Racial Purity in North Korea

North Korea has been a living nightmare for many of its citizens. Over two million have died of starvation because of the failed economic policies of the Kim dynasty. Others have been placed in detention centers where they have suffered terrible abuses. Still others have fled to china, of all places, in search of greater peace and opportunity. Sadly, Chinese officials have deported Korean refugees upon discovery of them.

Stories of horrors in North Korea have been circulating for years, but recently even more horrific tales have emerged. The North Korean regime is obsessed with a supposed racial purity. In keeping with this philosophy, authorities have forced abortions on women suspected of carrying babies by Chinese fathers and have murdered disabled infants. Dr. Ri Kwang’chul, a North Korean refugee, has testified to this practice of killing babies, saying, “There are no people with physical defects in North Korea.”

One woman has testified that she was sold by slave traffickers to a Chinese farmer. When she was five months pregnant, she was captured by Chinese police and sent back to North Korea. There she was placed in a detention center where she was ordered to abort the baby. She refused. Consequently, guards beat her badly and kicked her in her belly. She said that a week later she was escorted to a prison clinic “where in a most blunt manner they extracted the dead child from [her] body.”

Another woman has said that she was with a woman who had been sent back from China and was in the latter stages of pregnancy when doctors induced labor and suffocated the baby with a wet towel.

A grandmother in Sinuiju testified that she witnessed the deaths of babies, prematurely induced and put in a box to die. Two other babies were healthy, full-term boys. A guard had thrown them in the box also. Two days later the two full-term infants were still alive and blinking. The guard then beat them to death with forceps.

Other witnesses in a detention center in Chongjin saw babies, labeled “children of betrayers” thrown into a wicker basket and covered with plastic. Seven other babies there were taken from their mothers and placed face down on the ground to die of exposure in full view of their mothers. “Guards would say the mothers had to see and hear their babies die because they were Chinese.”

According to the Korean Bar Association in South Korea, 58% of North Korean defectors “have testified to seeing or hearing of coerced abortions in the North Korean prison system.”

A new study by three researchers at Seoul’s Korean Rehabilitation Center for Torture Victims surveyed the experience of 30 defectors among the 7,400 people who have since found refuge in the south.

All had been subjected to torture, both physical and psychological, at the hands of Kim’s military security agency. Again, one torture centre was identified at Sinuju. More than half were punished merely for having Chinese currency and more than half said they experienced sexual violence.

They reported beatings, electrocution, submersion in water and the “doghouse torture” in which the victim is contorted into an unnatural and agonising posture.

The people of North Korea have indeed suffered horribly under the Kim dynasty over the last few decades. Many ridiculed President Bush when he declared North Korea part of the “axes of evil”. However, these were not the words of a mere rube. Regardless of what one thinks of President Bush, the wickedness of the North Korean regime should be apparent to decent people everywhere.

Source of information and quotes: “Nation Under a Nuclear Cloud”, timesonline.