Segacs’s World I Know

Yad Vashem has expressed its outrage at North Korea about the horrible reports of gas chambers and human torture in concentration camps. Yad Vashem, as most of you know, is the main Holocaust Memorial Center in Israel. (Hat tip: Lynn):

Yad Vashem is appalled by reports of North Korea’s use of gas chambers to murder and perform medical experiments on political dissidents and their families. Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate Avner Shalev has sent an urgent letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in which he calls for a full investigation of this insidious abuse of human rights. The issue is all the more severe due to North Korea’s status as a member of the UN. The internment, torture, and murder of North Korean political dissenters and their families was recently reported by the BBC.

In his letter, Shalev states with alarm that only six decades after the utilization of gas chambers to exterminate European Jewry, North Korea has apparently employed them against thousands of its own citizens. “The lives of untold thousands of North Koreans are in danger because their totalitarian government perceives them as a threat”, Shalev writes. “Although the rationale, scale, and context are vastly different, the chilling image of the murderers coolly watching their victims’ death agonies is all too reminiscent of Nazi barbarism.”

The important thing here is Yad Vashem’s reaction, not the seemingly ridiculously benign steps that it is requesting the UN to take. Everyone knows that in these situatuions the UN has no real power. But if enough organizations such as Yad Vashem start speaking out, maybe they can make a difference.

So you think maybe this is North Korea’s attempt to deflect attention from the embarrassing reports of torture and death camps that emerged these past few days?

North Korea has indicated it is prepared to resume talks soon on its nuclear arms program, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said on Tuesday.

One round of talks involving North and South Korea (news – web sites), the United States, China, Japan and Russia was held last year in Beijing but ended inconclusively.

Come to think of it, it’s doubtful, given how little news coverage the torture and experimentation reports have gotten. Maybe the regime is just trying to head it off. Or maybe they don’t understand how willing the world is to ignore such atrocities.

This may not be exactly news… but speaking of the BBC, it boasts news in 43 languages… guess which one isn’t included?

Mind you, I can’t imagine what Hebrew-speaking broadcasters would actually want to work for the BBC…

Chris at FreeNorthKorea.net has republished an NBC News report from last year about the camps:

Among NBC News’ findings:

* At one camp, Camp 22 in Haengyong, some 50,000 prisoners toil each day in conditions that U.S. officials and former inmates say results in the death of 20 percent to 25 percent of the prison population every year.

* Products made by prison laborers may wind up on U.S. store shelves, having been “washed” first through Chinese companies that serve as intermediaries.

* Entire families, including grandchildren, are incarcerated for even the most bland political statements.

* Forced abortions are carried out on pregnant women so that another generation of political dissidents will be “eradicated.”

* Inmates are used as human guinea pigs for testing biological and chemical agents, according to both former inmates and U.S. officials.

Chris wonders why there’s been so little interest about North Korea this past year:

Why Does The World Ignore North Korean Concentration Camp Atrocities?
This article was published around a year ago. But, even though it was in a major news outlet, it seemed to have little or no impact on American policy. Why?

Now the evidence on North Korea’s gas chambers has proved that the stories told by the defectors about the depraved chemical weapons tests on prisoners are true. A director of security for one of the biggest camps has defected and has even been interviewed on the BBC. Nobody is disputing what he has to say. But how many care? Asia has for so long, had a degree of suffering unmatched elsewhere on the globe.

[ . . . ]

Certainly, Kim Jong Il is a diabolical Hitler-like figure who is so blind to his people’s suffering that he uses them to test weapons. But human rights figures near the bottom of the list of the US’s goals for negotiating with North Korea. Can anyone, anywhere, be safe while this condition in North Korea persists? NO!

It’s 13 months later now. And who posted about this last year? I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t. But if embarrassment over not covering the story then prevents me from writing about it now, then shame on me.

Yep, it’s February 2nd, otherwise known as Groundhog Day. And if you believe the rat-looking furry creatures, it looks like we’re in for six more weeks of winter:

During one of the coldiest and snowiest winters on record, Shubenacadie Sam, Nova Scotia’s best-known groundhog, got the weather-prediction wheel moving early Monday. He failed to cast a shadow upon emerging from his burrow, and according to legend that’s a sign that spring is just around the corner.

But within minutes, Sam’s sunny outlook was soon cast aside when Punxsutawney Phil, Pennsylvania’s prognosticator, and Wiarton Willie, Ontario’s weather woodchuck, saw their shadows after squirming out of their burrows.

Seeing a shadow, according to tradition, means six more weeks of winter is on the horizon.

That’s ok with me, as long as “winter” means weather like today, and not weather like the majority of January.

In the meantime, Tom pointed me toward this absurd tidbit about the amusing – though somewhat annoying – 1993 Bill Murray comedy “Groundhog Day”:

Unknown to Fred, and probably to most of the people in snow-bound Punxsutawney, Groundhog Day is now associated in the minds of many spiritual seekers with redemption, rebirth and the process of moving to a higher plane.

It seems Buddhists, Christians, Jews, and a host of other spiritual-seekers are convinced that “Groundhog Day” represents the basic tenets of their respective faiths.

Punxsutawney Phil as Jesus? Hey, why not?

Everyone’s all aflutter with the “bombshell” news that Ariel Sharon wants to get out of Gaza:

“I have given an order to plan for the evacuation of 17 settlements in the Gaza Strip,” Sharon said Monday in an interview with Haaretz columnist Yoel Marcus. (The full interview with Sharon will appear Tuesday in Haaretz.)

“It is my intention to carry out an evacuation – sorry, a relocation – of settlements that cause us problems and of places that we will not hold onto anyway in a final settlement, like the Gaza settlements,” the prime minister added.

Allison and Imshin are pro. Frankly, I think most Israelis have been in favour of getting out of the Gaza Strip ever since, well, pretty much since 1967. Israel even tried to give it back to Egypt in 1978, but Egypt didn’t want it. Israelis are bitterly divided over the West Bank and over the Golan Heights, but I think that most Israelis would wish the Gaza Strip “good riddance”.

My concern is more about the “how” than the “if”. I agree with Imshin when she points out that:

Yes, I wholeheartedly support getting out of there. But not like we got out of Lebanon. Not in a way that could be interpreted as a reward for terrorism. Not if it is interpreted as weakness and serves to feed the sick Palestinian propensity for murder and mayhem. We have to be very careful how we go about this.

Maybe I’m more cynical than she is… but I don’t see how there could be any way of making this look like anything other than rewarding terrorism. First the prisoner exchange with Hezbollah. Now this. Gaza is a Hamas stronghold… and this would be the first major victory for Hamas’s strategy of terrorism for land. No good can come of that.

As suspected, most of the major news outlets gave the North Korea story (see below) a cursory, back-page treatment.

I implored the blogosphere to do better. And some, at least, have.

Damian Penny wrote about the “People’s Democratic Republic of Death Camps”. David Janes astutely observed that “there’s no obvious way to blame the US for this, so it’s not really happening, is it?”. Lynn B. urges us to read up and talk about it. Meryl Yourish has a brilliantly-written post entitled “North Korea is Not Our Problem”.

I’ll update this throughout the day with (hopefully) more. Let’s not allow this to become a one-day headline.

Update: Paul Jané finds the words that failed me. Jonathan is feeling “curiously dispassionate”… which I find interesting in light of my reaction to the story, which was more emotional than even I expected. And Spin Killer weighs in.

This is truly, horrifyingly frightening:

Report: N Korean prison camp has gas chamber

Witnesses say North Korea operates poison gas chambers at its largest concentration camp, Camp 22, media sources reported Sunday.

“I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,” said one defector, former military attache at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing and chief of management at the camp. “The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.”

The defector, Kwon Hyuk, is to appear on the BBC’s This World program. He says he wants the world to know what is happening.

“The glass chamber is sealed airtight,” he explained. “It is 3.5 metres wide, 3m long and 2.2m high. [There] is the injection tube going through the unit. Normally, a family sticks together and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners. Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass.”

Hyuk explained how he had believed this treatment was justified. “At the time I felt that they thoroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault; that we were poor, divided and not making progress as a country.”

The article goes on to describe other horrors, such as poisoned cabbage and “medical experiments”. I don’t use comparisons to Nazism lightly, but what other conclusion is there to be drawn here other than that the past is repeating itself in the worst possible ways?

Where is the public outcry over this? Where are the demostrations in the streets? Where are the plans of the governments of the civilized world to stop it? Where is the reaction from all of the people who spent their lives saying “Never Again”?

I don’t know. But it’s high time to find out, and to do something to stop it.

Update: The BBC has more about the information coming to light from a defected intelligence agent on Camp 22. His account of torture, chemical experimentation, and the massive bureaucracy built to support it is absolutely chilling. Almost as chilling is how little remorse even he seems to feel:

“For the first three years” he explained ” you enjoy torturing people but then it wears off and someone else takes over. But most of the time you do it because you enjoy it.”

One of the big questions about the Nazi regime was, why didn’t the Allies bomb Auschwitz? Why, with all the information that came to light in the middle years of the war, was no action taken that could have spared millions of innocent lives?

Well here we are, in 2004. Sixty years later, where is the action in North Korea? Who will step up to stop what’s going on there?

Oh, I know it’s not that simple. Attacking North Korea could risk all-out nuclear war. The United States has a president with a worldwide reputation for being a war-monger, and he’s trying to get re-elected. The European Union is gutless. The United Nations is even more gutless – when it’s not being controlled by despots and dictators. There are a million excuses. And besides, North Korea just seems so far away, doesn’t it? There are people dying every day in other horrible ways all over the world. People do what they can.

So here I am, wondering what one lone person can do in light of news that was always suspected but is now being shockingly confirmed. I don’t know exactly, but I think that we need to start somewhere. I’d like to begin by urging people reading this, including other bloggers, to publicize these reports and raise awareness online. It may be a woefully inadequate first step, but at least it’s something.

Update #2: For those of you looking for further information, a couple of good links are freenorthkorea.net and the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, which has an October 2003 report on the prison camps that should make any normal human being’s skin crawl.

This one’s courtesy of the e-mail forward gods:

The Canadian Temperature Guide:

(10* C)Californians shiver uncontrollably,
Canadians plant gardens.

(1.6* C)Italian cars won’t start,
Canadians drive with the windows down.

(0* C)American water freezes,
Canadian water gets thicker.

(-17.9* C)New York City landlords finally turn on the heat,
Canadians have the last barbecue of the season.

(-51* C)Mt. St. Helens freezes,
Canadians Girl Guides sell cookies door to door.

(-73* C)Santa Claus abandons the North Pole,
Ottawa canal opens for skating.

(-114* C)Ethyl alcohol freezes,
Canadians get frustrated when they can’t thaw the keg.

(-273* C)Absolute zero; all atomic motion stops,
Canadians start saying, “Cold eh?”

(-295* C)Hell freezes over,
Leafs finally win Stanley Cup!