women and girls is identical to the male created pornography industry but because western men believe it is the right to view filmed sadistic male sexual violence committed against women and girls, magically the said filmed male sexual violence against women and girls becomes ‘mens’ sexual entertainment/mens’ sexual fantasies’ not real sadistic male sexual violence.
The holocaust created by the Nazis was not an isolated incident because other countries have also created their own concentration camps and British government also created them when Britain was fighting the Boers in South Africa at end of 19th century.
We must be careful not to claim ‘it is happening over there and ignore what is happening in our own countries. ‘
The fact that totalitarian regimes continue to exist must of course be made public but at the same time we mustn’t fall in the trap of claiming ‘here in the west we are more civilised than those ‘totalitarian regimes.’ Australia’s immigration policy continues to imprison migrants in camps which are unfit for humans and the UK’s government too has immigration policies which violate migrant’ women’s and mens’ human rights.