pumpkinboy

KIM JONG IL IS A DORK

North Korea: Chronology of Provocations

N Korea gassing dissidents: BBC

February 1, 2004 - 2:25PM

A program made by Britain's BBC says North Korea is killing political prisoners in experimental gas chambers and testing new chemical weapons on women and children.

Titled "Access to Evil" and being aired on Sunday, the program features an official North Korean document that says political prisoners are used to test new chemical weapons.

In a statement, the BBC said the documentary included comments by Kwon Hyuk, a new name given to a former military attache at the North Korean embassy in Beijing and chief of management at Prison Camp 22.

Using a drawing, he describes a gas chamber and the victims he says he saw at the prison in the northeast of the secretive communist state, near the Russian border.

"I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. The parents, son and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing," he said.

"Normally, a family sticks together (in the gas chamber) ... and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners. Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass."

Asked how he felt about the children, he said: "It would be a total lie for me to say I felt sympathetic about the children dying such a painful death. Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all."

The documentary for the BBC's "This World" series was to be broadcast at 9pm (0800 AEDT).

North Korean officials in London were unavailable to comment. BBC journalist Olenka Frenkiel told Reuters she had three independent confirmations that Kwon Hyuk was genuine.

The human rights group Amnesty International said it had been unable to confirm previous reports of such testing.

"We have heard of these allegations but we cannot confirm them," a spokeswoman said.

North Korea - described by US President George W Bush as part of an "axis of evil" because of a nuclear weapons program and authoritarian system - has denied accusations of human rights abuses.

A top-secret North Korean document also says political prisoners are used for "human biological experimentation and for production of biological weapons", the BBC said.

It interviews a person said to be a former prisoner in North Korea who had been ordered to poison others.

"An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners. One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it but to give it to the 50 women," Sun Ok Lee said, according to the BBC statement.

"All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes, they were quite dead."

Frenkiel said she had also seen other official North Korean documents, one of which referred to the transfer of a prisoner "for the purpose of human experimentation of liquid gas for chemical weapons" in February 2002.

Meanwhile, North Korea claimed the US military conducted at least 190 spy flights against the communist state in January, accusing Washington of mapping out a sudden attack.

North Korea's official news agency KCNA said yesterday that U-2, RC-135 and other reconnaissance planes of the US military were used for "round-the-clock" operations.

"Such aerial espionage clear shows the US imperialists' black-hearted design to mount a sudden pre-emptive attack on the DPRK anytime as they did to seize Iraq and Afghanistan," KCNA said. DPRK stands for Democratic People's Republic or Korea, or North Korea.

North Korea regularly makes such accusations. The US military does not comment on North Korean claims on spy flights, although it acknowledges monitoring North Korean military activity.

The United States keeps 37,000 American troops in South Korea - a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War.

Efforts are under way to continue international talks on North Korea's nuclear weapons program. The six-nation negotiations comprise the United States, Russia, China, Japan and the two Koreas. A first round ended in August with little progress made.

Reuters, AP

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/02/01/1075570282806.html

Enter secondary content here

YEARNING FOR FREEDOM
Cannibalism in North Korea prisons?
Ex-inmate: 'Brothers ate their own brothers in order to survive'

Posted: April 11, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern

© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com
Describing horrific conditions that led to cannibalism, two former prisoners presented a picture of communist North Korea's notorious prison camps at a meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, the Assist News Service reported.
"In order to survive, I ate rats, cockroaches and snakes," said Kang Chul Hwan, who was imprisoned at age 9 along with several family members because of the alleged political crimes of his grandfather.
A prisoner for 10 years, Hwan said he was among many children detained for their parents' alleged crimes. He estimated that one-third died of malnourishment.
"Children simply disappeared from the camp," he said.
Hwan is calling for an international team to investigate the human-rights situation in North Korea, one of the world's most closed countries.
About 1 million people have become victims of extra-judicial killings over the past 50 years of communist rule according to the most conservative estimates, said Kim Sang Hun, a South Korean who has worked for two decades as a U.N. official.
Lee Min Bok, a genetic engineer sent to prison after a failed escape attempt from North Korea, said starvation conditions led to widespread cannibalism.
"A woman who had just given birth was so hungry that she ate her own newborn baby," he said. "Brothers ate their own brothers in order to survive."
Bok described brutal treatment at the hands of guards before he was sent to the State Security Police Detention Center in Hyesan City, Assist News said.
Interrogation methods at the camps include water torture, sexual assault, severe beatings and psychological abuse, the former prisoners said.
In addition to malnourishment, Bok described filthy living conditions.
"There were no sanitation facilities and no showers, and your body became full of insects," Bok testified. "There were tens of thousands of lice all over my body."
The prison camps in North Korea today are like Hitler's concentration camps, he said.
The human-rights meeting was chaired by Baroness Caroline Cox, a deputy speaker of the House of Lords and the president of Christian Solidarity Worldwide in the UK.
"We have heard a grim and sober catalog of extreme violations of human rights in North Korea and China, with descriptions of suffering almost beyond comprehension," Cox said. "There is a moral imperative for all of us who have the privilege of living in freedom to use our freedom to influence the international community to try and bring an end to such appalling suffering and human degradation."
CSW issued a previous report of prison abuses that included an account by a former guard who defected to South Korea.
The guard described inmates who "looked like beasts all had a deformity limping, bent shoulders. They had sunken eyes, like a skull; unfocused, fearful."
Guards and torturers were trained to see the prisoners as sub-human, he said, noting that he had virtually no limit to the punishments he could inflict.
"You can do anything you like, but do not kill them, unless they resist authority," he said.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=31996