Central Committee of the Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland
This is what Socialists do when they have a supermajority in government. This is what they do when the populace is disarmed.
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One inmate, Choe Kwang Ho, sneaked away from his work for 15 minutes to pick fruit. He was executed, his mouth stuffed with gravel to prevent him from protesting, Jung recalled.
“I still can’t forget his emotionless face,” he said.
Life at the four other camps was even worse, Jung said. A former North Korean prison guard said only two inmates have ever escaped from the camps known as “total control zones.”
“Inmates there don’t even have time to try to catch and eat rats,” An Myeong-chul said in an interview in Seoul.
An said he served as a guard and driver at four camps before defecting in 1994. If a female inmate got pregnant, he said, she and her lover would be shot to death publicly. Then, An said, prison guards would cut open her womb, remove the fetus and bury it or feed it to guard dogs.
Forced abortions are common, and if babies are born, many are killed, sometimes before the mother’s eyes, defectors say. Grandparents also may be punished since whole families are imprisoned.
“We were repeatedly taught they were the national traitors and we have to eradicate three generations of their families,” he said.
An, 40, defected after his father, a former Workers’ Party official, killed himself after being accused of criticizing the government food rationing system as inefficient. Now working at a bank in South Korea, An said he pushes for the abolishment of North Korea’s prison camps as the least he can do to offset his work as a guard.
Public executions are not limited to the gulags.
Before he was imprisoned, Jung took his eldest daughter, then 8, to the execution of a prisoner in 1997 in the city of Chongjin. She watched solemnly as the inmate’s skull was smashed to pieces.
“She asked me, ‘Hey Daddy, is he vomiting?”’ Jung recalled, a bitter grimace curling his lips. “I should not have taken her there.”