On the 21st, the Washington-based Human Rights Commission of North Korea (HRNK) released a new report revealing that at least 2,000 political prisoners in North Korea’s so-called “secret labor camps” are fed pigs and fish daily to feed Kim Jong-un and other top officials in Pyongyang, and that those who die under torture are buried en masse as fertilizer on a hillside called the “flower garden.
According to a report released by the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo, HRNK said in a report released on the 21st that satellite photos of the Jetsan concentration camp (also known as Jetsan 11), which is only 50 kilometers from the capital Pyongyang, covers an area of nearly 13 square kilometers and houses at least 1,500 to 2,500 prisoners who are put to forced labor in logging, agriculture, animal husbandry, salt and mining. It is known that the political prisoners are kept in the same conditions. It is understood that the pigs raised by these political prisoners will be provided to the privileged class of North Korea, including Kim Jong-un.
Satellite photos released in the report show that there is a “flower garden” on the slope of the camp, where the bodies of detainees are buried. “The inmates believed that this was due to the frequent use of corpses as fertilizer. One survivor of the camp revealed that her job was to carry the corpses up the hill, because the pits where the bodies were buried were small and shallow, and the bodies had to be dented and folded to fit into the pits, and sometimes the knees of the dead were exposed on the ground.
There was a pig farm in the camp, and the meat was served to the privileged class in Pyongyang, the capital. A diagram of the pig farm.
In the early 2000s, up to 2,000 people died or were tortured each year; even women who were imprisoned in the camp because of the failure to break away from the country died because of malnutrition and overwork, resulting in two to three deaths a day. The horrific human rights shadows of North Korea
The horrific North Korean human rights story is chilling
Last year, the United Nations also released a report on the human rights situation in North Korea, showing the shady human rights practices in the country, where prisoners who try to escape or steal are publicly executed, and some are beaten with sticks and metal bars and even stripped naked.
The report, which was collected and analyzed by the U.N. human rights office, interviewed more than 330 defectors, mostly North Korean women who had originally fled to China, from September 2018 to May 2019. These individuals have accused North Korean jailers of serious violations of their rights to life, liberty and security. The DPRK, however, has consistently denied any human rights violations.
The report, submitted to the United Nations by the Human Rights Office, reveals that prisoners in North Korean custody are stripped naked for body searches and that women are even subjected to inappropriate searches, including sexual violence. Some guards further require prisoners to sit or kneel for the entire day and are only allowed to stretch their limbs for two minutes or less each hour, which can result in individual or collective punishment if they move without permission; numerous people have been beaten or killed.
Reports indicate that detainees will likely be questioned for a month or more, and that the conditions in jail are poor. In addition to being too small and overcrowded to lie down in, the sanitary conditions are very poor, and the prisoners are not fed enough, resulting in widespread malnutrition. There have been many reports of people dying of starvation in North Korean prisons because they could not survive. Hepatitis, tuberculosis, typhoid and pleurisy are prevalent in the prisons, and worst of all, there is little or no medical care provided.
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