Is N. Korea an issue for you in this campaign? Should it be?

[Carl Spackler]

From Anne Applebaum in WaPo (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10791-2004Feb3.html):
"Look, for example, at the international reaction to a documentary, aired last Sunday night on the BBC. It described atrocities committed in the concentration camps of contemporary North Korea, where, it was alleged, chemical weapons are tested on prisoners. Central to the film was the testimony of Kwon Hyuk, a former administrator at a North Korean camp. "I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber," he said. "The parents, son and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save the kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing." The documentary also included testimony from a former prisoner, who says she saw 50 women die after being deliberately fed poison. And it included documents smuggled out of the country that seemed to sentence a prisoner to a camp "for the purpose of human experimentation.

...Later -- in 10 years, or in 60 -- it will surely turn out that quite a lot was known in 2004 about the camps of North Korea. It will turn out that information collected by various human rights groups, South Korean churches, oddball journalists and spies added up to a damning and largely accurate picture of an evil regime. It will also turn out that there were things that could have been done, approaches the South Korean government might have made, diplomatic channels the U.S. government might have opened, pressure the Chinese might have applied."

Also read: http://www.hrnk.org/hiddengulag/toc.html if you can stomach it.

[maggrwaggr]

1. and we should believe this because .......

I've been reading about N. Korea for quite some time, and while I believe they are a dreadful dictatorship with huge human-rights abuses going on, the entire "crisis" that is being discussed since GWB took office is just one more manufactured crisis.

This is what these people do: Create a crisis, offer a solution. Said solution happens to be something you've been itching to do for years.

It's all bullshit.

Containment works. It worked with the Soviet Union and it worked in Iraq.

[Carl Spackler]

2. Is Amnesity International credible to you?

"6.7 Torture and ill-treatment of North Koreans who have been forcibly repatriated

North Koreans who have been forcibly repatriated from China are detained and interrogated in North Korean detention centres or police stations. These are operated either by the National Security Agency (also known as the National Security Police) (kukka bouei bu) or the People's Safety Agency (known as the police) (inmin boan song) or sometimes by both. After being forcibly repatriated from China, they are searched and interrogated by the National Security Police and/or the police.

Kim, who was forcibly repatriated to North Korea in October 1998 along with her husband by Chinese authorities, told Amnesty International that her husband died while he was in detention. "My husband was tortured in the next room to where I was interrogated; he was handcuffed and beaten by a stick. It appears that he confessed to plans (that we were going to South Korea). I heard that he could not walk, that all his teeth had gone; he died in November 1998. I never saw him again. I found out about my husband's death only in February 2000 when I was transferred to a provincial detention facility (kukka boan bouibu) in Chongjin. I found out that my husband died of illness in Onsong Social Safety Agency (SSA or police) detention centre."(117)"

More at:http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGASA240032004?open&of=ENG-PRK