AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL has today published satellite imagery that it says proves the existence of prisoner camps in North Korea – which the country’s government insists do not exist.
Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s Asia Pacific Director, said that the conditions they have surveyed in the camps are some of the worst it has documented “in the past 50 years” and that people there were being “treated essentially as slaves”.
Amnesty International says that it has spoken with former prisoners and guards of such camps, who say that “prisoners are forced to work in conditions approaching slavery and are frequently subjected to torture and other cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment”. Of those former detainees that Amnesty International has spoken to, all have witnessed public executions.
It says that the authorities use what are know as cube “torture cells”, inside of which a person can neither sit or lie down. The human rights NGO says that “disruptive inmates” are thrown in for at least one week, but that it was aware of one case of a child thrown into the cell for eight months.
An estimated 40 per cent of people in the camps die of malnutrition.
The group says it has received several accounts of people “eating rats or picking corn kernels out of animal waste purely to survive”.
It adds that a “significant proportion” of those sent to the camps are do not know which crimes they have been accused of committing.
Amnesty International interviewed Jeong Kyoungil, who was detained in Yodok camp from 2000-2003, in South Korea in April 2011. He said that he had seen people die in the camp on a daily basis:
“Frankly, unlike in a normal society, we would like it rather than feel sad – because if you bring a dead body and bury it, you would be given another bowl of food,” he said.
“I used to take charge of burying dead people’s bodies. When an officer told me to, I gathered some people and buried the bodies. After receiving extra food for the job, we felt glad rather than feeling sad.”
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