Prison camp #22. satellite surveillance picture.

Dear Mr President,


We are the ones who have fled to South Korea from the North where the famine and repressions unleashed by Kim Jong Il have made the life intolerable. We appeal to You, Mr. President, because we have left behind, in prison camps, dozens of thousands of our desperate sisters and brothers. We saw no other way to save our lives but escape.

We were born and raised in North Korea, we were educated and indoctrinated with baseless beliefs about the United States. We were taught to hate the United States; there was a time when we thought all Americans were murderers. But since we have arrived in South Korea, we have discovered that we must radically change our way of thinking. Our parents fought against American soldiers during the Korean War, deceived by the North Korean dictator into joining his reckless war. But, today we are convinced that if America did not rid the country of the spread of communism by the dictator, there would no longer be a future for the Korean peninsula.

We have recently witnessed a notorious dictatorship, which had been blighting human dignity and repressing freedom and human rights, fall under the awesome firepower of the United States. To the many people who opposed the war and staged demonstrations, we would like to ask what they could have done for the people of Iraq, whom the dictator was ruthlessly sacrificing from the comfort of his royal palace.

We believe that dictators should receive their just judgment for inflicting such cruelty that exceeds even the brutality of war. Today, the day of judgment for the only remaining dictatorship of North Korea draws near. From 1994 to 1998, on North Korean land, about three million people have died from starvation. This exceeds the great misery from the Korean war of 1950; it is difficult to find such cruel starvation in any other place in the world. Despite this fact, the North Korean people have been unable to demonstrate or voice their opinions, out of fear of the dictator. They struggle to eke by, spilling blood and tears.

Like the Nazi regime, the Kim Jong Il political regime has created political prisons and massacred many people. These barbarous atrocities have now continued for about forty years. If Nazi concentration camps killed prisoners by poison gas, North Korean gulags systematically slaughter prisoners by starving them or killing them through grueling forced labor. Since no one has been unable to halt Kim Jong Ils atrocities, innocent people have continued to suffer and die for a very long time. An even more serious problem is that with the recent increase of the interests in the human rights situation in North Korea by the international community, there is a possibility that Kim Jong Il will try to intensify his efforts to destroy the evidence.

We are sending this urgent letter because now, political prisoners are at an even greater risk of massacre. As former political prisoners who have defected, we know that the gulags located throughout the country are ruled out any possibility of survival in military emergency. The soldiers who guarded the political prisoners would tell us, don’t worry, the Americans won’t bomb you. If a war broke out or the conditions deteriorated, then the political prisoners would undoubtedly be killed first.

The former gulag guard, Mr. Ahn Myong Chul, once testified that if the international community tried to apply pressure on North Korea about its human rights problem, the guards were ordered to kill every prisoner in order to suppress evidence of the gulags. There are plans to massacre gulag prisoners by mass burials if a war breaks out or if tensions continue to intensify. Thus, as the North Korean gulag situation becomes a topic of discussion and the North Korean human rights problem becomes an issue for United Nations investigation, the Kim Jong Il government will try to destroy the evidence.

Since the prisoners are now at greater risk of slaughter, we are approaching this problem cautiously and prudently. Right now, while the issue of North Korean nuclear weapons has attracted public attention in the United States and in international community, the fate of two hundred thousand political prisoners remains in utter darkness and seems ever more precarious.

The letter is signed by:
Kang Chul-Hwan (a former inmate at Yodok camp)
Koh Young-Hwan (a former North Korean diplomat)
Kim Tae-Jin (a former inmate at Yodok)
Lee Young-Gook (a former inmate at Yodok)
Ahn Myong-Chul (a former guard at Hoeryong prison camp)
Kim Sung-Min (a former North Korean military officer)
Park Sang-Hak (a former refugee from North Korea)