Interview with David Hawk
By Chosun Journal
February 1, 2004
1. Please briefly introduce yourself.
Up until the 1990s, we basically had only two accounts in English: Kang Chol Hwan’s prison memoirs, The Aquariums of Pyongyang, and Soon Ok Lee’s book, Eyes of the Tailless Animals. It has not been until 2000 when a critical mass of former prisoners who were among the scores of thousands of North Koreans who fled into China (in the mid and late 1990s because of the famine) and then a much smaller number, 3,000-4,000, made their way from northeast China mostly down to Southeast Asia and eventually asylum in Seoul, so there are now 3,000-4,000 North Koreans in South Korea. Among them are several scores of former prisoners of various prison camps, so it is only recently, the last several years, that we have been able to get first-hand testimony that would only come from former prisoners or guards.
2. Can you briefly summarize your report, The Hidden Gulag, and its objectives?
I started by reading everything I could in English. Citizens Alliance and NKNet translated a number of things but I discovered that various kinds of places were being referred to as political prisons, everything from lifetime-sentence camps that hold 50,000 people to detention facilities along the border that hold 60-100 people for several weeks, were all being translated as political prisons which may be an accurate translation but it is not very descriptive because these are very different kinds of places—one has lifetime sentences and hard labor, the other is a few weeks. Then I also found some of the translations to be meaningless, such as translating kwan-li-so to be a “management center”, or translating kyo-hwa-so to be a reeducation center. Koreans may know what these words are but in English they make no sense to a non-Korean speaking audience.
So what I decided I would do is to start from the phenomena of repression and make sure that I found out what Korean words that people were using that were all being translated into “political prison”. I had to find out what a so-called “management center” really was and how it worked to see what the pedagogical content of the “reeducation camp” was—and in fact there isn’t any educational component to it unless you mean memorizing the New Year’s speeches of Kim Jong Il which is what they do for their reeducation after they finish a hard day’s labor, on very little food. At any rate I went back and constructed a glossary of repression, using multiple translators, to make sure that everyone was on the same page. I constructed with the help of some South Korean colleagues, the Glossary of North Korean Repression, that took the Korean hang-gul characters, the Chinese characters on which the hang-gul characters are based, and then a literal translation and descriptive translation.
I began interviews and classified the different kinds of prisons and made three trips to Seoul until I got enough interviews with enough prisoners to have multiple sources for the different kinds. I interviewed half a dozen people for the jip-kyul-so, almost all of the releasees and the one escapee Kim Yong from the kwan-li-so and two people who were guards at kwan-li-so, and also a number of people who were in the ro-dong-dan-ryeon-dae and the kyu-ryu-jang along the border so that I was able to reconstruct how the long-term hard labor prison camps work and also the system of punishment for Koreans who were forcibly repatriated from China. People’s stories were essentially so interesting that I wanted to give thumbnail sketches of the stories because they were really extraordinary stories. I also wanted to provide an analysis of these different kinds of camps and sketches from the accounts that the former prisoners gave of those particular camps.
The North Korean authorities deny that they have political prisoners and political prison camps and what I suppose the overall aim of what I hope the published report will do is to provide the vocabulary, analysis and the evidence that would be necessary for diplomats, U.N. officials, analysts and scholars to counter the claims by the North Korean authorities that they do not have political prison camps or political prisoners because by the standard common international definitions of the U.N. human rights systems, they certainly do.
After I did the interviews it became apparent only last June that we would be able to get commercial satellite photographs of the camps. First we obtained very detailed maps of North Korea that had coordinates and with the cooperation of an environmental group in Washington we were able to get the maps back to our colleagues in Seoul who brought into their offices the former prisoners who would locate the prison camps on the map. We would plot the coordinates and feed them to the commercial satellite companies to see if they had in their archives satellite imagery for those coordinates. Then we made huge blow-ups of the photographs—three rolls were three feet wide and twenty feet long—and spread them out and used a magnifying glass, scurrying around and identifying these places with the help of a translator. These maps with English identifications were then sent back to the environmental group that could inset the identification of these places and objects and impose them on the photographs. The last photographic section of the book took from June until October to finish. This way we were able to match up the prisoners’ testimonies with the photo images of these camps.
3. The publication of The Hidden Gulag in South Korea—how important is this?
There are many people in South Korea who actually know more about the camp system than I do because they have been working on this for a long time but because I approached it with fresh eyes I made the most comprehensive and systematic analysis of how the camp systems work. Our colleagues in Seoul thought that it was sufficiently valuable, in part also because of the satellite photographs, and decided to translate and publish it in Korean. What impact it may have there remains to be seen—it was just published last week. But obviously as someone who is not a Korean-speaking expert I am honored that people thought that the report I wrote is worthy of translation and publication in Korean.
4. Do you think that international human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, are doing enough for the crisis in North Korea?
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both need first-hand testimony, and AI likes on-site verification when it is possible, and in this case it is not. This is the first time to my knowledge that a human rights NGO utilized satellite photographs; it is a new technique for human rights organizations. But Human Rights Watch, interviewing many of the same people that I did, decided two years ago to focus on the situation of North Koreans in China and it was rightly perceived as very urgent—it was just as the gate-crashings were starting to happen in China, and the situation of Koreans in China was first becoming known, so there was an urgency and a timeliness to focusing on that. AI is about to release a report—it could be out any week now—on access to food, so they are involved; it is just based on different priorities. These are the same subject areas that the U.S. Committee will be looking into. AI decided to start on the food situation—the right to and access to food—and the refugee situation in China and it is probably perceived to be less urgent now to do the camps since the U.S. Committee just did a report on the camps.
The United Nations, just last April, for the first time took up the human rights situation in North Korea and passed a resolution recognizing the problems, condemning the violations and prescribing a number of remedies, most of which have to do with initiating dialogue with the North Korean authorities and also to employ what the U.N. calls “special procedures”. There are working groups on arbitrary detention and torture, so the appropriate political organ of the U.N. expressed that they wanted the monitoring procedures to become involved in the situation in North Korea. They also wanted the U.N. High Commissioner of Human Rights to initiate a comprehensive dialogue with the North Korean authorities. That is only possible if the U.N. is in association with the government. Governments have the choice not to speak to the people in the U.N Secretariat if they do not want to and the employees of the U.N do not go into countries where they lack an invitation or visa. I do not think that much was doable in terms of implementing the aspects of the resolution and that will be reviewed this coming April when the next session of the Commission meets in Geneva.
5. Do you think that people can look for parallels in the fairly recent dictatorships in for example, Rwanda, Chile, or Cambodia, and can we find any indication of hope for North Korea by looking at history this way?
North Korea is not comparable to Cambodia or Rwanda in almost any respects. The Rwandan genocide lasted three months; the Cambodian genocide lasted three years. The purpose of those repressions was to physically eliminate, in Rwanda’s case, an ethnic minority group. In Cambodia the purpose was to physically eliminate sectors of the population that the Khmer Rouge Maoist deemed to be irremediably, irredeemably tainted by feudal bourgouis, capitalist, or foreign association. So they sought out those people and killed them off for three years and eight months.
The situation in North Korea is entirely different. The purpose is not to kill off people, but to impose slave forced-labor and it has been going on for fifty years. It has the characteristics of the Stalin gulag camp and also some of the characteristics that Korean scholars describe as being a phenomena associated with late Chosun dynasty-era feudalism. What is unique to North Korea’s situation that I have not encountered anywhere else is the collective punishment, the guilt-by-association aspect where not only the perceived political wrongdoer but his family up to three generations is also imprisoned, and not in the same camp. The punishment is collective, it is for the entire family, which one can see in Kang Chol Hwan’s memoirs, where he is the grandson of somebody who ran afoul of the authorities and his parents and siblings were put away. Korean scholars say that that was the way the emperors in the Chosun dynasty maintained order. But that is a phenomena of repression that is unique, as far as I know, to the North Korean situation.
We must distinguish between hope and optimism, however. As long as North Korea wanted to be a hermit kingdom, as long as it only wanted to have relations with the Communist world, basically there was little that the international community could do. But that is changing. North Korea now, in Kim Jong Il’s unique way, is in fact seeking greater contact and normalized relations with the international community. Just since 2000 they have established relations with almost all of the member states of the European Union. They want to normalize relations with the Americans, they want to normalize relations with the Japanese and have access to markets because they have seen the way that South Korea, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, and all of the other countries have prospered on the basis of production for exports to markets in North America and western Europe. North Korea wants that, and they also want foreign investment from South Korean businesses to produce exports that they can sell in Japan, western Europe and the U.S. As long as this is the case that does create openings for the international community to demand improvements in the human rights situation in return for foreign aid, investment, and access to global markets.
There is a lot of foreign aid just for strategic purposes, but in many situations foreign aid is linked to human rights situations and the North Koreans want a resolution to the Korean War and an end to enmity with the U.S. Developing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles is an odd way to go about it, but Kim Jong Il thinks that if he does not the U.S. will simply ignore him. He develops these things in order to have them to trade. Since we will not import goods that are produced by prison-enslaved labor and we will not go along with a situation where production for domestic consumption is based on slave labor and prison labor and you have certain zones where privileged workers produce for global markets, the international community that the North Koreans wish to be a part of can now strongly demand—especially after the Cold War—international standards if North Korea wants to join the international community. It may take several years which is unfortunate because the people in the kwan-li-so are basically there under lifetime sentences and being used as slave laborers until they die from combinations of malnutrition, disease and work-related injuries.
The situation of repatriation of North Koreans from China is also quite urgent and desperate but it has only been within the last year that the U.N has taken this up. We do not know if the six-party talks going off and on in China will succeed—perhaps it will be limited to simply security arrangements where the U.S. gives a guarantee not to attack North Korea and North Korea agrees to liquidate their nuclear weapons program. But the North Koreans want more in which foreign aid is part of the deal. It may be possible if those talks take a turn to a more comprehensive solution to include humanitarian considerations as part of the solution. That was done with the settlement of the Central American wars of the 1980s. In Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaraguan human rights considerations were factored into the resolution of those conflicts. This was also the case in the solution in Cambodia and even earlier in the relaxations of tensions between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in the mid 1970s with the Helsinki Accord. It may or may not be possible with North Korea and may take five or ten years before they are willing to consider it. That we do not know, that all remains to be seen.
But there is now an opening that did not exist with the Kim Il Sung regime because he wanted to keep North Korea to itself and just maintain a balance between the Russians and the Chinese. North Korea went from a totalitarian monarchy to the Japanese occupation which was also very repressive, to the Stalinist system that Kim Il Sung imposed and developed after the creation of the DPRK. This system does not exist anywhere else outside of North Korea and is broken down. The production and distribution system does not work, so international foreign relief has to feed up to a third of the people there. North Korea may decide to try the route of China and Vietnam where they still have control of the state apparatus but the totalitarian control is eased and private businesses and personal freedoms to travel may be tried out. They are still Communist; people cannot organize political opposition parties, but it is a working model for running the economy and would constitute an enormous improvement in people’s daily lives. Perhaps that is what the regime will do.
