Auschwitz Under Our NosesAuschwitz Under Our Noses
Revealed: the gas chamber horror of North Korea's gulag
I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing. The glass chamber is sealed airtight. It is 3.5 metres wide, 3m long and 2.2m high_ [There] is the injection tube going through the unit. Normally, a family sticks together and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners. Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass.
- Kwon Hyuk
Sometimes Evil is, well, Evil. For years, there have been stories trickling out of North Korea about the oppression and deprivation that is an everyday fact of life in Kim Jong-il's Socialist Paradise. It could be even worse than previously feared.
Over the past year harrowing first-hand testimonies from North Korean defectors have detailed execution and torture, and now chilling evidence has emerged that the walls of Camp 22 hide an even more evil secret: gas chambers where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings.
Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They are left to an agonising death while scientists take notes. The allegations offer the most shocking glimpse so far of Kim Jong-il's North Korean regime....
Defectors have smuggled out documents that appear to reveal how methodical the chemical experiments were. One stamped 'top secret' and 'transfer letter' is dated February 2002. The name of the victim was Lin Hun-hwa. He was 39. The text reads: 'The above person is transferred from ... camp number 22 for the purpose of human experimentation of liquid gas for chemical weapons.'
Kim Sang-hun, a North Korean human rights worker, says the document is genuine. He said: 'It carries a North Korean format, the quality of paper is North Korean and it has an official stamp of agencies involved with this human experimentation. A stamp they cannot deny. And it carries names of the victim and where and why and how these people were experimented [on].'
The number of prisoners held in the North Korean gulag is not known: one estimate is 200,000, held in 12 or more centres. Camp 22 is thought to hold 50,000.
Most are imprisoned because their relatives are believed to be critical of the regime. Many are Christians, a religion believed by Kim Jong-il to be one of the greatest threats to his power. According to the dictator, not only is a suspected dissident arrested but also three generations of his family are imprisoned, to root out the bad blood and seed of dissent.
Of course, the question in my mind is "Now what?" How is North Korea different from Iraq? If anything, Kim Jong-il is far more guilty of egregious human rights abuses than Saddam Hussein could ever have dreamed of. If we took out Hussein for being a tyrant and a threat to US security, Kim is an even worse tyrant and an even bigger threat. Can the Bush Administration ignore this reality and maintain any semblance of credibility? Not from where I sit. Of course, Iraq has the one commodity North Korea does not: OIL. Therein lies the difference, and therein lies the reason why Kim will likely be allowed to keep his brutal Socialist Paradise in full bloom.
As long as Kim keeps his act confined to the Korean Peninsula, he is probably safe, and that is a terrible blow for American credibility- especially when it comes to our commitment to human rights. Then again, it's not really about human rights, is it??
