Jang Young-geol, a North Korean defector whose history includes detention at one of the communist state's notorious political prison camps, said Friday he was sent to the camp on an "unreasonable" charge of earning too much foreign currency.
While faithfully remitting foreign currency to help support the extravagant life of late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and his family in the 1990s, Jang, then an employee at North Korea's trade office in Russia, was ordered to go on a business trip back to the North in 1994. That trip ended both his career and his life as an official of good standing.
A car picked Jang up upon his arrival and he sensed something was very wrong when an intelligence agency official in the car ordered the driver to head to "Island No. 117."
After nearly two years of interrogations while imprisoned in the inhumane Yodok camp, also called simply "No. 15," Jang became aware he was there because he had earned so much foreign currency, the defector recalled in a meeting in Seoul of North Korean survivors of the country's political prison camps.
Jang said hundreds of other hard-working foreign-currency earners were sent to the political prison for the same reason.
While North Korean authorities assigned an annual foreign currency target of more than US$1 million to each foreign income unit, completing the assignment drew suspicion from the government because they assumed that achieving the ambitious goal must involve irregularities, Jang explained in a package of written recollections released at the meeting.
Wearing black large-framed sunglasses to avoid being identifiable in photographs or recordings, Jang remained silent throughout the meeting, which was arranged to present North Korean defectors' personal experiences of political prisons under North Korea's iron-fisted regime.
Kim Tae-jin, the head of Free NK Gulag, a group of North Korean defectors working to abolish the North's political prisons, said about 300,000 North Koreans are imprisoned in six political prison camps across the country. Most are there for inadequate reasons.
Being even a third-generation descendant of a North Korean defector to the South is considered an offense punishable by imprisonment in one of the camps, said Kim Hye-sook, also a defector who spent 28 years incarcerated at Bukchang political camp, located near Kaesong.
She spent three decades, mostly as a minor, in the prison camp because her grandfather defected to the South. After she lost her children in floods, Kim crossed the North-China border to come to South Korea, she said.
Prisoners often feed on secretly-caught snakes, frogs or fish to make up for poor food provisions in the prisons, which only consisted of steamed rice mixed with corn and salty soup made with dried vegetables, the defectors said.
Many prisoners die of malnutrition and the prison lights are usually kept on throughout the night to prevent escapes, Jang said. At meal times, he was only given the scoop section of a spoon to prevent suicide attempts, he said.
Such political prisons, often disguised as military units, are one symbol of North Korea's fear tactics and the oppression-oriented rules that prop up its reclusive hereditary regime, Free NK Gulag said.
Despite persistent calls from the international community to dismantle its political prion camps, the North continues to deny their very existence, the group said.
Friday's meeting was seen by the group as one small step to make public the dire human rights situation in the North's prison camps, and it said it will continue to strive to help free prisoners there. (Yonhap)