After having read The Aquariums of Pyongyang, I knew what to expect with this book, the tale of Soon Ok Lee’s 6 years in a North Korean labor camp.

First of all, it’s all the same to call it a labor camp, a concentration camp, a death camp, a prison, when speaking of prison camps in a Stalinist state. The idea of these camps is to provide cheap labor for gangsters presiding over a country that is an economic basket case. That was why Stalin worked 20 million to death.

The toll of the Kim dynasty–Kim Il Sung and his idiot son Kim Jong Il–is probably now also in the millions. Eventually, the number of deaths they are responsible will come to light, and they will join the ranks of modern history’s most reviled and detested mass murdering gangsters, such as Pol-Pot, Stalin and Hitler.

Tailless Animals shows you why. But it’s no Gulag Archipelago, far from it. Solzhenitsyn’s record is up there with the greatest, it’s a literary classic, and one my favorite books of this “genre,” if I can call it that. Tailless Animals is at the other end of the scale. It is not written well and is pretty simple in terms of expression and ideas. It almost seems as if it were written according to a checklist.

So much is left out. You get stark facts but no real attempt to evoke what conditions were like. On the other hand, as a steady and objective account of the depths of human depravity, it serves its purpose. It could be excused as written by someone using their second language, or as a translation, but I tend to think for such an important subject, perhaps more effort could have been made. And the sketches here and there are a waste of space. They appear to have been Americanized, with hardly Asian looking characters, which struck me as bordering on stupid if not insulting. They make it look like a child’s story. Was it to illicit more sympathy from dumb American readers? Regardless, it was a poor decision by the publishers.

Christian publishers, that is, so you can skip the Christian intro. I could have done without the Christian sentiments toward the end, but I guess they were a part of what the author became. Koreans have a habit of getting sucked in by religion as much as they have been by Confucian dictators. No, god didn’t make the birds fly out at the right time to cover any noise Lee made when seeking to cross North Korea’s border. No, the guards let her into Hong Kong because your fake IDs were good not because of god’s smoke and mirrors. Well, whatever gets her through the night.

The Senate hearing testimony she gave contains details that aren’t in the book. For one thing, the ability to bury all factory workers en masse in underground tunnels, if guards wanted to, are absent; for another, the biological experiments conducted on prisoners. Why were things like that left out? I can only wonder.

Despite my criticisms, everyone needs to read this book, as they do the others I’ve mentioned. North Korea is a poisoned land, operating on corruption, greed and thuggery such that decency cannot survive there. It really gets to me that the world knows North Korea is like this and has concentration camps but does nothing–scared of Chine, no doubt. Politics means that the people that get stuck the the death camps simply have no hope, except for the very, very lucky few.

It has been said to me by a Korean that this generation of Koreans is not enthusiastic about reunification with North Korea or its collapse. They know it would me a huge aid and rebuilding debt they would have to pay. It’s pretty disheartening. Sometimes I think I have a deeper loathing for Kim Jong Ill and his gangster cronies than the average Korean does.

I see in Korea’s young and not so young generations a preoccupation with other things, primarily their social mobility and financial success. They are fashion victims and brand whores. Like the Japanese, they spend far too much time watching the idiot box, obsessed with banal and formulaic soaps, with an endless collection of utterly trivial game shows and sophomoric comedy programs.

All of these diversions are self-centred and inward looking, all seemingly a little too smug and self-congratulatory over their own wit, cuteness or cultural uniqueness. They exhibit misplaced importance at every turn, and in that are mirrors of benumbed audiences that take superficial concerns and artificial emotions for something meaningful—oblivious or uncaring that it is all of minimal interest or importance to the world at large.

It’s all utterly mindless garbage, and though I cannot understand the language, I can see quite clearly the brainwashing repetition of patterns in all of it. Every soap episode has someone crying and people shouting at each other. TV here is like the music business, a tireless and endless stream of copied ideas and mediocre, barely disguised repetition, of aimless thrills and celebrity gossip.

When I first came to the country I thought K-pop was cute, interesting and technically advanced. But even then I could hear the stolen musical cliches and chord changes. Some songs sounded like a cynical rendering of sound bites taken from carefully selected pop classics of the last few decades. Now I just cringe when I hear K-pop and its mindless lack of originality, its pointless, boy-meets-girl blather. It makes me cringe as much as the soaps do. I even get angry at the vacuity of it all and how it contributes to complacency in all things.

A preoccupation with stupid diversions, self-centred trivia and the vanities of shopping—this is my impression of what mainstream Korea has become. I’m not saying everyone is like this. But it does seem to characterize the mainstream, and in that, I guess, it imitates much Western pop culture, which is guilty of the same excesses and even more culpable for starting it all.

The difference is that while South Koreans amuse themselves with mindless trivia, half of Korea—their own people, if the “one blood” myth has any credence—is suffering under a dictatorship whose cruelties are on the scale of the Nazis and Stalinist Russia. Everyone has known this for decades. The concentration camps can even be seen on satellite photos all over the web. Yet, nothing is done to liberate the 100s of thousands that are being kept in such places, like animals in a factory farm, right now, as you read this.

It seems that very few people in South Korea want their lives interrupted or disrupted by upheaval in North Korea.

Though it is difficult to see any other solution except war. To my mind, it would be over very quickly, perhaps in two weeks, and you would not get the protracted terrorist resistance seen in Irag. I should think that the upper echelons could be eliminated fairly quickly, the infrastructure would collapse within days. However, before anything, the concentration camps would have to be liberated, and with lightening speed, otherwise mass murder will result. Authorities allegedly already have a mass murder plans in place to cover everything up.

Afterwards, I’m sure if the populace could get a hold of him, Jong Ill would end up Mussolini style, hung upside-down like a pig after being shot or with his throat cut, though that is too easy and too good for him.

And what has inspired this rant? Well, learning about the book Eyes of the Tailless Animals: Prison Memoirs of a North Korean Woman and reading the Senate hearing testimony of its author, Soon Ok Lee. The book is 10 years old and I had not heard about it. I’d already read The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag and discovered in that the horrors of North Korea. I also knew about Dong Hyuk Shin. But there is a lot of evidence out there.

This got me thinking that there is too much forgetting, too much complacency out there, in South Korea as much as anywhere else. So, all of the above has been by way on introduction for presenting some material about the hell of North Korean concentrations camps, doing my part in spreading the word that everyone has to know about.

First, here is the incredible story of Dong Hyuk Shin. He was born and raised in a concentration camp because his parents were classed as criminals. Conveniently, this adds to the supply of slave labor, which is what the concentration camps are really all about. Shin lived in a camp for about twenty-three years as a slave laborer. He endured constant beatings, torture, starvation, and witnessed the execution of his family members.

Lifetime prisoners like Shin were not taught about the existence of Kim il-Sung and Kim Jong-il because it was assumed they would never leave their camps. It’s amazing to think, given that the main tool of Stalinist or communist regimes for brainwashing and spreading lies has always been propaganda. It enslaves the minds of people outside the prisons. To abandon even that shows how the prisoners were fated to die in prison without any propaganda wasted on them.

Second, the testimony of Soon Ok Lee is worth reading, and I’ve included it here in an it’s entirety.

End of rant, for today.

Yet again, primitive and barbaric behavior has been directed against innocent animals at a protest demonstration in Korea. In the picture above, pheasants are being slaughtered at a rally against Japan’s reiterated claims to territorial rights of Dokdo, a small group of rocky islands between Korea and Japan. Japan had published the claims in some teaching manuals.

Here’s how Al Jazeer reported the incident:

On Thursday protesters in Seoul staged a bloody demonstration outside the Japanese embassy, slaughtering live pheasants – Japan’s national bird – on the street.

. . .

Angry protesters battered, disembowelled and beheaded live pheasants, while dozens of war veterans in military fatigues shouted “Dokdo is our territory!” as they ate the birds’ internal organs and dripped blood on Japanese flags and on pictures of present and former Japanese leaders.

There were also banners that read “Stop violating our territorial sovereignty!” and “Japan must stop distortion of history”.

In April, Japan and South Korea held their first full-fledged bilateral summit in three years.

Ties were suspended after repeated visits by earlier Japanese leaders to a Tokyo shrine honouring the country’s war dead including convicted war criminals.

How pathetic. This does little to help Korea’s already poor standing in the world community in terms of its terrible animal welfare record. Nor does it help raise the consciousness of individual Koreans about the rights of animals, and most assuredly, a great deal needs to be done in that area.

Sections of the Korean community have a habit of slaughtering innocent animals at protest rallies. Apparently they do it to “express emotion.” I reported on another incident of this nature last year. At that incident, a young pig was suspended by ropes while someone hacked it to pieces with a knife—a most disgraceful, unmanly and cruel thing to do. No animal deserves a death like that. It did not cross the minds of these sadistic butchers that they were torturing to death what is essentially the child of another mammal.

It’s not emotion they are expressing at these protests, but their own backwardness and lack of intelligence. Animals sacrificed to “express emotion” are of course entirely innocent, with no connection at all to human affairs. And to abuse and exploit them as scapegoats is truly primitive. It’s the kind of thing ignorant peasants did two thousand years ago.

The grown men in the picture above should be ashamed of themselves.

I told you we wouldn’t have to wait long for more white trash news.

It was only a week or two ago on 60 Minutes that I saw segment on Interpol. They interviewed the man in charge, who is certainly working to make some changes. What a dynamic guy! On that segment they mentioned the reverse distortion technique now used on images that pedophiles have been distorted to conceal their identity. The guy above was featured in the example they showed, with a “whirl-pooled” face. A few days later, Interpol’s manhunt became more public and his reconstituted image was all over the internet.

He was in Korea until last Thursday. Now he’s being cornered in Thailand. Maybe he even watched the same 60 Minutes program. What a shock that must have been! And what a great way to hunt scum like this: just highlight them one by one like that, through Interpol and all over the internet. It gets results, and fast.

But what got my rolling my eyes again was that he was working in the ESL industry. Well, naturally. It’s almost inevitable that scum like that gravitate towards it. It’s easy to get into, it’s easy money, scumbags aren’t screened, it involves kids, it’s popular in Asia. It’s almost a complete package for a rock spider.

I wasn’t surprised to find that this scum had taught in Korea, although I was a bit surprised that it had been for over a seven year period.

Here’s a news article about it from today’s JoongAng Daily:

Pedophile suspect taught in Korea

October 17, 2007
An accused pedophile who is the object of an international manhunt fled for Thailand last week from Korea, where he had been teaching English at a school in Gwangju.
The suspect, whose picture was originally posted on the Web site of Interpol on Oct. 8, has been identified as Christopher Paul Neil of Canada.
Interpol said Neil is believed to have sexually abused at least 12 different boys in Vietnam and Cambodia in 2002 or 2003, based on some 200 photos circulating on the Internet.
The suspect had been working as an English and social studies teacher at Kwangju Foreign School in Gwangju, an unidentified official at the national immigration service said.
Another Canadian English teacher in Gwangju said that Neil had been working at the school since August.
The school declined to comment.
Apparently well-known among English teachers, Neil’s naming as a suspect was the subject of heated commentary on Dave’s ESL Cafe, a popular Web site for foreigners teaching English in Korea.
A woman who claimed to be a friend of Neil’s told the JoongAng Daily that she had identified his picture on the Interpol site and informed the agency of his identity. “I sent a message on Oct. 9 to Interpol.”
National Police Agency sources said they had been informed of Neil’s identity by Interpol last week but he left the country for Thailand before they could apprehend him.
The woman, who refused to give her name, said she met Neil when they were both teaching in southern Gyeonggi two or three years ago. She contacted the JoongAng Daily after reading a post on Dave’s ESL Cafe seeking information on Neil.
Neil was somewhat awkward, she said, but not “unusual,” and his behavior had not raised any suspicions. “Actually, he was gentle and liked to socialize,” she said. “My friends and I went out regularly with this guy.”
On the Dave’s ESL Cafe Web site several posters identified Neil as a visitor who used the name “Peter Jackson” when he posted messages.
In one post, “Jackson” discussed whether police clearances were needed to obtain working visas in Korea. “Public schools will want one,” the post said, “but you should be able to stall them. I never gave a police check for my last public school job.”
Neil’s friend said police checks were frequently on his mind. “He talked about background checks. He said he would tell the school to wait [for documents] and then eventually the school would forget about it.”

By Hwang Young-jin Staff Writer[yhwang@joongang.co.kr]

This clown arrived from Canada, where he’d been a teacher, in 2000. He taught in Seoul at some well-known institutes and as an English teacher at a regular school. Six months ago he taught at a Catholic middle school and, as mentioned, he was recently teaching at an international school down in the lower south-east of the country, in Gwang-Ju City.

It is unclear whether he offended in Korea. I’d say not, given the length of stay without any commotion; he’d perhaps traveled to countries that are just a short hop away. He wasn’t actually here for the whole seven years. Altogether, he only taught in Korea for about four and a half years. The rest of the time was presumably spent in other Asian countries, or in Canada.

It might amuse you to know that this guy wanted to be a Catholic priest. Will the cliches never end?

Yet again, white trash make the headlines in Korea. I hope it doesn’t encourage any more xenophobia. Like I always say, they really have improve their screening process to keep out the white trash. But at least here’s one foreigner who won’t be getting back in the country any time soon, especially not with the prison record he’ll be acquiring. Good riddance, you white trash piece of shit.

I had to laugh at the beginning of a post from seoulbuffoon, entitled “White trash among English teachers,” on the latest antics of said trash in Korea. Here’s how he starts it off.

There they go again!
The white trash in Korea are hogging the headlines for all the wrong reasons, as usual.

Hilarious. He was responding to the following article from the joongangdaily website:

English teachers arrested on drug charges
September 06, 2007

Police are investigating 23 people, most of them foreigners who teach English here, for smoking marijuana and trafficking in the drug, the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency announced yesterday.

The police detained three on trafficking charges: two Canadians, 28 and 30, and a Ghanaian, 34. They could be sentenced to 5 or more years in prison if convicted.

In addition, the police booked three Britons, five Canadians, 13 Americans and one Korean. The maximum penalty is a fine and 5 years in prison.

All 23, except for the Korean and the Ghanaian, are English instructors at hagwon, elementary schools or universities. The Korean is a girlfriend of one of the teachers.

“Some of the teachers were intoxicated while teaching students,” said Lim Chang-muk, an inspector at the agency. “Officially they made about 2 million won at schools, but they made as much as four times more outside of their regular jobs, which violates their E-2 visa guidelines.

With an E-2 visa, foreigners can only work at the organization that sponsored them. Most of the foreign suspects hold an E-2 visa.

The suspects obtained marijuana and hashish from suppliers introduced through their colleagues, police said.

The police said they confiscated 620 grams (1.4 pounds) of marijuana worth 13 million won ($13,860) and 0.7 gram of hashish.

What the . . . are these guys really making something like 8 million won (around $8000) a month? OK, I’m going to start looking for a teaching job. If they can make that much and still find time to party every night, that’s for me. But you know, I doubt it’s true—the money part, I mean.

As for the rest of it, I’ve got no doubt. I once knew of a guy who used to smoke dope before he went to work at Harrods of London. You think anyone’s going to be a little more responsible at a hagwon?

But let’s get back to our outraged poster. He’s got a few things to say about white trash, which I am delighted to present.

No wonder the entire clan of English teachers have very bad reputation here among Koreans.It just takes a couple of these assholes to tarnish their image. Although, if you believe some of the crap that is posted on the Internet ESL forums, young Korean girls are just dying to get into bed with them!

For this reason, there are frequent outbursts of public opinion to throw them out of the country, driven of course by the media stories.

I do not blame the Koreans for their extreme positions, especially when it comes to English teachers, but I personally feel that the government itself is to blame for allowing the white trash to find employment here without adequate qualifications. Once the “hagwon” education system is regulated, things are bound to improve.

Also the craze among Koreans to put their kids in hagwons and learn English from “blonde heads with blue eyes” has led to this unchecked mushrooming of fly-by-night operators who in turn employ anyone who is white to teach the kids.

If that does not happen, we will continue to see regular stories about their antics and the outburst by the public. In the meantime, the genuine English Teachers and other expats will continue to face a prejudiced public.

Having said that, I must mention that a recent survey by the Gender Equality Ministry found a marked softening in attitudes toward foreigners.

Grrr . . . those bad white trashers. This is what I love to see—lots of indignation and white trash biting the dust.

The Korean media love it, too. Here’s an excerpt from the koreabeat website about TV show on ESL teachers in Korea.

Foreign English teachers have been arrested for smoking marijuana before lessons and habitually using drugs in seedy areas.

The number of foreign English teachers who regularly use drugs is increasing.

One is a Canadian, “S” (24), who entered Korea intending to teach English in September 2004. S worked at an elementary school before being hired by an English hagwon in Gangnam, being paid W3,000,000 per month for six hours of classes per day.

Police say that since 2006 S has been using that money to procure Ghanian marijuana from drug dealer “A” (34) and regularly smoked it afterward.

Police claim that S would even smoke marijuana into the early morning and then go to school and teach the students. Police explained that not only S but most of the foreign English teachers arrested taught English by day and smoked marijuana by night.

A source at the foreign affairs division of the Seoul Police Department said, “American and Canadian English teachers think Korea is a ‘land of opportunity.’”

They become hagwon teachers not only because there is no country which has much desire to learn English as Korea but because they believe they can make up to 1,000,000 won per month through illegal private lessons.

The source also said, “the majority of them find it easy to seduce Korean women and do drugs with them.”

Foreign English teachers see Korea not only as a ‘land of opportunity’ but also as a ‘perverted heaven’.

The case of “R”, a 26-year old American who smoked marijuana with his Korean girlfriend, is a typical case.

R, while living with his girlfriend “H”, a worker in her 20s at a foreign bank, is accused of going to bars and clubs in Hongdae and Itaewon after classes and regularly smoking marijuana.

The police investigation concluded that they were all working in local universities, Gangnam, Seocho, Yangcheon, Bupyeong, or Gwangmyeong in regular hagwons and were all exposed as having committed the same crime.

The police emphasized that to prevent the entry of these kinds of foreign English teachers inquiries have already begun into criminal convictions for drug use.

Police also emphasized that, “they had satisfied the requirement to receive an E-2 foreign language visa of having a degree from a four-year institution and there was no problem with their degrees. In the cases of other English hagwons it appears there are no problems.”

The number of drug users is increasing? Mmm . . . I don’t see any source for that? If it’s accurate, we can expect some more fun and games in the future. Every time I venture outdoors I’ll have Koreans checking my eyeballs. This could make me paranoid even when I’m completely straight. You naughty waegookin dope-heads! You’re going to ruin the “land of perverted heaven” for the rest of us.

But aren’t those broad statements by the authorities classics. I think they must have been lifted straight from Xenophobia For Dummies. The part about “using drugs in seedy” areas has me confused, though, because didn’t they state that teachers smoked dope before going to class? What are they imputing of hagwons?

Well, so long to the white trashers that got caught. You’re all replaceable—and I’m sure many your replacements will be just the same, since the criteria for gaining employment over here probably won’t be tightened up for some time to come.

Update:

Wow! They did tighten things up. Now you have to get a police clearance of some kind from your home country. I also heard something about a drug test.

Thursday, Aug. 2:

My wife’s best friend’s sister-in-law committed suicide this morning. She opted for the method I discussed in my earlier post, the ever-popular leaping from an apartment balcony.

The news was relayed to me by my wife over Google chat in the early afternoon. Initially it was only that she had mysteriously died. And the husband couldn’t be contacted, so we knew the news before he did.

It’s a hard blow because the family are not wealthy. The husband works in the construction industry, and continues to work despite a cast of some kind on his leg. It’s possible he’s on a job out of town at the moment.

That may have contributed to the wife’s decision, for perhaps she simply couldn’t cope on her own any more. The latest I’ve heard is that police have adjudged from some items they read that she was suffering from depression.

She jumped at around 6am, thankfully not taking the children with her, as has happened in other cases. The children were still sleeping.

One of them is a girl in middle school, whose friends are from wealthier families, and who is known to insist on attending the extra curricula activities her friends do. That would have exacerbated any money worries because education—inside or outside of school—isn’t cheap in Korea.

Her life will never be the same, and perhaps her friends won’t be, either.

Friday, Aug 3:

The husband still can’t be contacted and a missing person’s report has been filed with the police. Rumour has it that he went to hospital, but that was not true. He also hasn’t turned up for work. Things are looking suspicious, if you ask me.

However, police are saying that no crime is involved.

Saturday, Aug. 4:

It seems that finally the brother has been contacted. He’s been working in Daegu. Why his phone was turned off is anyone’s guess.

(My apologies for some of the pixelated photographs that follow. I would most certainly have shown the uncensored versions if I could have obtained them.)

A primitive mentality operates behind the idea of seeking out scapegoats as objects of sin. It is a delusional action that goes back to the days before science and rationality. Yet even with science and rationality, the “scapegoat” impulse has remained, disguised in sophisticated belief systems and cloaked in ceremonial practices.

For example, the myth of Christ’s atonement came from the old tradition of animal sacrificing. As the Old Testament explains, a person could transfer sins and then be forgiven for them through the offering and the pouring out of the blood of, for instance, an “unblemished” lamb (cf. Lev 4:32). Later, Christ took on the role, but initially an animal was used a kind of ritual substitution object.

Thus, the animal takes on a meaning significant only to a select group of humans partaking in a collective delusion. The animal’s individuality is all but lost, and it regrettably receives no benefit, even though it is the one sacrificing everything. We can be as sure of that animal’s innocence as of its complete lack of comprehension of the moronic farce going on around it.

Unfortunately, such barbaric practices did not end some 2000 or 3000 years ago. They are still performed in Korea, a land that has modernized so quickly that the minds of some people do not seem to have advanced beyond a kind of backward and simple peasant ignorance.

But the people who attended this protest rally are more than just primitive, backward and uneducated: they are also evil and demonic. At least Christianity, despite its primitive beginnings, has become synonymous with a message of goodness and compassion. We do not see anything of that nature in the incident pictured here. We can safely assume therefore that Christians were not present at this satanic ritual.

No animal deserves to suffer and die like this.

This two-month-old pig was ripped apart with a knife and was then disemboweled at a rally attended by about 1,500 protesters in Icheon. It was a protest about a US military facility (or perhaps only an office) being relocated to the area. The mayor of Icheon was there, by the way, along with other officials, all of whom did nothing to stop the evil ritual.

Well, I guess I expected too much from a country that boasts 5000 years of culture and a miraculous modernization. Nor should I be surprised if some of its people insist on barbaric rather then cultured behavior, given that it happens wherever you find humans. But what a shame Korea has come so far and has achieved so much, and yet it still cannot entirely demonstrate an enlightened culture.

What could it possibly gain anyone to torture an innocent animal to death? Well, as I mentioned in my preamble about sacrificing animals, it all comes down to symbolism and analogy. At Korean protests, murdering an animal like this is supposedly to express the depth of feeling the protesters feel about an issue. Yes, it’s just done to express “emotion.”

This is not the first time protesters in Korea have viciously tortured and slaughtered a pig for the purpose of expressing “emotion.” In a protest a couple of years ago, a group of former South Korean commandos hacked to death a squealing pig daubed with the word “Koizumi” to protest against the Japan’s Prime Minister at the time, Kiozumi, and his surprise visit to a notorious war shrine.

Here you can see that something like an axe or knife has already been used on the poor animal. Primitive, barbaric, ignorant, evil, uneducated, small-minded, pathetic, demonic—this is what is says to me, and most of world I should think, regardless of the symbolic meaning it is supposed to convey, or what it means to small minded people. Clearly, they don’t have intelligence tests to screen commando applicants in Korea.

Koreans do get carried away at protests. Usually they strive to hurt themselves, and I’m all for that: if it’s emotion you really want to show, then using a substitute creature just doesn’t cut it for me (no pun intended).

So, the follow people are genuinely impressive and convince me of their emotion. In front of the Japanese Embassy in 2005, a 68-year-old mother snipped off her little finger with pruning shears and her 41-year-old son cut off his finger with a butcher knife. This was again against Koizumi and to protest the Dokdo issue (an ongoing tussle for a big rock in the ocean between Korea and Japan). Now, those acts show commitment. Elsewhere, a few wimps burned Japanese flags.

People like those at the protest in Icheon who torture young animals are wimps and cowards, too. Let’s make it plain what they are doing. Let’s put it in perspective and recognize that in the world of pigs, the animal they tortured to death was a small child. I know—people eat the children of nonhuman animals everyday because that’s what the meat industry serves up. Nonetheless, these barbaric theatrics pictured here should be seen for what they are: child abuse and torture.

The state of animal treatment throughout Asia is bad in general, and it’s no exception in Korea. I’m so ashamed of this country, a country I have made my home, when such abuses go on unchallenged. The laws are weak, as weak as the will of authorties to stop such abuse. I get the impression it’s the ingrained thinking in Korean society that is also to blame: widespread backward thinking about animals prevails alongside an otherwise modern system.

I don’t see any real excuse for practices of ancient stupidity and ignorance in this day and age, no matter what culture. Especially in Korea, a country that values education so highly, there’s no excuse for uneducated barbarism like this. It is totally unforgivable. Shame, Korea, shame. Some of your citizens are a disgrace to humanity.

So, I’m writing about this as my contribution towards change, for with improvement to its animal welfare laws, Korea can really show it does have an enlightened culture and not be the target of disdain from around the world. I don’t want to be ashamed of Korea, and I don’t want other people to be ashamed of the country, either.

But these are the people who have brought shame on Korea–look at them all–that’s all they have achieved: shame and disgust.

I’m also writing about this incident because I felt some emotion, and I wanted to have my own little protest. I wanted to say that you people who did this are low-life peasant-ignorant scum (this is the censored version of what I really think of you).

And now, I’ll just let stand the truth in words and pictures for all the world to see. That’s what usually happens in civilized countries, when we want to show our emotion.

The two favorite methods for committing suicide in Seoul, and probably throughout Korea, are hanging and tossing yourself out of an apartment building. The first method would appear to be the choice of celebrities. The second method probably scores highest as the one preferred by everyone else. This is partly because thousands upon thousands of people live in high rise apartments, which provides the convenience of a high platform for jumping on any given day.

But it has other merits that put it at the top of the list. Provided that you are up high enough, you are guaranteed of success. It’s probably 95% quicker to implement than hanging, especially if you run to the window. It reveals your considerate nature because ambulance personnel are not obliged to go far to retrieve your body; in many cases, they can pull up right next to you. It also makes a dramatic statement, especially desired if there is any spite in it, for society and those around you.

If I were shopping for a suicide method, I’d want these in the package. The one thing that bothers me, though, is the time it takes before the ground breaks your fall and the lights go out. There’s too much room for doubt there, too much time to reconsider and realize, as you plummet, that maybe you had been just a little bit hasty in your decision.

A dramatic suicide occurred just last week in Seoul in which the person, a 27 year old male, chose this jumping method for his exit from humanity. The story goes that he had been a university student but then was called up for military service. He was living with his mother at the time, and she was under the impression that he was still at university completing post-graduate studies. She believed this because that’s what he was telling her; and he was lying to her so that she would keep giving him money, which she thought was going towards his studies.

Things must have been tense in the household, presumably with not much money to go around. The husband and father of the family had died some two years ago from cancer. The mother was in her 60s, and I guess she probably didn’t have a job or, if she did, it didn’t pay much. So there’s the son, mooching off old mum.

Add to the mix his absconding from military duties, or rather civil duties—the service men have to do if they aren’t fit for real military service. So, the police were after him for another kind of social irresponsibility. It seems like this guy was just spiraling deeper and deeper into more and more trouble (no pun intended).

It wasn’t long before it all came to a head. Three months ago while having an argument with his mother, he killed her. It is likely she suspected his duplicity and the argument was about that. Her death may have been an accident, however—who knows? But he didn’t bother to report it, and instead wrapped her body in bed sheeting and just left her in the apartment. He continued to live there with the corpse for three months, which was probably all he could do, not having a job or a mother anymore to keep up his supply of cash.

Last Sunday night, it seems that he just couldn’t take it anymore. He called the police and confessed his crime. He then added that, before they got there, he would commit suicide. At least, in the end, he was a man true to his word. He jumped from his apartment balcony and fell 16 stories to his death.

We heard his body hit the ground. At first, I thought there had been a minor motorbike accident out on our complex’s back road, faced by our apartment. The sound was like a swishing directly followed by a thud. I’d also heard a couple of people, perhaps women, exclaim cries of surprise. All of it was not that loud, but enough to tear me away from the computer.

Sunah and I looked down from our balcony only to see people walking up and down under street lights on that back road, exercising like any other night. Nothing was untoward. Sunah did see closer in to our building, in the quadrangle of the kids playground, people moving toward the apartment building on our left, which borders the left side of the quadrangle. (That building kind of forms an L with ours.) But people milling about was not unusual. The weather was good, and naturally a lot of parents were out with their kids.

I was already thinking kids were responsible for the kerfuffle, and so upon seeing the road clear, I had gone inside. Then we both just went back to what we were doing.

Not until perhaps forty minutes later, when emerging downstairs with stuff for the recycling bins, did we discover all of the commotion going on. An ambulance was there and what looked like a large fire department bus, all lights flashing. People were everywhere, including others like us attending to their recycling (Sunday nights is recycling night). I did the recycling while Sunah went to ask about what was happening. We still hadn’t put two and one point five together.

After asking the apartment building’s guard, who seemed intent on ensuring nothing more than that the recycling was in order, she told me that some fat guy had jumped from his apartment and killed himself. She pointed to an apartment near the top of the building, from where he had leaped. All of its lights were on. The balcony’s outer sliding door wide open (as you would expect!).

That was enough for me; I headed over to the front of the building to have a look for myself. Not that I could get very close—there were officials keeping people back, plus the well-informed police had finally arrived. I couldn’t see a body anywhere, but I think, if it were still there, it might have been in the dark under trees and bushes. His crashing through the trees first would explain the swishing sound I heard just prior to the thud.

We went back to our apartment. Sunah was pretty upset by the whole thing. I was OK. But I did become slightly unsettled later on. What I mean is that, before long, everything was back to normal; just a tad too quickly for my liking. Actually, throughout this incident, everything remained normal just metres away on the back road; people continued to go about playing with kids and doing their exercise routines, and many probably had no idea that anything out of the ordinary had occurred.

I looked out into the night from my balcony and could see the 16th floor apartment from where the guy had jumped, about 40 metres diagonally to my left and a few floors down. It was still all lit up, and still there was no one inside—no cops, no investigators, no one. Little did I know at the time that the mother’s body was still in there wrapped up in bed sheets. To my front, down on the road and even directly in front of our building, the bustle of life continued on.

In a way, the suicide’s overwhelming lack of impact on everyday life probably made it easier to deal with because it was almost like it never happened. Add to that, I’m not at all against suicide and believe that if people want to do it, they should not be hindered. So the thing was not an affront to any sacred beliefs.

No, the suicide did not astounded me, but there was something sad and unsettling in the brief exclamation it represented; after an hour of commotion everything got back to normal, all was calm. There’s a lesson for us all in that.

As a postscript to this incident, Sunah and I happened to see our real-estate friend last night, the guy who helped us get our present apartment. He said he’d heard about the suicide, and that agents in the area were naturally keeping things quiet. There’s nothing like a murder-suicide to reduce the value of a property. Today, before posting this, I saw what appeared to be workmen doing something on the apartment’s balcony; readying things, I guess, for it to be sold.

This apartment complex had a suicide last year as well, I heard, and I’m reckoning that the average would be about one a year for each large apartment complex in Seoul. That doesn’t seem too bad, in my experience.

We found our pet rabbit, Panda, on the edge of a forested area of Seoul National University campus. How did it get there? Well, someone probably left her—I mean, dumped her in the area. For Koreans in Seoul, it’s a common practice, when animals have outlived their usefulness, to head for one of mountainous spots around the city and leave their pets there. I don’t think it dawns on many people that a domesticated animal may have no idea about how to find food. But that’s a whole other issue.

I remember one night in the back of a taxi, heading home around midnight from a drunken evening, we were half way through a tunnel, the traffic was bumper to bumper but moving fast, and I saw right in the middle cowering on a ledge, a huge hairy dog. No one was stopping. No one could. The tunnel had no emergency lane, it was just two lanes of bumper to bumper traffic with people no doubt wanting to get home. I alerted everyone about the dog, the people I was with in the taxi, but no one had seen it. We’d been moving too fast.

I wonder what the fate of the dog was, cowering there on a ledge in the middle of a tunnel, breathing in fumes, surrounded by loud traffic noise, and completely lost. It may have ended up killed and cooked and eaten, as happens in Korea still. Maybe someone was able to stop later and rescue it. I’ll never know. But I suspect it got there by being abandoned. I’m not saying it’s the solution all Koreans opt for when they can’t be bothered with an animal any more. Many use the Internet to advertise. But abandoning animals does seem pretty common, not that many people/families in Western societies are from the guilt of such behavior. But that’s a whole other issue.

These are other issues aside from what I really want to note down here, but they are not unrelated. In earlier times in Korea, there was a practice of abandoning old people in the mountains. This was when the old people had become too infirm or demented or whatever—just too much to handle. They were taken into the mountains and left there. Everyone knew they would eventually die, but no one would have to see it. Plus I guess guilt was assuaged by the thought that, well, in the mountains you have a fighting chance if you make a go of it amongst nature. Yes, it’s all very natural, and so a natural way to go—perhaps that’s how it was rationalized.

The thing is, this practice did not really die out in Korea, and in my view, I think we may see an increase of it in the coming years. Why? Well, I’ll explain that by quoting something one of my Korean coworkers never misses an opportunity to say when talking about the rapid changes Korea has undergone, the generation gap, family life, and so on. It refers to her generation, to those a little older than myself and to those of my age, and it goes like this: “We are the last generation to serve our parents and the first to be abandoned by our children.” It’s perhaps not that clear cut but I guess you could say the scales have dipped more to the abandon side.

Here are a couple of stories I heard recently that illustrate the phenomenon of abandoning old people in Korea today. An old woman was found wandering the streets apparently lost. The police tried to find out who she was but the woman didn’t know. She also didn’t know how to get home or even where she lived. A cell phone number was found and police rang that but it was never answered. Eventually, somehow, one of her sons was located. It was discovered by police that the woman was kind of abandoned by default. She had been in the street somewhere with her sons and, I think, a daughter, who were all arguing over who should look after her. None of them wanted to. Each one insisted the other should do it. Eventually, they abandoned their arguments in frustration and left, each thinking one of their siblings would take care of Mum. Old Mum, however, ended up with no one and alone in the street.

In Korea, the first son gets shouldered with all of the responsibilities and weight of family matters. But apparently, a first son told a second son that it was his turn to look after their parents. The second son reluctantly took them in. It seems that he was fairly well off and lived in a good area. However, the parents were a burden, and what’s more, they smelled. Eventually, it transpired that the son and perhaps his family went off somewhere, perhaps on vacation, leaving the parents alone. The son also left the balcony doors open to prevent the house from smelling because of the old folks. The only catch with this is that it was winter. Now, on top of that, the old parents were pretty much disabled in terms of movement. Apparently, they survived on noodles until their situation was uncovered by the buildings guard. By then the effects of the cold had caused infections of some kind. The upshot is the the father died. At the moment, I think the government is considering legal action.

What can be causing this to happen? Korean culture has rapidly modernized over the last few decades and with that traditional values have been crumbling away. That might be part of why it’s happening. Economic circumstances might be another. Just plain bad sons and daughters might be yet another. Whatever the cause, authorities are certainly not ignoring the phenomenon. It’s in the public eye, too. I recently saw a documentary on lost old people on TV. And another side to it is that old people do genuinely become lost, and some are never found much to the distress of their loved ones.

But is abandoning something so easily when it becomes inconvenient peculiar to Koreans? That’s a difficult and touchy subject to broach. The fate of the elderly here probably is not that different from in the West—the same things are done in different ways, I suppose, although outright abandonment is much less likely. It does seem more prevalent here. Then is it a cultural trait of some kind? I’ll say probably not, although I can’t help being reminded that for many years South Korea was the world’s adoption capital (perhaps it still is, I haven’t checked). It had more abandoned, I mean, orphaned kids than anywhere in the world. I say probably not, but it makes me wonder when these kinds of thing add up. That’s enough questions for now, boys and girls—sons and daughters.

Everyone’s in on it. The scammers are, of course. The hospitals are because they get revenue from patients unnecessarily taking up hospital beds and having needless tests. The insurance companies are because they know the hospitals are in on it yet they do nothing about it. The government must be because it’s apparently doing nothing to stop it. It’s insurance scamming, Korean style. And I’ve seen how it’s done.

We had just hopped into a taxi and the taxi was slowly pulling away from the curb. Behind us traffic was waiting at a red light, and we had a clear three lanes in front of us. It had been only several seconds since the taxi started moving. Suddenly, out of no where, an older model SUV that must have emerged from side street came along side, over took us, then veered in front and seemed rub its back end against the nose of the taxi, then stop. This was all happening in slow motion, mind you, because the speeds involved would have been approximate to those of a fast walk.

I was thinking, what an idiot, with nothing in front or behind, at the speed of 10-5 kilometres an hour, this moron has managed to hit us. As usual in such incidents, the guy got out, and so did the woman with him, both of them with stern faces. Our taxi driver, sighing and apparently resigned to it all, got out, too. From the remonstrances and body language I observed, it was clear the taxi driver was not putting up any kind of fight, yielding entirely to vigorous gestures and complaints of the SUV driver.

While this was going on, I also observed that the other side of the SUV had dents in it. The side that nudged the taxi also had other dents on that the taxi clearly did not make. Only later did it register that these dents may have been from other minor “accidents” like the one I was just involved in.

After the driver got back in, we learned that his insurance would probably have to pay for the damage. There was no point in contest it. Since his was the rear vehicle in the accident, it was his fault, and that was that. Well, I was pretty incensed. I usually know bullshit when I see it. Adamantly, I told my wife to explain to the driver that we were witnesses and that we could help him. I insisted several times over that it was clearly not his fault. But it all met with a shake of the head. This guy was really resigned to it all. He sighed all the way to our home.

I’m pretty certain that driver was the victim of scammer. Since then I’ve heard of other incidents, one involved a Korean coworker. In fact, she’s experienced two instances involving scammers. One of them was with a motorbike rider. It seems he bumped the edge of her car. After they stopped he was very angry at her and she got pretty upset. But there was no damage to his motorbike and no apparent injury. From memory, I think he claimed he needed to go to hospital and my coworker’s insurance paid for it. The second incident involved a driving instructor, of all people. He and my coworker’s car hit bumper to bumper. They exchanged details and moved on. A few hours later my coworker receives a phone, and it’s the guy from the accident claiming that he feels dizzy and his head hurts, or something equally pathetic. Once again, the insurance company had to pay this guy because of his insistence that he needed to go to hospital and have everything checked out.

Here’s where we get into Catch-22 territory. Those scammers insist that they have to go to hospital and that means that the insurance company will have to pay the bill, but it can also offer some money up front instead to pay for the hospital expenses. The insurance company knows it’s a con so it takes the cheapest way out and offers the scammer money. Naturally, the scammer accepts that, pockets the money and doesn’t actually bother going to hospital. In other words, the insurance company pays the scammer to just go away.

An insurance guy explained all of this to my coworker. He also cited in incident with a foreign car that was in an accident but sustained absolutely no damage. From what I gather, the driver was threatening to have his car inspected and repaired. At that news, the insurance company paid him about $5000 to just go away. Foreign cars, I take it, are very expensive to repair.

For those people who do go to hospital, they might get a brief hospital vacation off work, all paid for. They may not even have to be at the hospital all of the time. They could go out for dinner for example. What’s going on here? Well, the hospital knows it’s a con, too, so it might keep people around longer for unnecessary tests, thus boosting profits. After all, the insurance company pays for it all.

The insurance company knows its a con and it knows the hospital knows, and the hospital knows it knows, and the scammer knows that the insurance company and the hospital know it’s all a con. See what I mean? Basically, everyone knows its a con, and ultimately insurance company customers pay for it because it’s no doubt factored into policies and higher premiums.

So we come back to our taxi driver and the old SUV, dented on both sides. Obviously, those people in the SUV were going to do something similar to what I’ve described—cite the need for repairs, pocket insurance money, and drive off with all their little dents unrepaired, but useful for the next “nudging” incident.

Think about this for a moment, both myself and my coworker have been witness to scams, and we’re just part of a small department. Could that be a coincidence or an indication of just how much scamming is going on out there? It seems to be an unspoken national disgrace, and no one seems to have the will to do anything about it. Perhaps that’s because it’s just too lucrative for too many parties.

Unfortunately, the following is not about sex and molestation, booze and drugs, so I’m sorry to disappoint. Foreigner excesses in those areas have either declined or simply haven’t reached the news. I certainly hope this isn’t going to be a trend.

In the meantime, here’s something else foreigners are getting in trouble for in Korea: visa fraud and working illegally. I know, it’s lame, and I do apologize.
Here is the article from The Globe and Mail website that I include in its entirety because to read it on that site you have to pay.

Monday, October 10, 2005 Posted at 4:52 AM EDT

By COLIN FREEZE

Nearly 50 English teachers from Canada have been detained, deported or investigated on allegations of visa fraud in South Korea, a country seeking to purge itself of young Westerners increasingly regarded as unqualified, unruly and unwelcome.

Long a magnet for foreigners drawn to working overseas, Korea has arrested hundreds of them in the past couple of weeks. Immigration officials have been rounding up dozens of teachers at their homes, work, or at the airports.

While as many as 10,000 foreigners legally teach the language at private English schools in Korea, the nation’s media have been full of exposes about teachers with dubious credentials.

Many of the foreign teachers, if not most, are Canadian.

Many teachers say Korean officials and unscrupulous recruiters have long tolerated, even encouraged, the illegal activity.

Some Canadian teachers are worried that they, too, could end up in prison.

“I wish we could tell exactly how much trouble we are in,” a 30-year-old Canadian teacher said in a phone interview from Kwangju, Korea, on Friday. “The idea of me being locked up and handcuffed and fed grog is ridiculous. They say what we’re doing is criminal, but it doesn’t feel that way.”

The woman, who is from B.C., said she arrived on a spousal visa, but was enticed into teaching English illegally to supplement her husband’s income.

Her husband, a legal instructor, said Korea’s response is out of proportion to the situation. “We are all teaching children how to sing Row, Row, Row Your Boat, and ABC,” he said, adding that he believes more than 150 Canadians doing this type of work have been arrested.

The couple — who, like several other Canadians interviewed, asked not to be identified — say they are contemplating a “midnight run” out of Korea, and complain that the local embassy has not done enough for jailed friends.

“The whole situation is totally inhumane — I’ve heard of 70 [foreign teachers] being put in a room with capacity for only 30 or 40,” the wife said. “It’s not like they were dealing drugs or running guns.”

Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department says there are limitations to what it can do. It has officially logged about 50 English-teacher cases in the past two weeks: 35 have been deported, five are awaiting deportation and the rest under investigation.

“It’s clear that the South Koreans are enforcing their laws in a recent wave that began as little as two weeks ago,” the Foreign Affairs parliamentary secretary, Dan McTeague, said from Ottawa.

The Liberal MP warned Canadians in Korea to “make sure their credentials conform to the rigours of the law. If they don’t, they are strongly advised to rethink continuing in that setting.”

Many of the arrests of foreigners have followed that of a Korean man who is accused of selling fake diplomas. Many Canadians who tried to establish teaching credentials by buying fake university degrees are worried that their names have been handed over to the authorities.

One Canadian, who has taught legally in Korea for nine years and helps run an Internet message board for expatriates, is telling affected colleagues that the wisest course of action is to surrender.

“There are some people that freak out and say, ‘I better get out of Dodge’ — and then they get nailed at the airport,” he said.

Given that Korean authorities are believed to have an inch-thick dossier on illegal English teachers, he urged his compatriots to go a different route. “If you turn yourself in, immigration tends to take a more lenient thinking.”

Like many Canadians interviewed, he said that Koreans have an innate xenophobia that has hardened of late. “There has been a definite change in the way we’re being perceived in the last nine or 10 months,” he said. “Before, it was, ‘Please speak me English.’ Now, it’s ‘Get out of my country, white devils.’ ”

Visa frauds go on in just about every country, but Korea’s clampdown has been lent a sense of urgency by highly publicized accounts of immorality by young foreigners. Reports of marijuana and cocaine busts have long tended to feature Westerners — including five Canadian teachers who were arrested two years ago.

But more recent events have led to a furor. An unknown English teacher in Korea used the Internet to post what amounted to a how-to guide for seducing Korean women. Then, two English teachers from Cape Breton, N.S., made the headlines for breaking a local man’s jaw in a bar brawl. They spent 40 days in jail and were ordered to pay $30,000 (U.S.) in a form of restitution known locally as “blood money.”

And lately, Korean TV has aired segments painting English teachers as inept, unqualified foreigners who frequently lie about their credentials.

“People basically think all foreign teachers are drunks and molesters who can’t get a job back home,” said the teacher who helps run the Internet board for expats.

Mmm . . . that comment at the end is a bit harsh, though sums it up for me. No, only kidding—I would have left out the molesters part, and that’s because if Korean girls are willing, it doesn’t count as molesting, right? Let’s get one thing straight: not all foreigners are bad white trash. Good white trash are out there, too, you know, getting drunk and legally working for pay they’d never get back home.

It’s trash like this that gives Korea a bad name. Here he is caught with his pants down, drinking beer, doing drugs and no doubt he sleeps with a lot of Korean girls (actresses and such).

Korea’s Incheon airport is like a revolving door in way, with foreigners coming and going. A lot of Westerners, especially Americans and Canadians, come here to make some cash in between semesters or during a break before heading off to graduate school. As well as them, you get a lot of older graduates who had just drifted around after university, not in a good job or even able to find a job, some of them in their late twenties and early thirties. What makes Korea attractive for these older ones is that it’s door is open, when, for them, so many are closed or closing at home.

With such an influx, you get an infinite variety of white trash infesting the country. It’s galling that they should have it so good, yet not deserve it. What they get in Korea, they would never get at home. To be treated well and get paid well just because they happened to be born into the English language.

Foreigners have directly caused me aggravation as well, inside and outside of work. I’ve had a few bad foreigner neighbours, not ESL teachers, but teachers at a university nonetheless, and others that were probably foreign students. After experiences with them, with how incompetent, uncouth or inconsiderate they are, my prejudice has grown against foreigners in Korea.

On top of that, Korea has treated me well, so I don’t warm to foreigners who bad-mouth the country. And I don’t have much sympathy for the white trash that ends up in the news. When they screw up, effectively ruining a good deal for themselves, a better deal than they’re likely to get back home, I’m delighted, on the one hand, but filled with trepidation, on the other. They’re behaviour reflects badly on us all over here.

Nonetheless, I love hearing about their latest antics. For example, some pictures of a party at a bar came out, featuring Korean girls cavorting with drunken foreigners. The pictures were spread all over Korean sites, together with comments from plenty of angry Koreans. Of the extreme kind were those who wanted to get a posse together to go out and bash foreigners—any foreigners. Scary stuff. By the way, I saw the photos, and I’ve got to say, it all looked pretty tame to me.

Other than the standard illegal working, drunkenness and drug taking, you get incidents like the foreigner was bragging on an online forum about how he molested Korean school kids while teaching. The guy was probably just a stirrer, but who knows? They immediately shut the site down but I managed to read the text thanks to cached pages by Google. I wish I’d kept all of that stuff because I can’t find much on it now.

One can sympathize with Koreans who must hear the same old MO year after year–white trash foreigners misbehaving again. Don’t get me wrong, many genuine and committed individuals make a go of it here in Korea. But I’m not interested in them. I’m going to start keep a record from now on, for the fun of it, on white trash behaving badly. I love hearing about their antics and watching them bite the dust, and I’m sure there will be plenty of material to entertain me in the years to come.

This sculpture, one of the many scattered around Seoul’s Olympic Park, struck me as appropriate for the theme of this post, which is on murder and mayhem. I’ll mainly concentrate on the all-too-fashionable subject of serial killers, as there’s one on the loose in Seoul at the moment.

He struck last year in locations around south-western Seoul, some close to where my girlfriend was living at the time. The first two victims survived. One of them, a high school girl, was walking home from a subway station when a guy approached and without a word began stabbing her. There was no noise, nothing said. It was random. The man then vanished. The girl received stab wounds to her breasts and inner thighs. A few months later a fourth victim was attacked in a large park, one of whose entrances is about 200 metres from that apartment my girlfriend was living in. This latest victim only survived for a short period; but she did manage to give a description and details of what happened. Police surmised that the perpetrator was a local with intimate knowledge of the area, given how he always slipped away with ease.

After these events, women everywhere began taking precautions. There was a marked increase in police patrols, as I could not fail to notice, in that park I mentioned near my girlfriend’s place. And there was something else; an unnerving new dimension to the crimes emerged with the revelation of patterns to them. A number of the murders occurred on rainy nights, frequently on a Thursday, and often during the early hours of the morning. (My guess was a taxi driver.) There were also rumours that the victims had been wearing red when they were attacked.

Now, it wasn’t just the patterns that were disturbing, it was the sense of familiarity that accompanied them. Rumours filled with dark speculation began to spread, for these patterns recalled the modus operandi of a killer from an earlier time in Seoul’s history. Had he returned?

In the 1980s, there was a serial killer at large in the countryside just south of Seoul, an area populated with little farming villages, irrigation ditches and grassy fields. It was a dramatic case, and it became notorious because the killer has never been caught. I’d heard about it soon after getting here, though where I cannot remember. It could have been from a number of sources because occasionally the media refers to it. It’s one of those mysterious cases that insinuates itself into a generation’s psyche and becomes an urban legend. It could have been that I learnt about it from reading a snippet concerning a movie called Memories of Murder, which was based on the case. The movie was made a few years ago and I managed to see it near the end of last year. I have to say I was tremendously impressed.

The film, directed by Bong Jun-ho, received critical praise when it was released in 2003. With its high level of sophistication and polish, it is a testimony to the Korean film industry’s coming of age. What’s great about it are the subtle details and the black humour; it isn’t “Hollywood,” so it’s without the sensationalism or flash-over-substance that big money tends to generate, and although it does contain a dramatic denouement, that’s more about mental fracturing than gunplay. The film shows you the cops clumsily doing their best to frame someone; you see them torturing people to extract information; you see them fighting amongst themselves as they start cracking under the strain. In fact, it’s all about the cops and their deterioration in the face of failure, rather than the serial killer. You don’t really see the psychopath—after all, as I said, he was never caught.

One of the real detectives who investigated this case was interviewed in retirement. For him, the time was, as he described it, a season in hell. The toll of young women was mounting; there was no evidence, except for clues like the murders occurring on rainy nights, like a mournful song requested over the radio before they occurred, like the women who were targeted having worn red. The pressures were mounting and no progress was being made. Then everything stopped—no more killings, no substantial clues, just 9 dead women from 1986 to 1991. Time passed, people moved on, investigators retired.

A number of people suspected in the case died, too, some were involved in accidents and some committed suicide. It is unclear how many of these can be put down to ‘collateral damage’ due to the case. The police had interviewed around 3000 people in the course of investigations, freely exercising torture to gain information or confessions. This actually left a number of innocent individuals with mental problems.

Despite such extreme measures, the killer remains at large and may be still active. Not so long ago, a girl was killed in the same area and it appears to have been done by the same person or perhaps a copycat. Investigations into this last incident and two previous to it remain open. Investigations into the earlier unsolved killings are closed; you see, they’ve passed a 15 year time limit for resolution that is required here.

If there was a link between this 1980s case and last year’s south-western Seoul case, it was that efforts in both were characterized by a lack of progress, not that the same killer was involved. Police  soon quashed rumours about it being same killer, but that wasn’t much of a relief, of course, because it meant that there were now definitely two serial killers at large.

Meanwhile, the number of victims credited to this new, south-western Seoul killer had risen to six. Then, suddenly, all over the news there were images of a serial killer they had caught, a yellow blanket about his shoulders, a cap and face mask obscuring his features; flashes from photographers reminded you of a movie star’s entrance at an award night. It was a sensation. So they finally caught up with him, I thought. Well, you can image my surprise when I learned that this was, in fact, another serial killer I hadn’t even heard about!

The story behind this guy is astounding. He’d been even busier than the other two psychos put together, notching up 26 victims—something of a disappointment for him because he was aiming for 100. He put forward the default excuse of a troubled background (deaths in the family due to epilepsy, which he also suffered, a history of mental disturbances, blah, blah). Add to that his hatred of the rich, whom he blamed for all of his misfortune. Add to that a divorce and a later phone-sex girl’s rejection of his marriage proposal. Add to that a number of years in and out of prison. Hey presto: a social outcast primed to explode. He spared his ex-wife from slaughter in consideration of his son—most thoughtful. Instead, killing rich old ladies and prostitutes would be, according to his twisted logic, an appropriate revenge against a world that clearly had done him wrong.

It wasn’t hard to go out and teach the world a lesson, either. Old rich people were at home alone during the day and he could strike with impunity. For prostitutes, he’d call to have a girl sent over to his place or to a hotel, and if there was something about her that rubbed him the wrong way (excuse the pun), he’d bludgeon her to death. So it went on.

His water bill alone was approximating the total rental on some properties. Why? Well, you have to get rid of the body, and in such a crowded metropolis as Seoul that’s not easy. The usual method, therefore, is to cut it up, and that’s what he’d do in his bathroom, naturally, with the water running to wash away the blood and gore. Apparently, he’d play traditional victory songs while performing this rite (well in keeping with his nutter status). Then he’d bury the pieces in one of the inner city’s many wooded hill areas.

Now, this guy would often ring the same agency to get prostitutes. So, in the course of time, it struck the agency’s owner that catering to this client was bad for business. His girls were failing to return; he was losing income; he continually had to replace staff–it was most curious. Yet he didn’t jump to any hasty conclusions, except to put his girls’ disappearances down to their moving on. Besides, his kind of business is full of itinerants; and, in any case, it wasn’t up to him to ponder life’s mysteries, nor to care much about what happened to the girls in his charge. But he was an astute businessman, to give him credit, and so he stopped sending girls to the psycho for good measure. The psycho, undeterred, simply called another agency.

It’s curious how people can just go missing or crimes like this go undetected for so long. I’m sure it’s partly due to that big city paradox: the more people there are, the less you are noticed. This is compounded by the Korean tendency to internalize, to discretely look the other way or ignore things. In situations where something is uncomfortable, a minor fracas, for example, it seems that reality is selectively obscured or essentially just-isn’t-happening in the minds of many. Believe me, I’ve been there and witnessed something just not happen, according to those around me. I presume things are different when something really serious occurs.

At different locations, like bus stations, I’ve noticed sun-faded posters sticky taped to windows displaying the pictures of about 50 children. It was what I presumed, but I still queried my girlfriend about it. Yes, they were all missing kids; a number of them barely 2 years old, it seemed. I was taken aback. Shouldn’t this have prompted a national outcry? Think of Australia, where just one kid goes missing and the next thing you know 100s of volunteers are out combing bushland or the suburbs. It makes the evening news. That doesn’t seem to happen here. I questioned how these kids went missing. Who knows? Some disappeared from parks apparently. What’s the story behind all of the others? Surely there was not an adoptee shortfall that called for kidnappings, for South Korea used to be renowned worldwide as a steady suppler of abandoned children. So what happened to those poster kids? I don’t know.

I guess one just has to keep in mind that this is a country with one of the world’s highest population densities. People will go missing, people will be killed, and it won’t rate highly unless they happen to be a soap-opera star. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to impress that Korea is worse than anywhere else. If you ask me, Koreans are doing remarkably well considering their history–occupation by the Japanese, the Korean War, oppressive governments, wide-spread poverty.

The country has undergone a dramatic transformation—modernizing and westernizing. Pressures not experienced before have been introduced; and now that the boom of the 80s and 90s is over, new stresses and tensions associated with economic recession and unemployment are worming their way into daily life and social consciousness. Family dynamics and relationships are changing, too–I mean, really changing: divorce rates are reaching US proportions; nearly 50% of married women are reportedly having affairs. These things were unheard of not so long ago. But they don’t reflect anything remarkable by western standards.

No, if you ask me, the crime here, even bizarre crime, is just business as usual. You can’t blame it on the social effects of a turbulent history—that is, not all of it. A relatively new kind of crime is emerging here that you could argue is because of modernization and changing value systems. An example of it caused a big stir recently. A wife plotted to have her husband killed for insurance money. The couple’s son was in on it, too. With the strong emphasis on family (and bloodlines) here, this was most definitely a socially shameful, ‘taboo crime.’ Thus, when the plot was uncovered the wife committed suicide, leaving the husband to grapple with ongoing disbelief.

The public is also mystified, reflecting on this uncommon crime as a further indication of the fabric of society tearing apart. In fact, overly sensitive citizens have interpreted such crimes as a sign that the apocalypse is due at any moment. Of course, these panicky observations are laughable for a westerner from a country where financially inspired crimes and the inherent evils of capitalism are a part of daily life: it’s just the same old same old like I said, except in a Korean setting. But serial killing has always been around; you can’t put it down to economics.

So, what about that guy who killed 26 people? Well, he’ll be executed. They don’t waste time incarcerating lunatics like that over here. Like I always say, Koreans can be incredibly practical. (Apparently, in the old days, serious criminals were tied to trees and left as tasty tiger snacks. Koreans are environmentally friendly, too.)

However, the death sentence has created a problem for ‘lessor’ criminals on death row who were hoping for leniency. They’re upset at the loony for turning public opinion in favour of the rope. He just can’t seem to make friends these days. I guess it’s because the world is against him, yet again. As for the other serial killers–that is, the two I actually know about, well, they’ve just blended back into this so-called homogeneous society, perhaps until the next rainy night inspires a deadly melancholy.

Postscript: nearly a year after writing this the south-western Seoul killer, the one who struck near my girl friend’s apartment, was caught. His excuse was something like he didn’t like to see women happy, and if he saw women being happy, he felt like killing them. This included children, apparently, because two were included in his murdering spree. The countryside killer, however, remains at large.

Ms. Soon Ok Lee

North Korean prison camp survivor
Seoul, South Korea
June 21, 2002

I was a normal gullible North Korean citizen, loyal to Leader and Party, and believed that North Korea was a people’s paradise. I was the Director of the Government Supply Office for party cadres for 14 years when I was arrested in 1984 under the false charge of embezzlement of state property. I was subjected to severe torture during a 14 month preliminary investigation until I was forced to admit to the false charges against her. Eventually, I received a term of 13 years in prison at a kangaroo court. I had served 5 years and two months in prison when I was released in 1992 under a surprise amnesty.

During the first six months in the prison, I had worked briefly at all of the factories in the prison before I was finally assigned accounting work due to my background as an accountant. My routine responsibilities included updating prisoners’ list by deleting the dead from it and adding new arrivals to it, allocation of meals and work quotas, updating work accomplished, collecting daily work reports, carrying new work instructions to all work sites, and so on.

Thus, I had access to records of numbers of inmates and production plans, etc., and was privileged to daily visit all factories in the prison in both men’s and women’s sectors. I survived her over five years of ordeal because of the opportunity to walk to all the work sites every day which other prisoners could not and because I had relatively easy work in an office as an accountant with the prison officials.

I surrendered to South Korea in December 1995 with my son Dong chul Choi. I published a book, The Bright Eyes of the Tailless Beasts in Seoul in December 1996 to inform the world of these crimes against humanity by the North Korean government. With the help of a volunteer art student, I has produced the following illustrations to show the world the reality of the North Korean crimes against humanity.

In addition to the detention settlements for political prisoners, there are two or three secret political prisons. Prisoners accused of violating policies of the party are imprisoned here through kangaroo court. I was a prisoner at one of these political prisons.

I recollect life in the North Korean prison:

“A prisoner has no right to talk, laugh, sing or look in a mirror. Prisoners must kneel down on the ground and keep their heads down deeply whenever called by a guard, they can say nothing except to answer questions asked. Women prisoners’ babies are killed on delivery. Prisoners have to work as slaves for 18 hours daily. Repeated failure to meet the work quotas means a week’s time in a punishment cell. A prisoner must give up her human worth. When I was released, some 6,000 prisoners, both men and women, were crying and pleading with me in their hearts to let the outside world know of their suffering. How can I ever forget their eyes, the eyes of the tailless beasts?”

After release, I could have lived peacefully in North Korea and enjoyed my previous status as a senior party member because people all knew that I was innocent. However, I decided to risk my own life to inform the world of the Kim Jung II’s crimes against humanity. I testifies that most of the 6,000 prisoners who were there when I arrived in 1987 had quietly perished under the harsh prison conditions by the time I was released in 1992. This shows that about 1,000 prisoners died each year and a fresh supply of new prisoners was obtained each year in order to meet the production quotas! I recalls that I was the only prisoner released during the term of my imprisonment. The only exception I can recall is a group of some 250 prisoners, Koreans from Japan. They had arrived there from Yodok detention settlement, I was told, several months before my arrival. On the day of the 30th anniversary of the signing of agreement between North Korea and Japan for returning Korean residents from Japan to North Korea (shortly after her arrival at the prison), they were sent to an unknown location.

North Korean Kangaroo Court

The preliminary trial was for 10:00 am at my former office, where I worked for 17 years as a loyal party member. I asked for my husband before entering the court. “Your husband is not here. Don’t ever try to meet anybody else, understand?” was the reply. Don’t I even get to see my husband on the day of my trial?

I met my lawyer for the first time in the courtroom. The court consisted of a judge, prosecutor, lawyer and a two member “jury.” My interrogator was there also. The judge made a few remarks about the charges against me and asked me if I accepted the charge.

I had promised the interrogators earlier that I would accept the charge, but I simply could not control myself at that moment. “Your Honor, I have neither embezzled government property nor violated any of the party policy. Never, never! I am innocent. Please allow me a fair investigation.” The two guards at my sides shouted, “You must be crazy!” and started to kick me in the knees. At that moment, the judge declared the preliminary trial closed. The trial lasted less than 15 minutes!

It was very cold on November 9, 1987, my trial day. In the morning, the interrogators repeated their warning, “You better be careful what you say in court or your husband and son will be in serious trouble. Remember that!” (I did not know that my husband, in fact, had already been exiled internally!) However, I was firmly determined to do what I could to prove my innocence to the party officials and my husband. I was still so naive and excited by the idea of meeting my husband and telling him loudly, in the court room, all about my sufferings.

After the preliminary trial which lasted less than 15 minutes, I was detained at the police cell for the formal trial until five o’clock in the afternoon. I was given no water and food. The interrogators persistently harassed me with the same threat, “What about your husband and son? If you accept the charge in court, they will be safe. Otherwise, you know what’s going to happen to them.”

At court in the afternoon, I had to say yes when the judge asked me, “Do you accept the charges against you?” There was no evidence produced nor any witnesses against me. The judge made no reference to the absence of evidence and witnesses and committed me to a 13 year imprisonment in violation of the government commercial policy and state property embezzlement. The lawyer remained silent throughout the entire court proceeding. The mere formality to send me to prison was thus over under the pretext of a trial.

Underground Emergency Execution Chamber

Near the prison gate, there is a huge iron gate that leads to the underground tunnels. Guards often remind the prisoners that their lives are considered disposable and that they can be collectively annihilated at any time in the underground tunnels. The tunnels, of course, can be blasted at any time, leaving no traces of massacre. It is said that the underground space is so large that it can accommodate several thousand prisoners at one time. The male prisoners’ sector has a huge underground factory for the production of ammunition and weapons. I have never been to the underground weapon factory myself but I have frequently heard prison officials talking about it. I do not know whether the underground tunnels in the women’s sector are connected to the men’s underground factory.

I often saw fumes coming from a distant chimney atop a nearby hill. I was told that the chimney is one of the ventilators of the underground tunnels.

Meals for Prisoners

Salt soup
100 grams of broken corn, full meal
80 grams of broken corn, reduced for punishment
60 grams of broken corn, reduced for punishment

Prisoners’ Sleeping Conditions

Some eighty to ninety prisoners sleep in a flea infested chamber about six meters long by five meters wide (about 19 feet by 16 feet). Some eighty percent of the prisoners are housewives. The prison chamber is so congested that sleeping there is itself a torture. Prisoners sleep on the floor, squeezed together, head and feet alternating. So, prisoners sleep with the stinking feet of other prisoners right under their nose. They roll up their clothes for pillows.
During the winter, prisoners share body heat against the cold wind coming under the floor. However, during the summer, it is so stuffy with the sweat and stink of the prisoners that they prefer sleeping at the work site even though it means more work.

Two prisoners must stand on night duty for one hour shifts. The following morning, prisoners on night duty must report to the prison authorities all the details of their duty including the sleep talking of other prisoners. They get their duty hour extended if caught sleeping.

Evening Roll Call

The prisoners are divided into units and teams and must always act collectively by group under the slogan, “All Actions by Unit and Team!” Prisoners get up, line up for roll call, proceed to work, take meals, go to the toilet, finish work and go to bed collectively and at the mercy of the prison authorities.

At the end of the day’s grueling work, the prisoners are so tired and exhausted that many of them experience physical problems returning to the prison chamber promptly. This means that the other prisoners in the same unit have to wait and sleep less. Every night, it is a hellish experience that lasts for an hour or even longer: the calling of prisoners for others, or repeated roll calls, and prisoners desperate to go to sleep as soon as possible.

The Kaechon Women’s Prison comprises the following eleven work units: miscellaneous factory, export factory, shoe making factory, leather/rubber factory, clothing factory, fabric cutting factory, work preparation unit, maintenance unit, drop out punishment unit, farm unit and kitchen unit.
The prisoners must always keep their heads down at work and avoid other movement unnecessary for work. More than half of the female prisoners have lumps on their head or shoulders and are hunchbacks or crippled. Most female prisoners working in the shoe factory are baldheaded.

The entire unit is responsible for the mistakes of any one prisoner in the team. As a result, newcomers are not welcome because the entire unit will have to work more and go to bed later because of the newcomer’s failure to move and work fast enough.

Prisoners and Prison Guards

At all the factories, there are glass boxes for prison guards to sit in while supervising prisoners at work. The glass walls enable them to watch the prisoners at work while avoiding their terrible stench. In addition, the prison guards always wear masks and keep some distance from the prisoners because of the bad smell.

As standard practice, a prisoner must run to the official and sit down on her knees with her head down whenever she is called. The prisoner can only answer the questions asked and cannot say anything else. Prisoners are very often kicked in the face or breast for slow answers or movement. The prisoners are severely punished for raising their heads or stretching their bodies.

Punishment Cells, Chambers of Death

The punishment cell is one of the most dreaded punishments for all prisoners. The cells are usually 60 cm wide and 110 cm high. Therefore, the prisoners have no room to stand up, stretch their legs or lie down. They cannot even lean against the walls because they are too jagged. There are twenty such cells for female prisoners and 58 cells for male prisoners. They are usually detained for seven to ten days as punishment for certain offenses, such as leaving an oily mark on clothes, failing to memorize the president’s New Year message or repeated failure to meet work quotas.

When the prisoners are released from the cells, their legs are badly bent, with frostbite in the winter, and so they can hardly walk. Many victims are permanently crippled from the lack of adequate exercise and eventually died as a result of the work resumed immediately after the release. The prisoners call the punishment cell “Chilsong Chamber,” meaning a black angel’s chamber of death.

In November 1989, I was detained in the punishment cell for a week for attempting to cover up a faulty piece of shirt made by a 20 year old girl. The young girl was sent to the torture chamber and never seen again. Among other things, the freezing cold wind from the toilet hole made the experience extremely painful. During the summer, the prisoners struggle to brush thousands of maggots back into the toilet hole.

After being released, I had problems walking for 15 days but I was able to recover because my job gave me the needed opportunity to walk to all corners of the prison with work instructions.

They say it is a day of great fortune if a prisoner finds a rat creeping up from the bottom of the toilet hole. The prisoners catch it with their bare hands and devour it raw, as rats are the only source of meat in the prison. They say the wonderful taste of a raw rat is unforgettable. If they are caught eating a rat, however, the punishment is extended. So they have to be very careful when catching and eating a rat.

Prisoners Can Use Communal Toilets Only Twice a Day

There is one collective toilet, one meter wide and two meters long, for every 300 prisoners. Five or six prisoners use the toilet together at the same time. The first group leaves work for the toilet with a wooden pass. Then, they return to work with the pass. The next group is then allowed to visit the toilet collectively with the pass. In this way, the prisoners use the toilet only twice a day in group shifts, not when they need to. The prisoners squat on a slope and evacuate onto a sloped floor. There is only one hole at the end of the toilet.

Please note the toilet duty prisoner holding a wooden pass in the above drawing. The prisoner on toilet duty must stay inside the toilet for 17 18 hours a day. They are normally old and crippled women who are not fit to work. They look horrible with faces swollen and yellow from the stench. Some prisoners prefer the job because of the guarantee of a full ration meal, but they normally die within a year.

Prisoners Die After Spending Time in Punishment Cell

Hun sik Kim was the principal of Pyongyang Light Engineering College. She was sentenced to a 5 year imprisonment for suggesting to the City Education Board that her students’ labor responsibility be reduced so that they could spend more time studying.

In prison, she was assigned the work of measuring fabric to produce jackets, which were to be given as gifts to workers outside by the President on his birthday. One time, she miscalculated the imported nylon fabric but immediately corrected the error and no fabric was wasted. However, she was detained in the punishment cell for ten days for “attempting sabotage.” She was crippled and partly paralyzed when she was released from the punishment cell. On a very hot summer day in August, the camp doctors burned her bottom with heated stones to see if she could feel pain. Just before she died a few weeks later, she whispered to me, with a twittered tongue and tears in her eyes, “I want to see the blue sky. You know my children are waiting for me.”

When she was released from the punishment cell, she needed two prisoners to help her walk to the work site and back. The camp officials claimed that she was feigning injury, and yelled, “You bitch! Who do you think you are fooling?”

She was kicked around like a soccer ball by the guards but withstood the insults and beatings for about a month. She suffered injuries all over her body while pulling herself up. The sores began to badly suppurate from the infections. She often fainted. She was sent to the sick room but she had to continue her work in the sick room. I was in the same room because I was a paratyphoid patient. One day in August, the camp doctors burned her with heated stones to see if she could feel pain. I could smell flesh burning, and felt like vomiting and fainting. I remembered what the camp official told me when I first arrived at the camp, “You must give up all your rights as a human!” She never felt any pain when her flesh was burning.

From that day on, she could not control urination and evacuation. I was suffering from a high fever myself but tried my best to caress her burnt wounds with the dirty cloth the doctors gave me. She said to me, with a twittered tongue and tears in her eyes, “I want to see the blue sky. You know my children are waiting for me.” The next few days, I felt very sick and was unconscious myself, so nobody looked after her as she kept moaning.

A few days later, I came to myself, crawled to her and removed the cloth from her wound. I was shocked to see the wound full of maggots! She died that night. I shouted to a guard through the small door hole,
“Sir, somebody died here.”

The reply was, “So what? You bitch! Don’t panic. Wait until morning!”

I found the floor full of maggots the following morning. I had to brush the floor with my bare hands and pick up the maggots into a vinyl bag. I told myself, “You must not die like this. You must survive and tell the whole world about it.”

Patients Left to Die under Quarantine

I was sequestered in a patient room and left there to die twice, in 1989 and 1992. Paratyphoid spread among the prisoners in May 1989. Many prisoners complained of pain in the abdomen and high fever before fainting. The prison doctor ordered them quarantined in a small room. Some fifty patients were put into a tiny room, so small that patients were placed on top of one another. Those who were conscious reached out their hands for help; those who were unconscious simply remained underneath and died.

Yong hi, a 19 year old girl, was brought to the prison with her mother. She called her mom in a feeble voice for an apple and a little water before she died under the other patients. Her mother was working at the miscellaneous factory and did not know that her daughter perished there.

One day, I woke up to hear the voice of Shin ok Kim, the prisoner/nurse. “How is it that you are still alive? Everybody else died. Get out from there.” I was among the few lucky patients who survived the ordeal. When I somehow recovered from the disease, I was sent to report to the medical room. On this occasion, I witnessed the killing of babies in the medical room.

So Much Punishment and Loss of Life to Meet Export Deadline

To meet the deadlines for export, the prisoners often worked until one o’clock in the morning or, for many months, the prisoners slept two to four hours at the work site. They ate, worked and slept in the same place. The standard export items all year around were clothing and different kinds of brushes. They were for markets in Europe, Japan and Hong Kong.

On an ad hoc basis, prisoners produced rose decorations of various colors, each prisoner producing 60 pieces an hour or 1,000 pieces a day, for export to France (September 1990 to February, 1991). They produced some 900,000 pieces of brassieres for export to Russia for $2 a piece (May to November 1988), and countless pieces of sweaters to Japan (February to August, 1991).

There were big water pans for the prisoners to wash their hands clean frequently. Each prisoner was given a piece of white cloth to cover their dirty laps and keep the products clean. The finished products were beautifully packed and shipped for export.

The prisoners often fall asleep while working and wake up when their fingers are injured by the sewing machine. They apply sewing machine oil on the wound and continue to work. They have to hide their bleeding fingers for fear of punishment for sleeping. So much punishment and loss of life for the sake of meeting the export deadline! I was informed that the foreign exchange earned was spent to supply imported television sets and refrigerators for the security and police officers.

Dead Prisoners Buried under Fruit trees

Many prisoners died from hard work, poor treatment, and beatings. The dead bodies were often buried under the fruit trees in the prison orchard. The fruits (apples, pears, peaches, and plums) from the Kaechon orchard have earned a reputation for their large size and sweet taste. They are reserved for senior party and police officials.

On one occasion, 150 corpses were rolled up in straw mats and buried under the fruit trees. The families were never informed and the bodies can no longer be identified.

I remember some of the victims who disappeared under the trees. Kwang ok Cho, a 62 year old housewife from Shinuiju city, who was arrested for trying to obtain a blanket in the black market for her daughter’s wedding gift; In suk Kim, a middle aged housewife whose husband died in a mine accident and who often cried out in her dreams the names of her three children left behind at home; Dok sun Kim, a middle aged housewife from Chongjin city who was terribly worried about her old parents; Sa won Kim, a housewife from Kosong kun, whose handicapped husband badly needed her; Jong shim Lee, a 19 year old girl. Once, a group of dead prisoners were buried collectively at a location near the chestnut forest outside the prison.

Freezing Torture

One winter night in 1987 when I was under investigation at the Chongjin Police Station, the interrogator yelled, “Bitch! You’ve been spoiled by the warmth in the interrogation room. I’m gonna teach you a lesson!” He made me sit outside wearing my underclothes only. It was freezing cold outside. I was showered with a bucket of cold water and left on my knees for an hour. It was here where I saw other prisoners for the first time. There were some ten prisoners on their knees before me on the ground looking like grotesque boulders. The freezing torture was repeated every night throughout the winter. Six prisoners died from this torture.

There were some ten prisoners on their knees before me on the ground. I was told to sit in the front. I walked through the other prisoners to the front. It was so cold that the guard went right back into the office. I heard a low voice, “Hey, Comrade Soon ok, it’s me here!” It was Younghwan Choi, the Supply Manager of Hweryung District! Soon, I was able to recognize the familiar faces of five former colleagues. They had all been arrested under the same false charges that I was. They all realized that if they died from the torture, they would be perishing under false charges. So they all displayed strong will power to overcome the torture and survive.

However, I witnessed a total of 6 prisoners die from this freezing torture during the winter. The cold was very painful on my hands, legs and ears for the first 20 to 30 minutes. But after that, I felt nothing at all. When we were told after one hour to get up, we were literally frozen and could not stand up. We all fell several times before we somehow managed to rise and stumble back into our cold cells.

Soon, I had large swollen ears. My feet were so swollen that I could not put on my shoes. Water was running from the sores in my swollen legs. When I finally left the interrogation center and arrived at the prison, a prison official told me to apply pine resin from the shoe making factory. The resin melted all my flesh and I could see some of the bones in my feet. However, because of the resin, fresh flesh began to cover the bones and, after six months, I had normal feet again. I cannot remember when my swollen ears recovered.

Water Torture

One day in early March 1997, I was taken into a torture chamber that I had never been in before. I saw a big kettle on a small table and a low wooden table with straps, about 20 centimeters high. By surprise, one of the two interrogators tripped me with his leg. They strapped me on to the table and forced the kettle spout into my mouth. The spout was made so that it forced my throat wide open and I could not control the water running into my body. Close to suffocation, I had to breathe through my nose. My mouth was full of water and it overflowed from my nose. As I began to faint from the pain and suffocation, I could not see anything but felt sort of afloat in the air. I had been through all kinds of torture, such as whippings, beatings with rubber bands or hard sticks, or hand twisting with wooden sticks between my ten fingers, but this was worse.

I do not remember how long it lasted but when I woke up I felt two interrogators jumping on a board which was laid on my swollen stomach to force water back out of my body. I suddenly vomited and kept vomiting with terrible pain.

I had no idea how much water ran into my body but I felt like the cells in my body were full of water and water was running out of my body through my mouth, nose, anus and vagina.

I faintly heard somebody saying, “Why doesn’t this bitch wake up. Did she die?” I could not get up so I was dragged to my cell that day. From that day on, I suffered from high fever and often fainted. My whole body was so swollen that I could not open my eyes. I could only urinate a few drops of milk like liquid with blood and felt a severe pain in my bladder. I was able to get up and walk again in about two week’s time.

I can not explain how I could have survived such an ordeal. I would have died if that had happened to me in my ordinary life. I must have developed a mysterious super power to sustain myself under an emergency situation.

School Principal, a Torture Victim

In 1987, a school principal in Chongjin city found two female teachers murdered the previous night in the night duty chamber of the school. He immediately reported the murders to the police. When the police made little progress in the investigation, they arrested him for murder. He was subject to all kinds of severe torture for two years and forced into confessing the murder.

When I saw him in the police jail, both his ears were gone with only ear holes in their place. I have no idea how it happened but his fingers were cut short and clustered together. He was badly crippled, one leg shorter than the other, and unable to walk. His mouth was slanted and he could not control his lips, which made it very difficult to understand what he said. He was a tall and handsome person before he was arrested but became as short as a ten year old boy in the two years in the police jail.

He was the principal of Subok Girls’ high school in Chongjin City, North Hamkyong Province. He devoted his entire life to education as a career teacher.

He pleaded innocent throughout the severe tortures. Two years later, two criminals were arrested for robbery and confessed that they had snuck into the school to steal an organ, found two women teachers, and murdered them after an unsuccessful attempt at rape.

Nobody was punished or held responsible for arresting the wrong person. There was no apology. Rather, the provincial police forced him to sign a statement that he would never disclose that he had been tortured. He was completely disabled and received no compensation. He died shortly after his release.

This incident shows how incompetent the normal North Korean police investigators are and, as a result, how they commonly torture innocent victims to extract false confessions.

Prisoners Beaten Cruelly

One common form of torture was to tie a prisoner against iron bars, spread eagle by hands and legs and beat him all over the body with a rubber or cow skin whip. Just the pain from hanging by your body weight makes the ordeal unbearable. From the beatings, the skin becomes torn all over, blood splashes and the prisoners begin to feel that their skin isn’t human any more. When a prisoner is released from the iron bar, his whole body is so swollen that he cannot bend his back or knees. The prisoner must evacuate and urinate standing.

In the Nongpo Police Detention Center, there were three torture chambers and all kinds of torture were routinely practiced on inmates. I was 39 years old at that time. They subjected me to all kinds of torture there.

Once I resisted when they tried to undress me. One of the torturers punched me in my face so hard that I fainted to the floor. Sometime later, I woke up to find my mouth full of something. They were my broken teeth. Obviously, I bled terribly because the floor was full of my blood. My face was so badly swollen that I could hardly open my eyes. I spit out the broken teeth only after holding up my lips with my fingers. Four teeth from the upper jaw were gone. I began to feel terrible pain in my other teeth. Usually, I was taken to the torture chamber at five o’clock in the morning and remained there until midnight.

Tearing Off the Ears of a Prisoner

The Comptroller of the Seamen’s Club of Chongjin City was an old man, 60 years old. He could no longer withstand the tortures that continued daily. When the investigators tore off one of his ears and began tearing off the other, he decided to please the investigators by claiming to be a big thief the bigger the better. So, he told them that he stole a locomotive from the city railway station. He acquired the nickname, “locomotive head” from the police investigators and officers.

Prisoners Used for Martial Art Practice

A prisoner in the police jails becomes a different person, skin and bone, from starvation and torture. Male prisoners appear to become undernourished and confused sooner than female prisoners. The jail guards commonly use inmates as martial arts target. They punch and kick prisoners during martial arts practice. The prisoners fall bleeding at the first blow and remain motionless for a while on the cement floor until they are kicked back into the cells.

The guards often bring fish and grill it on their stove, sending a wonderful aroma to the prisoners. This is as painful as any form of torture could be for the starving inmates.

Christians Killed for Refusing to Convert

The cast iron factory was considered the most difficult place to work in the entire prison. Christians were usually sent there to work. One Christian working at the cast iron factory was killed by hanging in a public execution in December 1988 for hiding a friend at his house before he was arrested.
In the spring of 1990, I was carrying a work order to the cast iron factory in the male prison. Five or six elderly Christians were lined up and forced to deny their Christianity and accept the Juche Ideology of the State. The selected prisoners all remained silent at the repeated command for conversion. The security officers became furious by this and killed them by pouring molten iron on them one by one.

A North Korean Miner’s Wife

Jong ok Kim, about 45, wife of a minor, Hweryong district, was arrested for stealing some 20 liters of corn from a nearby cooperative farm when her children were starving at home in the spring of 1987. During the trial, the judge scolded her for stealing. There was a microphone in front of her but she did not know what it was. She murmured in a very low voice, “Of course, I know stealing is bad. Why would I steal if food ration had continued? How awful this country is.” Her complaint reached the judge through the microphone. He was furious and committed her to 15year hard labor in prison for “criticizing the party policy.” She died in the autumn of 1992 of undernourishment and diarrhea, after five years in prison.

She was detained at the cell next to me during the police investigation but we did not see each other at that time because the movement of prisoners was always so strictly controlled that prisoners do not meet each other. The guards in the jails, however, always felt bored when on duty for hours and they would normally ask inmates for all kinds of questions, “Hey you! What’s your name? Where are you from? What’s the Charge? etc.” I overheard their conversations with other inmates and knew about them and, in the same way, the other inmates knew about me even though we did not meet.

One day in prison in 1988, I was carrying work instructions as usual when a prisoner suddenly stopped me by pulling my clothes and whispered to me, “Aren’t you the Supply Manager from Onsong District?” Speaking each other was against the prison regulation. I was scared and I moved off without a word. The next day, when there was no prison guard around, I asked her, “How did you know about me?” This is how we met in the prison.

She worked at the leather factory in prison. She had been in prison for about 5 years when, one day in the autumn of 1992, she became too weak to meet her work quota. She received reduced meal for punishment and began to be weaker with less food. She also had serious loose bowels and felt so thirsty but there was no water for prisoners. She was so desperate that she drank the dirty water from the bucket where floor mops had been washed several times. The next day, she dropped to the floor while trying to make a leather bag. She did not move when prison guards kicked her hard. She was dead. They had her dead body wrapped in a straw mat and carried away.

One day in 1994, while I was hiding in China waiting for an opportunity to come to Seoul, I was listening to a mid night radio broadcast from Seoul which announced arrival in Seoul of two young brothers from North Korea. Their names rang my ears. When I was undergoing intelligence clearance in South Korea, I was able to confirm that the two brothers were indeed the sons of Sung Ok Choi.

When I was expecting to see her sons in Seoul, the intelligence officers advised me not to tell them about their mother’s death because the boys are in a very fragile condition emotionally. So, I did not tell them about their mother’s death when I first met them. One day in April, 1998, they visited me and told me that they had heard from their relatives in China that their mother had died. Then, I had to confirm the information. They are in South Korea now and visit me regularly.

Typical Scene of Prisoners at Work

Officially, the purpose of the prison is to reform the ideology of the prisoners. In reality, however, the purpose of the prison is to exploit slave labor. The prisoners work 1618 hours every day without wages. Cow leather whips are always ready on the walls and women are whipped, kicked, or punched daily for no reason. The prisoners are not allowed to talk, laugh or take a rest. In addition, the prisoners must always keep their heads down and only repeat the same motion for work. As a result, more than half of the women have lumps on their heads or shoulders, are hunchbacks, or are crippled. The camp officers and guards always wear masks because they cannot tolerate the prisoners’ stench! The prisoners often urinate or defecate while working because they cannot wait.

The prisoners are allowed to take showers only twice a year. Therefore, all the prisoners naturally stink. The entire prison is full of the awful smell of sweat and the stench of the prisoners enters your lungs the moment you are inside the prison.

The prison officials and guards are there by life appointment. North Korean authorities never transfer them to other posts for fear that their crimes may leak to the outside world.

Have You Heard About the Human Motor?

The power supply in North Korea was erratic and almost every other day prisoners worked without electricity during the daytime. However, the prison rule was that the daily quota had to be met whether there was electric power or not. So, female prisoners were whipped to keep the motor running manually for the power se wing machines.

There were about 100 sewing machines in the sewing factory, operated by one electric motor. The women were forced, ten in each team, to pull the belt on their shoulders and operate 100 sewing machines, for one hour each. The hardship of the prisoners was beyond description. The production officers mercilessly whipped the prisoners to maintain their productivity.

The female prisoners must meet their work quota to get the standard meal of 100 grams. Each shoe manufactured requires a countless number of small nails to be hammered and so each prisoner has to hammer so many nails every day.

Their fingers are all bent and deformed with hard skin. Three hundred prisoners produce 1,000 pairs of boots daily, working 1618 hours daily to meet the work quota. Often they are forced to work until morning to meet the quota, under collective punishment for the failure of other prisoners to meet the quota.

Myong suk Kim was a very competent and skillful worker and produced the best quality boots for senior officers. The machines were German, but they were imported in the sixties and started to give problems as they aged. One day, she could not meet the quota due to equipment failure. The guards kicked her and shouted, “You swine, you better fix your machine quickly.”

When it became clear one day that she could not meet the quota, she drank hydrochloric acid that was kept there for repairing the machine and killed herself. That was in January, 1992.

The prison authorities conducted ideology classes for all prisoners, everyday, to prevent this “ideological corruption” from recurring. It was very tiring to stop work for one hour everyday and stand listening to a nonsense speech before going to bed an hour late.

Women Prisoners Carrying Dung

The prisoners who are old, slow at work or caught looking at their reflections in a window glass are sent to the “drop out team” for 3 months, 6 months or one year for punishment. Their main job is to collect dung from the prison toilet tanks and dump it into a large dung pool everyday for supply to the farming teams working at the prison farm outside the wall. Teams of five prisoners must pull a metal tank weighing 800 kilograms.

Two women wade knee deep at the bottom of the toilet arid fill a 20 liter rubber bucket with dung using their bare hands. Three other women pull up the rubber bucket from above and then pour the contents into a transport tank.

Sometimes, the prisoners pulling up the bucket are so weak, they fall into the toilet tank because of the weight of the bucket. When the heavy tank is full, they haul it up to a very large and deep dung pool on the hill.

One rainy day in 1991, a housewife from Pyongyang name Ok tan Lee had been carrying dung all day long and was ready to transfer the dung to the huge pool. However, the lid of the tank on the wheel somehow got stuck and would not open. When she climbed on the tank to push the door open, she slipped from the rain wet surface and plunged into the ground dung pool. It was so deep that she disappeared into the dung. A guard some distance away (they always keep their distance because of the stink from the prisoners) shouted, “Stop it! Let her die there unless you want to die the same way yourself!” She was left to drown there in the dung.

Female Prisoners at a Rubber Factory

The prison rubber factory was one of the most dangerous and difficult places for women to work. They had to mix used rubber scraps with granular rubber, carry the resulting rubber substance, mix it with rubber glue that came from a big tank which produced poisonous fumes, and knead it in a big round tank. I remember one female prisoner whose head got covered by the rubber glue while she was cleaning the tall rubber glue tank. She suffocated.

Because air creates foam in the rubber, the whole factory is tightly sealed all year round. In addition, the factory is always full of hot steam for molding shoe soles. Therefore, it’s always stuffy and suffocating! The sticky mixture in the tank often overflows and women must push it back into the tank. This was very difficult work for hungry and weak women, and so the sticky mixtures often dragged women into the tank and killed them. So many female prisoners were killed and injured that the prison authorities finally ordered the factory to be operated only by male prisoners in 1989, two years after my arrival at the prison.

Babies Born and Killed

When I miraculously survived paratyphoid in 1989, I was sent to the medical room to report. When I arrived at the medical room, I noticed six pregnant women awaiting delivery. I was told to wait for my supervisor to come and take me over. While I was there, three women delivered babies on the cement floor without any blankets. It was horrible to watch the prison doctor kicking the pregnant women with his boots. When a baby was born, the doctor shouted, “Kill it quickly. How can a criminal in the prison expect to have a baby? Kill it.” The women covered their faces with their hands and wept.

Even though the deliveries were forced by injection, the babies were still alive when born. The prisoner/nurses, with trembling hands, squeezed the babies’ necks to kill them. The babies, when killed, were wrapped in a dirty cloth, put into a bucket and taken outside through a backdoor. I was so shocked with that scene that I still see the mothers weeping for their babies in my nightmares. I saw the baby killing twice while I was in the prison.

When I went back to the medical room for routine duty a few days later, Shin Ok Kim and Mi Ok Cho, the prisoner/nurses working in the medical room, were sobbing and one of them told me, “Accountant, we are devils worse than beasts. They say that the dead babies are used to make new medicine for experiments.” I was so afraid that I closed her mouth with my finger and said, “I never heard you say this.” I hurried to leave from their presence.

I was sent to the same medical room once again when I recovered from pleurisy in 1992. This time, there were some ten pregnant women in the small medical room. They were all injected to induce forced delivery and suffering from pain for many hours. A woman, so undernourished and weak, could not endure the delivery and died during labor. The prisoner/nurse there whispered to me that it is more difficult to deliver a dead baby than a living baby.

The other pregnant women looked so pale from the pain, and they had sweat on their faces. If they groanned from the pain, the doctor mercilessly kicked their belly hard and shouted, “Shut up! Don’t feign pain!” I was waiting for my supervisor to take charge of me from the doctor at the corridor outside. I heard the crying voice of Byung Ok Kim, 32 years old, and peeped into the room through the half open door. She had just delivered a baby and cried, “Sir, please save the baby. My parents in law are anxiously waiting for the baby. Please, please save the baby.” She was out of her mind with sorrow. All the other women remained quiet and she was the only woman crying and begging loudly. The doctor was taken momentarily by surprise. But soon, he regained himself and shouted, “You want to die, eh? Kill the baby!” He kicked her hard.

Then, the Chief Medical Officer came in and said, “Who was it yelling like that? Put her in the punishment cell!” The Chief Medical Officer kicked her hard several times and had her dragged to the punishment cell because she could not hold herself up. This is one of the scenes that I will never forget. She died shortly after she was released from the cell.

Public Execution in Prison

Public executions are standard practice in and outside prisons in North Korea. In 1988, seven men and one woman were publicly executed in the Kaechon prison without trial. At each public execution, all the prisoners, some six thousand (2,000 women and 4,000 men), are crammed into the prison square to watch.

The victims are always gagged so they cannot protest. They are tied to a pole in three parts; chest, sides and knees. Six guards fire three bullets each into the chest for a total of 18 bullets. With the top ropes having been cut by the bullets, the upper part of the body hangs down bleeding, like a rotten log broken in half, still tied to the pole by the lower ropes. Then, all the prisoners are forced to march around the dead body and watch.

Prisoners Go Insane from Watching Public Executions

The execution victims include those who pleaded for death during torture, stole food, or simply wept over the fate of two small children left home alone. The charge was lack of confidence in the mother party. Also included are those who are branded as “anti party elements” or “reactionaries.”

The public execution ground is so crammed with prisoners that the women in the front watch the killing from a distance of only a meter or so and often get blood splashed on them. Some women prisoners are so shocked that they vomit, faint, or develop mental illness (e.g., sudden singing or laughing hysterically). They are sent to punishment cells for being “weak in ideology” and “showing sympathy to the people’s enemy.” Those who become completely insane simply disappear and nobody knows what happens to them.

Hi suk Choi and Young ok Choi, housewives from Kimchaek City, were punished for singing at the site and later died of shock during electric torture. The Kaechon Prison has twenty punishment cells that are always full of “ideologically weak” prisoners on the days of public executions.

Prisoners Killed in Temperature regulated Compression Chamber

There are executioners in the Interrogation Department of the Provincial Security Headquarters. Here, they execute the prisoners that they are embarrassed to execute publicly. They always execute prisoners at midnight without trial and bury the corpses in a nearby valley.

There is also a temperature regulated compression chamber used for torturing or killing. The chamber is 60 square centimeters and the height is adjustable according to the prisoner’s height. A prisoner is pushed into a rice straw bag first, and then into the chamber with his head pushed down between his knees. These acts usually occur between one and two o’clock in the morning. Freezing temperatures are used in the winter and hot temperatures in the summer.

A 17 year old boy, the son of a welder in Kimchaek Steel Factory, was brought here sometime in October 1987. He was arrested for organizing gang fighting in school. Gang fighting is considered a very serious crime leading to subversion in North Korea. He was killed in the chamber by freezing in the midnight. I heard this from Yong ho, a guard, who proudly told us, “You bitches better obey unless you want to be killed like the boy, frozen and compressed.” In fact, other guards repeated similar threats.
A young man became lunatic as a result of continuing torture. He complained one day, “Great Leader? What has he done for me?” He was frozen to death in the chamber that night.

The chamber was next to my cell at the end of the corridor. The cries of a prisoner resisting and angry voices of guards trying to push him into a rice straw bag and into the chamber always woke me up. I always found

executioners in uniform and with a star on their shoulders on such occasions. During the 14 months I was there, I remember five or six killings in the chamber.

Male Prisoners Shot to Death for Attempting to Get “Edible Clay” from Women Prisoners

At the end of February 1990, we were carrying edible clay in bags. Some male prisoners on the other side of the river must have seen us eating the clay. They looked like skeletons with skulls and bright eyes. They gestured to us begging for some clay. None of us responded for fear of punishment. Desperately, three of them came to our side of the river to get some clay.
Suddenly, we heard shooting. It was a horrible scene when the shooting ended. We were all so scared. The intestines of one of the male prisoners were protruding. But he was still alive because we heard his feeble voice whispering, “Help!” The second prisoner had his leg broken and bleeding. The third prisoner was dead instantly. Soon a truck arrived and an officer said, “Put them all onto the truck, dead or alive.” We were told to resume our work. That night, some twenty women complained of pain and died as a result of having eaten too much clay.

At the end of February 1990, we were bringing fresh soil from a nearby mountain to the prison farm. It was very tiring to climb up the mountain to bring fresh soil all the way down to the farm. Because it was February and still cold, we could not find any plants to eat in the mountain, no matter how desperately we looked. It was too early in the season.

One day, I saw some prisoners eating clay. As always, we were exhausted, hungry and thirsty. One of them said to me, “Accountant, you want some? This is good and tasty. Try it.” I wasted no time and ate it. It was clay and, indeed, starchy and tasted good. I ate half the size of my fist that day and I felt somewhat full and even felt some strength, too. Our unit moved our burrow to a riverside location when the killing of three male prisoners took place.

Prisoners Shot to Death for Falling on a Steep Slope

In February, 1988, while carrying a 20 kilogram bag of top soil from a mountain to the prison farm, an exhausted female prisoner slipped and fell on the slope, causing two other prisoners also to fall from the path. Although they could have been helped up to rejoin the line, they were immediately shot and killed. The prison guards shouted at the rest of the women, “Did you see what happened? This will happen to you if you fall!”

Every February, all the prisoners are mobilized to carry top soil from Kaechon Mountain to the prison farm. The mountain is outside the prison, 600 meters high, very rugged and slippery when climbing up and down the steep slope.
Each female prisoner must carry a 20 kg bag of topsoil on her back all the way down to the farmland. Prisoners are kicked and beaten for any bag that weighs less than 20 kilograms. 300 prison guards and 350 policemen line up on the path with rifles pointing at the prisoners. The prisoners are ordered to make three trips in the morning and three more trips in the afternoon.

Climbing up and down a 600 meter mountain six times a day is like torture. The prisoners were warned that if they strayed from the path by even a step they would be shot to death instantly.

Prisoners Killed for Eating Pig Slops

There is no wasted food in the prison kitchen. The kitchen prisoners always give the leftover food from outside to the pigs. So, the pigs are always well fed and fat for the security officers. The prisoners envy the pigs for the good food and leisure. The dung carrying team is also responsible for cleaning the pigsty. The prisoners carrying dung are always so hungry that many of them risk their lives to steal the pig slops as they pass by. When caught eating the pigs’ feed, they are shot and killed.

The prisoners on the dung carrying team look forward to cleaning the pigsty because they can eat the leftovers from the slops with their hands still filthy with dung. The prisoners on the pig raising team supply pig slops when the prisoners come to clean the pigsties so that the cleaning prisoners can enjoy the chance to have a “good meal” with the pigs.

Kum bok Kim was from Kanggye town, Jagang Province. She was pretty and a very kind hearted woman. Once, she was caught giving the pigs their feed when other prisoners were around cleaning. She was badly beaten by a prison official and kicked until she fainted. She was forced to confess her crime in writing and was sent for further investigation. She died under torture during the investigation.

Prisoners Shot for Stealing Corn

All prisoners are mobilized once a year for harvest work in the prison farm. Some 400 guards watch while the prisoners work outside the prison. In September 1990, five male prisoners could not resist the temptation of eating raw corn during work and so they stole some ears and hurried to eat them. I was delivering a work order to a unit nearby at that time. The five prisoners were shot instantly by the guards without warning. In the prison, few trials or investigations were ever held for punishing or killing prisoners. Punishing and killing prisoners without trial or investigation were within the power of the prison superintendent.

Guards Killing Prisoners for Fun

A couple of times, I saw guards stop a group of male prisoners for fun. “Hey, you and you, come here. If you cross the barbed wire, I will let you go home.” With these words, the prison guards tempted prisoners to cross the electrified barbed wire. The prisoners were so desperate and confused that, without hesitation, they jumped to their death with the faint hope of going home. This shows how prisoners are considered disposable and easily replaced. This is not an isolated incident. I have heard about it several times and have myself seen it happen twice during the five years I was in prison.

Prisoners Killed During the Testing of a New Chemical Poison

One day in February, 1990, I was doing routine paper work at the staff operation office at around 10:00 0′ clock in the morning when, to my surprise, the prison superintendent, vice superintendent, intelligence chief and three other unidentified officials walked into the room. One of them pointed to something outside my window. I was very terrified at their unusual appearance. Then, I overheard them saying, “Look! How powerful. What a great scientist Dr. Sung ki Lee is, indeed! Well, from now on, its chemical warfare.” Shortly afterwards, as I was walking to the other side of the room to deliver some papers to my guard, I saw them seriously watching something outside the window. On my way back to my desk, I took a quick glance outside. I saw many prisoners lying on the slope of a hill, bleeding from their mouths and motionless, enveloped by strange fumes and surrounded by scores of guards in the gas masks I delivered to the Chief Guard earlier in the morning.

In February, 1990, I was asked by the Chief Guard to follow him to an administration warehouse at 05:30 in the morning. He ordered me to check out six bundles (five pairs in each bundle) of gas masks with rubber gowns, which looked like a sea diver’s kit. When I returned to my prison chamber, a total of 150 prisoners, several from each unit, were selected and separated from the other prisoners. The selected prisoners were mostly crippled and weak women who had less labor value.

I had to issue instructions for lunch with the same usual number for the male prisoners but 150 meals less for women. The prisoners started to exchange nervous looks with each other when the 150 prisoners did not return to work. An air of unusual tension and fear spread among the prisoners.

Normally, when a prisoner is sent to a punishment cell, an announcement is always made about why the prisoner is being punished to warn others. But that night, so many prisoners were sent to punishment cells for whispering, looking around nervously and exchanging signs of tension without the usual announcement. That night, the punishment cells were all full with a long list of prisoners awaiting the punishment. Obviously, the prison authorities attempted to cover up the killings.

Around October, 1990, an engineer supervisor was sent here from the defense chemistry factory in Hamhung. He was responsible for an explosion in the factory there and was secretly executed at an underground cell in about a month. At that time, I was told to reduce the number of meals by one in the kitchen. Later, I was confidentially informed about the killing by a prisoner/nurse who was involved in getting rid of the corpse.

At that time, 500 female prisoners were sent from here to the Hwachon area for some kind of expansion work of a chemical factory. The prisoners returned in about a month’s time. One of the prisoners told me that there was a special chemical research institute in Hwsachon.

Prisoners Killed During a Biological Test

One day in May 1988, I had been in the prison for only six months and I was still trying to get accustomed to the prison conditions. I was working on the second floor of the export factory moving half finished products from one table to another for assembly. During lunch time, I saw a pile of fresh cabbages at the kitchen entrance through the windows. This was the only time I saw cabbages in such good shape at the prison. I was so hungry that I began to wonder who would be the lucky people to eat them.

A little later when I came back to the same spot, I saw some fifty women prisoners eating the cabbage from a bowl with their fingers. The cabbages appeared somehow steamed. Soon, I saw the prisoners vomiting, bleeding from their mouths and moaning on the ground. I could not stay to watch more.

However, when I came back to the same spot again after a little while, I saw camp guards loading the dead prisoners onto a truck.

There were several strangers in white gowns around the dying prisoners. This was very strange because the political prison was under such strict control that no strangers were allowed inside. Then, I remembered that some fifty women had been told to come outside earlier, a few from each work unit.
Later, it was announced that they died from food poisoning. The prisoners knew what happened and they started to inform each other through their eyes. The prison officials were very nervous trying to keep the prisoners quiet. Why were the prison officials so nervous over the food poisoning when its mention was not a subject for punishment on other occasions? Unusually, many prisoners were sent to punishment cells that night for whispering or looking nervous.