Breakout
One Free Korea reports a mass escape of 120 North Korean prisoners from a camp at Hwasung on Dec. 20:
The prisoners did this by cutting the wire and clubbing a guard, and when they got out, someone outside was there with at least one getaway car. The regime’s security forces have put up numerous roadblocks to try to recapture the prisoners. They have reportedly recaptured 21 of them, who are virtually certain to face a firing squad. Elsewhere, the report suggests that others were recaptured in China.
The significance of this, if true, is proof of the existence of an organized underground inside North Korea. As you will see below, Hwasong is a very long walk from China. Without help from an underground, these people would have had nowhere to go; they would all have been recaptured or killed almost immediately. If around 100 prisoners were still at large weeks after the fact, or made it at least as far as China, someone must have helped, hidden, and fed them.
One Free Korea has more on other current incidents and history you won’t read among the joyous reports of the Songun Revolution at the DPRK News Agency.
Hat tip to Ed Driscoll, who notes:
Despite Ted Turner’s fantasies to the contrary, North Korea is a nightmarish hellhole of a nation. As Christopher Hitchens wrote last year, “George Orwell’s 1984 was published at about the time that Kim Il Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint“.
Or, as Crittenden put it last month, re official DPRK pronouncements:
When the public face of Kim Jong Il’s regime is this ridiculous, you might forget he is enslaving and starving millions of people, and imprisoning and murdering untold thousands, next door to wealth and freedom. But as you slog through his forced joyousness and other torturous convolutions, it becomes apparent how bleak even a life of privilege must be in a cesspit like that. In a world full of obscenities, this one may take first prize.
Topics: North Korea
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 1:16 pm on Wednesday, February 7, 2007
3 Responses to “Breakout”
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February 7th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
Jules-was it here that I read that the Japanese have moved to prevent remittances from ethnic Koreans in Japan from being sent back to North Korea? Every little bit helps in bringing down little Kim and there appears to be evidence that there is serious opposition to his government inside the hermit kingdom.
Too bad the supposed “train bombing” a couple of years ago didn’t do the trick. I wonder how long his luck will hold.
February 7th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Why Jules, you must be mistaken! Jimmy Carter said…, oh. Never mind.
February 7th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
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