"The Hidden Gulag - Exposing North Korea's Prison Camps",...

"The Hidden Gulag - Exposing North Korea's Prison Camps", a report by the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, said that close to 200,000 political prisoners worked in conditions of slave labour and near-starvation in dozens of secret prison camps in the country. The report documented dozens of horror stories by former guards and escaped prisoners, who detailed how entire families were locked up for suspected anti-government activity and newborn babies killed because they were suspected of having Chinese fathers. "These were terrible stories, and there were elements that I had not encountered anywhere else in the world, like the phenomenon of ethnic infanticide," said David Hawk, the report's author. The Committee, a private group, used satellite pictures to locate 36 camps tucked away in isolated valleys in the country. It documented ritual torture by guards, starvation diets, rapes, beatings and reports that inhumane living conditions were commonplace in the prisons. Investigators were shocked by reports from several women who had been imprisoned in camps near the Chinese-North Korean border. One prisoner, Choi Yong Hwa, testified she was assigned to assist in the birth of a child, whose mother was induced into labour. The baby "was suffocated with a wet towel in front of her mother" after being born. Another former detainee reports being present when newborn babies were tossed into plastic-lined boxes. In most cases, the babies were born to North Korean mothers who had been forcibly repatriated from China.