Survivors Report Torture in North Korea Labor Camps (Published 1996)
- ️Sun Jul 14 1996
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- July 14, 1996
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She has recovered her health to the point that she can hobble again, with a limp to remind her of the whips and racks and water-torture kettle. But as she tells it, the greatest trauma was not to her body but to her mind: the memory of a friend who stole a beet.
Li Sun Ok, 49, a small woman with a fearful quiver, says she met the friend in the North Korean network of hidden labor camps that are said to house large numbers of political and criminal offenders and their families.
Mrs. Li escaped from Communist-governed North Korea to join a growing number of defectors who say they have firsthand information on starvation and slavery in the camps.
"She was 39 years old and had two children, 5 and 7 years old," Mrs. Li said, recalling her friend who stole the beet, Chae Wal Ryung. "Her husband had been a miner, but he was trapped and killed in a mine accident. So she had to work in the mine in his place. But there wasn't enough food, so one day she stopped on her way home and stole a beet root from a field. She was arrested on the spot, and she was never allowed to go home or see her children again.
"She was a mother, and she used to think of her children. She had images of her children starving to death. But the guards accused her of being reactionary, of not having faith in the Party to care for her children. So she was shot. They gathered us all together to watch, and they shot her."
Mrs. Li and the other defectors portray the North Korean camps as unremittingly savage, but it is difficult to know how accurate this portrait is.