Supreme Oppressor

If a country has no regard for how it is thought of in the international community - and North Korea certainly qualifies here - and it breaks every international social convention possible, why would it be concerned that it is being censured for its human rights abuses?  This is a question that answers itself.  Since it is of no concern to North Korea how it is regarded externally for its ongoing threats to world stability, it most certainly is unconcerned about how human-rights-respecting countries view its treatment of prisoners.

It has no conscience respecting the institutionalized impoverishment of its people who have so little knowledge of the world outside their xenophobic, cloistered country that they believe their poverty is caused externally, and not by the dynastic regime that has latterly elevated the third in a succession of familial tyrants to the role of supreme oppressor.

North Korea sees purpose and glory in scientific/technological advances in rocketry and nuclear fission, in sending off powerful rockets to concern its neighbours who are well aware of its small but growing stockpile of nuclear armaments.  Yet another nuclear test is in preparation, the country's third.  These costly initiatives divert any possible funding to serve the interests of the country, feeding its population, preferring technological advances.

After all, through the kindly intervention and auspices of the United Nations and its appeals to donor countries, the World Food Bank and the United States, North Korea's fiercest critic, struggle with their own consciences to provide the starving population with the nutritional wherewithal to live another day, another year, eking out their miserable lives.

So the systematic abuse in North Korea's vast camps for political prisoners simply follow on a continuum of state abuse of its people.  North Korea is anxious to ensure that its glorious reputation for advanced rocketry, missiles and bomb-making is fully recognized by the outside world.  And it has extended an invitation to international journalists to witness its latest rocket launch, sending a data-receiving satellite into orbit.

The vast system of political prison camps in North Korea are held to be offensive to human decency.  An Washington-based advocacy group has released a 200-page report detailing facts, such as that 150,000 to 200,000 political prisoners are incarcerated, some for unforgivable offences such as singing South Korean songs, or visiting neighbouring China.

Good neighbour China would much prefer North Koreans not visit, and when they are discovered to be present across the border, they are politely returned to the regime.  Interviews with former prisoners or guards were included in the study report which found "exorbitant rates of deaths in detention", resulting from "systemic and severe mistreatment, torture, executions and induced malnutrition."

North Korea, it seems has locked up entire families, charging them with political crimes by association.  Women are forced to undergo abortions if they happen to have become pregnant from relationships with Chinese men, after slipping through the border.  Then returned by the Chinese authorities, who have no wish to encourage an influx of North Koreans for whom they will then have the responsibility for.

The International Coalition to Stop Crimes against Humanity in North Korea has estimated that 400,000 prison inmates have died in the past few decades.  They have mounted a petition urging that a United Nations probe be undertaken.  As in: this is dreadful, we cannot continue to allow these conditions to prevail, we must do something, anything, to rescue the North Koreans from their sinister, criminal fate.