Horrors of the Hermit Kingdom: Michael Kirby slams North Korea

Horrors of the Hermit Kingdom: Michael Kirby slams North Korea





“Nothing in my previous 35 years as a judge in Australia had prepared me for the systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations” of North Korea. These are the words this week of former High Court justice Michael Kirby, who was appointed by the UN four years ago to chair a commission of inquiry into human rights violations in the Hermit Kingdom. Kirby brought down his report on this “pitiless place” in 2015.

The shocking death of 22-year-old American Otto Warmbier struck an especially powerful chord. In an address to the Sydney Institute this week, Kirby said that “in understated public testimony, available online, many of the 30,000 North Korean refugees now living in South Korea came forward to tell a horror story of what is going on in their country”.

Warmbier, at the end of a five-day visit to North Korea organised by travel company Young Pioneer Tours, promoting trips to “the places your mother wants you to stay away from”, entered an off-limits staffroom at the Yanggakdo Hotel and souvenired a banner proclaiming undying loyalty to Great Leader Kim Jong-un.

What was “doubtless conceived as a cheeky gesture”, said Kirby, ended in a “grossly excessive” sentence of 15 years’ hard labour, which turned out to be a death sentence.

North Korea is “a land of ceaseless propaganda, of torture and inhuman treatment, of arbitrary arrest and detention, of public executions to which schoolchildren are brought to look and learn what happens to state enemies”.

Family members are required to join those sent to detention camps “so as to rid society of their contagion”. The ordinary prisons of North Korea, Kirby concluded after two years of receiving evidence, are places of “extermination and murder, torture, rape and other grave sexual violence … conditions similar to enslavement … shocking shortages of food and hygiene … where crimes against humanity are a feature of daily life”.

“Brutality attends trivial infractions, especially by foreigners, particularly by Americans” who, as with Warmbier, are usually denied any family communications or even consular visits.

Americans still in those prisons include Kim Hak-song, an ethnic Korean born in China and US-educated, who was working at the privately funded Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, which employs mainly Christian staff, and who in May was accused of “hostile acts” while engaged in an agricultural development project; Tony Kim, a teacher from the same university, who worked for a decade in the US as an accountant, and who was arrested in May while volunteering at an orphanage; and Kim Dong-chul, born in South Korea, who ran a hotel services firm in a special zone on the Chinese border, sentenced two years ago to 10 years’ hard labour for espionage and other crimes.

Fifteen Americans have been detained there in the past eight years. They previously have been used as bargaining chips for winning concessions, including luring American political leaders to Pyongyang.

Similarly, the abduction of scores of Japanese people, including children, and their transportation by spy boats back to North Korea, where many remain confined, brought former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi to Pyongyang to meet previous leader Kim Jong-il, the father of Kim Jong-un.

Such casual brutality, apparently summoned personally by the hereditary communist Kims, was graphically underlined this February by the murder, ordered by Kim Jong-un, in Kuala Lumpur airport of his brother Kim Jong-nam, whose crime had been to refuse to join the Kim family business of dictatorship.

Frequently, those who attempt to escape from prison camps — including children, incarcerated with their parents — are reported to be executed, with other inmates forced to watch.

Ahn Myong-chol, a former guard of Camp 22 where experimentation on prisoners has been reported, told a US congressional hearing of imprisoned children fighting over who could eat a corn kernel retrieved from cow dung.

Routinely, those charged with offences are tortured in detention centres — for instance, by being inundated in water at around freezing point — to elicit confessions, required of every person taken to court.

A high proportion of the estimated 120,000 prisoners in the system as a whole — almost four times more than in Australia, with a similar population — do not survive their sentences.

All must work in factories and those who fail to meet their production targets are sometimes kept for days in cells too small to stand up in or lie full-length.

They are required after such work to receive ideological instruction including memorising speeches of the three dictators of the Kim dynasty.

Kirby described North Korea as “a seemingly minor player in the great international chess game that has suddenly aspired to be a king. The established players do not seem to know how” to checkmate it.

“A tiny pawn, like Otto Warmbier, can quite easily be removed from the game, and even from life.” His fate now becomes a symbol of “a big story about thousands of nameless statistics locked up and oppressed” there.

ROWAN CALLICK
China Correspondent
Rowan Callick, a double Walkley Award winner and a Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year, has worked and lived in Papua New Guinea, Hong Kong, and is now back in Beijing for his second spell there as China Correspondent of The Australian.