People's Democratic Republic of Death Camps

The Observer and the BBC have uncovered evidence of the most horrific atrocities imaginable, including gas chambers and medical experiments on human beings, in North Korea:

Over the past year harrowing first-hand testimonies from North Korean defectors have detailed execution and torture, and now chilling evidence has emerged that the walls of Camp 22 hide an even more evil secret: gas chambers where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings.

Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They are left to an agonising death while scientists take notes. The allegations offer the most shocking glimpse so far of Kim Jong-il's North Korean regime.

Kwon Hyuk, who has changed his name, was the former military attaché at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing. He was also the chief of management at Camp 22. In the BBC's This World documentary, to be broadcast tonight, Hyuk claims he now wants the world to know what is happening.

'I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,' he said. 'The parents, son and 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.'

Hyuk has drawn detailed diagrams of the gas chamber he saw. He said: 'The glass chamber is sealed airtight. It is 3.5 metres wide, 3m long and 2.2m high_ [There] is the injection tube going through the unit. Normally, a family sticks together and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners. Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass.'

He explains how he had believed this treatment was justified. 'At the time I felt that they thoroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault; that we were poor, divided and not making progress as a country.

'It would be a total lie for me to say I feel 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.'

With his usual impeccable timing, Gwynne Dyer writes that American fears over North Korea's nuclear program are exaggerated and hysterical, since it's impossible to see how they could be of any use except to repel a (presumably U.S.-led) invasion. Dyer, of course, undercuts his own argument by acknowledging that Kim Jong Il is crazy - which is precisely why we warmongering neocons are so nervous about this man having even the smallest nuclear arsenal.

China is a foul dictatorship with a much more advanced nuclear-weapons program - but it doesn't really scare me that much, since the Chinese government would know better than to use them to launch a war. I am not willing to give the North Koreans the benefit of such doubt.

Update: Sari Stein has been all over this story. And read this, too.

Posted by damian at February 2, 2004 11:00 AM