Sketches of Life Inside North Korea’s Prison Camps
Feb 20, 2014 21:21:15 GMT -5
Post by PurplePuppy on Feb 20, 2014 21:21:15 GMT -5
Eight Sketches of Life Inside North Korea’s Prison Camps That Will Haunt You
Feb. 19, 2014 2:55pm Becket Adams
People being forced to stand for hours. Prisoners feeding off of rats and snakes. Forty people forced into the same cell and made to crawl on their hands and knees.
That’s the reality of life in a North Korea prison camp, as depicted by a series of haunting sketches included in a United Nations commission report this week.
“[C]rimes against humanity have been committed in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea pursuant to policies established at the highest level of the state,” the U.N.’s high commissioner on human rights stated in the report. “These crimes against humanity are ongoing because the policies, institutions and patterns of impunity that lie at their root remain in place.”
The sketches included in the report, which come by way of Kim Kwang-il, a North Korean who claims he spent six years in a prison camp, are similar to drawings released a short while ago by another escapee.
U.N. investigators were so shocked by what they found while documenting North Korea’s treatment of its citizens that they actually compared it to the Nazis during World War II, according to Reuters.
Here are eight of Kwang-il’s sketches accompanied by descriptions from the U.N. report:
The “pigeon torture”: “[W]e are bound to stay in that position until the jailer feels that you have been tortured enough. So the torture goes on until the time has come to the satisfaction of the jailer. This is the pigeon torture. This is a very strange word in Korea and to you. Your hands are bound back and if they tie you like this, your chest comes out forward and in this position you are tortured.” (Image source: United Nations)
Continues at link.
Feb. 19, 2014 2:55pm Becket Adams
People being forced to stand for hours. Prisoners feeding off of rats and snakes. Forty people forced into the same cell and made to crawl on their hands and knees.
That’s the reality of life in a North Korea prison camp, as depicted by a series of haunting sketches included in a United Nations commission report this week.
“[C]rimes against humanity have been committed in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea pursuant to policies established at the highest level of the state,” the U.N.’s high commissioner on human rights stated in the report. “These crimes against humanity are ongoing because the policies, institutions and patterns of impunity that lie at their root remain in place.”
The sketches included in the report, which come by way of Kim Kwang-il, a North Korean who claims he spent six years in a prison camp, are similar to drawings released a short while ago by another escapee.
U.N. investigators were so shocked by what they found while documenting North Korea’s treatment of its citizens that they actually compared it to the Nazis during World War II, according to Reuters.
Here are eight of Kwang-il’s sketches accompanied by descriptions from the U.N. report:
The “pigeon torture”: “[W]e are bound to stay in that position until the jailer feels that you have been tortured enough. So the torture goes on until the time has come to the satisfaction of the jailer. This is the pigeon torture. This is a very strange word in Korea and to you. Your hands are bound back and if they tie you like this, your chest comes out forward and in this position you are tortured.” (Image source: United Nations)
Continues at link.