Access to Evil

This weekend I watched the Discovery Times channel's program North Korea: Access to Evil. It was absolutely chilling stuff. The worst was the discussion of North Korea's chemical weapons experiments on political prisoners. Entire families were gassed at a time while scientists watched in special viewing areas, the parents attempting to administer mouth-to-mouth to their children until they all succumbed. One North Korean defector who claimed to witness all of this as a senior government official said that he felt no empathy whatsoever -- even towards the children -- as the prisoners were deemed to be responsible for all of the country's ills. Even in recounting the story he showed no emotion. It's almost as if the North Korean people have been so thoroughly indoctrinated that their very humanity has been stolen from them.

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Another defector described how political prisoners were forced to ingest a chemical that made them bleed out of every orifice in their body while violently throwing up and screaming in agony. It took a full 20 minutes for them to die. Indeed, a former prison guard said that in North Korea dying is often something that is deliberately prolonged. Executions are designed to inflict the maximum misery and pain. For more on the country's chemical experiments read this.

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Beyond the horrendous treatment of prisoners something that also left a deep impression on me was the footage of North Koreans engaged in mass grieving following the death of the Kim Il Sung in 1994. The people were in absolute hysterics in their mourning for a man that had condemned them to live in hell on earth. One boy, who didn't look more than 8 years old (although looks are deceiving in the country since malnutrition results in such stunted growth) was absolutely crying his eyes out in his military uniform. Traditionally stoic Korean women were wailing and almost beyond self-control.

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I had to wonder how much of the grief was genuine and how much was acting. I got the sense that in North Korea survival requires a very good acting ability lest one arouse suspicions over their devotement to the government.

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Update: Just noticed this:

Grandsons are condemned to life-long terms as slave laborers alongside their grandfathers, both equally helpless in the brutal surroundings. Prisoners are arbitrarily murdered by security guards. Women suffer from forced abortions at the hands of unlicensed doctors. Newborn babies are beaten to death. And sons and daughters are publicly executed in front of their mothers.

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This is not the story of an age of slavery from centuries past or of a survivor of Nazi Germany's Holocaust. It is what is happening at this moment inside the gulags of North Korea. The stories of gulag survivors are often too horrible to believe for the citizens of civilized countries. If one were to have the opportunity to speak with a survivor of a North Korean gulag, what they would reveal might be well beyond the threshold of the listener's imagination.

The San Diego Union-Tribune is dead-on:

The only completely effective remedy, of course, would be regime change in North Korea. Sixty years of Stalinism and its attendant cult of the personality are chiefly responsible for North Korea's horrors, up to and including the famine of the 1990s and the Hidden Gulag of forced-labor camps.

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But assuming there is no quick fix – as in removing Kim Jong-Il and his Orwellian regime – what can be done short of that?

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We see several measures that can and should be taken.

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First, the cause of human rights in North Korea should be put prominently on the international agenda. American diplomacy, assisted by human rights groups, public opinion, a diligent press and U.S. allies in Asia especially can accomplish this. Nothing must be more disheartening to North Koreans beginning to learn a little of the world and daring to hope for a better life than to realize that so few know or care about
their plight. That lapse must end, and it can end.

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Second, a more aggressive effort must be mounted to assist North Korea's people. That means getting around the dictatorship that rules them with food aid and other humanitarian supplies. It also means conveying the message, however indirectly, that the people of North Korea don't have to live as slaves in a backward and cruel slave state.

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Third, pressure must be brought on Kim Jong-Il's government to improve its ghastly record of abusing, indeed denying, all basic human rights of its citizenry. Embarrassing Kim's regime by publicizing the plight of North Koreans could be an effective start. Exposing North Korea's Hidden Gulag to international view and condemnation would be a useful step.

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Above all, don't let it be said that the world knew of North Korea's horrors, and did nothing.