North Korea Unspeakable Horrors

I've always been fascinated with North Korea, especially in the recent time, especially after the Junior Kim took over the dictatorship from his daddy.

A lot of people don’t know much about North Korea. Mainly because North Korea is completely cut off from international community – nothing gets in the country, and nothing gets out. Most of the narrative about the country is built from testimonials of the survivors and the work done by the spy agencies (satellites, espionage..etc). Based on the narrative, there’s absolutely no doubt that North Korea is perhaps the most repressive country in the world.

If time permits, I’ll try to write more articles about North Korea. I hope you guys are as interested in this as I am. I have to warn you that most of my coverage will be extremely negative and maybe a bit graphic. So, you’re probably not going to hear about their great gymnastic program or their hardworking students.

I was recently reading news about North Korean Auschwitz-style prison camps. Lots of unspeakable horror is going on there.

Amnesty commissioned the images from DigitalGlobe, a commercial satellite imagery vendor. In their release, Amnesty claims that up to 200,000 prisoners, including children, are being held "in horrific conditions in six sprawling political prison camps."

Amnesty said the camp covered an area of around 216 square miles (560 square km), or three times the size of America's capital, Washington DC.

Pyongyang denies their existence, despite satellite images and testimony from witnesses. Amnesty claims many prisoners are allegedly being held for nothing more than watching foreign soap operas or holding a particular religious belief, while others are incarcerated simply for having a family member deemed politically undesirable.

According to Mr. Lee, women were "disappeared" after being raped: "After a night of 'servicing' the officials, the women had to die because the secret could not get out. This happens at most of the political prison camps."

Kim Young-soon, a former detainee in Camp 15 in the 1980s, described a public execution she witnessed of two detainees caught attempting to escape: "They were brought to a stage after they were badly beaten. The prisoners were tied to wooden stakes and shot three times in their head, chest and feet," she recalled.

In September this year, a United Nations inquiry into human rights abuses in North Korea highlighted the "unspeakable" and "widespread" atrocities being carried out in camps that required an international response, including a mother forced to drown her own baby and a prison camp inmate compelled to eat rodents and lizards just to survive.