• Comparative Analysis of Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, the Former Soviet Union and North Korea
• Inside the Gulag

By Pierre Rigoulot

This paper aims to compare North Korean prison camps with Nazi and Soviet camps to analyze their similarities and differences. Such a comparison in Europe at least is a daring venture, for our knowledge of North Korean camps is new and still very limited. The source of our limited information is in the effort of some people, including the organizers of this symposium, and in the testimonies of a small number of those who defected in the past ten years: Chul-hwan KANG and Hyuk AHN on Yodok Camp No. 15, Myung-chul AHN on several camps and Dong-chul CHOI on Camp No. 11. In contrast, hundreds of books have been published about the Soviet and Nazi camps, and numerous archives are available for the study of these camps. Despite this imbalance, some points of comparison are worth making for they enable us to consider North Korea free from particularism and, I dare say, from exoticism.

The North Korean case is, in the first place, the problem and tragedy of the Korean people. If, however, we can build a bridge between the Soviet and Nazi camps that have so preoccupied the Europeans and the North Korean camps, it will help to raise concern in Europe for the latter as well.

Before going into the main body of my presentation, I would like to make a brief clarification on the methodology used in this paper. I have focused on only one among many facets of repression namely, concentration camps. Famine as in USSR in the past and in North Korea today, massacres that occur outside concentration camps (for example, the massacre in the ghetto of Warsaw, or the activities of the special Nazis groups, massacres carried out by Soviets in Vinitaza and Katyn), and the horror in the North Korean prisons are all important issues of themselves. Recently, the French media featured Soon-ok LEE's account of her experiences in the political prison, and it was appalling to say the least.

Among these important issues, I have chosen to deal only with the concentration camps in North Korea, i.e. a system of concentration camps comprising ten large camps (eleven, according to Mr. Dong-chul CHOI who was an officer in the North Korean State Security Department in the 1980s) that house between 150,000 to 200,000 inmates. This comparative study is composed of four parts. In the first two sections, I will draw some analogies between North Korean camps and the Soviet and Nazi camps. In the latter two, I will focus on their differences. The four sections may be summarized as follows:

1. 1.North Korean camps, as are Nazi camps and Soviet gulags, constitute an element of the totalitarian system, which is made up of: single and compulsory ideology, one-party dictatorship, Fuhrerprinzip, trend towards the absorption of civil society by the political sector, use of terror, and most importantly, a permanent camp system.
2. 2.North Korean camps are a component of the International Communist system. North Korean leaders have been trained, supported and armed by communist states for decades.
3. 3.North Korean camps are within the Asiatic cultural sphere and exhibit strong Chinese influence.
4. 4.Finally, North Korean camps show their own specific features that we must underline.

II. North Korean Camps Are Camps of Totalitarianism

A) Like Soviet and Nazi camps, North Korean camps form a system, that is to say a standing reality, organically linked with political power. It appears and disappears with the regime, and builds a body with its own rules and economy.

The first Soviet camps were set up by Lenin and Trotski in 1918. The first Nazi camps were inaugurated immediately after the seizure of power by Hitler in 1933. I have no evidence of the existence of camps in 1948-1950 period in North Korea, but there is no doubt that camps were filled up just after the 1950-1953 war with real or supposed enemies of the regime; and these camps are still in operation.

From this point of view, Nazi, Soviet and North Korean camps have no relation with the temporary camps that arose in wartimes, for example, during the so-called Spanish "reconcentration" in Cuba in 1896, or in the beginning of the 20th century when the British forces imprisoned the Dutch in South Africa. Moreover, these camps are completely different from the strategic hamlets built by Americans and South-Vietnamese in the 1960s.

B) North Korean camps have developed in a course similar to those of the Nazi and Soviet camps, in that they have shown a trend toward increasing the number of prisoners from more diversified classes.

North Korea first started with imprisoning pro-South Korea sympathizers and political foes purged by KIM Il-sung. In the case of the Nazis, they first interned political enemies such as communists and democrats and proceeded to expand the scope and to intensify the force of repression. As a result, even those groups that posed little threat to the state including Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and diverse asocial groups were forcefully detained in these camps. The Soviets, on the other hand, commenced with the imprisonment of tzarists and open opponents to their regime before striking reformist socialists, anarchists, trotskists, and finally, diverse suspects and millions of the so-called foes, kulaks, who were the wealthier peasants.

C) Nazi, Soviet and North Korean powers share the willingness to deprive inmates of their moral, political and legal identity.

1. 1) Legal identity: People who are arrested are usually sent to camps by a simple administrative decision.
2. USSR: the role of the "special conference" (OSSO) and the flexibility of the sentencing.
3. Nazi Germany: Arrest is made of the targeted group as a whole, without trial and upon political decision.
4. North Korea: Security agents arrest people without trial and without informing them of the length of their sentence.
5. 2) Political identity:
6. Notwithstanding some slight variations, the internment in Soviet Camps means loss of civil rights, and renewed or prolonged penalties in the form of assigned residence.
7. The case of Nazi camps is similar where the victim is deprived of civil rights and subjected to arbitrary decisions.
8. In the North Korean concentration camps, the deprivation of civil rights also exists but in a more complete and definitive form. The exception is Yodok Camp No. 15, where the families of the "criminals", especially those who are deemed "recoverable" are confined.
9. 3) Moral identity: The negation of the individual's legal and political identity is accompanied by the negation of the individual as a moral being. In the three kinds of camps we found:
10. efforts to compromise the victims with their executioners (use of prisoners as chiefs of work brigades or chiefs of huts in Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, and as chiefs of working groups in North Korea); surveillance by informants and obligatory pledge of loyalty.
11. degrading standards of living (constant hunger, low grade of sanitary conditions, lack of medical supplies). One may do a comparative study on the varying conditions of food supply in the different concentration camps. The conditions of low hygiene and malnutrition in today's North Korea may be comparable to what Margarete Buber-Neumann experienced in Karaganda (Kazakhstan) in 1938-1939. When Buber-Neumann entered the Ravensbrk camp, after being delivered by Stalin to Hitler, she was offered a towel, a soap and a toothbrush!
12. isolation - usually more complete in Nazi and North Korean camps - from the outside world and even from their beloved family also under arrest (Here, some contrasts favorable in the case of North Korea must be made regarding Yodok Camp 15). Compulsory abortion, disappearance of newborn children, separation of mother and baby can be observed everywhere.

Generally speaking, negation of individuality and humanity has reached critical levels in concentration camps. This does not refer only to the kind of dehumanization exhibited by a guard in Yodok Camp who admonished a pregnant woman, "How can a counter-revolutionary and an enemy of the people such as yourself dare to bear a child" Such brutalities as the use of inmates as targets for shooting practices in North Korea or in medical experiments in Nazi Germany are only part of the story. Testimonies on the three types of camps usually confirm the growth of inhumanity and insensitivity among the inmates themselves. Chul-hwan KANG spoke to me about fathers driven by hunger to steal food from their own children. Robert Antelme in his famous book about Gandersheim camp under Nazi Germany described the inmates stealing pieces of bread and potato peelings from one another. In his Memories from Kolyma, Varlam Chalamov, a long-term inmate, also depicted the loss of humanity in the concentration camp.

D) Finally, the three camps share the same functions that are simultaneously found only in the camps of totalitarian countries: to punish, to isolate, to use, to eliminate and to exterminate.

Elimination is achieved by the very low conditions of work, nutrition and hygiene. Mortality rate can be different depending on time periods and even among camps in the same country. It is always important and necessary that we be cautious about the classical distinction between extermination - something wanted, conceived, and organized for itself - and elimination. Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote in his Gulag Archipelago that the only thing that the gulag lacked from looking like Nazi extermination centers was poison gas.

North Korean camps also lack gas, but they are equal to Soviet camps in their severe restriction of food and sanitary conditions and extremely demanding work quotas that induce the deaths of the inmates. Elimination in the North Korean camps aims at the inmates as a group rather than individuals, which is similar to the Nazi extermination of the Jews as a racial group. Usually in Nazi, Soviet and North Korean camps, the weakest are the first victims of such phenomenal and arbitrary crimes. We must acknowledge that in North Korea, though global, anonymous and phenomenal, the extermination is itself the goal. The open goal of the North Korean authorities in the concentration camps detaining those who are "beyond recovery" is to eradicate three generations of their inmates. The verb used by North Korean authorities, myulhada, means 'to exterminate'.

Those who are "beyond recovery" are exterminated gradually and over a lengthy term when compared to the case of Jews, whose extermination by the Nazis was carried out on a short-term (at least, from 1943, of those who were not selected to work).

E) The last typical feature of the camps in the totalitarian states: The detainees are crushed in the name of an ideology that puts a hierarchic order among social, political or racial groups in relation to the group that is considered the ideal or the superior one.

It is why one can find "normal", "severe", and "special" camps in USSR, fake camps (Theresinstadt), camps of internment (as Ravensbruck was for German inmates), camps for elimination (Buchenwald, Struthof) and centers of extermination (as Sobibor or Auschwitz-Birkenau) in Nazi Germany, centers of forced labor (for detentions shorter than a year), one camp, namely Yodok, for people who are recoverable and camps of life detention for people who are beyond recovery, such as Seng-hori camp in North Korea.

III. North Korean Camps Are Communist Camps

I will now underline the analogies between North Korean camps and Soviet camps.

A) Detainment is justified by a historicist ideology. It is in the name of the People or of the working class fighting for socialism, and, of course, in one name of the leader who symbolizes them, that the power is used to repress and throw men and women into camps.

B) Forced work is used in Soviet camps and in Yodok as a punishment as well as a means of regeneration. In other words, it is through forced work that one can come back to the proper practice of the popular class: a physical effort aiming at a transformation of Nature. By adopting the working class behaviour one can rediscover the social origin or political stand in accordance with the Communist state will.

In addition, forced work is a way of elimination in North Korean camps such as Yodok and especially in the camps for those beyond recovery. But even from this point of view we do not depart from communist conceptions. In Soviet or North Korean camps, forced labour means the fulfillment of a norm. And the norm has to be conceived in a planned and centralized system of production typical of all communist states.

Forced labour has not the same crucial place in Nazi camp system. Dachau in the 1930s was not a forced labour camp. It was the breakout of the war and the first difficulties of the German army, that led to the use of the inmates' labour. In the view of the Nazis, the labour was not a means of achieving redemption.

Thus, North Korean camps belong to a communist tradition, like that of the Chinese Laogai or the Soviet gulag. In Yodok, prisoners work in the fields; they fell trees or work in gold mines and pug pits. Works that are more difficult and clandestine are open in other camps: navvy work for military sites, for instance.

It seems, however, that I have to bring out the differences of the North Korean historicist ideology (It will be a good transition to my third and fourth parts on the specificity of North Korean camps!). In North Korea, the so-called "good origin" has a major significance. To be born in a "heroic family", i.e. a family of which a member was marked out as a hero by the Communist Party (even if it took place 50 years ago), is to have near genetic superiority. Chul-hwan KANG's mother, for instance, was not sent to Yodok Camp with her children (although she was, as they were, member of the family of a so-called political criminal) because her father's family was marked out as a heroic family. The children went to camp - at seven and nine years of age - and the Party ordered the daughter of a hero to cut off the rotten branch which represented her family and which was contaminated by an act of treason.

Such a point of view grazes a racial conception, really at stake in North Korea - a confirmation being brought by some eugenic practices. Here we are sent back, of course, to Nazism.

The next two parts will confirm particularities of North Koreans camps in contrast with those of Hitler and Stalin.

IV. North Korean Camps Are Asiatic Camps

Guards in Yodok Camp used to say: "There are only two medicines for the complete eradication of influence of spoilt capitalist ideology: labor and control." Here, "control" means more than the supervision by guards, which can be found in Nazi and Soviet camps as well. "Control" as commonly used by the Yodok guards includes ideological control. In all communist camps in Asia, the transformation of the detainees necessarily involves education of the detainees and their practice of introspection. Such is the way to get rid of the "old man" as the Scriptures would say.

Jean Pasqualini and Harry Wu gave a complete view of these meetings of criticism and self-criticism, and of the repeated autobiographies. These are found in the memoirs of detention in camps of Vietnam and Laos as well. Many books were published in French about the first Vietnam War (1945-1954) and about Vietnam after the seizure of Saigon in 1975. A remarkable continuity can be noted in the way camp inmates are dealt with. The communists of Vietnam used to organize many courses, lectures, meetings with quizzes and songs. Complete with deadening labour, a low-diet regime and promises of liberation contingent upon the "ideological progress", they held a powerful weapon.

At Yodok Camp No. 15 - as well as in the entire country - criticism and self-criticism meetings are organized twice a week. A worship is owed to KIM Il-sung or KIM Jong-il. Lectures are given, too, with daily reading of the Rodong Shinmun and competition of reciting KIM Il-sung's New Year's Address by heart.

It should also be noted that in Yodok, sick, exhausted and starved inmates are given three big copybooks, one pen-holder and one ink pot. The first notebook is named "Notebook for Assessment of Life" used in criticism and self-criticism sessions. The second one is titled "Notebook about the Party Policy" in which speeches by KIM Il-sung are noted. The third is the "Notebook of the Revolutionary History" of KIM Il-sung and KIM Jong-il.

V. Specificities of North Korean Camps

A) The most striking specificity is the familial disposition of the North Korean concentration camps. This can be interpreted in many ways:

1. 1) There is a clear distinction between the so-called political criminal and his family (defined as all people living with him): The criminal is sent to a camp with severe rules, usually for a life-term detention from which there is little chance of release. But his family is usually sent to the "normal" detention center in Yodok.
2. 2) In this camp, the family is not broken up as in the camps of Nazi Germany and former USSR. It can be said that the families are detained as a whole (with noteworthy exception of the criminal). They live in "villages" and their lives roughly resemble the ordinary lives of the poor peasants.

B) In fact, the real name of each village is "Work Group 1, 2, 3, etc." which signifies that in North Korea the camp encompasses the place where inmates work and study. In Soviet and Nazi camps, the prisoner is taken out of a camp limited by barbed wires to a work site located outside. In this regard, a camp such as in Yodok - about 40 kilometers in diameter, encompassing fields, pits, mines, "work groups" (alias villages), schools for children, rivers, mountains, etc. - resembles more of a vast reserve than a Soviet or Nazi camp.

C) The third specificity of North Korean camps is the clear distinction between the "usual offenders" and "political offenders". Here, one must be careful about the term "political offenders" because an inopportune word or an attempt to leave the country can send someone to the camp. The term "usual offenders" must also be employed with care because many of the accusations have one political meaning and origin. Given these precisions, it must be underlined that no usual offender goes to a camp (He is sent to a prison). North Korean camps are reserved for political offenders. The North Korean system thus spares their camps one of the worst nuisances of the Soviet or Nazi camps, namely the confrontation with the criminal underworld, so well described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

VI. Conclusion

I had hoped to throw some bridges between North Korean camps, and Soviet and Nazi camps to draw greater attention from the European people to the former. I believe the attempt was successful.

I would like to conclude with the following remarks:

1. Each network of camps is so specific that even if it is useful to compare them, it is wrong to put these networks on top of each other and to grade them.
2. The difficulties in comparing the networks become more important when we think of factors like war or peace being at stake or the duration of the political regime producing the camps. For instance, as World War II progressed, the Nazi network became very different from what it was in 1933-1940 and added to its usual system of centers of extermination.
3. The life spans of the three systems are very different: 70 years for the Soviet camps, nearly 50 years for North Korean camps and only 12 years (half of them during the war) for Nazi camps.
4. Last but not least, the gulag and the Nazi camps do not exist anymore. North Korean camps, however, still do. Our studies on them cannot be coldly scholastic. Our efforts to expand the knowledge of these camps and to unveil their nature, simultaneously entail deep feelings of indignation and willingness to enlighten our struggle against totalitarianism for democracy and human rights. Such knowledge and struggle can be shared by all mankind. In this regard, North Korean camps are the concern of all.

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by Larry Diamond, Hoover Digest, 1998, No.4

North Korea the world's last Stalinist dictatorshi. It is home to some of the harshest political prisons and labor camps in the world. Larry Diamond recently met several people who escaped from the North Korean gulag.

North Korea is the worldfs last true Stalinist regime. In most of the world, communism is dead, at least in everything but name. But in North Korea, totalitarian controls and a bizarre ideology have survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, the global wave of democratization and liberalization, the political transformation of South Korea, and the death in 1994 of dictator Kim Il Sung. Like almost everything else about the country, its very name The Democratic Peoplefs Republic of Korea is a grotesque, Orwellian lie.

Human rights reports from the State Department, Amnesty International, and elsewhere portray a regime so paranoid and ruthless that capital punishment is prescribed for such petty offenses as slandering the Communist Party, attempting to defect, listening to foreign broadcasts, or writing reactionary letters. The domineering regime forbids the sale or ownership of any radio that is not preset to receive only North Korean channels. The North Korean government, obsessed with power, spends a quarter of its gross domestic product on its military. And it is the systemic irrationality and cruelty of the North Korean system, much more than the vagaries of weather, that account for the countryfs current dreadful famine, in which hundreds of thousands are starving to death or have already perished.

For some time now, policymakers in the United States, South Korea, and Japan have been debating what to do about North Korea how to halt its nuclear weapons development program, how to prevent it from starting a war on the Korean peninsula, whether to comply with its conditions for the delivery of food aid, and whether and how to end its economic isolation.

The camps

These are grave and urgent issues. However, in the press of constant crisis, and in the thick fog of secrecy that shrouds the North Korean regime, an equally grave issue has been obscured and virtually ignored: the existence of a vast gulag of political prisons and concentration camps. More than ten political prisons and work camps now hold an estimated 200,000 North Koreans. As a result of the brutal conditions, punishing labor demands, severe nutritional deficiencies, and frequent arbitrary executions, the Center for the Advancement of North Korean Human Rights estimates that some 400,000 prisoners have died in these camps since they were established by Kim Il Sung in 1972.

North Koreafs gulag has a political purpose: to use torture, terror, imprisonment, forced confessions, and executions to silence even the slightest expressions of dissent or free inquiry. But victimization has gone far beyond any rational political purpose. As every previous totalitarian experience has shown, total concentration of power inevitably feeds limitless excesses of cruelty and terror. Absolute power goes paranoically mad. The North Korean gulag provides an instrument for any bloated party official to avenge the most trivial slight. In the camps themselves, sadistic officials and guards impose subjugation and brutality beyond imagination. From the whispers of a terrified populace, we know that when a North Korean is arrested and sentenced to a political prison, no one expects to hear from him or her ever again.

Beyond its political purpose of terror and control, North Koreafs gulag has an economic dimension of which the world has been previously unaware. This side of the atrocity has only come into focus as former North Korean political prisoners and prison camp guards have risked their lives to defect to South Korea in recent years. According to their eyewitness accounts (including three that I obtained personally during several hours of interviews in Seoul in May of this year), North Koreafs political prisoners are made to produce a wide range of products that the communist system is too inefficient to produce under conventional socialist means.

The North Korean economy has been caught in the crushing vise of its own contradictions. Total violation of individual freedoms and incentives has brought the North Korean economy ever closer to total collapse. For more than two decades, the regimefs desperate response has not been to liberalize the economy, as in China or Vietnam, but rather to expand state control to its absolute limit: slave labor. This system has been supported (even if unwittingly) by democratic nations in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere, which have purchased the exports made and processed by North Korea slave labor system.

For the cash-starved regime, political prisons and concentration camps have become a vital cog in the production machine. The prisons are each given specific monthly, quarterly, and annual production quotas that they must meet at any cost. Individual prisoners are given their own daily work quotas, which they must fulfill to exacting standards, working sixteen hours a day, on penalty of death. To fill their institutional quotas, prisons must obtain by any means necessary fresh supplies of prisoners to replace the considerable number who die under the draconian conditions. It is this constant need for fresh prisoners that renders any North Korean citizen subject to arrest on the flimsiest of charges.

Eyewitness acccounts

Sun Ok Lee was one such victim. But she is a survivor, and it is partly because of her indomitable will and precise memory that we now have so much information about North Koreafs system of slave labor. For fourteen months in 1986 and 1987, Mrs. Lee (then thirty-nine) was relentlessly subjected to different forms of torture to force her to confess to a crime (embezzlement of state property) of which she had been falsely accused by a local police chief. At one point, her lip was torn half way to her ear. They frequently poured cold water on my body and left me outside in freezing winter nights. Once I was left on the floor unconscious for many hours and woke up to find worms in my wounds. Enduring daily torture and humiliation, she watched a number of her fellow detainees die under the same strain and was tricked into making a false confession in 1987. She then began a five-year term in the notorious Kaechon Prison.

Kaechon held its own horrors. The prison uniform was almost a rag and the dirt on it made it stiff almost like a plank. I was kicked for every movement from one location to another. I was no longer a human but a beast. Mrs. Lee estimates that 80 percent of the prisoners were ordinary housewives who had committed petty offenses.

Conditions in Kaechon were extremely harsh. Mrs. Lee explains: the work begins at 5:30 in the morning and closes at 11:00 at night. You can go to the toilet only twice a day, once each in the morning and in the afternoon, at fixed times. There is only one toilet for every 300 prisoners. Eighty to ninety prisoners share a floor space of 5 meters by 6 meters. Sleeping there was torture in itself. Life in the gulag revolved almost completely around work. A Stalinist slogan on the prison wall declared ideology reform through strengthened labor. Mrs. Lee explained that there was constant pressure on the prisoners to meet daily production quotas on items intended for export. Failure to meet these quotas resulted in reduced food rations or other punishment.

Mrs. Lee recounted the story of one of her fellow prisoners, Young Suk Kim, thirty-five, who struggled with the instructions for knitting sweaters for export to Japan because she could not read. Often she complained to herself in tears, Why was there no school in my village Why am I not able to read A guard who overheard her became enraged: What Are you saying that there is anybody in North Korea who cannot read You are defaming the state on purpose. You must be investigated. Young Suk Kim was taken away to an investigation cell and was never seen again. A month later, Mrs. Lee heard she had been beaten to death during interrogation.

Sun Ok Lee was in a position to know much more than most prisoners. A statistician and accountant, her training proved highly useful to the prison administration. She was put in charge of making distribution lists and assigning specific work quotas and tasks. She was notified how many new prisoners would be delivered to Kaechon. She received the overall production quotas for the prison from the national planning bureau and had to figure out how they would be met. (Visiting officials repeatedly told her that the quotas had to be met because prison labor constituted 40 percent of the countryfs production. This figure cannot literally be true, but it underscores the priority the regime placed on this source of production.)

With an accountantfs eye for detail, Sun Ok Lee remembered and eventually recorded what she learned:

In Kaechon prison, there is a separate building for production for overseas export. From March 1988 until January 1989 (I can remember the dates),we produced womenfs brassieres for export to Russia. For the whole year of 1989 we produced all kinds of table mats, ashtrays, vases to be sent to Poland. In 1989, for export to France we produced artificial roses, one stem with twelve flowers put in a box. From the autumn of 1989 and all of 1990 we produced hand-knitted sweaters for Japan, for both men and women. Between 1988 and 1991 we produced all kinds of garments including summer shirts, sometimes fatigue clothes, white and blue, which I understand went to various countries in Europe. [Some] clothes went to Hong Kong first, for export on to different countries in Europe.

Mrs. Lee has no doubt that the use of prison labor continues in North Korea. They were doing it still when I was leaving prison in 1992. And the economy has kept deteriorating since then. North Korea is in need of income from outside to sustain itself.She explains that prison workers are motivated by terror. In prison, the slightest mistake or fault could be cause for severe punishment, even killing. What they do in these meticulous jobs is a matter of life and death. So they are very, very efficient and careful to do it correctly.

Other eyewitness accounts paint a similar picture. Chul-Hwan Kang, now thirty, was taken away to Yodok concentration camp with his family at the age of nine and held for ten years. Kang, too, was a survivor. ew people at Yodok survived more than ten years. I had a strong will to survive. There was nothing I did not eat: snakes, rats, frogs, whatever I could lay my hands on. Some of us would find worms in the ground or from the river. Some could not do this. Those who could not eat anything just perished.

From the moment he arrived as a child, Kang was given a quota and put to work. Inexperienced, he had to work through the night to collect his quota of firewood, before he finally collapsed to the ground. Children were put to work sifting gold bits from sand in the river, planting corn, mining limestone, and, when they were older, logging:

When we worked to cut down trees, we were told by the guards, look you have to be careful, this is for export to Japan. We had ropes around the tree to make sure that they fell softly and weren't broken. The guards told us the logs could not be exported to Japan if they were broken.

So many people were killed and crippled handling these trees. [People often] fell off the trees as they were trimming them. They had to bring the logs down to the foot of the mountain for inspection. If there was any slightest damage, the logs would not pass, then the prisoners would have to do the work all over again. So even on cold winter days we would cover the logs with our clothes, to make sure they arrived at the inspection point unharmed. But these were very heavy logs we were carrying; some undernourished prisoners would drop the logs and others would fall down with them, breaking their legs and arms or dying. So many prisoners were killed this way.

An appeal to the West

The Citizensf Alliance to Help Political Prisoners in North Korea (a South Korean human rights group) has been working with North Korean defectors such as Sun Ok Lee and Chul Hwan Kang (and even former prison camp guards) to help them adjust to a new life in South Korea democratic and market-based society and to receive and publish their accounts. These eyewitness accounts are lifting the shroud of secrecy and forcing the West to confront a powerful moral and political challenge. Can we deal with a North Korean regime of this nature, or do morality and common sense demand that aid and engagement be conditioned on steps to open up and dismantle the gulag

One thing that the former political prisoners and prison camp guards passionately agree on is the urgent need for international attention. The North Korean regime fears exposure of the crimes against humanity that are systematically committed in its political prisons and concentration camps. At first blink, this may seem strange for a totalitarian regime seemingly oblivious to international opinion. But every similar system in this century from Stalin and the Nazis to Mao and the Khmer Rouge has been obsessed with masking its crimes from the worldfs view. Every regime craves international legitimacy of some sort. And even in the minds of the worldfs most savage torturers and mass murderers, there still lurks some knowledge of global norms and even, perhaps, some faint awareness of good and evil.

The defectors are convinced that the gulag system cannot survive international exposure. They make one appeal above all others: that the United States, Japan, and other Western countries and international organizations demand comprehensive inspection of all of these sites as a condition for aid and more normal relations. As Tong Chul Lee (Sun Ok son, and a former prison camp guard) observed, the unconditional provision of assistance from outside would result in strengthening the leadership, and the leadership is based on making slaves of the people.

International attention and pressure have already forced the North Korean regime to reorganize the gulag, closing down a number of prisons close to the border with China or otherwise vulnerable to international scrutiny. In 1987, when North Korea was beginning to normalize its relations with Japan, Korean families in Japan were demanding to know what had happened to their relatives who had returned to North Korea. Kang believes this pressure led to the release from prison of his family and other returnees from Japan. How, Kang observes, North Korea wants to normalize diplomatic relations with the United States. Obviously, they are very concerned with outside pressure. I was told by recent defectors that this is why they are improving prison conditions and building model prisons for display to foreigners. The notorious Sunghori Prison that Amnesty International had identified has now been closed down. I believe that was where my grandfather was taken. Nobody ever survived that prison. No one was ever released.

The defectors hope that truth and openness will somehow begin to penetrate the world most closed society. When I was in North Korea, Sun Ok Lee recalls, I did not have the slightest idea of freedom and what it means, what human rights are. When I came to South Korea, it was the first time I learned about what freedom is: the right to make your own choices, to have free elections, to say bad things about the government if you want.

North Koreafs whole population has been confined to their small territory and regimented for such a long time, they are completely ignorant of a free society outside North Korea. I am very anxious that international pressure break through these barriers, inform the North Korean population on how important democracy is, and give them knowledge to compare their present situation with what is going on in the rest of the world.

Mrs. Lee plans to continue to do her part. Her account of the atrocities in North Koreafs gulag, Bright Eyes of Tailless Beasts, has sold widely in Japan, and she now hopes to publish an English-language translation. Most of all, however, she wants to tell her story in a public hearing before the United States Congress. It will probably not be long before she gets her chance.