In early April North Korea declared that it was cancelling the armistice which ended the 1950s Korean war and was “in a state of war” with South Korea. It threatened to hit the USA with nuclear weapons.
It has withdrawn 50,000 North Korean workers from a special industrial zone which is on the northern side of the Korean border but houses South Korean companies.
No-one knows what North Korea may do further. The 86-year-old Fidel Castro has called the situation “incredible and absurd”, and urged North Korea to restraint, while also denouncing any US military action.
We know something of what North Korea is like as a state. In the first place, Kim Jong Un, the third in a dynasty of Stalinist rulers, can declare war without any chance for the people of North Korea to express an opinion.
A report by David Hawk, The Hidden Gulag (2003), describes North Korea’s system of prison camps.
150,000 to 200,000 people are held in forced labour camps without legal process or right of appeal. In most cases the reason is some sort of association with dissent.
It may be singing a South Korean pop song. Or being found to have parents who dissented. Or showing insufficient respect for the works of Kim Il Sung.
The routine is to put not only the offender, but three generations of the offender’s family, in the camps, and to keep them there indefinitely.
Prisoners are made to do forced labour, to subsist on very little food, to do public self-criticism sessions, and to observe public executions within the camp of prisoners deemed to have misbehaved.
We know about this from former camp guards who have escaped across North Korea’s long border into China, and prisoners who occasionally get out. A Venezuelan Communist Party member who went to North Korea to do the official translation into Spanish of Kim Il Sung’s works, and then fell into disfavour, was eventually released after diplomatic pressure from Venezuela.
North Korea also has labour camps for prisoners jailed after trials, for definite terms, and for specified offences. Those “offences” may include absence from work, or leaving one’s home village without permission. A common “offence” is having fled to China and been recaptured.
Women prisoners who are pregnant on being returned from China are routinely subjected to forced abortions, or having their babies killed immediately after birth on the grounds that they might be Chinese-fathered.
We must oppose use of North Korea’s warmongering to strengthen US militarism — but without any shade or hint of apology for Kim Jong Un’s tyranny.
