Word: koreans
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...Hyundai has a reputation for selling cars to the budget-minded. But last year, as U.S. auto sales plunged, incentives such as rebates and fancy financing schemes weren't moving wheels off the lots as they usually did. John Krafcik, chief executive of the American subsidiary of the South Korean carmaker, polled consumers to find out why. The answer: fear. "The root cause was not that the deals weren't good," Krafcik says. "So many of them said, 'I'm afraid of losing...
...president of a Seoul-based organization called the North Korean Gulag Shutdown Movement, spent four years in Yodok for trying to escape the country. "I was always hungry and cold," he says, recalling life in the camp. He remembers scavenging for dead rodents and snakes to eat. "When I found one, that would be a good day," he says. At his camp, it "was normal for the prison guards to be cruel. No one had hope or cared about anything," says Kim, who was finally released. The camps' pervasive sense of hopelessness is a common theme woven through many defectors...
...will still probably be sent to a regular prison - called a kyohwaso, or reformatory - rather than a prison for political prisoners, where conditions are relatively better. Kyohwaso life is extremely harsh: scholars estimate only 50% of prisoners survive their first year. One of the first accounts of the North Korean prison system, a 2000 memoir called The Aquariums of Pyongyang, tells of routine torture and deprivations on par with those of Nazi concentration camps. The book's author, Kang Chol Hwan, was imprisoned in the Yodok concentration camp at age 9 for 10 years with his family. He suffered starvation...
...Shin Dong Hyuk, a 27-year-old who is reportedly the only living former prisoner to escape a North Korean prison camp, also wrote a recent book about his experiences, Escape to the Outside World. Shin says he was born and raised in a camp about 55 miles north of Pyongyang and like many prisoners witnessed routine atrocities, including the execution of both his mother and brother. Before his escape in 2005, Shin was tortured at least twice, once for accidentally dropping a sewing machine in the garment factory where he was forced to work at the camp. He also...
...These stories come from North Korean survivors who did not have the potential advantage of the world's attention as they served out their long and difficult sentences. Lee and Ling have the Obama Administration moving on their behalf; the White House has already urged North Korea to release them "on humanitarian grounds." Sources knowledgeable about North Korean politics and prisons say Pyongyang will not allow the high-profile prisoners to starve to death, die of disease or endure torture. Small comfort. In any case, since their detention in March, the journalists have been visited by representatives of Sweden...