- North Korean refugees repatriated by China tell of prison
where new-born children are left to die. Richard Spencer reports from Seoul
-
- There is a cell in Nongpo prison where they take the
women whose babies are to be killed.
-
- As in the other cells, the women are packed so tightly
they can only crouch, squeezing together, for sleep. There is no room to
lie down, so when one of the women goes into labour, the others stand up
to make space.
-
- They watch, but are not allowed to help, as the baby
is born. One woman designated by the guards takes the baby and lies it
face down on the floor.
-
- Then the women sit again, including the bleeding mother,
and the baby is left to die. If it cries for too long, more than a day
or two, a guard smothers it.
-
- No crying is allowed, by the mother or the other women.
If any explanation is given, the guard says: "You should not have
gone to China. This will teach you to have sex with Chinese men, to have
Chinese babies."
-
- Often, the regime of Kim Jong-il, North Korea's so-called
Dear Leader, is treated as a comic opera. Television news pictures are
of his extraordinary parades, where military hardware and ballroom-dancing
couples in immaculate formation pay tribute to Kim and his late father,
President Kim il-Sung.
-
- Now, as its nuclear weapons programme is once again on
the table, it is treated more seriously, as a potential negotiating partner.
-
- Yet out of sight is a network of jails and labour camps
containing hundreds of thousands of starving, dying people. Their offence
may have been to allow a photograph of one of the Kims to get dusty. In
many cases, they simply have the wrong relatives.
-
- But Nongpo is a new type of prison. According to reports
from North Korean refugees, it is a detention centre for escapers who have
been caught in China and repatriated.
-
- It is one of half a dozen such facilities and they specialise
in short but particularly brutal punishment regimes. After being beaten
and starved, prisoners are sent to work in fields and brick factories for
14 hours a day, until they collapse.
-
- Since the late 1990s these prisons have refused to tolerate
"foreign" babies.
-
- Mrs Kim, 51, a grandmother and mother of four, first
crossed the frozen river that divides North Korea and China to look for
two of her daughters, who had already escaped. She discovered that, like
many such women, they had been kidnapped and sold as wives to local farmers.
-
- After she was caught by Chinese police, along with her
granddaughter and 19-year-old son, she was sent to a series of prisons,
ending up in Nongpo. "It was indescribable," she says. "Food
rations were a handful of grains of wheat, three times a day."
-
- There were 70 men, and about 200 women. The women were
in three small rooms. The first was for healthy women, the second for the
sick. Pregnant women, along with others such as Mrs Kim, were in the third.
-
- "We all just squeezed together, sleeping in a sitting
position, with our heads bowed down.
-
- "In the month I was there, seven babies were born,
one other was born prematurely and died immediately, and there were two
abortions.
-
- "When a baby was born, the mother wasn't allowed
to scream. If she made any noise, the guard would come in and beat her.
-
- "When the baby was born, the woman who took the
baby would put it on its face. Then it would die. If you didn't kill the
baby, you would be punished."
-
- The women say the killing of babies is a conscious policy
to prevent the soiling of North Korean "juche" - self-reliance
- with foreign blood. This is despite the fact that the "blood"
is that of Chinese, North Korea's only allies, without whose million dead
in the Korean War it would not exist today.
-
- The "abortions" witnessed by Mrs Kim were induced
by the kicks of the guards. But another woman, Mrs Lee, 31, who was there
before, said women were given abortion-inducing drugs and returned to the
room to deliver.
-
- She saw eight babies die in her 15 days there. She was
released early after pretending to go mad.
-
- Since arriving in South Korea she has met two women who
were in Nongpo with her. They had not needed to pretend to go mad, she
said. One has a form of hysteria that makes it impossible to stop laughing.
-
- The "grandmother" selected to "receive"
babies when Mrs Kim was there also went mad. "When she developed psychiatric
problems, they let her out, saying she was a model prisoner."
-
- By several accounts Nongpo was the worst of the prisons,
at least during the period 1999-2000.
-
- South Sinuiju detention centre at least had a medical
facility in which to kill babies. Lee Yong-hwa was assigned to accompany
a woman to a nearby army hospital to give birth. (As with the other women,
this is a pseudonym: all have families in North Korea.)
-
- There, a curtain was drawn while doctors in uniform delivered
the baby. Miss Lee looked through the curtains as the baby was smothered
with a wet cloth. "The woman passed out," she said. "When
she recovered, she just cried and cried."
-
- A report published before Christmas by David Hawk, a
former United Nations official, recorded infanticide at one other detention
centre, Onsong, and forced abortions at all these places and at Chongjin
detention centre.
-
- In all, Mr Hawk spoke to eight refugees who had first-hand
evidence of the practice. Reports of baby-killing are a favourite way of
blackening an enemy regime, and there is no infallible proof of their stories.
But, he points out, their stories tally.
-
- China has won praise for its role as middle man in talks
on North Koreans nuclear weapons. But this cuts little ice with the refugees,
who all demand an end to China's policy of sending refugees back to a terrible
retribution.
-
- China's greatest fear, which motivates both its policy
on the nuclear issue and its unwillingness to allow a flood of refugees,
is that North Korea will collapse.
-
- Meanwhile, Washington's offer of a non-aggression agreement
could, according to some analysts, give Kim Jong-il's regime another 10-20
years.
-
- There may be little alternative to negotiations but Mrs
Lee reckons there is also little point. "The North Koreans lie over
and over. I think to get rid of North Korea there will have to be another
war," she says.
-
- She has a reason to want a swift resolution. Her two
daughters, after she arrived in South Korea, left their Chinese husbands
to try to join her.
-
- They were caught on the border with Vietnam and sent
back to North Korea. The last she heard, they were about to be sent to
the camps.
-
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