North Korea: Three former North Korean inmates gave harrowing accounts yesterday of alleged suffering at political camps, part of an event organised by activists aimed at prodding Seoul to tackle Pyongyang on human rights.
The reclusive communist state usually gives a prickly response to criticism of the way it treats its citizens. South Korea has largely avoided confronting it on the issue for fear of hampering reconciliation efforts.
"North Korean prisons aren't just prisons," ex-prisoner Kang Cheol-hwan told a forum taking place in the lobby of the National Assembly. "The situation is similar to Auschwitz. Back then people were killed by gas - in the North, people are worked to death without being fed. Only the method is different."
He said prisoners were fed only corn, salt and porridge, despite having to work from around 4 a.m. to 8 or 9 p.m., with just a brief break. "The way to bring about change is by confronting its rights issues," he added, urging the South Korean government to stop turning a blind eye to the matter.
Two other former inmates, who said they had been held in a prison in Hamkyung province, also re-lived their past at the event, entitled "North Korea Holocaust". It was organised by the International Coalition for North Korean Human Rights, a South Korean rights group.
Some mothers resorted to feeding their children baby rats, recalled Kim Young-soon, who said this was driven by the belief that it could get rid of the bulging stomachs caused by starvation.
Former detainee An Hyuck said there were at least five such camps and 150,000 inmates.
"We were surrounded by death every day," he said, adding that anyone trying to escape would be shot.
A report by the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea has said the North has between 150,000 to 200,000 political prisoners working as slave labourers.
The North consistently denies these camps exist, although British Foreign Office minister Bill Rammell, who visited Pyongyang in September, said North Korean ministers told him about running prison camps for "re-education".
While North Korea has engaged in dialogue with some European countries on human rights, it has refused to discuss the issue with South Korea or the United States.
The North, which is under international pressure to scrap its nuclear weapons programmes, said a new US law urging more human rights in the North meant nuclear talks were meaningless because America was "hell-bent" on topping the communist state.
The North Korean Human Rights Act, adopted last month, calls for the expansion of human rights for the North's 22 million citizens, and earmarked up to $24 million a year for the effort.
- (Reuters)