North Korean Atrocities Spawn Film

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As the rest of the world waits more or less patiently for the Olympics to start in Beijing, A South Korean group, Justice for North Korea has chosen this time to highlight the problems of North Korean and Chinese border crossers. The groups International Coordinator is Park Ji Hye, who had this to say

"It's a good time to show China cannot be given a free pass for forced repatriation to North Korea," says Park Ji Hye, the international coordinator for a group called Justice for North Korea.

North Korea, as is no surprise to anyone who reads the news has one of the worst human rights records on the planet, perhaps even making Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe look like an only slightly soiled Princess.

The venue chosen to highlight those who cross the border from North Korea to China or South Korea is a film called "Crossings". The film is a collection of stories about "crossers" and tells the story of one man, Kim Yong Soo who left his wife, sick with tuberculosis in North Korea crossing secretly to China trying to find medications for her.

Kim's story closely parallels the real life story of one crosser, Oh Yon Jong who left her son to become an economic emigrant in South Korea in the simple search to find food to feed her family, and in the process, losing her family.

The policy of China has been to repatriate all North Korean economic emigrants they find. The penalties meted out by the North Korean authorities are indescribably harsh in nature. Often when a person is charged with a crime, three full generations of that persons family are held accountable with them. Or even every person who lives in the same apartment building.

The North Koreans have recreated the old Soviet style gulags to extract every last morsel of labor and punishment from the offenders. Little wonder neighbors will turn in their neighbors for the slightest perceived offense.

Director Kim Tae-kyun said he hoped the film would help draw international attention to the dire human rights situation in the North. "North Korea is perhaps the most hidden country in the world and is in a situation where people are starving to death again, but there is no channel to show the facts" to the world, Kim said at a recent press screening for the movie.

The North Korean gulags are known as "kwan-li-so" they are forced labor camps for those guilty of the heinous crime of being "wrong thinkers" and "wrong doers'

Concentrations of Inhumanity
The report on concentrations of inhumanity distinguishes between commonplace human rights violations such as miscarriages of justice, more serious “consistent patterns of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights,” and human rights violations that are so egregious that they rise to the level of “crimes against humanity,” “war crimes,” or “genocide.”

It analyzes, according to the provisions of the international law defining crimes against humanity, the unique phenomena of repression associated with the core element of the North Korean gulag: the kwan-li-so political penal labor encampments where as many as 200,000 persons, including both suspected wrong-doers and wrong-thinkers, and up to three generations of their family members, are imprisoned without trial and subjected to forced labor under extremely severe conditions.

In the report, David Hawk calls for two immediate measures: 1) for the international community to recognize the severe human rights abuses in North Korea as crimes against humanity; and 2) for the North Korean government to begin the measures necessary to bring the kwan-li-so labor camps into compliance with international norms, and amend the practices that run afoul of standards set forth by international law.

In the past thirteen years North Korea has also been in the midst of a famine caused by both floods and droughts, coupled with disastrous agricultural policies by the Government. During that time since 1995, as many as, or more than, two million North Koreans have died of starvation, that is roughly 10% of the total population of the country. The deaths have fallen equally on all levels of the population though.



In a report from the UN World Food Programme is what seemed to me a stunning statement.

"Today in North Korea the average seven year old is eight inches shorter and twenty pounds lighter than their South Korean counterpart."

In 1998, the World Food Program (WFP) conducted a study of child malnutrition in North Korea. The results showed that 15.6% of children were wasted and 63.8% were stunted. In its current report on North Korea, the WFP estimates that approximately 55% of North Koreans are malnourished, with the heaviest concentration in the Sino border provinces. Residents of these provinces bore the brunt of the famine; mortality in some villages was as high as 20-25%.

While the world cries loudly regarding the evils of the United States, the single largest donor to the DPRK (Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea) in the food program has been the Great Satan, The United States, having sent more than a billion US dollars of food aid to the DPRK.
During this same period of time five NGO (Non Governmental Organizations) have fled the DPRK due the the unwillingness of the government to providing transparent food distribution processes. With most if not all of the food going to the Pyongyang area and the DPRK Military, the people in the outlying districts have had to fend for themselves with little to show for it except one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world.

The plight of the North Korean people is what the film "Crossings" hopes to illuminate. Lets hope and pray that China with their highly expansive economy is willing to show some largess to the world in response to the film and the spotlight the film holds on the inhumanity of the DPRK government.

A side note: At the Justice For North Korea Xanga site is a planetary photo of that area of Asia at night. In that photo, Japan and China stand out brightly lit, the area where North Korea sits, is strangely dark. What an odd way for a nation to live.