{"id":580,"date":"2011-08-29T13:52:26","date_gmt":"2011-08-29T17:52:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pray_for_the_persecuted_church\/?p=580"},"modified":"2011-08-26T14:02:10","modified_gmt":"2011-08-26T18:02:10","slug":"amnesty-international-denounces-north-korean-cruelty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pray_for_the_persecuted_church\/2011\/08\/amnesty-international-denounces-north-korean-cruelty.html","title":{"rendered":"Amnesty International denounces North Korean cruelty"},"content":{"rendered":"

The plight of Christian inmates in North Korea’s huge network of\u00a0concentration camps\u00a0has been denounced by the human rights group Amnesty International, which unveiled new satellite photos that show the camps have grown dramatically in size.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
North Korean troops<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Testifying about the terror of growing up in one of the camps was Kim Hae-sook, who\u00a0was 13 years old when she\u00a0was sent with her\u00a0entire family\u00a0to Bongchang-ri Camp No. 18. There she was held for 30 years.<\/p>\n

Her\u00a0crime? Her grandfather\u00a0had escaped to freedom in\u00a0South Korea.<\/p>\n

She described growing up watching\u00a0public executions and struggling to scavenge food to keep her family members alive. She also told how being denounced by another prisoner as a Christian was an automatic death sentence.<\/p>\n

“I have seen public executions hundreds of times,” she\u00a0recalled. Now in her 50s, she escaped North Korea after her release from prison in 2002. “A lot of people were executed by firing squad. If someone believes, then that person would be hanged.”<\/p>\n

She spent her early teens scavenging\u00a0for grass for her family to eat since the prison often didn’t\u00a0always feed its captives. At age 16, she was put to work in\u00a0a notoriously dangerous mine, working 16-18 hours a day. Three of her family either starved to death or were killed in mine accidents. Food is scarce in the camps. Amnesty International said it\u00a0regularly hears descriptions of\u00a0prisoners eating rats or picking corn kernels out of animal waste in order to survive.<\/p>\n

To read\u00a0about the\u00a0courage of North Korean Christians,\u00a0CLICK HERE<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Emotionally,\u00a0Kim was scarred and today is haunted by her family’s suffering. She continues to have nightmares of\u00a0torture and executions that prisoners were forced to watch.\u00a0Some prisoners\u00a0were taken to\u00a0areas known as “Total Control Zones” from which it was known they would never be released.<\/p>\n

She said\u00a0many of her fellow prisoners\u00a0didn\u2019t know why they were being held.<\/p>\n

“These are places out of sight of the rest of the world, where almost the entire range of human rights protections that international law has tried to set up for last 60 years are ignored,”\u00a0said\u00a0\u00a0Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s Asia Pacific director.\u00a0He released satellite images of the camps showing four of the six camps. A comparison with satellite pictures from 2001\u00a0shows a significant\u00a0growth in the size of the camps, which have been operating since the 1950s.<\/p>\n

CLICK HERE: Pope Benedict XVI\u00a0worries that\u00a0persecution of Christians worldwide is growing<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Former prisoner Kim Tae-jin, the president of Democracy Network against North Korean Gulag, said there is no way to know how many North Koreans are prisoners of their own government. “North Korea is never going to come up and say ‘we do have this number of political prisoners.’ Everything is based on guessing. Once you step into the camp, your soul is deprived. You no longer think that you are alive even though you are alive.”<\/p>\n

‘North Korea can no longer deny the undeniable,” said Zarifi.\u00a0“For decades the authorities have refused to admit to the existence of mass political prison camps. <\/span><\/p>\n

‘<\/span>As North Korea seems to be moving towards a new leader in Kim Jong-un and a period of political instability, the big worry is that the prison camps appear to be growing in size,” he said, referring to the son and presumed successor of dictator Kim Jong-il.<\/span><\/p>\n

CLICK HERE\u00a0for details of North Korea’s\u00a0cruel medical experiments on\u00a0Christians<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jeong Kyoungil, who was detained in Yodok from 2000 to 2003, said prisoners worked from 4am to 8pm with two breaks for meals of corn gruel.<\/span><\/div>\n
\n
\n

“From 9 pm to 11pm, it’s time for ideology education. If we don’t memorise the 10 codes of ethics we would not be allowed to sleep,” he said. “<\/span>‘Disruptive’ inmates are put for at least a week in a cube ‘torture cell’, where it is impossible to either stand or lie down.’ <\/span>Another\u00a0former detainee at Yodok an estimated that 40 per cent of inmates died from malnutrition between 1999 and 2001.<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

For Kim Hae-sook, her connection with Bongchang-ri Camp No. 18 remains as strong as ever. <\/span>Her siblings are still being held in detention over 40 years after they were first taken there from their home in the back of an army truck.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The plight of Christian inmates in North Korea’s huge network of\u00a0concentration camps\u00a0has been denounced by the human rights group Amnesty International, which unveiled new satellite photos that show the camps have grown dramatically in size. Testifying about the terror of growing up in one of the camps was Kim Hae-sook, who\u00a0was 13 years old when…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":270,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,123,130,4],"tags":[65,64,63,113,112],"class_list":["post-580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia","category-communist","category-inspiration","category-persecution","tag-amnesty-international","tag-concentration-camps","tag-north-korea","tag-persecuted-christians","tag-persecution"],"yoast_head":"\nAmnesty International denounces North Korean cruelty - Pray for the Persecuted Church<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pray_for_the_persecuted_church\/2011\/08\/amnesty-international-denounces-north-korean-cruelty.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Amnesty International denounces North Korean cruelty - Pray for the Persecuted Church\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The plight of Christian inmates in North Korea’s huge network of\u00a0concentration camps\u00a0has been denounced by the human rights group Amnesty International, which unveiled new satellite photos that show the camps have grown dramatically in size. 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