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“The use of torture is an established feature of the interrogation process in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” the UN commission found. “Starvation and other inhumane conditions of detention are deliberately imposed on suspects. … Persons who are found to have engaged in major political crimes are ‘disappeared,’ without trial or judicial order, to political prison camps (kwanliso). … Their families are not even informed of their fate if they die. …

“The inmate population has been gradually eliminated through deliberate starvation, forced labour, executions, torture, rape and the denial of reproductive rights enforced through punishment, forced abortion and infanticide. The commission estimates that hundreds of thousands of political prisoners have perished in these camps over the past five decades. The unspeakable atrocities that are being committed against inmates of the kwanliso political prison camps resemble the horrors of camps that totalitarian States established during the twentieth century.”

Hundreds of thousands of Koreans have been subjected to similar criminal abuse as Otto Warmbier suffered at the hands of North Korea’s Stalinist regime

Translation: The gulag of the Soviet Union, the concentration camps of Nazi Germany — they have been roughly replicated in North Korea. The whole world knows this — the UN report is a public document — and yet the regime lives on. How can that be?

It turns out that plenty of people find the regime repugnant but convenient. China’s Communist rulers are first in that line: Kim Jong Un annoys them, but they do not want a unified, pro-Western Korea on their border. South Korea has a Ministry of Unification but also many citizens who do not want the responsibility or expense of bringing 25 million impoverished North Koreans up to their living standard (South Korea’s population is about 50 million).

For its part, the United States is more interested in negotiating an end to North Korea’s nuclear weapons program than helping its captive millions. “Our goal is not regime change,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in April.

And so, though the country is backward and totally dependent on outside assistance, the regime lives on. The prison camps endure. And Otto Warmbier’s parents are heartbroken.

Washington Post