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Het Noord-Koreaanse regime sluit gehandicapten op in speciale kampen waar ze in mensonterende omstandigheden moeten leven. Ook zijn er vrouwenkampen en heropvoedingskampen. Dat is de conclusie van de VN-rapporteur Vitit Muntarbhorn. Zijn onderzoek is gebaseerd op mensen die Noord-Korea zijn ontvlucht.
Pyongyang, de hoofdstad van Noord-Korea, is de bekendste stad en dient als 'modelstad' naar de buitenwereld toe. Het is daarom verboden voor gehandicapten, dwergen of geesteszieken om er te wonen. Ze worden in speciale kampen gestopt. Zo bestaan er 'dwergenkampen' van uitsluitend kleine mensen die door de politie uit hun families zijn weggehaald. Ze mogen in de kampen met elkaar trouwen, maar mogen geen kinderen krijgen.
Elk type gehandicapten heeft een eigen kamp. De mensen in de kampen worden slecht behandeld: vernedering is routine, ze worden afgerammeld en gemarteld. Naast gehandicaptenkampen zijn er ook 'vrouwenkampen': hierin bevinden zich vrouwen van politieke dissisenten en vrouwen die zwanger zijn van mannen die niet 'puur Koreaans bloed' hebben. Hierbij kun je denken aan Chinese of gemengdbloedige mannen. Ook zijn er heropvoedingskampen: hierin worden mensen gestopt die Noord-Korea probeerden te ontvluchten. Ze krijgen een verplichte heropvoedingscursus aangeboden.
De Verenigde Naties mogen van Noord-Korea niet het land in om de kampen te inspecteren. De Noord-Koreaanse grondwet verbiedt marteling, maar Muntarbhorn weet dat marteling plaatsvindt in Noord-Korea. Hij heeft de president Kim Jong-il dan ook herhaaldelijk gewezen op bepalingen in de eigen grondwet.
Bron
FPThose who have lived to tell us about Camp 22, located in the bleak northeastern tip of North Korea, can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and all of them are former guards or staff. Of all of North Korea’s numerous labor camps and detention facilities, large and small, Camp 22 is one of the largest, and almost certainly the most terrible, if only for the inhuman experiments witnesses say were done to the men, women, children, and even infants sent there.
Camp 22 is said to hold 50,000 men, women, and children. We can only see one portion of the camp with Google Earth’s high-resolution photography.
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North Korea’s system of spying, thought-control, isolation, and terror may have no equal in human history. That is how Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il kept the secrets of Camp 22 inside its ten-foot wire fences and distinctive blocky guard posts for decades. That changed when satellite photography went public. Since then, Google Earth has revealed the world’s most secret places to armies of amateur “squints.” Satellite photography was available to the human rights researcher David Hawk when he set to work on “The Hidden Gulag,” his ground-breaking study of North Korea’s forced labor camps. Hawk’s interviews with survivors and former guards alone would not have had the same impact had those witnesses not been able to point to those photographs and say,
“This is the detention center,” he said. “If someone goes inside this building, in three months he will be dead or disabled for life. In this corner they decided about the executions, who to execute and whether to make it public.
“This is the Kim Il Sung institute, a movie house for officers. Here is watchdog training. And guard training ground.” Pointing to another spot, he said: “This is the garbage pond where the two kids were killed when guard kicked them in pond
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The yellow scale line to the right of the fence line is just shy of 14 miles. According to “The Hidden Gulag,” the whole camp is 31 miles long by 25 miles wide. That works out to over 700 square miles, but if one makes allowances for the camp’s irregular shape, a rough estimate of 500 square miles seems more likely. That would make it as big as the city of Los Angeles. Where high-resolution photography is available, it’s not hard to see the fence line punctuated at intervals of about 1200 feet by guard posts (below, left), buttressed, in places, by smaller guard shacks like these (below, right).
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Two of Camp 22’s gates are visible from the air. Looking closely at this gate, the southernmost of the two (below, left), you can actually see a group of people standing in the courtyard, and another behind one of the buildings. Are these guards? Or is this a new crop of prisoners being brought in? Further north is the main gate (below, right), which lies on the road to the town of Hoeryong.
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Closer in, we can see the mine in more detail: a row of hand-cars just outside the tunnel entrance, and piles of mine timbers. The resolution is even good enough for us to see oxcarts passing each other on the road south of the mine. In other places, you can even see individual people walking on the road. The oxcarts give some idea of the size of the huts in which the prisoners live.
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My image of a concentration camp’s housing is of neat rows of barracks like this. When I first saw the satellite photos of Camp 22, they were not what I expected. From the air, it could almost be any ordinary village or neighborhood, but for the fence that surrounds it, and for the reports of the witnesses. Prisoners, some of them with their families, mostly live in small huts.
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[ Bericht 10% gewijzigd door paddy op 25-12-2007 14:42:53 (Bron toegevoegd) ]