Saturday 15 March 2014

North Korea: 10 starkest paragraphs from UN report

Today the United Nations released a 374-page report detailing the scale of human suffering inside North Korea and the vast state apparatus the regime uses to control its people. Here are ten of its findings:

1) Children are forced into weekly "confession and criticism" sessions as part of their indoctrination:

Quote Children in the DPRK are introduced at an early age to “confession and criticism” sessions. Children gather in groups weekly and take turns standing up and describing their activities for the previous week, as far as possible showing how they were living in accordance with the teachings of the Kim philosophy and the Ten Principles. The Principles are recited during the confession. Children must berate themselves if they have failed in some way during the preceding week; such as being absent from class or not having made a contribution as expected. They must then make a commitment to become better. They are also expected to describe the failings of at least one of their peers in the same group. Until they identify someone for criticism, they are not allowed to stand down.

2) 100,000 children take part every year in the Mass Games, a minutely-choreographed display in honour of the regime:

Quote [A witness] described how she missed an entire semester of university education because her class was required to practise for 6 months, 10 hours a day, for a short segment of a parade, to be held in the Kim Il-sung Stadium of Pyongyang in the presence of Kim Jong-il. Training was so intense that some participants fainted from exhaustion. Fainting was especially common during summer when students trained in the hot sun, on concrete floor. Practice emphasized perfection. Anyone who made repeated mistakes was made to remain on the training ground until midnight as a punishment. Ms L recalls that her teachers would invoke the example of a boy of 7 or 8 years of age who had practised through the intense pain of an acute appendicitis. He eventually died because he did not receive timely medical care. The dead child was treated as a hero because he had dedicated his entire life for an event in the presence of Kim Jong-il.

3) The bodies of prisoners are sometimes burnt and their ashes used as fertiliser

Quote A former male inmate confirmed that the practice of burning the dead collectively and using their ashes as fertilizer carried on at Ordinary Prison Camp (kyohwaso) No. 12 was still ongoing when he was released in 2011. On one occasion, he was forced to bring a pile of bodies up the mountain and saw that rats had already gnawed of the flesh from their faces. The witness estimates that at least 800 prisoners died every year from malnourishment, infectious diseases and accidents at work.

4) Children are taught to draw either pictures of the Dear Leader or of stabbing US and Japanese soldiers

Quote Children are taught that they should aspire only to emulate Kim Il-sung. For example, those inclined to drawing are encouraged only to draw pictures of the Supreme Leader or make drawings which might have pleased Kim Il-sung. Good drawings are put up in schools. Typically, they either depict the Kim family or they depict children stabbing Japanese or American soldiers with swords or pencils.


5) Every home is fitted with a speaker through which North Korean propaganda can be blared:

Quote DPRK nationals receive information from the state through “fixed line” broadcasting. The fixed line system operates through the use of speakers in every DPRK household. These speakers are inspected regularly by officials to ensure they are still functioning. These fixed lines are often used for broadcasting “forbidden” news and information (i.e. news that the outside world is not supposed to know) and also for emergency situations. Information that is transmitted through the fixed lines includes conditions of factories and farmlands, and how each collective farming effort has performed in output and production. Details regarding criminals, the crimes they have committed and the punishments imposed are also transmitted through the fixed lines.

6) North Korea engages in Orwellian-style rewrites of history:

Quote Reportedly, following the execution in December 2013 of Kim Jong-un’s uncle, Jang Song-thaek [pictured below], about 35,000 articles from the KCNA website and a further 20,000 items from the Rodong Sinmun website were removed. This appears to be part of the wider efforts to purge Mr Jang from the DPRK’s (political) history and is reflective of how the state controls and manipulates information to support its official position.


7) Sexual assault by state officials is common:



8) North Korea divides its citizens into three tiers and 51 categories based on party loyalty as part of the Songbun class system. Here's the breakdown.

Core class: People from the families of laborers, hired people from the families of laborers, hired peasants (farm servants), poor farmers, and administrative clerical workers during the Yi Dynasty and Japanese occupation, Korean Workers’ Party bereaved families of revolutionaries (killed cadre members, in anti-Japan struggles), bereaved families of patriots (killed as noncombatants during the Korean War), revolutionary intellectuals (trained by North Korea after liberation from Japan), families of those killed during the Korean Wars, families of the fallen during the Korean War, servicemen’s families (families of active People’s Army officers and men), and families of honored wounded soldiers (family members of service members wounded during the Korean War)

Basic class: Small merchants, artisans, small factory owners, small service traders, medium service traders, unaffiliated persons hailing from South Korea, families of those who went to the South (3 distinct categories), people who formerly were medium-scale farmers, nationalistic capitalists, people repatriated from China, intellectuals trained before national liberation, people from the core class who are deemed lazy and corrupt, tavern hostesses, practitioners of superstition, family members of Confucianists, people who were previously locally influential figures, and economic offenders

Complex (wavering and hostile) class: Wealthy farmers, merchants, industrialists, landowners or those whose private assets have been completely confiscated, pro-Japan and pro-US people, reactionary bureaucrats, defectors from the South, members of the Chondoist Chongu Party, Buddhists, Catholics, expelled party members, expelled public officials, those who helped South Korea during the Korean War, family members of anyone arrested or imprisoned, spies, anti-party and counter-revolutionary sectarians, families of people who were executed, anyone released from prison, and political prisoners, members of the Democratic Party, capitalists whose private assets have been completed confiscated.

9) The North Korean regime is estimated to have kidnapped 200,000 foreigners since 1950, including women abducted so they could be taken as wives:


10) One witness described a woman smuggling copper wire inside of her dead baby:

Quote The woman was using a cloth, a wide band to tie the baby on her back, and she took the baby off and laid it on the table, but then I suddenly realized that the baby was probably 18 months old or less than 2 years old; it was a boy. I saw red blood around the stomach, and the police asked what this was all about. The woman was simply crying and the police suddenly ripped the baby’s torso apart and about 2 kilograms of copper wire was found inside the baby’s stomach. This just told me that this is how far you have to go in order to keep living here in North Korea.


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