Posted on 06/10/2002 3:41:31 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
SEOUL, South Korea -- On a cold March day, the bleak monotony of a North Korean prison work detail was broken when a squad of male guards arrived and herded women prisoners together. One by one, they were asked if they were pregnant.
"They took them away in a car, and then forcibly gave them abortion shots," Song Myung Hak, 33, a former prisoner, recalled in a recent interview here about the day two years ago when six pregnant prisoners were taken from his work unit in the Shinuiju Provincial Detention Camp. "After the miscarriage shots, the women were forced back to work."
With more and more escapees from North Korea claiming that forced abortions and infanticide are the norm in North Korean prisons, the country's official Korean Central News Agency has denounced the charges as "a whopping lie."
In 2000 and 2001, China deported thousands of North Korean refugees, with many ending up in North Korean prison camps. People who later managed to escape again, to China and South Korea, say that prisoners who were discovered to be pregnant were routinely forced to undergo abortions. If babies were born alive, they say, guards forced prisoners to kill them.
Earlier defectors from North Korea say that the prohibition on pregnancy in North Korean prisons dates back at least to the 1980s, and that forced abortions or infanticide were the rule. Until recently, though, instances of pregnancy in the prisons were rare. China's deportations of thousands of illegal migrants from North Korean in recent years has resulted in a sharp increase in the number of pregnant women ending up in North Korean prisons. Defectors, male and female, are reviled as traitors and counterrevolutionaries when they are returned to North Korea. But women who have become pregnant, especially by Chinese men, face special abuse.
"Several hundred babies were killed last year in North Korean prisons," said Willy Fautre, director of Human Rights Without Frontiers, a Brussels-based private group. Fautre said that over the last 18 months, he and his volunteers have interviewed 35 recent escapees from North Korean camps.
Of the 35, he said, 31 said they had witnessed babies killed by abandonment or being smothered with plastic sheets. Two defectors later described burying dead babies, and two said they were mothers who saw their newborns put to death.
"This is a systematic procedure carried out by guards, and the people in charge of the prisons -- these are not isolated cases," Fautre said in a telephone interview. "The pattern is to identify women who are pregnant, so the camp authorities can get rid of the babies through forced abortion, torture or very hard labor. If they give birth to a baby alive, the general policy is to let the baby die or to help the baby die with a plastic sheet."
Lee Soon Ok, who worked as an accountant during her six years at Kaechon political prison, recalled in an interview that twice she witnessed prison doctors killing newborn babies, sometimes by stepping on their necks.
With virtually no medical care available for any prisoners, surgical abortions were not an option. Lee, now 54 and an economic researcher in Seoul, said: "Giving birth in prison is 100 percent prohibited. That is why they kill those babies."
The author of a book on her prison experiences, Lee has long campaigned to focus attention on North Korea's prison system. On May 2, she was one of three North Korean defectors who testified on human rights abuses in their homeland at a hearing of the House International Relations Committee. American and South Korean food aid help feed about one-third of North Korea's 22 million people.
As more and more accounts of infanticide are made public by former prisoners, North Korea has issued angry denials.
On Jan. 19, North Korea's official news service said that Human Rights Without Borders' charges that "unborn and newly-born babies are being killed in concentration camps" were "nothing but a plot deliberately hatched by it to hurl mud" at North Korea.
Since then, allegations of baby killing in North Korean prisons have increased.
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They were featured in February at a human rights conference on North Korea in Tokyo, and in March were included for the first time in the State Department's annual human rights report on North Korea. They were raised in April by European Union delegates to the annual session of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, and in May a former North Korean prisoner testified before a House committee.
North Korea's mission to the United Nations did not return telephone messages about the charges. But on May 9, at the U.N. conference on children in New York, the North Korean delegate said his nation holds each child as "king of the country."
But recent interviews with seven defectors now living in the Seoul area provided a detailed and different picture in North Korean prison camps.
All of the recent defectors except one, Mr. Song, allowed publication of only their family names, which are common Korean surnames. These four said they feared reprisals against relatives in the North. Two defectors, who had escaped almost a decade ago after working in the prison camp system, allowed their full names to be used.
The defectors' names and telephone numbers were supplied by Human Rights Without Borders. They were interviewed individually, in their homes, without human rights or government officials present. South Korea's government, seeking to avoid conflict with the North, discourages defectors from speaking out.
In her Seoul apartment, Lee, 64 and no relation to the accountant, said she was still haunted by memories of prison after being deported from China in 2000.
The widow of a North Korean general, Lee recalled thinking that she had won an easy job in the clinic after arriving on June 14, 2000, at Pyongbuk Provincial Police Detention Camp. Then she said she saw a prison doctor administer injections to eight pregnant women to induce labor.
"The first time a baby was born, I didn't know there was a wooden box for throwing babies away," Lee recalled. "I got the baby and tried to wrap it in clothes. But the security people told me to get rid of it in the wooden box."
That day, she said she delivered six dead babies and two live ones. She said she watched a doctor open the box and kill the two live babies by piercing their skulls with surgical scissors. The next day, she said, during a four-hour shift, she helped to deliver 11 dead babies from 20 pregnant women who had been injected to induce delivery.
Between March and May of 2000, 8,000 North Korean defectors, overwhelmingly women, were deported from China to North Korea during a crackdown on prostitution and forced marriages, according to D.K. Park, a retired U.N. worker who works with Human Rights Without Frontiers along the border between North Korea and China.
"They blame North Korean women for having Chinese babies and just kill the babies," said Song, now a college student in Seoul, of his time in Shinuiju prison in spring 2000.
Park, 41, no relation to the human rights worker, said she was among those caught up in a Chinese sweep two years ago, ending up in a work camp in Onsong, North Korea. She was nine months pregnant at the time.
"One day, they gave me a big injection, in about 30 minutes I went into labor," she said in her apartment south of Seoul. "The baby I delivered at the detention camp was already dead."
For babies born live in prison cells, defectors say, male guards threaten to beat women prisoners if they do not smother newborns with pieces of wet plastic that are thrown between the bars.
"Guards told the prisoners to kill the babies," recalled Lee, a 33-year-old vocational student who is unrelated to the accountant and the general's widow. She said that in 2000, as she was moved among four camps, she saw four babies smothered at Onsong District Labor Camp in April, and three smothered at Chongjin Provincial Police Detention Camp in late May.
"The oldest woman in the cell did it reluctantly," she said. "The young women were scared. The mothers would just cry in silence."
A former factory worker who survived in China through marriage to an ethnic Korean Chinese, she estimated that 70 percent of the people she saw deported from China in the spring of 2000 were women, and about one-third of the women were pregnant.
In the summer of 2001, a 28-year-old former North Korean border guard surnamed Kim was imprisoned at the same Chongjin detention facility. There he buried three newborn babies wrapped in "blue-tinted plastic bags." He recalled: "The prisoners were ordered to get the babies coming from the mothers and to kill them."
His wife, now a 25-year-old day care-worker in Seoul, said in the same interview at their apartment here that during her 10 weeks at the same camp last summer, she counted seven babies born and smothered in nearby cells.
The current wave of reported baby killings has nationalistic overtones.
"The guards would scream at us, `You are carrying Chinese sperm, from foreign countries. We Koreans are one people. How dare you bring this foreign sperm here?' " Lee, the vocational student recalled. "Most of the fathers were Chinese."
In an editorial on May 23, the official Pyongyang Radio said: "Our nation is one nation that inherited one bloodline." In North Korea, class, ethnic and political guilt can be passed from one generation to the next, Fautre, the human rights group director, told the human rights gathering in Tokyo in February. "Unborn and newly-born babies are not spared the qualification of being enemies of the state as their mothers are North Korean defectors."
But two decades before pregnant refugees were forced home from China, infanticide was standard practice in the North Korea prison system, a former guard said in an interview near here.
"Ever since Kim Il Sung's time, it has been a North Korean regulation to prevent women from delivering babies in prisons," said Ahn Myung Chul, a 33-year-old suburban Seoul bank employee, who worked as a guard from 1987 to 1994 in four North Korean camps. Ahn, who also trained guards, added in an interview: "If babies have to be delivered, babies have to be killed. The trainers told military personnel that this is the procedure."
North Korea's prison camp system currently holds about 200,000 people in conditions so brutal that an estimated 400,000 people have died in prison since 1972, according to the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a private, Washington-based group.
"Nothing would surprise in accounts of this kind," Selig S. Harrison, Asia Program director at the Center for International Policy in Washington. Harrison, a seven-time visitor to Pyongyang, added: "North Korea is a repressive, repugnant, totalitarian state, and it certainly uses repugnant methods in its prison system and in its concentration camps."
Foreign journalists traveling inside North Korea are restricted to tightly guided tours and requests by the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit prisons are routinely rejected.
"Those of us inside the country have no knowledge of the existence of prison camps or practices inside them," Richard Bridle, the UNICEF representative in Pyongyang, said by telephone. Asked about infanticide policies, he said: "The only stories we get are from outside. There is no information circulating inside the DPRK on this."
"Those of us inside the country have no knowledge of the existence of prison camps or practices inside them," Richard Bridle, the UNICEF representative in Pyongyang, said by telephone.
Why do I get the feeling that UNICEF won't be doing much about this anytime soon?
"I must say the foreign minister was very nice," Albright said. "He said he had passed me last year at the general assembly. We had not spoken to each other. He did tell me, however, that I looked younger this year," she said. Source
Bump!
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