THE WORLD’S CHUBBIEST DICTATOR, KIM JONG-UN, FEASTS ON GOURMET DINNERS … WHILE THOUSANDS OF IMPRISONED “ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE” STARVE TO DEATH: HUMAN RIGHTS GROUP DEMANDS INQUIRY INTO FATE OF 20,000 NORTH KOREANS WHO ‘DISAPPEARED’ FROM GULAG By Julian Ryall, The Telegraph Newspaper, London ... courtesy The National Post Newspaper, Toronto Canada, September 5 20013 news.nationalpost/2013/09/05/human-rights-group-demands-inquiry-into-fate-of-20000-north-koreans-who-disappeared-from-gulag/ Tens of thousands of North Korean inmates of Camp No. 22 -- one of the regime’s most brutal labour colonies -- have disappeared, according to a human rights group which is demanding an inquiry into their fate. There are fears that up to 20,000 may have been allowed to die of disease or starvation in the run-up to the closure of the camp at the end of last year. The suspicion has emerged after a report by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK), detailing the situation in penal colonies …[during the time] Kim Jong-un consolidated his power, after taking over from his father (Kim Jong-il) who died in 2011. The Washington-based organization gleaned information from defectors, including former guards and the occasional survivor of a prison camp, as well as examining satellite imagery. HRNK focused much of its attention on Camp 22, a vast compound sprawled across 770 square miles, making it larger than London. The report discloses that two camps have been closed in the past year, but that 130,000 individuals are still being held in penal labour colonies. “Through this vast system of unlawful imprisonment, the North Korean regime isolates, banishes, punishes and executes those suspected of being disloyal to the regime,” the report states. “They are deemed ‘wrong-thinkers,’ ‘wrongdoers,’ or those who have acquired ‘wrong knowledge’ or have engaged in ‘wrong associations.’ “ Detainees are “relentlessly subjected to malnutrition, forced labour, and to other cruel and unusual punishment,” the report says, with thousands more forcibly held in other detention facilities… “North Korea denies access to the camps to outsiders, whether human rights investigators, scholars, or international media, and severely restricts the circulation of information across North Korean borders,” the study added. At Camp No. 22, in North Hamyong Province, in the far north-east, the prison population shrank dramatically in the months before its closure -- probably in December 2012. Reports suggest that a severe food shortage meant that little was passed on to inmates, and that numbers dwindled rapidly from 30,000 to 3,000.
Posted on: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 04:33:15 +0000
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