The Hidden Gulag - US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea

The Hidden Gulag Second Editionfirst edition of Hidden Gulag (2003) and now in its second edition (2012) challenges North Korea’sdeliberate effort to hide the truth. With painstaking care he has unearthed and compiled evidencefrom the period 1970 to 2008 to demonstrate an extensive prison camp system hidden away in NorthKorea’s isolated mountains. Amassing satellite photographs and hand drawings of the differentcamps, testimonies from former prisoners and interviews with former guards, he has documentedbeyond a doubt the existence of penal labor camps and other political prisons. He has met withalmost all of the former kwan-li-so prisoners who were either released or escaped to South Korea. Ofthe more than 23,000 defectors who have made the treacherous journey to the South over the pastdecade, hundreds are former prisoners. In telling their stories, they are making the world aware ofthe crimes and atrocities upon which Kim family rule has long been based.It is worth recalling that some forty-five years ago, political prisoners in China were an undifferentiatedmass of people unknown to the rest of the world. In fact Andrei Sakharov, the renowned Sovietscientist and dissident, together with other Soviet dissidents in the 1970s publicly called on theirChinese counterparts to establish lines of communication with the outside world in order to preventthe authorities “from crushing them without a trace in the remote labor camps and prisons.” Theypointed out that international exposure of human rights violations was an important way to detergovernments and bring about change. Today, North Korean prisoners are the ones coming to thefore. Their country, now led by Kim Jong-un, continues to be closed to the world, but the conspiracyof silence surrounding the camps is nonetheless being breached.More than 120 states at the UN General Assembly in 2011 expressed “serious concern” about the“the existence of a large number of prison camps and the extensive use of forced labour” in NorthKorea. This must be followed by bilateral and multilateral efforts to gain access to the camps so thatinternational organizations can bring in food and medicines, help reduce the high death rates andend the horrifying isolation of these prisoners. For too long, it has been considered too difficult, toocontroversial, and too confrontational to point to the camps in discussions with North Korean officials.That is precisely why the report’s recommendations are so important in calling for access to thestarving, abused and broken men, women and children held captive. It is not just nuclear weaponsthat have to be dismantled in North Korea but an entire system of political repression.Roberta CohenCo-ChairCommittee for Human Rights in North Korea5