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On April 9, three days before North Korea’s latest missile launch, the Committee for Human Rights in Korea released the second edition of Hidden Gulag, a report calling for the dismantling of North Korea’s vast system of prison camps. The North Korean regime claims such camps don’t exist but a man born in one, and to date the only person to escape, has a different take.
“We think the Holocaust is a thing of the past, but it is not,” Shin Dong-hyuk recently told reporters. “This continues in North Korea.” He believes that the regime is capable of “collective execution” of all prisoners. The grounds for that belief emerge in Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, by Blaine Harden, a former Washington Post bureau chief in East Asia. This remarkable new work is well worthy of attention by policy makers, churches, and anyone concerned with social justice and human rights.
A book of this importance should have included an index but Harden does provide maps and photos. An appendix lists the ten laws of Camp 14, which Shin Dong-hyuk was forced to memorize and even recite at guards’ demand. Rule 10 says: “Prisoners who violate the laws and regulations of the camp will be shot immediately.” Camp commandants force prisoners to watch executions, including those of their own parents. Shin watched his mother executed by hanging. His older brother was shot, with three guards each firing three times. Likewise, in camp schools, teachers thought nothing of beating students to death. One can’t be too careful with “reactionaries.”
The public executions of family members elicited a strange response from Shin Dong-hyuk. Life in the camps had made him see his mother as little more than a rival for food, always scarce in North Korea. Shin was also angry with her for plotting an escape. His experience confirms the utter dehumanization imposed by the Communist regime, which strips victims of basic human sympathies. Shin “never heard the word love,” for example, and was born into to a full-blown regime of slavery.
According to Camp 14 rule number 7: “Prisoners must more than fulfill the work assigned them each day.” Further, “Prisoners who neglect their work quota or fail to complete it will be considered to harbor discontent and will be shot immediately.” The work involved heavy lifting on farms and in factories, and tasks no human being should be required to perform.
“Beyond the workplace, there must be no intermingling between the sexes for personal reasons,” explains Camp 14 rule number 8. Further: “Should sexual physical contact occur without prior approval, the perpetrators will be shot immediately.” But as Shin discovered, camp guards were free to forage. Should one of the inmates become pregnant, the mother and the baby were killed.
Along with death and slavery, torture proved commonplace. Shin Dong-hyuk’s body, and his soul, bear the marks of his own torture sessions. Such suffering was part of the process in which a materialist Marxist-Leninist regime punishes children for the sins of their parents. As Kim Il Sung put it: “Enemies of class, whoever they are, their seed must be eliminated through three generations.”
“Prisoners must genuinely repent of their errors,” says Camp 14 rule number 9. Further: “Anyone who does not acknowledge his sins and instead denies them or carries a deviant opinion of them will be shot immediately.”
This firsthand account recalls the reports of Malcolm Muggeridge on Stalin’s forced famine in the Ukraine, an atrocity on such a scale that observers would refuse to believe. The world of the camps is also a much bleaker place than anything in George Orwell’s dystopian vision. Escape from Camp 14 confirms that even a regime of fathomless depravity, the most militarized society in the world, cannot fully extinguish the human spirit and the quest for freedom.
The account of Shin’s escape confirms the miraculous side of life, with reflections of the Christian faith. Another had to lay down his life in order that Shin might break free. He escaped physically but in China, South Korea, and later the United States, he still had to deal with the legacy. Life in Camp 14 reduced him to “being an animal.” Now, he says, “I feel like I am becoming human again.”
In a speech to a Korean Pentecostal church in Seattle, Harden writes, Shin “harnessed his self-loathing to indict the state that had poisoned his heart and killed his family.” He told the congregation, in no uncertain terms, that Kim Jong Il was worse than Hitler because while Hitler attacked his enemies, Kim worked his own people to death in places like Camp 14.
“North Korea’s labor camps,” Harden notes, “have now existed twice as long as the Soviet Gulag and about twelve times longer than the Nazi concentration camps.”
For all their horror, the camps are not the whole story, and this is hardly a domestic Korean issue.
Kim Il Sung begat Kim Jong Il, who begat Kim Jong Un, the current incumbent. A hereditary communist totalitarian state not only works its own people to death but kidnaps foreign nationals and abets terrorism. North Korea also menaces the world with nuclear weapons and has been threatening actions that would reduce South Korea’s government “to ashes.”
On all counts North Korea is easily the most loathsome regime in the world. As such, it should easily be the main focus of peace and human rights activists, especially in the churches. So why isn’t it?
A camp of activists, primarily on the Religious Left, believes that to expose the atrocities of North Korea is to provide aid and comfort to the United States, with whom North Korea is still officially at war. In this view, the United States and its allies, particularly Israel, are the major human rights problem and obstacle to piece. Escape from Camp 14 could be the first account to provide an escape from that mindset.
Lloyd Billingsley is the author of From Mainline to Sideline: The Social Witness of the National Council of Churches. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Reason, Los Angeles Daily News and many other publications. From 1998-2011 he served as editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute.
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