Lina Petronino ’20
A policy of intense ‘cleansing’ is enforced in North Korean camps, meaning that the original offender’s children, and his or her children’s children, will have to bear the immense torture and inhumanity that lays within the walls to which they are confined. Therefore, a vast majority of the inhabitants of these camps will never experience life outside of the oversized cages.
However, those who have had exposure to the external world are known to take their lives once exposed to the merciless conditions of the camp they have been assigned. As for the first generation offenders that have the strength to continue living, they have to discard many of the aspects of themselves which make them human, as said by Hyuk Kim, a former prisoner, in a recent U.N. report. Among the second and third generation prisoners, there is no understanding of human emotions; they cannot comprehend or express the complexities of grief, love, compassion, and kindness. All they can really feel is the consuming and aching sensation of their constantly empty stomachs.
But one cannot assign blame to these prisoners, for it is the remorseless environment they live in that has molded their minds to think like this since birth. In these institutions, a set of rules is thoroughly enforced. These laws include:
- Guards must be obeyed unconditionally
- No two prisoners can meet without the permission of a guard
- Prisoners must fulfill their work quota
- Prisoners cannot steal, no matter how small the amount
- Prisoners cannot attempt to escape
- Anyone that sees an offender or to these laws must report them
Those who do not obey these rules are either tortured or shot on sight; it is usually the latter. Due to these regulations, public and gory executions are a norm, guards are allowed to beat prisoners without restraint or a given reason, deaths are viewed as normal and much more.
In the book Escape From Camp 14, a story about one man’s heinous accounts and escape from the prison camp to which he was born, the protagonist, Shin Donghyuk, describes how he had betrayed his mother and brother by snitching to the guards that they were planning to escape.
This resulted in the public killings of his two relatives, which Shin had felt they deserved for defying the unforgiving laws of the camp he had once lived in. In fact, he had hated them for it, because it resulted in him being harassed by his fellow students and teacher alike, who believed that their actions were precedented because he was related to such criminals. Shin also describes how his teacher had struck a fellow student to the ground until she had met her untimely death just because the student had stolen five grains of corn.
Stealing food is not uncommon in the camps. In many cases, if a prisoner does not steal, he or she will starve to death. The prisoners are given one serving of corn porridge, pickled cabbage, and cabbage soup every day, unless they are denied food as a form of punishment or if a famine plagues the country. Oftentimes, prisoners would capture snakes, insects, or rats to cook or scavenge through undigested kernels of corn in cow dung.
Yet, despite these truthful and petrifying accounts of life within these camps, many North Koreans deny
a that there is a problem. For example, the North Korean Central News Agency states that, “There is no ‘human rights issue in this country, as everyone leads the most dignified and happy life”.
North Korea’s failure to address these problems coincides with the general disinterest or concern that the rest of the world possess towards them. In South Korea, North Korea’s neighboring country, only 3% of the population voted North Korea as a serious concern to them. China is also notorious for their lack of compassion to North Korean refugees, who will oftentimes send these refugees back to their retched homeland if caught. However, if the terrifying yet necessary knowledge were to be spread globally, the rest of the world would more willingly embark towards eradicating the horrors that occur in the continent of North Korea. But if we remain ignorant and silent, nothing will change. People will continue to live in the awful conditions of the camps as they and their ancestors have for decades now.
Years down the line, we cannot afford to look back on history and wonder what restrained us from taking action.
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