were required especially for “class enemies”—those who were born in South Korea, collaborators with the Japanese colonial government, and former landowners—because “their seed must be eliminated through three generations.” Former camp guards who testified to the U.N. Commission of Inquiry confirmed that their training included this instruction, leading the commission to conclude that this practice was intended to “re-engineer the social fabric” of North Korea to “conform to the ideology of the suryong system by purging entire groups and individuals from general society.” In other words, they should not exist.
The regime considered the worst “crimes” to be watching South Korean movies, attempting to escape to China, engaging in proscribed economic activity, or having had contact with Christian missionaries or being in possession of a Bible. Often the prisoners did not know why they were there, and children especially had no idea why they and their families were uprooted and taken by security officers to the isolated camps. One defector told the U.N. Commission of Inquiry that she was thirteen years old when she was arrested while on her way home from school and driven to a prison camp where her family had already been taken. For the nearly three decades of her incarceration, she never found out why her family had been punished, only later to discover that her grandfather had fled to South Korea during the Korean War, thereby tainting her family as being among the “hostile” classes and vulnerable to the most extreme treatment from the regime.
The memoirs and testimonies of the defectors, both young and old, are difficult to read because of the horrific violence perpetrated on their bodies and minds. When Kang Chol-hwan entered the infamous Yodok gulag for the first time, he “cringed at getting too close to the other detainees. Their faces were ugly, they had missing teeth, their hair was caked together and overgrown, and they were all filthy as animals. Yet more striking than their physical appearance was the aura of weakness that oozed from their every pore.” Kim’s camps are meant to dehumanize the individual and facilitate death. Inmates, including children, are forced to work in grueling jobs—mining, farming, construction—with insufficient rations, requiring them to supplement their diets by eating rodents, frogs, snakes, and insects or by informing on other inmates to curry favor or additional rations.
Physical and psychological torture is common. Prisoners’ heads are covered with a plastic bag and submerged in water. They are deprived of sleep or mobility by being forced inside a small cage or suspended from the wall by their wrists. Rape and sexual torture are rampant, according to a report from the International Bar Association War Crimes Committee. Prison guards take advantage of their position to assault female inmates, and women also use sex to try to survive. Those women who become pregnant are forced to abort, often in a brutal manner, such as “an abortion induced by three men standing on a plank placed on pregnant prisoner’s stomach,” or pushing a stick into the vagina or beating a woman to trigger premature labor. Fetuses and newborns are thrown into the garbage, fed to guard dogs, or suffocated with a wet towel while the mother watches. A former North Korean army nurse said she witnessed abortions being conducted through the injection of motor oil into the wombs, while other rape victims she saw tried to induce abortion themselves by inserting a rubber tube in their vaginas.
The United States and the United Nations have declared that these human rights violations are sanctioned by the top leadership in North Korea. For the first time, in July 2016, the United States called out Kim Jong Un, his sister, Kim Yo Jong, and other senior officials for their human rights violations, as part of Washington’s overall efforts to squeeze the regime. Adam Szubin, the acting undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, stated in a press release that “under Kim Jong Un, North Korea continues to inflict intolerable cruelty and hardship on millions of its own people, including extrajudicial killings, forced labor, and torture….The actions taken today by the [Obama] Administration…highlight the U.S. Government’s condemnation of this regime’s abuses and our determination to see them stopped.” Six months later, in January 2017, Washington sanctioned additional regime officials, including Kim Yo Jong for her role as the vice director of the party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department, as well as heads of the key party and security organizations responsible for “severe human rights abuses,” “rigid censorship policies,” and activities that conceal