North Korea's Prison Camps: Comparing The U.S. system to N. Korea's is loony toons.

[cali]

Gitmo is disgraceful and repuslsive. Our prison system is in dire, dire need of reform, but saying that the U.S. is as bad as N. Korea- or worse- is idiotic and ignorant.

Born and raised in a North Korean gulag
By Choe Sang-Hun

On Nov. 29, 1996, 14-year-old Shin Dong Hyok and his father were made to sit in the front row of a crowd assembled to watch executions. The two had already spent seven months in a North Korean prison camp's torture compound, and Shin assumed they were among those to be put to death.

Instead, the guards brought out his mother and his 22-year-old brother. The mother was hanged, the brother was shot by a firing squad.

"Before she was executed, my mother looked at me," Shin said in a recent interview. "I don't know if she wanted to say something, because she was bound and gagged. But I avoided her eyes.

"My father was weeping, but I didn't cry," he said. "I had no love for her. Even today I hate her for what I had to go through because of her."

Shin's story provides a rare glimpse into one of the least-known prison camps in North Korea.

Shin, now 24, was a political prisoner by birth. From the day he was born in 1982 in Camp No. 14 in Kaechon until he escaped in 2005, Shin had known no other life. Guards beat children, tortured grandparents and, in cases like Shin's, executed family members. But Shin said it did not occur to him to hate the authorities. He assumed everyone lived this way.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/world/asia/09iht-korea.4.6569853.html


Revealed: the gas chamber horror of North Korea's gulagA series of shocking personal testimonies is now shedding light on Camp 22 - one of the country's most horrific secrets


The Observer, Sunday 1 February 2004 00.49 GMT

In the remote north-eastern corner of North Korea, close to the border of Russia and China, is Haengyong. Hidden away in the mountains, this remote town is home to Camp 22 - North Korea's largest concentration camp, where thousands of men, women and children accused of political crimes are held.
Now, it is claimed, it is also where thousands die each year and where prison guards stamp on the necks of babies born to prisoners to kill them.

Over the past year harrowing first-hand testimonies from North Korean defectors have detailed execution and torture, and now chilling evidence has emerged that the walls of Camp 22 hide an even more evil secret: gas chambers where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings.

Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They are left to an agonising death while scientists take notes. The allegations offer the most shocking glimpse so far of Kim Jong-il's North Korean regime.

Kwon Hyuk, who has changed his name, was the former military attaché at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing. He was also the chief of management at Camp 22. In the BBC's This World documentary, to be broadcast tonight, Hyuk claims he now wants the world to know what is happening.

'I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,' he said. 'The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.'

Hyuk has drawn detailed diagrams of the gas chamber he saw. He said: 'The <snip>

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/feb/01/northkorea