North Korea: Life Under Kim

The article is now several years old - 2001, but is as accurate today as it was seven years or twenty seven years ago.

What amazes me, after all I have read, and the many years of education - is some people who work within the US government, have delusions that Kim can be sorted out in some rational manner. The US State Department is delusional when it comes to issues of such importance.

What will you offer him - more pornos? Maybe a date with a Hollywood actress? More carrots? A repeat of the fiasco - Agreed Framework.

I am not sure, to be perfectly honest, who is more dangerous to our long term national security - Kim, bin Laden, or agencies within the US government.




LIFE UNDER THE RED STAR

A Prison CountryA report from inside North Korea.
by NORBERT VOLLERTSEN
Tuesday, April 17, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

I know North Korea. I have lived there, and have witnessed its hell and madness.

I was a doctor with a German medical group, "Cap Anamur," and entered North Korea in July 1999. I remained until my expulsion on Dec. 30, 2000, after I denounced the regime for its abuse of human rights, and its failure to distribute food aid to the people who needed it most.

North Korea's starvation is not the result of natural disasters. The calamity is man-made. Only the regime's overthrow will end it.

Human rights are nonexistent. Peasants, slaves to the regime, lead lives of utter destitution. It is as if a basic right to exist--to be--is denied. Ordinary people starve and die. They are detained at the caprice of the regime. Forced labor is the basic way in which "order" is maintained.

I will recount some of my experiences. Early in my spell in North Korea I was summoned to treat a workman who had been badly burned by molten iron.

I volunteered my own skin to be grafted onto him. With a penknife, my skin was pulled from my left thigh and applied to the patient. For this, I was acclaimed by the state media--the only media--and awarded the Friendship Medal, one of only two foreigners ever to receive this honor.

I was also issued a "VIP passport" and a driver's license, which allowed me to travel to areas inaccessible to foreigners and ordinary citizens. I secretly photographed patients and their decrepit surroundings. Though I was assigned to a children's hospital in Pyongsong, 10 miles north of Pyongyang, I visited many hospitals in other provinces. In each one, I found unbelievable deprivation. Crude rubber drips were hooked to patients from old beer bottles.

There were no bandages, scalpels, antibiotics or operation facilities, only broken beds on which children lay waiting to die. The children were emaciated, stunted, mute, emotionally depleted.

In the hospitals one sees kids too small for their age, with hollow eyes and skin stretched tight across their faces. They wear blue-and-white striped pajamas, like the children in Hitler's Auschwitz. They are so malnourished, so drained of resistance, that a flu can kill them. Why are there so many orphans? Where are all the parents? What passes here for family life?


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North Korea






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