Twenty former North Korean prisoners who, against all odds, managed to escape to safety in South Korea have told sickening stories of torture, starvation, and abuse.
The prisoners call it the "pigeon" - one of the most terrifying forms of torture in the North Korean gulag.
Their hands were handcuffed behind their backs and tied to a hot-water pipe, suspending them at a height that made it impossible to stand or sit. Their limbs were soon paralyzed. Then the interrogators began their brutal work: kicking them, clubbing them or beating them relentlessly with crude weapons such as shovels or firewood.
"My bones seemed to break through my chest, and my whole body became paralyzed," said Kim Gwang-soo, who survived four years in North Korean prisons.
Accused of espionage, he was jailed in an underground cell - reserved for political prisoners - where the sounds of torture could be muffled. "Even if I screamed," he said, "nobody could hear."
Human rights groups estimate that as many as 200,000 are imprisoned in the North Korean network of concentration camps, where horrific torture is routine.
Their accounts cast a horrifying new light on conditions in North Korea's totalitarian regime, where the mere act of trying to escape is seen as treason. They described years of abuse, beatings, humiliation and starvation so cruel that some prisoners lost half of their body weight.
Prisoners are kept in overcrowded and unsanitary cells, fed a meager diet, and forced to work as slaves. Those who do not fulfill their daily quota of labour are punished with a reduction in food rations. Women and children are treated about the same as the men. Starvation and death are common.
Like most escapees from the North Korean gulag, the twenty initially fled to China, which does not recognize them as refugees from political oppression and victims of inhuman cruelty. Most of them had been forcibly repatriated by Chinese authorities before their ultimate getaway to freedom.
Mr. Kim [not his real name], who had travelled to China as a government trade officer before his arrest, was accused of being a spy because of his frequent travel. He still has scars on his head from the beating by interrogators in Hoeryong City, near the Chinese border. He said he was tortured by security agents for nine months, until he signed a false confession in a desperate effort to escape the abuse.
He was repeatedly beaten with a five-centimetre-thick wooden club. "All my teeth were broken in the course of investigation in the security agency, so I had to live without any teeth for four years," he said.
Thus is President George W. Bush vindicated for labeling the regime of Kim Jong-il a member of the “Axis of Evil”.
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