Shocking sketches emerge of life in North Korea's gulags showing how prisoners resort to eating mice and snakes and were beaten until they vomited blood



Former prisoner of gulag commissioned artists to depict his experience

Sketches show crimes against humanity, such as beatings and starvation

Drawings were included in a U.N. report accusing North Korea of crimes

Former prisoner Kim Kwang-il claims treatment is 'worse than depicted'



Drawings follow warnings to China about their allying with North Korea



Shocking sketches have emerged of the mistreatment of prisoners in North Korean gulags, depicting how inmates resorted to eating mice and were forced to drag other prisoner's corpses to the crematorium under armed guard.

The drawings come from the recollections of Kim Kwang-il, a 48-year-old man who was a North Korean prisoner for two years before he defected to South Korea in February 2009, Business Insider reports.

After he defected, he got professional artists to draw sketches of his experiences in the gulag prisons, depicting the different aspects of inhuman treatment by the North Korean prison guards.

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Horrendous: This drawing by a former North Korean prison guard of torture at a camp is describing a position called 'pigeon torture'. where 'prisoners are reportedly beaten on the chest until they vomit blood'

Everyday torture: One of the drawings by the guards, simply titled 'Detention centre' seems to depict a guard forcing a prisoner into a small opening in a wall

'Scale, airplane, motorcycle.' Survivors told the U.N. that they had to stay in stress positions until the collapsed

Kwang-il's drawings were subsequently included in a U.N. report that accuses North Korea of crimes against humanity, including 'torture, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence' as well as continued starvation of inmates.

Kim Kwang-il told the U.N. that he: 'actually got worse treatment than the pictures that are shown in the book'.

The reports of the sketches involved in the U.N. report come after news that China rejected what it said was ‘unreasonable criticism’ of Beijing in a new UN report on human rights abuses in North Korea, but it would not be drawn on whether it would veto any proceedings in the Security Council to bring Pyongyang to book.

The reaction came as it emerged that prisoners are used as human punchbags during North Korean guards’ martial arts training sessions.

North Korean security chiefs and possibly even Kim Jong Un, the leader of the country, should face international justice for ordering systematic torture, starvation and killings comparable to Nazi-era atrocities, U.N. investigators said.

The unprecedented public rebuke and warning to a head of state by a UN inquiry is likely to further antagonise Kim and complicate efforts to persuade him to rein in his isolated country's nuclear weapons programme and belligerent confrontations with South Korea and the West.

This drawing depicts prisoners foraging among live wild animals. In the Korean description: 'out of starvation and hunger, find snakes and rats and you eat them'

Drawings of corpses being left in the gulag: 'The mice eat the eyes, nose, ears, and toes of the corpses'

The U.N. investigators also told China, the North's main ally, that it might be ‘aiding and abetting crimes against humanity’ by sending migrants and defectors back to North Korea to face torture or execution, a charge that prompted a sharp rebuke from Beijing.

‘Of course we cannot accept this unreasonable criticism,’ Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a briefing on Tuesday. ‘We believe that politicising human rights issues is not conducive towards improving a country's human rights.

‘We believe that taking human rights issues to the International Criminal Court is not helpful to improving a country's human rights situation.’

The latest revelation about North Korea’s treatment of its citizens is that prison guards use inmates as human punchbags, according to The Times.

Former camp guard Ahn Myong Chol told the UN Commission: ‘Sometimes the instructors would summon inmates who were working in the field so that we could practise our skills on them. The reason for actually practising our skills on these inmates was to make them stay on alert and to instruct us that those are our enemies.’

Hua, meanwhile, would not answer what she said was a ‘hypothetical question’ on whether China would use its veto powers if the report was brought to the U.N. Security Council for further action. Diplomats have said China will most likely block any such proceedings.

Prisoners were subjected to various exercises designed to inflict pain: 'Pump torture. After sitting, you stand about a hundred times'

Death sentence: This picture by a guard is entitled 'The corpses are taken to the crematorium'

Asked why China blocked U.N. investigators from going to the North Korean border, across which many North Koreans cross illegally, Hua said she could not comment and would have to look into the matter.

‘These people are not refugees. We term them illegal North Korean migrants,’ she added.

China deals with these people appropriately ‘in accordance with international and domestic laws and the humanitarian principles’, Hua said, declining to provide an estimate for how many of these people have cross into China.

The investigators told Kim in a letter they were advising the United Nations to refer North Korea to the International Criminal Court to make sure any culprits ‘including possibly yourself’ were held accountable.

In a statement in Geneva, North Korea ‘categorically and totally’ rejected the accusations set out in the 372-page report, saying they were based on material faked by hostile forces backed by the United States, the European Union and Japan.

‘The world is finally waking up to the fact that North Korea is a far-right state, in that the regime derives its right to rule from a commitment to military might and racial purity,’ said Brian Myers, a South Korea-based North Korea expert.

'Solitary confinement punishment. Capturing mice from inside the cell'. Routinely, the prisoners would have to catch mice, snakes and rats, in order to be able to eat

‘But for that very reason, the regime has never felt very embarrassed by criticism of its human rights record, and has reported sneeringly on that criticism to its own people. Perhaps it will realize that it cannot keep attracting investors and collaborators without making more of a pretence to progressive or leftist tendencies.’

The findings came out of a year-long investigation involving public testimony by defectors, including former prison camp guards, at hearings in South Korea, Japan, Britain and the United States.

Survivors told investigators of atrocities including a woman who was forced to drown her baby and an entire family who were imprisoned and tortured for watching a banned foreign soap opera.

The report is a damning indictment of the totalitarian regime’s use of mass starvation, torture and public executions in political prison camps which are believed to hold up to 120,000 people.

UN commission chairman Michael Kirby said leader Kim Jong-un could be held personally accountable for crimes committed by his henchmen, and called for the world to take action against the state, which is already under pressure to halt its nuclear weapons programme.

Mr Kirby said the alleged atrocities were ‘wrongs that shock the conscience of humanity’ and warned there could now be no excuse for the international community if it failed to act.

His investigators have heard harrowing evidence of life inside the country’s ‘total control’ prison camps, which are said to have been the backdrop to some of the worst crimes against humanity since Hitler’s concentration camps.

It has emerged that North Korean prison guards use inmates as punchbags. Pictured is a North Korean soldier kicking a pole along the bank of Yalu River near Sinuiju

Menacing: North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un should face international justice for a catalogue of appalling crimes against humanity, UN investigators have. Above, a woman soldier at a camp in North Korea

U.N. investigators have warned North Korean security chiefs and possibly even Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un should face international justice for ordering systematic torture, starvation and mass killings

The unprecedented public warning and rebuke to a ruling head of state by a U.N. Commission of Inquiry is likely to complicate efforts to persuade the isolated country to rein in its nuclear weapons programme and belligerent confrontations with South Korea and the West

Survivors described state-sponsored abductions, public executions and lifelong enslavement for minor transgressions deemed to be disloyal to Pyongyang.

Former prisoner Shin Dong-hyuk was beaten, tortured and forced to watch the execution of his mother and brother when he was 13, after he informed guards they were planning to escape.

He was born in the punishment camp where his parents were inmates and was so brainwashed by his captors that he believed it was his duty to report the escape plot. He eventually escaped himself in 2005, aged 23.

In other harrowing evidence, survivors have told of pregnant women being made to work until they miscarried and forced abortions. Another inmate, Jee Heon-a, told how a mother was forced to drown her own baby.

She told the commission: ‘A security guard came in and told the mother to turn the baby upside down into a bowl of water. The mother begged the guard to spare her, but he kept beating her.

'So the mother, her hands shaking, put the baby face down in the water. The crying stopped and a bubble rose up as it died.’



The U.N. investigators said they had also told Kim's main ally China that it might be 'aiding and abetting crimes against humanity' by sending migrants and defectors back to North Korea

Prisoners were not fed during the famine of the late 1990s and ate rats, frogs and insects to survive. Thousands more starved to death.

The report warned North Korea’s extermination of political prisoners over the past five decades might amount to genocide. It said perpetrators acted with impunity, with the state’s apparent approval. Mr Kirby said hundreds of security forces officials could face prosecution.

The report warned the abuses were ongoing.

It said: ‘Systemic, widespread and gross human rights violations have been and are being committed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, its institutions and officials.

‘In many instances, the violations of human rights found by the commission constitute crimes against humanity... The gravity, scale and nature of these violations revealed a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.’

Chairman Mr Kirby, a retired Australian judge, said the world could no longer plead ignorance as an excuse for a failure to act.

He said: ‘At the end of the Second World War, so many people said, ‘If only we had known’. Now the international community does know. There will be no excusing a failure of action because we didn’t know.’

In his letter to Pyongyang, Mr Kirby said the commission was advising the UN to refer North Korea to the International Criminal Court, and has recommended targeted UN sanctions against officials and military commanders suspected of the worst crimes.

The team recommended targeted U.N. sanctions against civil officials and military commanders suspected of the worst crimes

Image: Kim Jong Un has just opened the Masikryong Ski Resort in the east coast to garner favour with the elite

GOSSIP ABOUT TYRANT COST ME MY WHOLE FAMILY

When Kim Young Soon was reported for ‘gossiping’ about then North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, three generations of her family were thrown into a brutal labour camp. Her elderly parents and four young children all died after being imprisoned with her under a system of ‘guilt by association’. She survived after being held at Yodok for nine years over the accusation that she gossiped about an affair her friend had with Kim Jong-il, the father of current leader Kim Jong-un.

Young Soon told Amnesty International: ‘The guilt by association system applies to the family members – my mother and father, who were over 70 years old, my nine-year-old daughter and my three sons, who were seven, four and one. ‘When my parents starved to death, I didn’t have coffins for them. I wrapped their bodies with straw, carried them on my back and went to bury them myself. And the children… I lost all my family.’ Describing conditions at Yodok, she said: ‘It is a place that would make your hair stand on end.’

He warned the North Korean leader personally: ‘It is open to inference that the officials are, in some instances, acting under your personal control.’

A glimpse of hell: Traumatised survivors relive public executions, rape and forced abortions inside North Korea's prison camps

Telling of public executions, hard labour and starvation, four survivors of North Korean prison camps have shared their shocking stories of life in the country’s gulags.

Kim Young Soon spent nine years in Yodok prison camp along with her elderly parents and four young children, for gossiping about an affair her friend had with Kim Jong Il.

‘It is a place that would make your hair stand on end,’ she said in a video released by Amnesty International on Monday.

Ms Kim’s elderly parents and four children, aged nine, seven, four and one, were also sent to the prison camps for her alleged crime. They all died from starvation and hard labour.

‘When my parents starved to death, I didn’t have coffins for them. I wrapped their bodies in straw, carried them on my back and went to bury them myself. And the children… I lost all my family,’ she said.

A former prison guard, speaking anonymously to Amnesty, said that this strategy, called 'guilt-by-association' was implemented to fulfil the aim of ‘exterminating the three generations of a family.’

The guard also revealed how officials would rape women from the camp and then kill them.

He spoke of the two execution methods used by prison officers to kill inmates. The first involved getting them to dig their own grave and then hitting them in the back of the head with a small metal hammer. The other method involved strangulation with a rubber rope.

Kim Young Soon spent nine years in Yodok prison camp for gossiping about an affair her friend had with Kim Jong Il. Her parents and four young children were imprisoned with her and all of them died in the camp Satellite images of the Yodok prison camp in North Korea. An estimated 200,000 peopled are interred in prison camps throughout the country

Another survivor who shared her testimony in the Amnesty International video was Park Ji-hyun. She was sent to a prison camp in Onsung, after she attempted to escape from a Chinese farmer to whom she had been sold.

She told of the horrific treatment of women in the camp, all of whom were forced to take a pregnancy test upon arrival at the camp.

‘They would force abortion after the pregnancy test,’ Ms Park said. ‘Pregnant women get sent to labour camps to carry loads up and down the hills which cause miscarriages.’

Labour: One former prisoner says pregnant women were forced to do strenuous labour to force miscarriages

Many detainees in these camps die of hard labour. Ms Park said that women were forced to function as livestock, pulling carts laden with a tonne of soil.

‘We couldn’t do this at a walking pace either. We had to run,’ she said.

Those in the camps would often have to labour from 4:30am until dark, and then attend meetings until midnight.

Joo Il-Kim, a former military captain, talked of the starvation rife throughout the country.



'You are haunted by the nightmarish image in dreams': Joo Il-Kim, a former military captain spoke about witnessing public executions in North Korea Park Ji-hyun was sent to a prison camp after she attempted to escape from a Chinese farmer to whom she had been sold A former prison guard speaks anonymously to Amnesty International about the atrocities that are committed in the prisons of North Korea A former prison guard speaks anonymously to Amnesty International about the atrocities that are committed in the prisons of North Korea

Starvation is such a problem that prisoners would resort to eating animal feed, or even beans and maize kernels stuck in animal dung.

‘I saw piles of bodies [of people] who have died from starvation in public places,’ said Mr Joo.

The former captain also describes the practice of public executions, which he alleges is common in the closed country.

‘People scream in horror at this sight. The crowd roars. It is so gruesome, you instinctively close your eyes or turn your head away… When all the gunshots have died down, you look and the body is heaped onto the ground. You cannot sleep after witnessing it. You are haunted by the nightmarish image in dreams,’ he said.

Mr Joo, the former military captain featured in the Amnesty International video says that despite the challenges of ending the alleged human rights violations, the only hope for the country is that stories of such atrocities need to be told.

‘People in the UK and the international community should know the reality of North Korea. Once you know what the reality is, the voice to improve the situation in North Korea can follow,’ he said.

Survivors who provided testimony to the U.N. panel are sceptical that the report will have any effect on the regime.

Isolation: North Korea's prisons are so isolated it's hard to get a grasp of the endless atrocities that occur within their walls

Starved: North Koreans sometimes resort to eating undigested food found in animal feces

Slave labor: Prisoners are often forced to work from sunrise to sundown and are forced to attend 'meetings' until after midnight

March: Laborers are often forced to walk 12 to 14 miles to work plowing fields