TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - North Korea's former inmate described the horror he experienced during his imprisonment in his country. Shin Dong-hyuk exposed it before a panel of a UN Commission of Inquiry that opened in South Korea's capital yesterday. "I thought my whole hand was going to be cut off at the wrist, so I felt thankful and grateful that only my finger was cut off," said Shin Dong-hyuk, punished for dropping a sewing machine.
Dong-hyuk along with several other former inmates is now living in South Korea. They claimed the state prison in the Northern Korean peninsula is very terrible.
Jee Heon-a (34) told the Commission that from the first day of her incarceration in 1999, she discovered that salted frogs were one of the few things to eat.
"Everyone's eyes were sunken. They all looked like animals. Frogs were hung from the buttons of their clothes, put in a plastic bag and their skins peeled off," she said. "They ate salted frogs and so did I."
Speaking softly, she took a deep breath when describing in detail how a mother was forced to kill her own baby. "It was the first time I had seen a newborn baby and I felt happy, but suddenly a security guard came in and told the mother to turn the baby upside down into a bowl of water," she said. "The mother begged the guard to spare her, but he kept beating her. So the mother, with shaking hands, put the baby face down in the water. The crying stopped and a bubble rose up as it died."
There are currently 150,000 to 200,000 people in North Korean prison camps, according to independent estimates, and defectors say many inmates are malnourished or worked to death.
"There are still many things to be dismantled there (North Korea)," said Dong-hyuk who believes conveying the facts in the world forum is the right thing to do. "Since North Korean people cannot stand up with guns, like Libya and Syria ... I personally think this is the first and last hope left," Shin Dong-hyuk said.
This is the first UN official to hear human rights violations in the country led by Kim Jong-un.
THE GLOBE AND MAIL | REUTERS | ANDI PERDANA