For some time now, policymakers in the United States, South Korea, and Japan have been debating what to do about North Korea how to halt its nuclear weapons development program, how to prevent it from starting a war on the Korean peninsula, whether to comply with its conditions for the delivery of food aid, and whether and how to end its economic isolation. More than ten political prisons and work camps now hold an estimated 200,000 North Koreans. As a result of the brutal conditions, punishing labor demands, severe nutritional deficiencies, and frequent arbitrary executions, the Center for the Advancement of North Korean Human Rights estimates that some 400,000 prisoners have died in these camps since they were established by Kim Il Sung in 1972. But victimization has gone far beyond any rational political purpose. As every previous totalitarian experience has shown, total concentration of power inevitably feeds limitless excesses of cruelty and terror.
Absolute power goes paranoically mad.
The North Korean gulag provides an instrument for any bloated party official to avenge the most trivial slight. In the camps themselves, sadistic officials and guards impose subjugation and brutality beyond imagination. From the whispers of a terrified populace, we know that when a North Korean is arrested and sentenced to a political prison, no one expects to hear from him or her ever again. Beyond its political purpose of terror and control, North Korea s gulag has an economic dimension of which the world has been previously unaware. This side of the atrocity has only come into focus as former North Korean political prisoners and prison camp guards have risked their lives to defect to South Korea in recent years.