Inside North Korea's barbaric prisons where inmates are starved, tortured, undergo forced abortions and dig their own graves

Inside North Korea's barbaric prisons where inmates are starved, tortured, undergo forced abortions and dig their own graves

The pariah state's labour camps killed American student Otto Warmier but he is just one of thousands subjected to the most brutal treatment imaginable


Brutal treatment inside North Korea's prison camps

It is hard to imagine a grimmer existence than that of an inmate in a North Korean prison camp.
Deprived of food, they are forced to eat rats and frogs to survive housed in cramped cells infested with lice. Regular beatings and potentially fatal torture are the norm. Then there is the hard labour, which includes pulling ploughs across fields for 12 hours a day.
An estimated 200,000 victims of Kim Jong-un’s despotic rule are thought to be living lives of utter wretchedness in his internment camps at any one time.
The camps are patrolled by guards equipped with automatic rifles, hand grenades and trained dogs.


Prisoners are routinely deprived of water and food torture includes ‘sleep deprivation, beatings with iron rods or sticks, kicking and slapping, and enforced sitting or standing for hours’, is routine,
Inmates are allowed just one set of clothes they live and die in rags without soap, socks, underclothes or sanitary napkins.”

In 2014 Yeonmi Park told of how her father was tortured after being jailed for illegal trading.
Guards placed sticks between his fingers and crunched them together. He was made to sit in excruciating stress positions for interminable periods
One camp - Hoeryong concentration camp - known as "Camp 22" closed in 2012 after a warder defected but extreme human rights violations including routine torture, forced labour and human medical experiments had previously been reported.
Families of inmates are viewed as guilty by association and so who generations are sent to camps.



An Amnesty International film has former prisoners and their captors talking about the horror of life inside North Korea's prison camps.

They describe forced abortions, impossibly hard labour, starvation and prisoners forced to dig their own graves.
Kim Young-Soon, who spent nine years in a political prison camp Yodok, said: "It's a place that would make your hand stand on end.
"From sunrise to sunset you work, there are no set working hours.
"You get up at 3.30am to report for work at 4.30am and then you work until it gets dark.

"When my parents died of starvation in a camp I didn't have coffins for them and I wrapped their in straw and carried them on my back to bury them."
A former prison official said inmates would need to walk 12 miles to fields they had to plough.
He said: "I have witnessed prisoners forced to dig their own grave and then being made to stand before the grave and killed with a metal hammer.
"Another time they use a rubber rope which when the prisoner is struck with it wraps itself around the neck and then pulled to strangle them.



Another former guard said his camp was surrounded by an inner perimeter consisting of a 3,300-volt electric fence.
People who tried to escape would have to negotiate this then had to contend with a no-man’s land dotted with man-traps and upturned nails with the final barrier a cordon of barbed wire.

eonmi Park escaped North Korea and described the evil of the regime 

Former military captain Joo-il Kim said starvation caused by food shortages is the biggest problem.
He said: "I saw piles of bodies who had died of starvation in public places."
Jihyun Park fled North Korea but was arrested in China and sent to a labour camp.
She said: "People are so hungry they eat dog and cattle feed left out at other people's houses and beans and maize stuck in animal dung."
When she arrived she was subjected blood test for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
She said: "Women found to be pregnant were subjected to enforced abortions or sent to labour camps and forced to carry loads up and down hills causing miscarriage.
Earlier this year a report Anti-Slavery International detailed some more of the conditions found inside the prison camps.

Prisoners were beaten for various reasons (e.g. lying or being suspected of lying, not working fast enough, forgetting the words to patriotic songs
The report said more than 90 per cent of the interviewees either witnessed beatings or were hit themselves while in detention
Many of those in prison camps end up their because they are caught illegally crossing into China looking for work and food.
Article 62 of North Korea's revised 2004 Criminal Code punishes its citizens for travelling to another country without state permission: "Any citizen who defects, surrenders, or gives secrets to a foreign country or to the enemy in betrayal of the country and the people shall be sentenced to a reeducation through labour institution for not less than five years.
"In cases where the person commits an extremely grave offence, he or she shall be given life imprisonment in a re-education through labour institution, the death penalty or have his or her property confiscated."
Inmates, the report found, are often refused access to the toilet, one interviewee said: "I was hit once because I asked one of the guards if I could go to the toilet.
"He wouldn't let me, but I was so desperate that I went anyway. I got caught and was hit in the head with a gun cleaning rod. I was bleeding, but received no medical attention.
"They just put cigarette ashes on my wound to stop the bleeding."

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