Ample warning

The United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (CIO/DPRK) held a public hearing at Johns Hopkins SAIS in Washington, DC October 30-31. Established in March, the CIO/DPRK has since convened in Seoul, Tokyo, and London to receive testimony from first-hand witnesses and experts. The Commission is mandated to present findings and recommendations to the UN Human Rights Council in March 2014.

Chairperson Michael Kirby, former Justice of the High Court of Australia, and Sonja Biserko, founder and president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, led this hearing.

Kirby recently told the BBC that despite his 35 years of experience as a judge listening to cases “which somewhat harden one’s heart,” testimonies heard by the CIO have brought him to tears.

There were tears in the room on last Wednesday as the Commission collected anecdotal evidence from two witnesses who have defected from the DPRK. Twenty-five-year-old Jin Hye Jo recounted the deaths by starvation of her grandmother and two younger brothers, the trafficking of her older sister, and the alleged extrajudicial execution of her father by security forces. Because her father was born in China, her family was suspect in the eyes of the state.  This placed them firmly in the “wavering class,” the middle rungs of North Korea’s elaborately hierarchical caste system known as songbun.  Her father therefore had no choice but to work for low pay in the mines, and her family went chronically hungry while government leaders were driving BMWs and drinking high-end whiskey. Jin crossed into China four times—and was repatriated four times, enduring imprisonment and torture “almost to death”—before finally obtaining the protection of the UNHCR in Beijing on her fifth attempt in 2006.  She, her mother and her younger sister have settled in the US.

The second witness was listed as Ms X to protect family members still living in North Korea. She was born in 1960 into a high-status family, which enabled her to become a math teacher and businesswoman. Rations for even the highest classes were so small that she recalled never feeling full during her childhood. When X married, she acquired the much lower status of her husband, a miner in the “wavering class.” In 1998, she was arrested for her links to missionaries operating in China, connections established while on business trips. After ten days of interrogation and torture, she left for China and did not return. Her husband and daughters, five and ten years old, remained in North Korea. According to the rules of collective punishment, they were stripped of their house and all belongings and deposited in a mountainous “no-man’s land.” She arrived in the US after three years in transit, and one of her daughters has since managed to join her. Spouses of defectors are considered automatically divorced, and her husband eventually remarried.

Both witnesses said that they hoped that their testimonies would help draw international attention to human rights violations in North Korea.

Victor Cha, Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council (2004-2007), began the expert testimonies. In negotiations with the DPRK, he said, US officials have consistently downplayed human rights in hopes of reaching an agreement on denuclearization. Cha questioned the underlying assumption that addressing human rights concerns would undermine progress on the nuclear issue. Concerns about the DPRK’s credibility as a negotiating partner are central to the current deadlock in the six-party talks. If the DPRK could demonstrate its commitment to the process by meeting specified human rights benchmarks, this might lead to progress on both human rights and denuclearization.  On the related issue of nuclear safety, Cha said that the DPRK’s nuclear power facilities lack necessary safeguards and have gone decades without international inspections, presenting a serious danger to surrounding populations.

Cha introduced two statistics that he considers important: the number of North Korean cell phone users has reached two million, and 15,000 now have intranet or internet access. When the public distribution of food broke down during the famine of the mid-1990s, a rudimentary market economy formed. The combination of nascent markets and increased access to information may herald profound political, economic and social change in the DPRK.

Andrew Natsios, director of the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs, and Marcus Noland, a fellow at the Institute for International Economics, discussed access to food in the DPRK. The famine of the mid-1990s was among the worst of the 20th century, resulting in six million deaths, and many North Koreans continue to struggle with food insecurity. About 10% of two-year-olds suffer from severe stunting that will permanently affect their physical stature and mental capacity. The army recently lowered its minimum height requirement to accommodate the population’s falling average height.

The North Korean government says that the famine resulted from poor harvests caused by harsh weather conditions and that the international community has used a tragic natural disaster to scapegoat the DPRK’s political system. Both Natsios and Noland repudiated this argument. While external factors—such as flooding and the DPRK’s loss of access to subsidized energy following the collapse of the Soviet Union—did contribute to the crisis, they said, the famine was avoidable. Its primary cause was irrational governance that sacrificed citizens’ wellbeing in pursuit of ideological goals.

The government’s aim of food self-sufficiency was unreasonable, Noland said, given the DPRK’s relatively small amount of arable land. When international food aid began to arrive, the government decreased its food imports, using the aid as a substitute instead of a supplement. By combining food aid with existing levels of food imports the government could have acquired enough grain to meet normal demand. Even “trivial” levels of resource reallocation, representing 1-2% of the North Korean economy, could have purchased enough grain to avoid the calamity. The government responded with hostility to aid agencies, which were at one point feeding a third of the population.

Prevented from fully assessing and monitoring the crisis, agencies could not target their aid efficiently. According to Natsios, 40-70% of food aid was diverted to the military. Although the government did not engineer the famine, Natsios said, it used food insecurity as a means of controlling the population. The public distribution system has historically allotted larger rations to high-status citizens than to members of the “hostile” class. During the famine, food shipments tended to remain in the vicinity of the capital, while outlying areas, particularly the northeast, received far less aid.

Natsios, who directed food aid to the DPRK while serving as USAID administrator, outlined ten principles for ensuring that future food aid arrives at its intended recipients, including:

• no aid should be distributed through the discriminatory government system,
• foods not favored by the elite (such as bulgur wheat) should be sent instead of rice,
• shipments should be delivered directly to the eastern regions where food insecurity is greatest, and
• food should be sent in installments.

In Natsios’ view, if the DPRK fails to comply fully with international aid agencies, these installments should cease to ensure that the aid is not diverted and resold by the government. Noland differed on this point, arguing that even if only a portion of the aid trickles down to the most needy, the international community is morally obligated to provide assistance.

Satellite imagery analyst and KPA Journal editor Joseph Bermudez analyzed satellite images of prison camps and gave an overview of North Korean security and intelligence agencies. The DPRK has the 4th largest military in the world, but obsolete equipment, training deficiencies, and widespread malnutrition have undermined the strength of the conventional forces. This has reportedly caused the government to lean more heavily on asymmetric capabilities, including nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

Defectors have described the testing of chemical and biological weapons on prisoners. The majority of these reports are not believable because they are “internally inconsistent,” Bermudez said, but there are enough of these statements to suggest that “something is happening.” In 1994, a defector who had consistently delivered reliable information on other subjects reported that biological agents had been tested on political prisoners at the College for Army Doctors and Military Officers and Kim Il-Sung University Medical College.

David Hawk, Visiting Scholar at the Columbia University Institute for the Study of Human Rights, summarized and updated The Hidden Gulag, his 2012 report on North Korea’s penal system for the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Drawing on defectors’ testimonies, he described a roughly two-tiered penal system composed of the kwan-li-so prison camps and the kyo-hwa-so penitentiaries and labor camps.

The kwan-li-so prison camps are reserved for the arbitrary, incommunicado, lifetime detention of political prisoners, who are subjected to forced labor.  Available data suggest a declining prison camp population, from 150,000-200,000 in the 1980s to a current figure of 80,000-120,000. The “extraordinary” death rate in these camps—from malnutrition, industrial accidents, torture and execution—has apparently exceeded the rate of incarceration. The declining numbers also suggest that the government is phasing out its policy of “guilt by association,” which punishes multiple generations of a family for subversive acts by individual family members. The government may believe that it has been “successful” at killing off family lines perceived as threatening.

Inmates in the kyo-hwa-so penitentiaries and labor brigades have been convicted of a criminal offense and are serving out a defined sentence. Their families are generally notified of their incarceration. However, these facilities are similar to the prison camps in important ways: many of the “crimes” would still qualify these detainees as political prisoners by international standards, imprisonment occurs without due process, and death rates are high.

Roberta Cohen, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, described decades of systematic sexual violence and exploitation against incarcerated women.  Prison guards—all of whom appear to be men—promise rewards such as extra food or less grueling work assignments in exchange for sexual favors.  Cohen highlighted the issue of pregnant prisoners. A state law deferring the imprisonment of pregnant women does not cover women who become pregnant while incarcerated. These women are often harshly punished, and the frequency of forced abortions and infanticide suggests a systematic practice approved by the guards’ superiors.

Economic insecurity forces women to illegally cross into China in search of food and opportunities, leaving them vulnerable to trafficking and incarceration. According to Cohen, the Chinese government is complicit because its officials inform on North Korean refugees and prevent the UNHCR from monitoring the border. Cohen called on UNICEF and the WFP to explicitly address the plight of incarcerated women and children. The international community must be given access to penal facilities, and the DPRK government should supply statistics on the number of female guards and prisoners.

John Zimmerlee, vice president of the Coalition of Families of Korean and Cold War POW/MIAs, said that more must be done to account for military personnel who—like his own father—disappeared during the war. Following the prisoner exchanges at the time of the armistice, former POWs said that other POWs they knew to be alive had not been freed. Hundreds of servicemen listed as prisoners in North Korean documents and broadcasts were missing. Zimmerlee said unaccounted-for military personnel could even number in the thousands, but it is difficult to know because US, UN and DPRK officials have stonewalled attempts to gain access to documentation. Zimmerlee made an emotional plea to the US, the UN and the DPRK to release classified documents that will help to clarify the fates of the missing servicemen.

The hearing concluded with testimony from Jared Genser, the managing director of Perseus Strategies, a law and consulting firm concentrating on human rights and humanitarian issues. Like Cha, Genser criticized the international community’s focus on denuclearization at the expense of human rights concerns. He called on the UN to apply vigorously the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine in the case of North Korea.

The application of R2P does not necessarily imply military intervention. The capabilities of the Security Council and all specialized programs and agencies should be marshaled to instigate changes to harmful DPRK policies and to supply as much humanitarian aid as possible. To highlight the issue, the Secretary General should appoint a Special Representative to address human rights in North Korea. By not responding, Genser said, the international community is permitting institutionalized violence to continue, undermining the credibility of its pledge to protect populations from mass atrocities.