cruelty of his regime. The vicious purge of his uncle and other senior leaders was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to the lengths that the regime would go to squelch any dissent on a mass scale, with barbarity rivaling that of Nazi Germany.
KIM’S GULAGS
If the backdrop of amusement parks, department stores, and high-end restaurants is intended to serve as a manifestation of Kim’s generosity and love for his people, a sprawling network of known prison camps stands as a terrifying reminder of what happens to ordinary North Koreans who display insufficient loyalty to the regime. As many as 120,000 North Koreans are held in a half dozen of the country’s worst prisons—the gulags—which the regime has used for decades to suppress dissent and ensure Kim family rule; and there are untold numbers in the two dozen detention and hard labor camps. After conducting scores of interviews with defectors, among whom were former prison guards, the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea concluded in its pathbreaking report that the North Korean regime has been practicing “systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations…committed by its institutions and officials.” The nearly four-hundred-page document confirmed what human rights advocates and North Korean defectors had been saying for years, and shed light on the depth and breadth of the regime’s cruelty and disregard for human life and dignity. While Kim has promoted the pastel socialist paradise to represent North Korea to the world, the prison camps are the regime’s dirty secret kept as a hidden but necessary part of control over the entire population. Kim did not create the camps—his grandfather did in the 1950s and modeled them after Stalin’s gulags—but despite his efforts to establish a narrative of modernity and prosperity, his perpetuation of these coercive institutions reflects their importance as a pillar of regime survival and security.
North Korea has two types of prison camps: the kyohwaso, which are prisons for criminal and political offenders, usually with fixed terms and some established judicial mechanisms in place, and the kwanliso, or political prison camps, for major political offenders who have committed crimes deemed “anti-state” or “anti-people,” vague offenses that can be interpreted in myriad ways to justify the detention of individual “criminals” as well as three generations of their families for guilt by association. The U.N. report indicated that more than a third of all inmates—nearly 36 percent—were imprisoned because of their assumed associative guilt. The difference between the two kinds of prisons can be seen in the intensity of their punishments rather than qualitative distinctions, such as torture, rape, and sexual violence, forced starvation and labor, and summary executions, which are standard practices in both. Both crime and punishment often seem arbitrary, and the severity of each depends on one’s songbun, which determines the ability to bribe one’s way out of trouble or obtain the help of powerful sponsors.
The father of the defector Hyeonseo Lee was accused of bribery and was beaten during his interrogations—he subsequently died from his injuries—but Lee surmised that the more likely reason for his arrest was that “he had fallen out of political favour, or had put some senior cadre’s nose out of joint,” suggesting that prisoners could use their connections or money to escape punishment and that their fate could be negatively decided by someone with a vendetta. Lee also recalled the fate of one family deported to a prison camp because the father had rolled a cigarette using a piece of newspaper that happened to have Kim Il Sung’s picture on the other side. The U.N. Commission of Inquiry reported one case in which security forces tortured a seventeen-year-old caught watching South Korean movies, shattering his ankle and disfiguring his face. They released him after his family paid a bribe, but the boy subsequently died from a brain hemorrhage resulting from the torture.
The Kim regime does not acknowledge the existence of the kwanliso, the political prison camps, either domestically or internationally, since to admit the existence of dissent would be anathema to a regime that espouses the total devotion of its populace. The U.N. Commission of Inquiry described the kwanliso as camps that “serve to permanently remove from society those groups, families, and individuals that may politically, ideologically, or economically challenge the current political system and leadership.” In effect, the prison camps serve to identify and isolate perceived challengers to the regime. Kim Il Sung himself said that intergenerational imprisonment and punishment