North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has reopened a prison camp that had been closed since the 1980s, according to information from the South Korean portal Daily NK Reports. The place, known as Camp 17, is the destination for critics of the regime, who are forced to do forced labor and “ideological re-education”, as a witness told the newspaper.
As soon as he took over the country's supreme leadership from his father in 2011, Jong-un carried out a series of arrests in the country. Many opponents of the dictatorship, including his uncle, were executed or sent to forced labor camps. According to reports from international NGOs that monitor the situation on the Korean peninsula, there is information about entire families who were imprisoned in these prisons.
O Daily NK revealed, through anonymous sources, that North Korea currently operates nine large “ideological re-education” camps. “The news about the expansion of forced labor camps should not surprise us,” said the coordinator of Open Doors’ work with North Korean Christians.
The volunteer states that “Kim Il-sung was a powerful leader, the true 'Big Brother', loved by many people because of indoctrination. His son, Kim Jong-il, didn't have the same charisma, but he was very cunning. He strengthened the prison system to repress the people. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il’s son, uses the same strategy as his father.”
Prison and re-education camps are regime-controlled spaces of repression for citizens who, in the eyes of the state, must be “corrected or ideologically repositioned within the North Korean government.” Prisoners are forced to work and receive ideological training in these places.
According to investigations carried out in recent years, detainees survive on small portions of food and, often, under conditions of ill-treatment. Furthermore, they are exposed to dangerous work situations and cruelly punished.
The country, which remains first on the World Religious Persecution List of the NGO Open Doors, also operates camps described by the State as an “absolute control zone”, where prisoners spend the rest of their lives. Enemies of the state who are considered “incorrigible” work themselves to death.
Portal searches Daily NK and surveys by organizations not linked to governments estimate that approximately 200,000 people live in forced labor camps controlled by the Pyongyang regime. There are also hundreds of North Koreans who have been banished to remote areas, where they are also victims of forced labor. They don't live in a prison or a camp, but they also can't leave the area they were sent to.
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