Torture and Sexual Assault Ceremonies: The Horror in North Korea Concentration Camps | Israel today

A human rights organization report reveals the atrocities taking place in the detention camps of the closed state • Survivors tell of rape, flogging and prolonged hunger in freezing cold

• North Korean soldiers in Pyongyang // Photo: AP

A Journey to Kim Jong Un's Torture Rooms: A new and unique report sheds light on life behind the electric fences of North Korea's detention and concentration camps, one of the most secretive and confined dictatorships in the world.

The report, published by the American Human Rights Watch, describes a routine of sadistic torture, sexual abuse, rape and starvation and contamination in contaminated cells in a series of detention camps scattered across the country. And no less dark of North Korea's penalty system. 

The report was revealed yesterday during a press conference held at the organization during which the organization's Asian director, Phil Robertson, said: "Prisoners are simply dying for food shortages if they fail to bribe one of the guards to bring them food from their family members."

The report is based on 15 testimonies of men and women who fled North Korea after 2011, the year Kim Jong Un came to power in the country, along with testimonies from senior members of the country's penal system that few have fled to the West over the years.

"Worse attitude than living"

According to the report, the most difficult stage in imprisonment is that shortly after detention and before trial, many prisoners do not survive until the date specified in their trial.

"The written rules prohibit violence against detainees, but we are expected to obtain a full confession before the trial. So you must beat them to obtain the confession," a prisoner who defected to South Korea said and testified for the report.

 Testimony of the prisoners paints a picture of systematic and ceremonial torture.

Almost everyone said they had to kneel with their legs crossed for 16 hours every day.

Extremely light movement on the part of the detainee will immediately lead to blows from all that is near by the guards.

Another torture is tasks performed in the yard as and lifting heavy loads over and over again or running in circles 1,000 times around the yard.

"If one of the inmates in the cell dared to move," says Park Ji-chul, a former inmate, "the guards ordered all the inmates to reach out from the bars and then today they are stepped on with studded boots."

"The detainees were treated worse than animals, that's what they wanted us to become," G. Chul continues.

Ion, a government official, told the report's authors that by the secret police in 2011. He went through two days of incessant beatings before he was even told what he was suspected of. "They suspected I was spying.

They beat me for half an hour with everything they had, "says the prisoner. Ion was not convicted of treason but was forced to spend five years in a labor camp after being convicted of smuggling luxury into the country.

Sexual violence as a method

Women arrested were almost all reported incessant acts of sexual harassment and rape in detention camps.

Kim Sun Young, a trafficker in her fifties, claims she was raped both by the interrogator during her interrogation and by one of the guards, who led her to the interrogation.

"There was nothing I could do, any movement would also bring beatings in addition to rape," she described to the report's authors.

The report ends with a call for the North Korean government to recognize human rights violations and torture in its law enforcement system and "end the brutal abuse inherent in the system and the degrading abuse of detainees." The report also called on foreign governments to put pressure on Pyongyang to change its path.