GENEVA (Yonhap) -- A North Korean defector and activist testified this week at an international forum here to horrors he had suffered while imprisoned in a concentration camp in the communist country.
Jung Gwang-il, who defected in 2003, told a group of international human rights activists that he was locked up for 10 months for his friendly ties with a South Korean businessman, whom he had been acquainted with while doing trade in China.
During his imprisonment at Yodok concentration camp in eastern North Korea, Jung went through such tortures that his weight slid from 75 to 35 kilograms. Among the tortures afflicted on him, he recalled hanging upside down for an entire week with his hands cuffed and suffering food poisoning after eating corn seeds that had once been covered with human manure.
"Sixty to 70 people died every year during the period when seeds had to be planted after developing heavy diarrhea and stomach problems caused by eating raw corn," said Jung, who was arrested upon his return from China in 1999.
Speaking to about 150 human rights activists from 20 groups, including Freedom House, Jung said he witnessed a variety of diplomats and other high-ranking North Korean officials undergoing imprisonment at the camp.
"I also saw people crushed to death by trees that were hurriedly rolled from above by their fellow prisoners, who were racing to get their work done and win cornbread presented as a prize by the supervisors," Jung said.
He added that people killed during winter were left rotting until land thawed in spring so they could be buried, bemoaning that the prisoners were treated inhumanely even after their deaths.
Jung is a member of a South Korean group that seeks to publicize human rights abuses believed to be rampant in North Korea's concentration camps.
North Korea has long been labeled as one of the worst human rights violators in the world. The regime of leader Kim Jong-il does not tolerate dissent, holding hundreds of thousands of people in prison camps across the nation and keeping tight controls on outside information, critics say. The North has bristled at such charges.