• by Ahn Mi Young (seoul)
• Wednesday, February 17, 2010
• Inter Press Service

Kim Tae-Jin remembers shuddering in fear when he arrived at Yoduk Prison, a notorious detention centre in North Korea, in 1998. 'First, a fear of brutal uncertainty struck me. I doubted if I would remain alive there for long,' Kim recalled.

Kim’s fear quickly turned into hopeless despair when he saw the other inmates who had been in detention for several years. 'Those inmates looked like 'walking skeletons',' Kim narrated during a recent press conference here.

It took only a few weeks’ stay in prison for Kim to himself become like a 'walking skeleton.' He lived on a daily ration of 200 grammes of corn soup and was required to work from dawn to dark. Even during harsh winters, he and his fellow hungry inmates would struggle to cut one gigantic tree after another, pull them down the steep hills and carry them off to another place.

'I would feel faint,' Kim said. 'Hunger was at its extreme, depriving us of any human dignity. We were eating anything that crawled or flew. We ate any grass under the sun.'

Kim, who has since escaped Stalinist North Korea and defected to the South, said that until today, he does not know why the secret police brought him to Yoduk.

Even children are not spared imprisonment. Many are detained together with their parents, who cannot even explain to their children what charges brought them together in the prison camp.

'I was imprisoned with my husband and two sons,' said 73-year-old Kim Young-Soon, who was an inmate at Yoduk from 1970 to 1979.

One of her sons drowned and the other was shot to death while trying to escape from the prison. Kim’s husband was sent to another prison camp and she has not heard from him since.

Kim Young-Soon said it was years after her release in 1979 when she found out the charge against her -- she had been a classmate of Sung Hye-Rim, an alleged mistress of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il.

'I realised that I knew too much about her, something that North Korean officials want to erase from their records in order to place a second wife (Ko Mi Young) and have a legitimate bloodline to succeed Kim,' she said.

Kim said it takes just 'small things' to bring North Koreans to prison. 'If you say Kim Jong-Il has a lump on the neck, if you watch South Korean TV dramas, if you damage the statue of Kim Il-Sung’s torso, these can bring you and your family into the gulag without trial or explanation,' she pointed out.

It was a different case for Jung Sung-Shik, whose real name is being withheld for security reasons. Jung was a trader in the northern border towns of China in the late 1990s, which brought him into regular contact with South Korean businessmen. Then, one of his North Korean colleagues tipped off the North Korean authorities that Jung was spying for South Korea.

'It was not true. I was doing regular business with the South Koreans,' Jung said. It was only after his release in 2004 that he learnt that he had been detained for three years for alleged espionage.

Twelve days after he was freed from prison, Jung fled to China and then entered South Korea through Vietnam and Cambodia, using the escape route that many others have used to flee North Korea as well.

In December, a Seoul-based non-government organisation called Democracy Network Against the North Korean Gulag, which represents North Korean defectors in South Korea including the two Kims and Jung, petitioned the International Criminal Court at The Hague to put Kim Jong-Il on trial for human rights violations.

'People would be terrified just at the word ‘gulag’. The horror of the gulag camps is used to keep a firm control on 23 million North Koreans who suffer from malnutrition and poverty but must remain mum about their pain,' said Kim Young-Soon.

According to the South Korean National Human Rights Commission an estimated 200,000 political prisoners are being held in six North Korean prisons.

'We will continue to witness the (horrors) of the gulags in North Korea when we stand at the EU (European Union)-led hearings in June,' Jung Gyoung-Il, secretary-general of the Democracy Network Against the North Korean Gulag, said in an interview.

About 16,000 North Korean defectors currently live in South Korea, many of them reaching the country after months of adventurous passage through Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos or Thailand.

Laos is the most preferred route because they can be sent to South Korea after paying about 200 U.S. dollars. Missionaries who work with escapees from the North add that there are a number of North Koreans who have no choice but to stay in Laos because they are unable this amount.

China, meantime, has intensified its watch against North Koreans who are attempting to cross the border in search of food.

Once North Koreans arrive in South Korea, they are sheltered in a state-run ‘Hanawon’ education centre where they learn skills and how to live in and adjust to South Korean culture.

Many defectors, however, find that life in a free capitalist country could be as daunting as their escape from the North. A survey of 637 defectors found that they stayed at work for only 16 months on the average because they are often unable to adapt to the different culture in South Korea.

The two Koreas have been separated since 1945, creating vastly different societies on the two sides of the demarcation line that divides the two parts of the Korean peninsula.

'At first, I was curious for me to know that I should pay even for electricity. In North Korea, we never pay for such things because the country pays for all utilities,' said Jung Gyoung-Il.

© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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