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AXIS OF EVIL
The North Korean World of Torture
By Dale Hurd
CBN News Senior Reporter
North Korea is at least as cruel as Nazi Germany. It is a torture chamber for millions of Koreans who no doubt hope and pray daily that the government will collapse.
CBN.com – A North Korean Christian, in a handwritten note smuggled to South Korea, wrote, "We don't know how long this suffering will go on. We have joy in our hearts. Almighty God prepared paradise in heaven for us, and this mortal life is short."
The horror that many North Koreans have endured is unspeakable. Christians have been buried alive, mothers forced to kill their own children, two million dead from starvation,
and even cannibalism. German Doctor Norbert Vollertsen led a medical team through North Korea's hospitals and orphanages in 1999.
Vollertsen said, "I took care of several hundred children in those kindergartens and hospitals and they were literally dying under my hands. Most of the time I was too
late because they were so weak… They were looking like ghosts, so skinny…no more emotional reaction. They can't cry anymore. They can't laugh anymore."
Vollertsen, who believes he has to stand up to North Korea the way more Germans should have stood up to Hitler, says it is time for the world to put a stop to it.
"Seven-year-old children, 70-year-old ladies - they all speak about torture, concentration camp, mass execution, rape, about baby-killing, about every cruel biological
medical experiment you can imagine, how they are using human beings as guinea pigs to develop anthrax, for example," Vollertsen said.
North Korea is at least as cruel as Nazi Germany. It is a torture chamber for millions of Koreans who no doubt hope and pray daily that the government will collapse. Except
"collapse" is apparently not what the other nations in Asia want, because collapse means a wave of North Korean refugees, which could end up costing them a lot of money.
Nicholas Eberstadt, a North Korea expert with the American Enterprise Institute, said, "The dirty little secret in Northeast Asia is that all of the countries surrounding
[North Korea] - Japan, China, Russia and even South Korea - are more reconciled to a continuation of the status quo. The South Korean government, the current government and the incoming government, seem to be
terrified by the possible economic costs that would be entailed in a North Korea collapse, a Korean peninsula reunification."
In a crude paraphrase, North Korea is a torture chamber, but to end it would cost too much money. "That's what many people in the south fear, and that's what many
of the people running governments around North Korea seem to fear," Eberstadt said.
So, China has been arresting desperate refugees and sending them back to North Korea, where they face torture and death in concentration camps. And Vollertsen says even South
Korea is now tipping off North Korea when it sees North Koreans trying to escape by boat.
North Korea also needs cash, and its proven shakedown technique is threatening war, or, as they did last fall in announcing that they are restarting their nuclear program.
Retired U.S. Army Colonel William Taylor has met with the North Korean leadership. He said, "They can go to the brink and then break off and get concessions. Brinkmanship
is their normal pattern of diplomacy. They've done it over and over - scares the living heck out of Seoul and Washington."
Former ambassador to China James Lilly said, "What they're trying to do is to get a big fat sum of money out of us. And they're using this extortion technique.
They succeeded very well in '93, '94, with the Clinton Administration, to squeeze him for billions. And they're running around saying, 'See, if you get tough with the Americans, we threatened a war
and we got all this money which is three-fourths of what we wanted.' They got $680 million in food. They got an equal sum in oil. They got these two heavy reactors, light water reactors worth about $4 billion...
for threatening."
Behind the bluster is a paranoid, destitute, Stalinist Disneyland caught in a time warp. It would be funny if it weren't so evil. The Democratic People's Republic of
Korea, or DPRK, was created after World War II when the former Japanese colony of Korea was divided.
North of the 38th parallel became a communist clone of the Soviet Union. Its leader, Kim Il-Sung, was installed by Stalin. The South was free and protected by the U.S. Army.
But in 1950, Stalin and Kim miscalculated and invaded the south, sparking the Korean War. They almost drove U.S forces from the peninsula until General Douglas MacArthur staged a bold landing at the port of Inchon.
Lilly explained, "MacArthur had a beautiful strategic success in Inchon. It was a miraculous strike and it defeated the whole North Korean army. And then he moved on to
the Yalu. And everybody had trepidations about that. The Chinese moved in [because the North Koreans were finished], and of course we were driven back to the DMZ and settled on the line of demarcation."
MacArthur believed the United States should, if necessary, attack China to keep all of Korea free. Harry Truman disagreed, and MacArthur was eventually fired. Korea remained
divided. And the war has still not ended in the North, which maintains the world's fifth largest army while its population starves, even funneling foreign food aid to its military. Pyongyang's only real
economic exports are illegal drugs, dangerous weapons and counterfeit currency. Its leader Kim Jong-Il is venerated as god-king.
Eberstadt said, "The North Korean state system is both Stalinist and Asiatic dynasty. What you have in North Korea is a Stalinist version of emperor worship. Kim Il-Sung,
the founder of this communist dynasty, he's been dead eight and half years, but according to the most recent constitution, he's still the president. His son, Kim Jong-Il is also the subject of intense
Stalin-style, super-Stalin-style emperor worship - cult of personality.
Describing the cultish leader, Eberstadt continued, "He not only knows everything and is infallible, but if you have ever seen this little butterball on TV, it turns out
he is one of the world's greatest athletes...making five holes-in-one the very first time he ever played golf, according to the North Korean government. Kim, who is now in his 60's, has been portrayed as a
weirdo and a drunk. But North Korean defectors and diplomats who have met him, including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, say Kim is actually a clever, ruthless, extremely wealthy man who enjoys
geopolitical games."
This leader of one of the world's poorest countries has an estimated personal fortune of at least $4 billion. He owns eight villas around the world. He enjoys $600-bottles
of cognac. His military has developed multi-stage missiles and enough plutonium to build at least two atomic bombs. Meanwhile, North Korean 7-year-old boys are reported to be eight inches shorter than South Korean
7-year-olds, because of malnutrition and starvation.
Vollertsen said, "The people are eating rats, snakes, little animals, insects, whatever they can find."
Some believe there are 500,000 Christians in the North who meet secretly in caves, as well as untold thousands who are tortured and killed in concentration camps. Punishment
for being a missionary is summary execution.
Vollertsen said, "All those defectors told me that the Christians in North Korea in those concentration camps were treated in the worst way. They were talking about all
those executions, about all those people in their family, their grandparents, their children who went to a prison camp, because their father was reading a Bible. They will not allow a second generation of Christians
... so when there is a young woman who delivers a baby and she is a Christian she must kill her own baby with her own hands, or some border guards will beat this baby to death and afterward they will feed this baby
to the dogs of the guards."
Satellite imagery shows that North Korea has been lying to the United States about its nuclear program for years, and it has been working on missiles that can hit the United
States mainland.
Because of that Eberstadt says the U.S. can no longer negotiate with the North. Washington is left with persuasion or force. He says if the DPRK chooses to fight, the North
Korean leadership should be decapitated in one quick strike, before it can organize a counterattack and destroy Seoul. But Lilly rules out an attack.
"You can't, you can't attack North Korea because if you do, you lose Seoul. They'll put 500,000 artillery shells on Seoul and it would probably kill three
million people in the first couple days," Lilly said. "My own sense is you deal with the North Korean's on their weak point, which is their economy. If we pull back on grain and oil and the Chinese
cooperate with us and South Koreans cooperate to a degree, we could probably get them to do something. You'll never discover their whole program. You'll never discover it, but you can drive it underground so
it will not be a problem."
Eberstadt disagrees. "I think that a nuclear North Korea will be a nightmare for American security interests. As best we know, North Korea has attempted to sell virtually
all of its military gadgetry and achievements to other states abroad, and they're not nice states. A nuclear North Korea is going to be a supermarket for nuclear goods for all of the worst governments and groups
around the world."
Vollertsen has been told by defectors that North Korea is much closer to collapse than most westerners realize. But he is fighting against a world of indifference, and
governments more concerned about economics than about children.
"And when we hear all these stories we will be ashamed. We will be shocked that we were so ignorant for nearly 50 years now, that we simply didn't care because we did
not know," Vollertsen said. "There are many, many people afraid about this collapse, but I think we have to look into these eyes. We have to think about these children, look into these eyes and try not to
care."
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