The Invisible Gulag | World Security Network - by Jonathan Kay, National Post:
December 10, 2010 - "The world remains pock-marked by countries that still insist on calling themselves 'communist.' But in reality, Joseph Stalin's totalitarian dream of exterminating the individual human spirit survives in only one tiny corner of the world: North Korea....
"North Korea is a giant prison. Worse than a prison, in fact, because prisoners in normal countries don't have to forage for wild grass, or catch rats, to stay alive. For most Westerners, who aren't permitted to see this real-life Mordor with their own eyes, the country's horrors are so vast that they lie in a surreal place beyond our political imaginations. North Korea seems less an actual country than a sort of sovereign theme park dedicated to the glorification of evil....
"Norbert Vollertsen, a blond middle-aged German doctor, first travelled to North Korea in 1999, as part of his charity work with an international NGO. Taking shifts in a Pyongyang emergency room, he was horrified by the scenes he witnessed. Even patients with treatable diseases such as diabetes and tuberculosis lay dying on gurneys. Meanwhile, the medication that had been sent from Germany to save their lives was on sale for American dollars at a special Pyongyang store reserved for foreign diplomats.
"One day, Vollertsen saw a line-up in front of his hospital. He learned that a tractor-factory worker had been severely burned by molten metal, and that the people queuing up were donating pieces of their own skin so that the man could be saved.... Vollertsen made the fateful decision to join the line-up....
"A week later, Vollertsen was asked to make another skin donation. But this time, when he showed up at the hospital, North Korean TV cameras filmed the whole thing. The event was broadcast on the country's (only) newscast, and Vollertsen was celebrated as a national hero.... The regime even awarded him the "North Korean Friendship medal" and -- more importantly -- a driver's licence that permitted him to roam the North Korean countryside unimpeded. No Western journalist has ever had such access....
"Nothing Vollertsen had seen in Pyongyang prepared him for the even more piteous scenes he witnessed in the rural provinces.
"All around were desolate landscapes -- the forests having been chopped down for firewood. Starvation was rampant: Most peasants survived on bags of donated rice from the West (which the North Korean government claimed to be a form of 'tribute' delivered from fearful Western powers)....
"The patients Vollertsen treated in children's clinics were scarcely more animated than corpses. He recalled to me one particularly haunting specimen -- an emaciated 12-year-old whose striped pajamas, reminiscent of a Nazi concentration camp prisoner, struck a grim historical chord with Vollertsen. 'He looked straight into my eyes,' the German doctor remembers, 'so full of sorrow and despair. No future. No hope. Nothing. It reminded me of the photos of the people you see at the Washington Holocaust museum.'"
Read more: https://web.archive.org/web/20130417005739/http://www.worldsecuritynetwork.com/Koreas/National-Post/The-Invisible-Gulag
December 10, 2010 - "The world remains pock-marked by countries that still insist on calling themselves 'communist.' But in reality, Joseph Stalin's totalitarian dream of exterminating the individual human spirit survives in only one tiny corner of the world: North Korea....
"North Korea is a giant prison. Worse than a prison, in fact, because prisoners in normal countries don't have to forage for wild grass, or catch rats, to stay alive. For most Westerners, who aren't permitted to see this real-life Mordor with their own eyes, the country's horrors are so vast that they lie in a surreal place beyond our political imaginations. North Korea seems less an actual country than a sort of sovereign theme park dedicated to the glorification of evil....
"Norbert Vollertsen, a blond middle-aged German doctor, first travelled to North Korea in 1999, as part of his charity work with an international NGO. Taking shifts in a Pyongyang emergency room, he was horrified by the scenes he witnessed. Even patients with treatable diseases such as diabetes and tuberculosis lay dying on gurneys. Meanwhile, the medication that had been sent from Germany to save their lives was on sale for American dollars at a special Pyongyang store reserved for foreign diplomats.
"One day, Vollertsen saw a line-up in front of his hospital. He learned that a tractor-factory worker had been severely burned by molten metal, and that the people queuing up were donating pieces of their own skin so that the man could be saved.... Vollertsen made the fateful decision to join the line-up....
"A week later, Vollertsen was asked to make another skin donation. But this time, when he showed up at the hospital, North Korean TV cameras filmed the whole thing. The event was broadcast on the country's (only) newscast, and Vollertsen was celebrated as a national hero.... The regime even awarded him the "North Korean Friendship medal" and -- more importantly -- a driver's licence that permitted him to roam the North Korean countryside unimpeded. No Western journalist has ever had such access....
"Nothing Vollertsen had seen in Pyongyang prepared him for the even more piteous scenes he witnessed in the rural provinces.
"All around were desolate landscapes -- the forests having been chopped down for firewood. Starvation was rampant: Most peasants survived on bags of donated rice from the West (which the North Korean government claimed to be a form of 'tribute' delivered from fearful Western powers)....
"The patients Vollertsen treated in children's clinics were scarcely more animated than corpses. He recalled to me one particularly haunting specimen -- an emaciated 12-year-old whose striped pajamas, reminiscent of a Nazi concentration camp prisoner, struck a grim historical chord with Vollertsen. 'He looked straight into my eyes,' the German doctor remembers, 'so full of sorrow and despair. No future. No hope. Nothing. It reminded me of the photos of the people you see at the Washington Holocaust museum.'"
Read more: https://web.archive.org/web/20130417005739/http://www.worldsecuritynetwork.com/Koreas/National-Post/The-Invisible-Gulag
