About North Korea

by JSH

Overview

The event Beyond the Border: North Korea seeks to educate Carolina and Duke students and the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill community about North Korea and its current political, religious, and social climate through the first-hand knowledge and experiences of a North Korean defector.

As a Carolina student, I’ve noticed that students have little knowledge of North Korea. Students only know—and vaguely—that North Korea is associated with political words that President Bush has frequently uttered: “nuclear weapons” and “axis of evil.” My peers naively ask me whether I am from North or South Korea without realizing that a reply “North” would mean that I am from a “hermit kingdom” of confinement, a Stalinist regime of oppression and starvation, and an Orwellian nation of illusion. More than just a political association, North Korea should be realized as a grave humanitarian situation, where people are brainwashed, stripped of their freedom, brutalized, and killed through a massive system of concentration camps.

The “Hermit Kingdom” of Confinement

North Korea’s citizens are not allowed to voluntarily leave the country. There is no such thing as leaving, only risking one’s life and escaping. Despite the perils of armed guards, exhaustion, starvation, dehydration, and harsh mountainous conditions, in the past 10 years a hundred thousand North Koreans have made it across border into China, North Korea’s northern neighbor. Sadly, one-hundred-thousand is minute compared to the 23.30 million still living under Kim Jung Il’s cruel iron fist. Likewise, a southward escape across the Korean peninsula’s DMZ line, the most militarily fortified border in the world, is another unyielding solution.

How many of those one-hundred-thousand survive after escape is hard to determine. The United Nations and humanitarian organizations worldwide advocate the safety of North Koreans as refugees in China. But China blatantly disregards the international promulgations, collaborating with its communist ally to actively search and seize these “criminals,” to impose brutal treatment upon them in Chinese prisons until their eventual repatriation to North Korea. Upon repatriation, they are punished for the felon crime of defection: executed or imprisoned in concentration camps—tortured and subjected to inhumane amounts of labor, often in dangerous working conditions with little to no food and water.

The Stalinist Regime of Oppression and Starvation

There is an estimated 200,000 prisoners in North Korea’s numerous concentration camps, most serving life-time sentences. Citizens are imprisoned even for the most trivial of crimes, such as stealing a piece of bread in order to survive. (In the mid-1990s a severe famine hit North Korea on top of its already chronic food shortage. An estimated three million people died). The government also imprisons citizens arbitrarily for “posing a threat” to the state and its Juche ideology that practices the worshipping of Kim Il Sung and his successor son Kim Jung Il as gods. Family members of political defectors are imprisoned for up to three generations. This is the government’s grotesque form of punishment for successful escapees and also serves to dissuade citizens from attempting escape.

In the mid-1990s, a famine devastated North Korea that forced its citizens to flee the country in search of food, despite being ignorant of the outside world. As more people continue to escape North Korea, more information leaks out of the “hermit kingdom” of confinement to evidence a Stalinist regime of oppression. The U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea has published extensive research on North Korea’s human rights violations, one of which is The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps. This publication is a compilation of testimonies from thirty in-depth debriefings conducted by the South Korean government of escapees and defectors who were either former prisoners or prison guards. It reveals the specific brutalities that one would experience in North Korea’s concentration camps. Not surprisingly, the exclusive testimonies coincide and also parallel in the level of brutality. Prison-guard sketches of the camp’s blueprint match satellite images. Both prisoners and prison guards can pinpoint exactly where they worked and stayed in their respective concentration camp.

The Orwellian Nation of Illusion

It is remarkable how much North Korea resembles George Orwell’s 1984 dystopian society. North Korea’s citizens are kept isolated from the rest of the world and only fed government propaganda. There is no political or religious freedom. Any sort of dissension is preemptively eliminated through the secret system of concentration camps—people just seem to “disappear”—and the entire country’s fervent worship of Kim Jung Il as a god is very real. Citizens believe they are a part of a “worker’s paradise,” despite the fact that the majority of the population is impoverished; the average North Korean is seven inches shorter than his South Korean counterpart because of malnutrition.

The North Korean government is obviously morally depraved. People are worked and killed off like cattle whenever the government deems necessary. It controls people’s minds by propaganda, and anyone disillusioned is simply eliminated through the system of concentration camps. Thus, countrymen have continued worshipping their leader for decades, their very leader who sanctions violent crimes against them and brainwashes the entire country in order to maintain control.

I remember watching a documentary by British journalists who were allowed inside the capital Pyongyang, which serves as North Korea’s (eerie) showcase to the rest of the world, where they have erected buildings too lavish for the country’s poverty. The journalists were taken by the tour guide into Pyongyang’s museum and led into a room only laden with a few desks with pencils. There they were adamantly told that their “Great Leader” invented such things as desks and pencils that the country graciously uses today. Also in the capital, pictures of Kim Il Sung everywhere display his omnipotence like a god. People’s minds are literally encapsulated by the country’s ubiquitous propaganda.

Politics

Politically, government and religion are inseparable. Kim Jung Il, the son of Kim Il Sung, is the supreme godhead and leader. As dictator Kim Jung Il spends 30-50% of the nation’s GDP on military and has created the fourth largest standing army in the world comprised of two million soldiers—yet North Korea is one of the poorest countries. It is no wonder that its citizens are starving to death. Instead of the corrupt totalitarian government feeding its starving people, it has long been indicted of developing nuclear weapons, arming terrorist organizations in the Middle East, and passing nuclear intelligence on to enemy countries such as Syria.

In October of 2007, after 14 years of halted negotiations from breaching a 1994 non-proliferation agreement with the U.S., North Korea has finally agreed in six-party talks with the U.S., South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia, to submit an accurate report of all its nuclear facilities in exchange for one million metric tons of fuel oil or the economic equivalent thereof. The deadline for this report was by the end of 2007; it is now 2008 and North Korea has yet to comply with a full statement.

Vision for North Korea-UNC: Our Mission

Our purpose is to research North Korea's political, economic, social, and cultural climate and history; to increase interest and organize a study of its current affairs; to facilitate discussion and debate; and ultimately raise awareness of its human rights violations. In close collaboration with Duke's VNK, we actively work to raise funds and be an outspoken voice for public awareness on behalf of North Korean refugees. Anne Applebaum, the author of Gulag: A History writes:

“…as in Stalin’s time, North Korea’s leadership doesn’t want anyone to know any of these details [about concentration camps], since such revelations not only will damage their foreign reputation but also put their own regime at risk…

Certainly after absorbing such details, it will be more difficult for Americans or Europeans to sit down and negotiate, coldly, with their Korean counterparts and not mention human rights violations. South Koreans, when they know the details of life in the North, will also find it more difficult to argue in favor of appeasing the Northern regime. If these stories filter back to the North Korean police and administrators, those officials too will find it more difficult to justify their own behavior, or to claim that they don’t know what is really happening in the country’s concentration camps. And if the full truth about the camps becomes known to the wider population, then whatever support remains for the state constructed by Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il will begin, even more decisively, to ebb away.

This is not to say that words can make a dictatorship collapse overnight. But words certainly can make a dictatorship collapse over time, as experience during the last two decades has shown. Totalitarian regimes are built on lies and can be damaged, even destroyed, when those lies are exposed. The greater and more detailed evidence that can be provided, the more damage the truth can do.”

This is exactly what our organization seeks to do: spread the truth. We may only be one organization at one university, but we are one of many organizations at many different universities that spread the truth to our fellow students, who can then join us to exponentially spread the truth to the world around us. Our organization seeks to bring human rights to the forefront. We do not want North Korea to just be a political issue, but we want North Korea to be intricately tied with human rights.

We want people to realize that understanding a part of the world so unlike ours is like beholding an abstract work of art. Both are mentally hard to grasp. Although we may not completely understand, it does not mean we don’t try to. Rather, we are challenged to stretch our minds, to rally our creativity, to push beyond our normal limits of thinking—so that we may arrive at a closer understanding. Others’ sufferings are distant to us, and closing the gap of estrangement takes focus. But by doing this, unreality that arises from an idle mind becomes more and more our reality—reality that people who are not any different from us are suffering, that people who are very much like us desire the same basic rights—universal human rights. And ultimately, understanding can move us to action.