The indispensible guide to North Korea’s atrocities

A type of caste system, known as songbun, determines where North Koreans can live. Only the highest-level songbun can reside in the capital, Pyongyang.

The indispensible guide to North Korea’s atrocities

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Global Post / The Star | 2 March 2014

On March 21, 2013, the United Nations Human Rights Council established a commission to investigate what it called “systematic, widespread and grave violations of human rights” in North Korea.

For almost a year, investigators gathered evidence and testimony from more than 80 witnesses, victims and experts in public hearings in Seoul, Tokyo, London and Washington, D.C. They conducted private interviews with more than 240 people.

The commission has published its report and what it discovered was shocking, even considering all we already know about North Korea. Investigators found: “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation.”

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Here is what the UN report tells us about life and death in North Korea:

No freedom of expression

In schools, a large part of the curriculum focuses on the lives and teachings of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. A former North Korean teacher claims this focus “constitutes most of the education.”

“When you get to this prison you are not human, you are just like animals, and as soon as you get to this prison, you have to crawl just like animals.”

A guard at an underground detention facility 

Students are discouraged from drawing unless their drawings depict members of the Kim family or the killing of Japanese and American soldiers.

North Koreans must display three framed pictures in their households: one of Kim Il-sung, one of Kim Jong-il, and one that shows the two leaders in conversation with each other.

Homes are equipped with “fixed line” broadcast systems that allow the state to broadcast messages directly to citizens.

When citizens purchase a television, they must register it with the Transmission Surveillance Bureau, which modifies the TV set so that it only receives official channels.

Widespread discrimination

Class discrimination is based in something called songbun, a sort of caste system that determines where citizens can live, what kind of work they can do, how much food they receive and whom they can marry. Women are subject to an array of human rights violations, including sexual violence, lack of representation among political elites, vulnerability to trafficking and more.

The songbun system divides the population into three general categories and 51 subcategories.

Only the highest-level songbun can reside in Pyongyang, which comes with access to decent housing, medicine and food. For low-caste citizens, even visiting the capital can be difficult.

History can determine your songbun. Guerrillas who fought with Kim Il-sung earned their families the highest status, while wealthy industrialists, collaborators and spies, South Korean prisoners of war, Catholics and Buddhists received the lowest.

The state maintains extensive songbun records on every citizen, tracing genealogy and loyalty. The files are updated over time. Low scores can hinder admission to university and being hired. It’s nearly impossible for citizens to access their own files.

Women are supposed to wear skirts and black shoes. No pants or sandals allowed. Dress rules are enforced by the Moral Discipline Corps: groups of citizens that monitor “morality violations.” Women are also forbidden from riding bicycles.

According to some witnesses, families that include a member with disabilities are not allowed to live in Pyongyang.

Little freedom of movement 

The state assigns your residence and the Worker’s Party of Korea assigns your job, with songbun being a key factor. If you want to move, you need government permission.

The state can move you at any time. Banishment from Pyongyang is a particular concern for citizens. If a resident is charged with a political crime, it can downgrade the entire family’s songbun.

The only citizens permitted to travel outside North Korea are those with spotless ideological records and high songbun.

Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have starved to death since famine began in the 1990s, but state authorities have never lifted the ban on foreign travel.

Border guards are ordered to “shoot to kill” citizens seeking to escape the country.

Arbitrary detention and torture

Prisoners accused of political crimes disappear without trial, sent to political prison camps where they are denied contact with the outside world. Authorities do not inform prisoners’ families of their loved ones’ detention statuses. They sometimes do not inform prisoners of the crimes they’ve been charged with. In prison, men and women are subjected to forced labor, torture, rape, deliberate starvation, and other abuses.

“Guest houses” are what the State Security Department (SSD) calls its secret interrogation detention facilities.

Witnesses and victims describe underground detention facilities where cell doors are less than a metre in height, so prisoners enter and exit by crawling. One former prisoner testified that he was told by a guard, “when you get to this prison you are not human, you are just like animals, and as soon as you get to this prison, you have to crawl just like animals.”

Torture is a routine feature of interrogation. A former SSD official described a torture chamber with wall shackles designed to suspend prisoners upside down and a water tank to simulate drowning. Interrogators would sometimes drive needles underneath a prisoner’s fingernails or pour hot chili pepper sauce down his or her nose. Interrogators at a Ministry of People’s Security interrogation centre in Pyongyang have kept prisoners in a small metal cages for hours.

Security and detention authorities withhold food as punishment and use the threat of starvation to coerce confessions and compliance. One prisoner, who was detained for 10 months after trading goods with citizens of South Korea, dropped from 165 pounds to 79 pounds while imprisoned.

Guards at secret prison camps are under orders, in the event of war, to exterminate the prisoners and destroy all evidence of the camps.

Most estimates put the number of prisoners in secret camps at more than 100,000.

Restrictions on food

North Korea distributes food unequally, uses starvation as a form of political coercion, and has refused international food aid that might have saved some of the hundreds of thousands of citizens who have died since widespread famine broke out in the 1990s. Starvation and malnutrition have improved since then, but remain a widespread problem, especially in poorer, more remote regions.

Witnesses testified that people ate grass, roots, dirt and bark during the 1990s famine.

Between 2011 and 2013, 30.9 per cent of the North Korean population was suffering from malnourishment.

The state distributes more food per person to citizens with high songbun than to other citizens.

Discriminatory food access is both class-based and geographical, since class determines residence. That means the North Korean state can limit humanitarian access to the most severely at-risk populations by limiting geographical access.

Kidnapping foreigners

Since the Korean War, North Korean authorities have abducted more than 200,000 citizens of foreign nations. Most of these abductions took place during and immediately after the war.

More recently, North Korean authorities have kidnapped Japanese nationals — the UN commission estimates the number to be about 100 — and used them to teach Japanese at spy and military training schools.

North Korea has made a great effort, employing the full force of its land, naval and intelligence capabilities, to abduct North Korean defectors, even in cases where defectors have received residency status or citizenship elsewhere.

The UN’s conclusion

“Systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations have been, and are being, committed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, its institutions and officials. In many instances, the violations of human rights found by the commission constitute crimes against humanity. These are not mere excesses of the state. They are essential components of a political system that has moved far from the ideals on which it claims to be founded. The gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world. Political scientists of the 20th century characterized this type of political organization as a totalitarian state: A state that does not content itself with ensuring the authoritarian rule of a small group of people, but seeks to dominate every aspect of its citizens’ lives and terrorizes them from within.”