You have probably heard about the North Korean dictatorship regime with its ridiculously strict rules and punishments. Perhaps you already know about the prison camps - a modern day version of the Nazi concentration camps, where citizens are detained for any number of imagined crimes: Imagine rolling a cigarette using newspaper, which happens to bear the dictator's photograph. Or listening to South Korean radio stations. Maybe you own a Bible or you may have just been talking in a public place about your dislike of the regime. Many of the prisoners in these camps have no idea what they have done wrong. In a way, it doesn't matter, because they are unlikely to ever be let out anyway. Even worse, the North Korean regime operates a system of "guilt by association", meaning that if you commit a "crime", your parents and children will be sent to the prison camps too. Can you imagine being sent to a concentration camp - for life - because your grand-dad was considered to be disloyal to the leader or made a mistake at work?
As Amnesty points out, these camps are difficult to imagine because they are so extreme and so we don't like to think about them, because they are so horrific. However, here is a brief outline: Life in the camps is unbearable - torture, forced labour from dawn until night, child abuse, murder, women being forced to kill their babies etc. These inhumane camps have existed for 50 years and hold some 100.000 people, yet the North Korean authorities deny that they exist. Amnesty International has satellite photos proving that they do exist, and encouragingly, Amnesty believes that one prison camp was closed down because of the international attention a previous Amnesty report generated. However, their satellite images suggest that some of the camps are getting bigger.
Outside the prison camps, the regime survives partly by brainwashing it's citizens, partly by banning all outside influences and non-approved media (though slowly the North Koreans are getting glimpses of the internet and other media, such as South Korea dropping leaflets there), partly by encouraging people to report on each other and partly by eliminating people by sending them go the prison camps. Not to mention the starvation levels: Defectors even talk of children rooting through cow dung to find un digested seeds. Also, people cannot move freely out of the country - they have to escape through a mined and heavily guarded area. However, defectors estimate that most citizens now realise that the propaganda about how happy and healthy everybody is, is propaganda.
If you don't want to stand by, what can you do? By donating to Amnesty International, you help their campaign to lobby for pressure to be put on governments, collecting and verifying testimonies, placing newspaper ads and commissioning satellite photographs. Amnesty's evidence was used at the UN Geneva Summit in 2013. Go to https://www.amnesty.org.uk/giving/north-korea-issue.
As Amnesty points out, these camps are difficult to imagine because they are so extreme and so we don't like to think about them, because they are so horrific. However, here is a brief outline: Life in the camps is unbearable - torture, forced labour from dawn until night, child abuse, murder, women being forced to kill their babies etc. These inhumane camps have existed for 50 years and hold some 100.000 people, yet the North Korean authorities deny that they exist. Amnesty International has satellite photos proving that they do exist, and encouragingly, Amnesty believes that one prison camp was closed down because of the international attention a previous Amnesty report generated. However, their satellite images suggest that some of the camps are getting bigger.
Outside the prison camps, the regime survives partly by brainwashing it's citizens, partly by banning all outside influences and non-approved media (though slowly the North Koreans are getting glimpses of the internet and other media, such as South Korea dropping leaflets there), partly by encouraging people to report on each other and partly by eliminating people by sending them go the prison camps. Not to mention the starvation levels: Defectors even talk of children rooting through cow dung to find un digested seeds. Also, people cannot move freely out of the country - they have to escape through a mined and heavily guarded area. However, defectors estimate that most citizens now realise that the propaganda about how happy and healthy everybody is, is propaganda.
If you don't want to stand by, what can you do? By donating to Amnesty International, you help their campaign to lobby for pressure to be put on governments, collecting and verifying testimonies, placing newspaper ads and commissioning satellite photographs. Amnesty's evidence was used at the UN Geneva Summit in 2013. Go to https://www.amnesty.org.uk/giving/north-korea-issue.
You can also join http://northkoreacampaignuk.org/how-you-can-help-3/ and http://www.northkoreanow.org
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