Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Charles Jenkins: Prisoner of Pyongyang, Part 4

Charles Jenkins describes [North Korea as] a heavily militarized state where "everyone was in the army" and which reached deep into the lives of its citizens via "leaders" who controlled everything from loose talk to bedrooms. He claims people are not free to choose a sexual partner, to talk to others or even to invite others for a private drink at home.

"People get drunk and start talking," he says. "When Kim Jong Il first took over, about half a kilometer from where I lived was a scientific research center, and these educated people, doctors, professors; they had a party and started drinking and talking about Kim and one of them squealed and all of them disappeared. They got sent to a concentration camp."

Pyongyang operates "five to seven camps," he says, and the camps have swallowed up whole families. "They found all that person's relatives and sent them too. I asked why one time and they said because your relatives will be against the government, so we take them all."

Above all, though, it is his graphic descriptions of poverty that stay in the mind. "We had rice and you'd wash it four or five times and it would still come out gray, it was full of bugs, rocks, four or five years old. You cook it and still break your teeth on the rocks. When I came to Japan I cooked my own rice and it was clean. I couldn't believe it."

[Excerpt from an article by David McNeill, The Independent]

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