Gulags

• Death, Terror in NK Gulag
  In the far north of North Korea, in remote locations not far from the borders with China and Russia, a gulag not unlike the worst labor camps built by Mao and Stalin in the last century holds some 200,000 men, women and children accused of political crimes. [MSNBC, 1/15/03]
• Gas Chambers
  A series of shocking personal testimonies is now shedding light on Camp 22 - one of the country’s most horrific secrets. [Observer, 2/1/04]
• Routine Infanticides

  N. Korean prisons reportedly force abortions or kill babies. [NY Times, 6/23/03]

• The Hidden Gulag
  … a North Korean gulag of forced-labor colonies, camps, and prisons where scores of thousands of prisoners - some political, some convicted felons - are worked, many to their deaths… a system of smaller, shorter-term detention facilities along the North Korea-China border used to brutally punish North Koreans who flee to China… but are arrested by Chinese police and forcibly repatriated to the DPRK. [D. Hawk, 10/22/03]

Refugees

• Escapees from the North Korean Hell
  The images of these two North Korean children are part of some five hours of recorded video testimony of hunger migrants, collected in the past two months on the Chinese side of the Sino-Korean border by a humanitarian organization that we shall not identify for security reasons. [Le Monde, 5/14/01]
• Sex Trafficking

  Human Traffickers Prey on North Korean Women [Chosun Ilbo, 7/21/02]

• One Day in the Life
  In September, a North Korean boy named Heo joined a group of seven other refugees in China — most of whom had left their homeland by crossing the Tumen River — and boarded a southbound train from Jilin Province to Beijing. The North Koreans carried no luggage. [NY Times, 4/27/03]
• The Invisible Exodus
  There are anywhere from 10,000 to 300,000 North Koreans living in hiding in China, mainly in the province of Jilin, along the border region with North Korea, mixed among Chinese citizens of Korean ethnicity. [Human Rights Watch, 11/1/02]

Martyrs

• Chasing Bible Balloons
  Several times every summer, North Korea’s military display extraordinary frenzy. “They are chasing balloons imprinted with the Gospel of Mark,” Michael Weygandt, an executive of the worldwide Voice of the Martyrs organization, told United Press International Monday. [UPI, 7/9/02]
• Assassinating Missionaries
  As the Korean-Chinese congregation assembled at the huge church in Yanji, the usual group of ragged orphans from North Korea appeared, begging for help. [SCMP, 6/17/01]
• Cult of Kim Il Sung
  You know you’ve arrived in Big Brother country as the tourist ferry steams into port and carved into a mountain face visible for miles are the words: ‘’Long Live the Great Politics'’ of Kim Il-sung. [AP, 4/7/01]
• Keeping the Faith
  N. Korea’s Secret Christians Get Support From South. [WP, 4/10/01]
• Underground Railway
  Underground railway brings glimmer of hope to the secret Christian ’spies’ of North Korea. [Independent, 1/29/03]

Peace

• Feeding the Dictator
  From The Guardian newspaper, UK: Food aid to North Korea only props up Kim Jong-il’s grotesque regime. It should be stopped. [MSF, 8/6/01]
• Seoul Abstains from UN Vote
  South Korea joined 13 other nations today in abstaining from voting on a resolution adopted by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights that condemns North Korea for “widespread and grave” abuses of human rights. [NY Times, 4/16/03]
• Sunshine Policy Transforms SK
  The North was the enemy. It had invaded the South to start the Korean War. It was a hostile, communist state. The South, by contrast, was free - an emerging democracy in the global order. Yet today, the South’s prevailing view of the North has flip-flopped. South Koreans have lived through the five-year Sunshine Policy, one of whose central tenets is that North Korea not be thought of as a “communist enemy.” [CS Monitor, 1/22/03]
• Kim DJ Buys Nobel Prize
  Allegations of paying for rapprochement between North and South Korea taint President Kim’s greatest achievement. [Time, 2/10/03]