Tuesday, August 7, 2007

North Korea's Camp 22...


North Korea's Camp 22 prison

North Korea's Camp 22...and what the meaning of "all" is...
By Claudia Rosett, Rosett Report
Monday, August 6, 2007

Sipping soda and chatting away to the press, one of the most indefatigable briefers on the international scene is the U.S. envoy to the six-party talks on North Korea, Chris Hill. Part of Hill’s diplomatic art includes ladling out a certain amount of merriment in his endless rounds of morning walkthroughs, evening walkthroughs, airport interviews, statements, q and a’s, and full-bore press briefings. On July 23rd, having just returned from Beijing, Hill gave a briefing for which the State Department’s transcript includes seven instances of mirth so pronounced that the transcribers took the trouble to note, in parentheses, the “laughter” soundtrack.
Humor is a fine thing, in its place. But the words that punctuate this gaiety are disturbing in the extreme. The subject here is North Korea, and a regime that has starved to death an estimated one to two million of its own people (possibly more), cheated on its 1994 nuclear freeze deal, indulged in criminal rackets that according to the U.S. government include counterfeiting U.S. currency, and last year set horrifying and dangerous precedents for rogue states by testing an intercontinental ballistic missile and a nuclear bomb. In response to the deal struck by Hill in February, North Korea’s totalitarian government has already engaged in its usual tactics of insult and delay, while ratcheting up its demands. So far, Pyongyang has extorted a host of concessions, including bilateral talks, arrangements for free fuel and other aid, and, at Hill’s urgent behest, the unfreezing and transfer to Kim, with the help of the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve, of some $25 million in allegedly crime-tainted funds. In exchange, Kim has shut down the same Yongbyon reactor that he shut down in the mid-1990s as prelude to cheating on the Agreed Framework nuclear freeze deal conceived by Jimmy Carter and signed on to by President Clinton. But there is no sign yet of North Korea providing the promised full accounting for all its nuclear ventures.
So what has Hill been saying about that, amid the comic by-play? Well, one disturbing development is that it gets ever harder to tell from his language whether he is negotiating on behalf of the U.S., or of North Korea. From that same July 23rd briefing, here’s his “big thing” rationale for why North Korea has not yet provided that nuclear accounting:
“Bear in mind, they just did a big thing last week. They shut down an entire complex, and sometimes when you’ve just done a big thing, you don’t want to wake up the next day and go on and do another big thing.”
(Note: In his linguistic flip, above, from “they” to “you,” the “you” with whom he apparently wants us to identify, or at least sympathize, is … Kim Jong Il).
Later in the briefing, a reporter asked if Hill had any sense that North Korea is about to provide the promised nuclear accounting. Hill’s reply belongs to the genre of “what the meaning of ‘is’ is,” except here it’s the meaning of “all”:
“Well, you know, we’re not going to talk about what they’re prepared to do. I mean, let me just talk about what we’re prepared to do and when we look at a declaration, it has to — and all means all and we’re not prepared to look the other way and pretend that a partial declaration is all, so — I mean, we, I think, owe it to ourselves, owe it to our citizens to be very vigilant and to insist on all meaning all.”
Somehow, this is not a locution that inspires confidence. It conjures visions of Hill sitting at the negotiating table with Pyongyang’s emissaries and trying to gentle them along with this brand of vaguely imploring diplomatic baby talk, while they speak for a regime that lives off slave labor, narcotics peddling, counterfeiting, and nuclear extortion. But OK, let’s cut Chris Hill some slack. It’s a long flight between Beijing and Washington, and that time zone change is a doozy.
Except now we get to where the bottom drops out. Hill wends his way to the subject of human rights in North Korea (which, in keeping with Pyongyang’s preferences, he refers to not as North Korea, but as the DPRK — short for Democratic People’s Republic of Korea). He starts off sounding pretty good, noting that even if North Korea scraps its nuclear program,
“That doesn’t mean that we end our problems with the DPRK. We will continue to have issues. We have human rights concerns in DPRK.”
But from there, it’s straight downhill:
“I mean, there are certain standards, international standards. We don’t think the DPRK is quite up to those. And that’s going to be a continuing issue. But unless we can solve this nuclear issue, I don’t think we can even get to those.”
This statement —chilling in its implications — comes in between laugh lines involving Hill’s chipper relations with the press. What Hill has just said is that in all his talks with North Korea (the big-thing-doing DPRK), human rights are not even on the table.
That’s not funny. It’s horrifying. This grotesque version of diplomatic etiquette, including Hill’s toadying description of North Korea as “not quite up to” international standards, is more likely to aggravate the threat from North Korea than to end it. The message to Pyongyang, and to anyone else listening in, is that Hill is so eager to produce a deal — no matter how false — that he doesn’t dare upset Kim Jong Il.
For a serious test of the value of these talks with North Korea, here’s something worth tabling while Kim Jong Il recovers from the exertions of switching off Yongbyon (again). Why not demand that Kim open up North Korea’s Camp 22 to a snap visit by the international press? That would be far more informative than this endless flow of merry briefings from Chris Hill. It would also be a bargaining chip far more in keeping with our own democratic principles than the rotten old habit of trying to buy peace by sending tribute — which we call aid — to Kim’s regime.

What is Camp 22? You can read about it and take a satellite-photo tour, on Joshua Stanton’s One Free Korea blog. It’s a labor camp in northeasten North Korea, believed to hold about 50,000 men, women and children — part of a North Korean gulag that for cruelty rivals the labor camps of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. These camps are the dark core of the Kim dynasty’s long reign of hideous secrets, duplicity and terror. Until they are opened and dismantled, no promises from Pyongyang at the bargaining table will be worth trusting. Until Hill starts negotiating from that premise, it doesn’t matter how many chortles he gets at his press briefings. The last hideous laugh will be Kim’s.
Claudia Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.


SEE ALSO:
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Joshua Stanton’s One Free Korea blog
Holocaust Now: Looking Down Into Hell at Camp 22


Claim: North Korea gassing citizens
Rights group says regime possibly has experimental chambers
Posted: April 29, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

North Korea's hardline communist regime is using deadly nerve gas on its own citizens and possibly is operating experimental gas chambers, according to a Jewish human rights group.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told WorldNetDaily he went to Asia to talk with North Korean defectors who said they witnessed gruesome experimentations.
Cooper began the investigation after learning of a BBC documentary in February 2004 based on interviews with a former North Korean official who had defected. The rabbi interviewed that man and two others, who confirmed the claims.
The Rabbi interviewed a 55-year-old chemist who said he was in charge of an experiment to test the effect of deadly nerve gas on political prisoners.
"He said he was involved in the killing of two people – one who did not expire for two and a half hours, and the second didn't die till three and a half hours had passed," Cooper told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for a documentary that aired last night on the radio program "Dispatches."
Soon Ok Lee, a North Korean now living in the United States, escaped from a political prison camp where she says she witnessed chemical testing on humans at least once or twice.
Cooper said the Simon Wiesenthal Center intends to pursue action against the North Korean regime for possible crimes against humanity.
The rabbi told WND that after talking with U.S. officials in Washington, President Bush indicated to him his personal interest during a brief encounter at a White House Hannukah celebration in December.
"The president was very animated and emotional about this issue," Cooper said.
While admitting the political situation is complex amid tension over North Korea's nuclear program, Cooper believes international pressure can produce "behavioral changes" in Pyongyang.
"We need to send a message to North Korean officials that you are going to be held accountable personally for this kind of behavior," he said.
As WorldNetDaily reported, South Korea officially has ignored the charges, fearing a confrontation that might hurt relations between the two countries.
Yesterday, human rights activists in Asia, Europe and North America staged North Korea Freedom Day, with rallies in a number of cities to protest Pyongyang's human rights violations.
In the BBC report, a witness described watching entire families being put in glass chambers at a North Korean prison camp and gassed while scientists took notes.
Kwon Hyuk, who has changed his name, was the former military attaché at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing and the chief of management at the prison, known as Camp 22.
"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 drew detailed diagrams of the gas chamber.
"The glass chamber is sealed airtight. It is 3.5 meters wide, 3 meters long and 2.2 meters high. [There] is the injection tube going through the unit. Normally, a family sticks together and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners. Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass."
According to the report, estimates of the number of prisoners held in the North Korean gulag could be as many as 200,000 in 12 or more centers. Camp 22 is thought to hold 50,000 people, including critics of the regime and Christians.

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