EFL
Refugees returning to North Korea face forced abortions in Kim Jong-il’s prison camps in a drive by the dictator to keep his people ’ethnically pure’, reports Richard Spencer in Beijing. Pregnant North Korean refugees repatriated after being rounded up in China have their babies forcibly aborted or killed after birth, according to a report that adds more horror to what is known of the Stalinist state’s gulags. Evidence from a number of women who have escaped from the prison camps of the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-il, reveals a pattern of infanticide, principally due to concern that babies conceived outside the country might not be "ethnically pure".
The report, by the United States Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a cross-party monitoring group, cites evidence from eight former inmates. One described how a guard took a baby away from a woman married to a Chinese and put him in a box nearby. A doctor then explained that since the country was short of food, it should not have to feed the children of foreign fathers. When the box was full of babies, it was taken away and buried, she said. It was not clear whether they were alive or dead at the time.
As many as 300,000 North Koreans have fled across the border with China. Many live secretly among the country’s ethnic Korean population, while some seek asylum in embassies or by making the long trip to Thailand, via Burma, to the south-west. Those who are discovered are regularly returned by the Chinese authorities, North Korea’s notional allies but in this case more concerned to prevent a mass exodus that might precipitate the Kim regime’s collapse. There, according to the committee’s report, they are put into special camps, where they are held for shorter periods than other detainees but treated even more brutally. One 25-year-old woman, Choi Yong-hwa, told the report’s author, David Hawk, a former United Nations human rights investigator, that she was assigned to help pregnant women. "The woman assisted by Choi was given a labour-inducing injection and shortly thereafter gave birth. While Choi watched in horror the baby was suffocated with a wet towel in front of the mother, who passed out in distress." A grandmother who was given a similar job watched seven babies delivered either naturally or as a result of an abortion-inducing drug. All were killed. Two had survived for two days before a guard "came by, and seeing that two of the babies were not dead yet, stabbed them with forceps at a soft spot in their skulls". According to the report, between 150,000 and 200,000 of North Korea’s population of 22 million are held in prison camps. Among their crimes are failing to care properly for photographs of Kim and his father Kim Il-sung, singing South Korean pop songs, and being the offspring of people executed as traitors. |