North Korea prison abuses
Updated
North Korea's prison system has long been deemed a brutal one, and one which plays a central role in the regime's suppression of political dissent.
Now, surveys based on the experiences of North Korean refugees, have unveiled more revelations. The East West Center in Hawaii has released a report with the University of California, San Diego based on the North Korean interviews.
Presenter: Sen Lam
Speakers: Marcus Noland, senior fellow at the East West Center, in Washingtonk, DC
- Listen:
- Windows Media
NOLAND: Well, there were two surveys. One survey was conducted in China basically in calendar year 2005, that involved something over 1,300 respondents. The second survey was conducted last year in November in South Korea with 300 respondents. The much more secure legal environment in South Korea allowed us to administer a much longer and more nuanced questionnaire to that smaller group of people than the earlier survey in China.
LAM: So who were these people who were questioned, were they all political detainees or did they come from a broad spectrum of asylum seekers?
NOLAND: Oh, they came from a very broad spectrum of North Korean society. Most of the North Korean... In the early days, people who left North Korea tended to be elites who in a literal sense were defecting, but since the famine of the 1990s, over the last 10-to-15 years, many of the people who leave the country are common people, especially from the upper part of the country provinces in the far northeast. So in our sample we had just regular workers, farmers, school teachers, we had some people who had been in the army, some people who had been government officials or party officials, some merchants. There was quite a cross section of North Korean society.
LAM: And Marcus, tell us a bit more about the findings - the harshness of North Korean prisons I think is quite well documented - but it's how the prison system is being used, that's of interest I understand?
NOLAND: Yes, traditionally, North Korea's prisons had both a criminal and a political role. I mean every society needs prisons to put murderers and rapists, but the North Koreans also had long term political prisons. But starting in the 1990s as the socialist economy frayed, what developed as an ad hoc set of institutions to house people who had violated some rules - such as they had left the village to go out and scavenge for food - That system was eventually codified and has become a fourth component of their prison system. And what has happened is the system is now developing economic component as well. As the socialist system frayed, people were forced into market oriented activities and the prison system has become a way for officials to extort money from these people. Basically they accused them of violating some sort of economic regulation and threatened them with incarceration. The abuse in these facilities is extremely high and as a consequence, people will pay bribes in order to avoid themselves or their families going to jail and possibly starving or being beaten to death. So it has become a form of economic predation in addition to its traditional roles in terms of political repression and dealing with common criminals.
LAM: And your report says that the North Korean prison system also looks like the workings of a gang - do you mean a kind of North Korean mafia system?
NOLAND: Oh absolutely. Basically the laws have been written so that virtually anyone outside the elite carrying on a normal existence violates some provision of the law. That means that everyone in the society is potentially a criminal. The police are given extreme discretion with respect to who they arrest, who they incarcerate and for how long they incarcerate them. Given that level of discretion and the horrific sorts of abuses that occur within these facilities, it is made to be an instrument for the police and other officials to extort money out of people who otherwise could be incarcerated in these really dire circumstances.
LAM: And Marcus, how were you persuaded that these refugee accounts were reliable accounts?
NOLAND: Well, what's interesting is that in the case of the China survey, we surveyed people in 10 different cities or actually 12 different cities and the accounts were very similar across these different cities. Then we did the survey in South Korea and the accounts in the Chinese and South Korean-based surveys were quite similar. Then, for example, we asked the people what they observed when they were incarcerated and if you asked them questions about general phenomenon, like did you see prisoners getting beaten, of course you got affirmative response rates of 100 per cent. And as we asked about more and more specific type of abuses, the response rate fell. Finally, when we got to the issue of forced abortions or infanticide practiced on women who were pregnant the time they were repatriated from China and suspected of carrying by national children, the response rate dropped on the order of 5 per cent or 7 per cent. That told me that these respondents were not just telling us what they thought they wanted to hear. The fact that they would report beatings or public executions at rates on the order of 40, 50, 60 per cent. But then when we asked them about specific things like forced abortion and infanticide or medical experimentation on prisoners, the response rate dropped quite substantially.
