Waking Up to the Nightmare

Monday, Dec. 06, 2004 By BILL POWELL

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The coal-mine shaft was called cutting face no. 2, located deep in the mountains of North Korea, near a town called Kaechon, 200 km north of Pyongyang. Coal mining anywhere is dirty, dangerous work, but this was no ordinary coal mine. It was part of a camp for political prisoners in North Korea where "perceived political wrongdoers," as a recent human-rights report put it, are sent without trial or charge for sentences of unspecified lengths.

Kim Yong, 54, was one of roughly 15,000 prisoners at Kaechon in the late 1990s, and he is one of the lucky ones. Kim told veteran American human-rights activist David Hawk that he escaped in 1999 by hiding in a coal train that delivered the miners' daily take to a nearby town. He eventually made his way across the border to China, and then to Seoul, where, along with other refugees from the camps, he has been able to tell his story. Constant hunger is a way of life for the prisoners—malnutrition and disease were rampant, well before famine plagued the nation in the 1990s according to former inmates. But if a detainee breaks the rules to get something to eat, their days in the camps will end. One day, says Kim Yong, ripe chestnuts fell from a tree at the entrance to Cutting Face No. 2, and a prisoner named Kim Chul Min stooped to pick a few of them up. Guards shot and killed him for his trouble. Kim Yong says that a friend of his was so desperate for food that he stole one of the prison guard's leather whips, soaked it in water, and then tried to eat it. Guards beat him to death with a stick smeared with human excrement.

In the epilogue to Journey into the Whirlwind, her shattering memoir of life in the Soviet Gulag, Evgenia Ginzburg wrote: "Can such things just happen and be done with, unattended by retribution?" The prison camps in North Korea are the Gulag of the 21st century; in the past year, thanks mainly to the testimony of a number of former prisoners who have escaped to South Korea, the outside world has come to know much more about the grim conditions inside. In particular, a report authored last year by Hawk for the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea meticulously pulled together detailed information—gathered mainly from extensive interviews with more than 30 former inmates—about the horrors in the camps. Hawk, who ran the U.N.'s human-rights office in Cambodia in the 1990s, had helped document the killing fields there and the genocide in Rwanda. He brought rare credibility to a politically charged issue, and there have been few questions raised about the report's details or general conclusions since its publication a year ago. "If anything, when the history is eventually written, we'll probably find out things were worse than he described," says a senior diplomat in Seoul.

But knowledge in this case is not necessarily power. The U.S. and South Korea are unable to agree on what, if anything, to do about the camps. In October the U.S. Congress passed the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004 that requires the appointment of a special envoy to press the human-rights issue. President George W. Bush, who in 2002 famously said he "loathes" North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, is eager to raise the profile of human rights in North Korea. But to date, South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun has been unwilling to bring up the matter. His government fears that doing so could hurt Seoul's slowly improving relationship with Pyongyang—and conceivably divert attention from resolving the issue of the North's nuclear program.

Roh's stance has been harder to maintain as more information about the camps has been made public. An Hyuk, a former prisoner in the North who co-founded NKGulag, a Seoul-based human-rights organization, told TIME that the government "needs to find a way to deal with this issue or else it will lose a lot of credibility." Won Hee Ryong, an opposition legislator, says South Korea is "giving up our own values just to win the heart of North Korea." International interest in the camps is growing, as volumes of credible testimony about the prisons in the North pile up. Among the most troubling claims to emerge from former detainees is infanticide: according to several former prisoners, women who have become pregnant while in China are not uncommonly required to give birth while still in detention and then forced to watch as their own babies are killed. Hawk's report contains eight eyewitness accounts—including one of a child suffocated with a wet towel in front of its mother's eyes—and separately, TIME interviewed two women, who did not want to be identified, who claim to have seen either forced abortions or the murder of newborns.

In response to such stories, the outside world has begun to stir. Senior British diplomat Bill Rammell raised issues of human rights in a visit to Pyongyang in September, during which, he later said, the North Koreans admitted to the existence of reeducation-through-labor camps. The U.N. this summer named a special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea. In the case of North Korea, the world remains a long way from getting an answer to Evgenia Ginzburg's pointed question. But it has started asking it.

With reporting by Donald Macintyre/Seoul