North Korean atrocities

A new report on North Korea's gulag says pregnant women who've been returned to the country after trying to escape are having their babies forcibly aborted or killed, to keep the DPRK "ethnically pure":

Pregnant North Korean refugees repatriated after being rounded up in China have their babies forcibly aborted or killed after birth, according to a report that adds more horror to what is known of the Stalinist state's gulags.

Evidence from a number of women who have escaped from the prison camps of the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-il, reveals a pattern of infanticide, principally due to concern that babies conceived outside the country might not be "ethnically pure".

The report, by the United States Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a cross-party monitoring group, cites evidence from eight former inmates.

One described how a guard took a baby away from a woman married to a Chinese and put him in a box nearby. A doctor then explained that since the country was short of food, it should not have to feed the children of foreign fathers. When the box was full of babies, it was taken away and buried, she said. It was not clear whether they were alive or dead at the time.
[...]
According to the report, between 150,000 and 200,000 of North Korea's population of 22 million are held in prison camps. Among their crimes are failing to care properly for photographs of Kim and his father Kim Il-sung, singing South Korean pop songs, and being the offspring of people executed as traitors.

Johann Hari has an excellent response to Wanker columnist Gary Younge's assertion that the "anti-war" movement may be strong enough to keep North Koreans "out of harm's way":

"Out of harm's way"? In a horrific Stalinist state that even Noam Chomsky describes as "the worst regime in the world"? Leaving North Koreans under that is something to be proud of? In fact, I would happily wager that the poor people of North Korea would welcome a US invasion, as we now know definitively that the Iraqis did. (Check out the opinion polls - 66% say the current difficulties are well worth it to get rid of Sddam). I know the situation is complicated by North Korea's acquisition of nuclear weapons, but to imply that the civilians within North Korea actually benefit from the "solidarity" of leaving them to be starved and gulaged is morally depraved.

What Gary means, of course, is that not the North Koreans are out of harm's way - he is a smart man - but that they are out of America's way. It is only US-backed tyranny that excites his (and too much of the anti-war left's) anger.

You can read my take on North Korea here. It's a long way from being the best thing I've ever written, and it is probably far too beligerent. But I'd far rather be too tough on tyranny than simply blankly ignore it so long as America's finger-prints aren't on the cattle-prod.

No, this isn't about saying that America is terrific and the last great hope of man on earth. Its foreign policy has done more harm than good in the last fifty years. [Editor's note: I love Hari, but I get the impression he tosses off lines like this now and then to ensure his readers that, yes, he's still a good Leftist.] But for crying out loud - an American liberation is, if it can be done without triggering a nuclear war, surely better than a regime that systematically starves its own people and - to quote Amnesty - "denies the population any freedom of thought at all."

Posted by damian at October 23, 2003 06:53 AM