North Korean defector Kang Chol-Hwan, author of The Aquariums of Pyongyang, called on the international community to monitor foreign aid instead of blindly donating funds and material so that it does not simply prop up Kim Jong-Il's oppressive regime in his home country.
On Monday, campus group Liberty in North Korea hosted a talk with Chol-Hwan at Steinhardt Hall in an effort to bring insight and awareness about ongoing human-rights abuses in North Korea to Penn.
Addressing an audience of about 135 people, Chol-Hwan described the 10 gruesome years he spent in Yodok, the most notorious labor camp in the Asian country.
Chol-Hwan was put in the camp at the age of nine due to his grandfather's opposition to the government. At the camp, he was subject to 14 hours of forced labor each day.
The North Korean "concentration camps are similar to those of Hitler and Stalin's gulags," Chol-Hwan said. Even soccer players who had fallen out of favor by losing a game in the 1968 World Cup were imprisoned.
Chol-Hwan witnessed brutal public executions in which prisoners were hung on trees and had rocks forced down their throats. Onlookers were then ordered to stone their peers to death until their skin and clothes began to peel into a bloody mangle.
"The Nazis used gas chambers," he continued. The North Korean "government uses starvation and forced labor. ... There was so much famine that we used to catch mice and roast them."
As meat was nonexistent in the prisoners' daily rations of 350 grams of corn and salt, Chol-Hwan said he was so hungry that mice became a surprisingly tasty delicacy.
"Even when I traveled to South Korea, I did not taste anything as delicious as the mice" in North Korea, he said.
Chol-Hwan escaped 10 years ago to South Korea, where he actively began to denounce the North Korean regime and voice his testimony as a former camp prisoner.
Since his escape, the situation has not improved, and little is known by the international community, he said.
Four other Asian countries and the United States just recently finished talks with North Korea about dismantling the country's nuclear program. The government receives foreign aid from the United States and others as an incentive to cooperate in negotiations.
Meanwhile, according to Amnesty International, people in North Korea continue to suffer starvation and torture.
Ironically, it is foreign economic and humanitarian aid that is "propping up [Kim Jong-Il's] regime like an old man on crutches," Chol-Hwan said. Aid, he went on to say, is frequently diverted from feeding the famished and ends up in the hands of government officials or on the black market.
"Only can a powerful emphasis on human rights change something ... like China opening up its borders to refugees," Chol-Hwan said.
The talk snapped eyes open.
"It struck me that I knew so little about this because my parents always sheltered me from talking about" North Korea, said Michelle Kim, 19, of Bryn Mawr College. "I feel tremendous guilt."
Sung-Hoon Ahn, 30, also agreed. A Penn English Language Programs student from Seoul, South Korea, Ahn said he did not really know about the North Korean crisis until that night.
"South Koreans are not ready to accept North Koreans, [and] the proof is that I barely knew anything about it. I feel so bad right now," he said, "but from now on I'll inform my friends about it."
