These eyewitness accounts are lifting the shroud of secrecy and forcing the West to confront a powerful moral and political challenge. One thing that the former political prisoners and prison camp guards passionately agree on is the urgent need for international attention. The North Korean regime fears exposure of the crimes against humanity that are systematically committed in its political prisons and concentration camps. At first blink, this may seem strange for a totalitarian regime seemingly oblivious to international opinion. But every similar system in this century from Stalin and the Nazis to Mao and the Khmer Rouge has been obsessed with masking its crimes from the world s view.
Every regime craves international legitimacy of some sort.
And even in the minds of the world s most savage torturers and mass murderers, there still lurks some knowledge of global norms and even, perhaps, some faint awareness of good and evil. The defectors are convinced that the gulag system cannot survive international exposure. International attention and pressure have already forced the North Korean regime to reorganize the gulag, closing down a number of prisons close to the border with China or otherwise vulnerable to international scrutiny. In 1987, when North Korea was beginning to normalize its relations with Japan, Korean families in Japan were demanding to know what had happened to their relatives who had returned to North Korea. Kang believes this pressure led to the release from prison of his family and other returnees from Japan.