The Modern Day Gulag-North Korean Concentration Camps
Josh Roselli and Alex Friedman
On the topic of human rights, North Korea has been
long cast in the shadows by the global community due to concerns over national
security. In the modern age, world leaders and Western civilization primarily
concern themselves over the potential imminent nuclear threat that North Korea
creates, as its brutally totalitarian ruler, Kim Jong Un, continues his
publicized critique on Western nations, specifically the United States. Human
rights violations, crimes against humanity that spawned early in the 1900’s and
to this day vigorously continue, are not illustrated or argued. North Korea
contains numerous concentration camps, camps filled by people in the lowest
tier in their created “caste” system. These prisoners, who are usually family
members of those who have “opposed the government”, are forced into a brutal
labor system, where death is considered as a release from the starvation, harsh
living conditions, and endless beatings that these people encounter day by day.
A global estimation of the total amount of North
Korean civilians that actually call these camps “home” range from 90,000 to
120,000 people, with upwards of 400,000 people since the camps’ foundation
losing their lives to starvation, torture, and execution. The purpose of these
camps is to “enforce obedience and suppress crime by threatening not just the
life of the dissenter, but also the lives of his loved ones.” As stated before,
these “dissenters” are those who have either shown opposition to the Kim family’s
rule, or who are related to Korean civilians who have defected to the South, or
north to China. Usually, these camps are a life sentence; either you escape
through execution, or hunger and disease will eliminate you first. Those who
are born in the camps are given a preliminary education, which consists of
basic arithmetic, reading, and writing, and then are placed in different aspects
of manual labor as they grow older. In most cases, sex is harshly punished, and
the impregnation of a women can lead to either immediate execution, or the
birth of the child only to be executed in front of the parents. For example, a
camp survivor (who remains unnamed due to security concerns) states that he
heard of an execution where, “With shaking hands, the mother was forced to pick
up her newborn and put the baby face down in water until the cries stopped and
a water bubble formed from the newborn's mouth.” The brutal conditions in these
camps draw clear comparisons to Nazi concentration camps, even a method of mass
execution similar to Holocaust gas chambers has been reported, but not
confirmed. The North Korean government vehemently denies the existence of these
camps, yet they have been clearly documented though satellite photography.
As the global community
looks to world powers, such as the United States, to place sanctions on North
Korea that would abolish these camps, or at least thrust them into the spotlight
of the media, significant obstacles present themselves that directly tie into
the work we have studied in this course. A huge aspect of the global human
rights community that we focus on in class is the United Nations, as these
camps clearly violate almost every aspect of the UDHR, ICCPR, and ICESCR. North
Korea has never ratified any of these covenants, but the topic of their human rights
violations been frequently brought to the table. These prisoners are placed in
impossible living conditions, denied the right to live, never given ample means
of nutrition, and are forced into a modern day scenario of enslaved, forced,
labor. The biggest obstacle to abolition of these camps, outside of the Korean nuclear threat if the West becomes too involved in the inner workings of
their nation, is that two members of the UN Security Council, Russia and China,
are allies of North Korea, and will readily veto any movement by the Council to
bring North Korea in front of the ICC for fear of lost economic relation, and
potential nuclear threat.
Questions for Discussion:
-
Given the current situation in relation to
escalated United States relations with North Korea, how can we as a nation best
combat these grotesque violations of human rights while avoiding war and ensuring
the safety of our nation?
-
Will military involvement be the only true
solution to the abolition of these camps? If so, why, and if not, how can the
global community combat these camps in an effective way that does not involve a
declaration of war?
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