U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea
spread the awareness. silence is no longer an option.
One time, she miscalculated the imported nylon fabric but immediately corrected the error and no fabric was wasted. However, she was detained in the punishment cell for ten days for "attempting sabotage." She was crippled and partly paralyzed when she was released from the punishment cell. On a very hot summer day in August, the camp doctors burned her bottom with heated stones to see if she could feel pain. Just before she died a few weeks later, she whispered to me, with a twittered tongue and tears in her eyes, "I want to see the blue sky. You know my children are waiting for me."
WARNING: The following is very graphic and disturbing.. (especially the picture that follows) but it is a reality.
David Hawk, a human rights investigator for The US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, issued a report in 2003. He reported "extreme phenomena of repression ... unique to North Korea." He concluded that the country practiced "ethnic infanticide." He obtained testimony from eight women who described cases of infanticide.
Choi Yong-hwa, 28, described how she was made to go with a woman with an advanced pregnancy to a clinic in Sinuiju. The doctors induced labor. The newborn was then suffocated with a wet towel. The mother passed out.
A grandmother, 66, described events at Sinuiju involving the deaths of seven newborns. Two were born at full term; five were premature babies born after induced labor. The newborns were thrown into a garbage container. Two days later, the premature babies were all dead and the full term babies were near death. A guard hit the latter with forceps until they died.
The horrifying result?!!?
HOW.............. WHY......
"The elderly, he was told by a senior North Korean official, had stopped eating to keep their grandchildren alive."
*Spare me a few minutes and please watch the video in my blog and the ones below.. then tell me if you can turn your back.. these are innocent human beings. They are paying a price for what?? Being born?? If you're thinking that one person cannot make a difference.. imagine every other person having that same attitude. What then? I have listed ways that you can help on the left side. It is as simple as writing a letter or posting a simple link. These people, our people.. desperately need us.. don't abandon them..please..
"Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately." -Elie Wiesel
"Children of the Secret State".. this video is kind of long but well worth it..
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"'An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners,' she said. 'One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it but to give it to the 50 women. I gave them out and heard a scream from those who had eaten them. They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes they were quite dead.'" -Soon Ok-lee, was imprisoned for seven years.
A person and their entire family can be sent to a prison camp for merely singing a foreign pop-song, listening to foreign radio, or damaging a picture of Kim Jong Il.
Helping Hands in Korea
Prayer for North Korea
Human Rights in North Korea
North Korean Refugees
Liberation in North Korea
Tons of informative articles
The Chosun Journal
They are just chlidren......
"For a person's subway ticket, a North Korean child could have been fed for a month."
FAQ
http://www.northkoreanrefugees.com/faq.html
Q: I've heard that the food situation in North Korea is so bad that many people are dying from starvation. How did this come about? And when did it start?
A: When the Korean War ended in 1953, the Korean Peninsula was in much worse condition than Japan had been just after the Second World War. In North Korea, which is smaller than Japan (North Korea: 120,000 sq. km; Japan: 370,000 sq. km; South Korea: 99,000 sq. km), the carpet bombing was several times greater than Japan had seen in World War II.
The Korean War resulted from a combination of several things. There was the ambition of Kim Il Sung, as well as the Cold War between the communist bloc and the liberal bloc. And there was the proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union in terms of military and warfare technology rather than territorial possession or doctrine. During this time North Korea received enormous amounts of aid from the East-European socialist countries during their postwar recovery years.
It is known that North Korea received particularly generous help from East Germany and Hungary, as well as from Czechoslovakia, which was known for the high level of its technology, including ceramics. There was also help from the Soviet Union, Mongolia and China (Mao Tse-tung's son, Mao An Ying, died in the Korean War).
All that aid is considered the reason for North Korea's extremely rapid recovery. In 1959, only six years after the war, North Koreans returning from Japan arrived at Pyongyang and were astounded by the high-rise apartment buildings lining the street in front of the station. This was a surprise to the entire world.
South Korea lagged far behind. The world was surprised when former president Kim Yong Sam mentioned that, until 1972, the food situation had been better in North Korea than in South Korea. Economic development in South Korea didn't actually begin until the 1980's when the country initiated a spurt of development in preparation for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.
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Meanwhile, the postwar food shortage in Japan was extremely serious. Even some public officials died from starvation, as some in the United States felt that because Japan was responsible for the war, its people deserved punishment. Then the Korean War broke out, bringing a lively procurement boom to Japan.
Hence, it is not true that the food situation in North Korea was better than it was in Japan in 1959 when the homecoming project was started. I still remember, however, eating kim-chi at the Japanese Red Cross Center in Niigata Prefecture in Japan in June 1961. It had been transported from Chunjin, and it tasted delicious, probably because of the various seasonings used. I was there to join the people going back to North Korea. The staple food was corn rather than rice, and fish was dried cod or the like.
North Korea then interrupted its seven-year national economic plan to improve the living standard. It shifted its national focus and began reinforcing itself for possible war after it seized the Pueblo, an American espionage boat. It had also watched other events such as the American X-15 espionage aircraft being shot down in Soviet territory, the Vietnam War becoming bogged down, and South Korea dispatching its soldiers to the Vietnam War.
Judging from those facts, it is reasonable to assume that the living standard (the food situation) in North Korea has not been improved since the mid-1960s. It appears that Kim Il Sung and the top Labor Party members abandoned their efforts to improve the national economy; they gave themselves over to luxury, depending heavily on money received from Japan. This included money donated by the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, as well as other donations, gifts, and various joint ventures. Many such ventures failed, however, including the Kim Man Yoo Hospital, due to the departure of participants.
Still, we heard nothing of the new "starvation hell" until the 1990s.
This coincides with the stories that I myself personally heard from nearly one hundred North Korean interviewees, including defectors from that country, as well as refugees who had escaped into China and those who temporarily escaped and then had to return again to North Korea.
The starvation in North Korea became critical primarily due to several major external elements: the collapse of the Soviet Union; the fall of the Berlin Wall; the end of the socialist system in Eastern Europe; the recognition of South Korea by China; and the diplomatic ties with South Korea that China and Russia concluded. Thus, the flow of aid to North Korea in the form of petroleum and military economic assistance ended.
Domestically, the farming methods failed, including terraced fields and high-density farming, as instructed by Kim Il Sung, who was an absolute amateur in the field. At the same time, they had difficulty securing adequate transportation and storage, electric power, fertilizers, and petroleum. In addition, unfair distribution of profits discouraged people from working. All these factors contributed to the worsening of their food situation.
The personality cult system led to disapproval of engineers, false accusations, and negligence. If people protested the teachings of Kim Il Sung, the force of law was brought to bear, and punishment or execution awaited them. This is a sure sign of self-destruction that characterizes a totalitarian state.
The current starvation was brought about by the external and internal factors mentioned above, which is a great tragedy.
Q: They say that people are dying from starvation in North Korea, but people who have visited Pyongyang for sightseeing say that they saw no signs of a bad food situation. I wonder if the story about starving people is just a vicious rumor made up by an anti-communist group hostile to North Korea, or possibly a rumor spread by North Korea in attempts to get aid?
A: Pyongyang is the capital of North Korea. Foreigners visit there and foreign legations and mass communication media facilities are concentrated in the city. Pyongyang is the face of North Korea.
There are extreme restrictions in North Korea on the people's freedom of movement and on travel. Without a special permit specifically indicating the necessity for a visit, ordinary citizens of North Korea are prohibited from access to Pyongyang.
They long ago expelled every physically handicapped person from Pyongyang, calling them disgraceful. This is highly aberrant, especially in view of today's international trend in which symbiosis between physically/mentally handicapped persons and physically unimpaired persons is accepted as a barometer of social welfare.
Even in Pyongyang, however, the people recently have grown increasingly vocal about food supplies being in such short supply.
However, they will never ever allow sightseers from abroad to glimpse such a situation. Sightseers will find lots of food, beer and other beverages, fruits, and candies.
I am not sure, however, how you would react if you ever get the chance to try any candies in North Korea.
I once got candies as a souvenir from that country. They were dry and tasted quite flat (not sweet at all).
The people in North Korea are very proud people. They continued to insist until about 1980 that it was no one's business if they worshiped one particular person, maintained their hereditary system, or poured 60% of their GNP into military expenditures. They also insisted that they were self-sufficient (although they actually depended heavily on financial support from China, the Soviet Union, and Japan).
We would be quite happy if the starvation were simply a vicious rumor spread by anti-communists, and if the people in North Korea were really living in comfort.
Unfortunately, however, the truth is different. The food shortage worsened after 1990, and especially so after 1994. Rations were completely stopped. Workers do not go to work. Children do not go to school; instead, they go to the hills in their neighborhoods and try to fill their stomachs with grass.
Murders and the sale of human flesh in markets were no longer uncommon. Drowned bodies of people who had starved to death have been found floating in the rivers at the border - bodies so swollen from being in the water that their clothes had split.
I directly heard the following story in China from one of the priests who care for orphans. Dead bodies become caught in the reeds and grass along the riverbank on the Chinese side, where they gave off a foul smell. The priests cannot stand the stench, and in one month alone they had to dig fifteen graves along the riverside to bury the decomposed bodies of starved victims.
Q: Despite reports that the North Korean people are starving, I recently saw on TV showing black markets in North Korea, and it looked like they had lots of goods there. Isn't the starvation an exaggeration by mass communication media to earn high audience ratings?
A: It is true that the black markets have become more active recently, since the authorities are no longer able to keep a tight lid on them after government rations were discontinued. To begin with, even the authorities have to use the black markets to get food, and they probably are taking bribes and dominating the black markets.
It is also true that you can get anything, if you have enough money. The prices are extremely high. The average worker's monthly salary ranges from 60 to 70 won, and this will barely buy 200 grams of rice or one pack of cigarettes.
In July 1995, we invited Mr. Kang Chul Hwan and Mr. An Hyuk, who had been in a North Korean Prison Camp, to lecture meetings in several places in Japan.
Because his grandfather committed a crime (he made the mistake of criticizing Han DukSoo, one of the managers of the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan), Mr. Kang Chul Hwan was confined in the prison camp located in Ham Gyong, South for ten years. He entered when he was nine years old. When he was released from the prison camp at age nineteen, he was only 153 cm (about 5 ft.) tall and weighed only 39 kg (about 86 lb.). In the next ten years, he grew to 173 cm (about 5.8 ft.) and his weight increased to 75 kg (about 165 lb.) This demonstrates how malnutrition can affect the growth period.
The recent food shortage has turned the entire North Korean country into a prison camp.
During the past four or five years, I have met probably almost one hundred people who have escaped from North Korea. Some of them have gone into exile in South Korea, some are refugees hiding in China, some are working in China away from home (North Korea), some illegally left North Korea, and some are children repeatedly crossing the border.
The children protected by groups of volunteers in China enjoy good nutritional conditions. However, when those children get a chance to eat in a restaurant, they are all interested in eating only meat because they are fed only greens. (However, this same eating-meat trend also applies to many Japanese kids.)
The children repeatedly crossing the border are in tragic condition. For example, a 20-year-old boy looks like he is only 15 years old, or a 17-year-old boy looks only 11. A 16-year-old girl who looked 11 didn't even know about menstruation. Her classmates and seniors looked like they had completely stopped growing.
One 10-year-old girl had crossed the border fifteen times. Children are not supposed to be executed, shot, or imprisoned, but who can assure that they will not be shot by mistake from a distance? Age is hard to judge from a distance. If they are arrested, they are beaten and threatened, even tortured. One boy was attacked by a thief who left a sword scar on his face.
We clothed those children, who had neither underwear nor socks, and who had no alternative but sleep in open fields in temperatures of -30 degrees centigrade (-22 degrees Fahrenheit). We also bathed them (most looked like they had not bathed for five years, judging from the thickness of their grime). They had never seen shampoo. We fed them, and interviewed them to find out how their parents had died or been killed.
We found how limited our options were for helping those children; we could do nothing but shed helpless tears for the tragic circumstances of these children.
Q: I hear that the people in North Korea are required to get permits just to travel. Despite that, how do so many people manage to get to the borders?
A: That's a good question.
In June 1961, I was at the Red Cross Center, preparing to enter North Korea the next day. Even the tax-free shop at the Center carried no maps or timetables. They said the maps and timetables were military secrets.
So, you can easily image how difficult it is to get travel permits. More detailed information is provided in the book entitled "Escape from North Korea" co-authored by Kang Chul Hwan and An Hyuk.
However, for the past several years, it seems that the issuance of travel permits has become practically impossible due to the discontinuation of rations in the food shortage.
The food shortage caused rations to be discontinued, even to authorities. This includes the police (security officers) and the army; it also applies to their families, of course. They are responsible for clamping down, but of course they cannot continue their jobs without food. The result is a lawless world.
Thus, people take any kind of opportunities to use transportation. They climb onto the roofs of trains or hang onto the couplings between coaches.
They risk their lives on the roofs of the trains; they may be shaken off or crushed inside tunnels. Do you suppose that those people paid to get train tickets or to carry travel permit cards?
One cannot expect to see such illegal free riders carrying permits or certificates.
Of course, not everybody gets the chance to move about freely. There are very few trains. Further, I have heard that it now takes five days from Chunjin to Pyongyang, while it used to take only three days. Likewise, it now takes three days from Chunjin to HangHum on the east coast, while it used to take less than one day. The problem is due to the shortage of electric power, which most seriously affects the operation of electric locomotives. Their great efforts to expedite electrification in the 1960s are now working against them.
It would be illogical to assume that many people make it as far as the border, because the borders are heavily guarded. The children from North Korea told us that few people make it to the borders; instead, they go to the area neighboring the train station in an up-country town (HamHung, for example) and try to board the trains, but that they die in ditches near the train stations.
It seems that many escapees jump off the trains midway and instead go over the mountains to avoid guards rather than taking the trains all the way to the border.
Such a route may be confidential, and should probably not be disclosed like this.
Q: How do the people in North Korea make a living?
A: Discontinuation of the rations has completely broken down the livelihood of the North Korean people except for some among the upper class.
As was mentioned, the average worker's monthly income is 60 to 80 won, and this is hardly enough to buy anything.
Back in 1960 when the average monthly income of workers was also around 60 won, the monthly rent for a high-rise apartment averaged about 2 won. Rice was available for extremely low prices, and lots of other kinds of food, including fish and meat, were rationed. The utility charges were almost free, medical treatments including full nursing were completely free, and school expenses were of course free. If anyone wished, they could go to the Kim Il Sung University or even Moscow University.
People were able to save some money every month, and they got one-month paid holidays for enjoying hot springs. All daily necessities were provided, so even returnees who entered North Korea empty-handed could fully enjoy the warmth of their fatherland.
But all of that was false propaganda developed by the mass communication media in Japan. The returnees who believed those claims went back to North Korea and encountered a cruel fate at the hands of their fatherland.
It is known, however, that the returnees who had relatives sending them money from Japan, and the executives of the General Association of Korean Residents who were also lucky enough to have someone sending money from Japan were known to be wealthier than the original citizens of North Korea.
A woman I met in China in September 1998 said that she had been receiving two million yen (about US $16,400 dollars at $1=122 yen) a year from her uncle in Japan for forty years. After her uncle died, her cousins told her that they could not afford to keep on sending her the money. She, however, refused to believe that her cousins could not afford the money. She concluded, "In Japan, surely two million yen is just chicken feed. Bring me the money now."
Here is another incredible true story. A child from North Korea begged me for money at the border between China and North Korea. I discovered that he was seventeen (hard to believe from his appearance) after we started to talk, and also discovered that he absolutely had to return home by election day to avoid serious trouble. Specifically, if he failed to make it home by election day, not only he but all his family members would be indicted for a criminal offense and sent to a prison camp.
I asked him, "How much do you need to save your four family members from starvation right now? I know you have risked your life by crossing the river and illegally entering China to beg. How much do you have to bring back to Korea?" He answered that he needed 150 yuan (about 2,500 yen or US $30).
I was shocked by the big difference from the foregoing story. This answer motivated us to start our campaign "One thousand yen will help an entire four-member family survive for a month. Donate the money you would spend for one lunch."
Here is a recent private letter addressed to a cousin living in Japan.
"The situation here began worsening last spring, and we are now in terrible shape. The food rationed by the government stopped, and we have no other choice but buy black-market rice. My monthly salary is 100 won (note: this person is an elite living in the capital area), while one kilogram (about 2.2 lb.) of rice now costs 110 to 120 won. We cannot buy anything at government-run stores. Although starving to death never before even entered our minds, it is becoming quite believable these days. Because of malnutrition, minor health disorders easily turn into fatal diseases."
Here is another private letter from a returnee to a mother living in Japan.
"My wage is 89 won, and my two younger brothers each earn about 80 to 90 won. However, we get only 20 to 50% of the wages because of the extreme shortage of cash. So, we get 10 to 20 won a month - 25 to 30 won at the most. From this amount, the fees for insurance, union, and social sentry are withdrawn from the wages, so the actual amount of money that we get is 10 to 20 won.
In the black market, 180 grams (about 0.4 lb.) of rice costs 65 won, one egg costs 5 to 5.5 won, 180 grams (about 0.4 lb.) of corn costs 35 won, one apple costs 7 to 10 won, and one persimmon costs 3 to 5 won.
There is a lot of uproar currently because we now have lots of thieves. Family suicides are not uncommon.
We are so lucky that we can afford to buy the black-market rice thanks to you, Mother. People over here are having a really hard time. They have swollen, yellow faces because of starvation."
Does this mean that poor people must die? As a matter of fact, many people are dying from starvation. What a tragedy!
Answering these questions is torturing me. I don't think I can continue any more. Please allow me to stop.
source: http://www.northkoreanrefugees.com/faq.html
"Famine and economic collapse cut the life expectancy of North Koreans by more than six years during the 1990s, a senior North Korean official said Tuesday in a rare disclosure.
Death rates for infants and young children climbed while incomes fell by almost half, said a report presented by Vice Foreign Minister Choe Su Hon to a UNICEF conference in Beijing.
North Korea rarely releases official data, but figures in the report closely mirror outside estimates.
The country has depended on foreign aid to feed its people since 1995, when its agricultural system collapsed after decades of mismanagement aggravated by years of bad weather.
North Korea says 220,000 people died of famine in 1995-98. South Korean and U.S. estimates of deaths range from 270,000 to 2 million.
Choe's report portrayed a nation wracked by chronic shortages of food and medicine, its economy in collapse and health care system ruined. Mortality rate
The report didn't give specific figures for famine deaths, but said average life expectancy fell from 73.2 years in 1993 to 66.8 in 1999.
The North Korean population grew by 1.5 million people in the same period to a total of 22.6 million, the report said.
The mortality rate for children under age 5 rose during those years from 27 deaths per 1,000 to 48 per 1,000. The same figure for infants rose from 14 to 22.5 per 1,000 births, the report said. Meanwhile, North Korea's per capita gross national product slipped from $991 per year to $457, it said.
Choe said a 1995 flood caused $15 billion in damage. The disappearance of trading partners with the fall of the Soviet bloc and sanctions imposed on the country for failing to curb missile sales abroad also hurt the economy, he said.
Economic woes helped bring on a health crisis. The percentage of the population with access to safe drinking water fell from 86 percent in 1994 to just 53 percent two years later, Choe said.
Vaccination coverage for diseases such as polio and measles from 90 percent of children in 1990 to just 50 percent in 1997.
Malnutrition, dysentery, and vitamin and iodine deficiency remain serious problems among children, along with a shortfall of hospitals and schools, the report said.
The report pledges better cooperation with the international community -- a possible sign that the isolated Stalinist state will further its recent opening to the outside world.
North Korea's government will "mobilize the country's possible resources and strengthen its cooperation with the international community" to boost health care and services to children, Choe said."