Horrifying and harrowing accounts of North Korean atrocities are coming to light by a UN report, the Independent reported Monday.
A prisoner is forced to haul emaciated corpses up a mountain ready for burning so their ash can be used as fertilizer but sees that the flesh on their faces has been gnawed away by rats.
Horrified inmates watch as a guard angered by the crying of a baby forces its mother to drown it face down in a bucket of water.
These are just two in a litany of alleged “unspeakable atrocities” described in a nearly 400-page report released by an independent UN panel of inquiry into the North Korean regime and its decades-long subjugation of its citizens through incarceration, enforced starvation, torture, rape, enslavement and sexual abuse.
“Hundreds of thousands” of detainees have lost their lives over 50 years,” it claims.
“We saw so many people die we became so used to it. We became so used to it that we didn’t feel anything,” one survivor of the camps told the investigator, who used the report’s release to call for those responsible for the atrocities inside the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and possibly the country’s leader himself, Kim Jong-un, to be referred to the International Criminal Court for prosecution.
Presenting the report in Geneva, the panel chairman, Michael Kirby, said some of the crimes described evoke those committed by the Nazis, like forcing prisoners to load corpses into pots for burning.
“At the end of the Second World War so many people said ‘if only we had known... if only we had known the wrongs that were done in the countries of the hostile forces’,” he said. “Well, now the international community does know... There will be no excusing of failure of action because we didn’t know.”
Also released was a letter from Kirby to Kim warning that his purpose is to “render accountable all those, including possibly yourself, who may be responsible for crimes against humanity.”
It added: “Even without being directly involved in crimes against humanity, a military commander may be held responsible for crimes against humanity committed by forces under the commander’s effective command and control.”