The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps

http://www.hrnk.org/hiddengulag/preface.html
By Anne Applebaum

From Preface:
"Painstakingly, David Hawk and the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea have compiled an enormous amount of information, including not just the numbers of prisoners and the locations of camps but also the details of camp life — the winter cold, the numb fingers, the workplace accidents — that make the stories more vivid. Those details are also what make this report so powerful.

"Some, of course, will avoid reading it, fully knowing that if they do read it, they will have to change their tactics, or at least think differently about the political problems posed by North Korea. 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."





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