Gulag Nation

Gulag Nation

Sit on a newspaper picture of Kim Jong Il, and you'll spend the rest of what will now be a short life in a North Korean concentration camp.
U.S. News and World Report has a chilling story about North Korea's prison camps.

"The horror of the North Korean gulag is compounded by the trivial offenses that can draw such punishment: listening to foreign radio, accidentally sitting on a newspaper photo of Kim Jong Il, or making a heedlessly candid remark. Most prisoners, recalls Ahn, "made one small mistake." One was arrested after singing a South Korean pop song titled, "Don't Cry for Me, Younger Sister." The unlucky woman, says David Hawk, a researcher for the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, learned the tune from watching a North Korean propaganda film but was nonetheless accused of disturbing the public socialist order."

What I find most interesting about it is that USNW's publisher, Mort Zuckerman, is a big fan of Fidel Castro, having lavishly feted the Cuban dictator a few years back whent the bearded one came to New York to deliver an anti-US harangue at the United Nations. Does Zuckerman believe that there can be such a thing as nice communism? And does he believe that Castro's prison camp nation is a good exampe of a worker's paradise?

And no doubt the French will oppose any liberation of North Korea, otherwise, where would they get cheap silk flowers?

"At the camp, Lee was tapped to supervise production of exported goods: artificial silk flowers bound for France, handmade wool sweaters for Japan, decorative needlework for Poland. Suits and dress shirts were sold through Hong Kong, getting their origin labels there, before shipment to Europe. If quotas were missed, Lee says, she faced torture. Guards stepped on her head, knocking out teeth and skewing the left side of her face. During one beating, her left eye started to pop out of its socket. She pushed it back in with her fingers. Her arms were injured after she was hung in chains from a ceiling. Even now, she has difficulty sitting or standing for long periods."

But, as it has done since the time of the Caesars, Christianity wins: "Lee won release in 1993, apparently for her success in meeting production quotas, she says. The earnings had gone into a fund to celebrate Kim Il Sung's 80th birthday the previous year. By then, though, Lee was in no mood to celebrate. "As soon as I got out of prison, I decided I didn't want to live in that hell," she says. Lee fled with her son in 1995. She converted to Christianity, having marveled at jailed Christians who refused to renounce their faith in the face of torture and execution. Lee moved to an apartment block on the outskirts of Seoul. Still, she is plagued by feelings of guilt about those left behind. Her new life's mission is to expose the terrors of the camps. "I want the world to know how evil Kim Jong Il is," she says. "The world needs to put more pressure on North Korea."