Word: pyongyang
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ballistic-missile programs. The result was a toothless "presidential statement" from the Security Council. But with the test of another nuke on May 25 - this one over 20 times more powerful than the squib the North exploded in its first test three years ago - along with several missile launches, Pyongyang has put the Chinese leadership in the one place they hate to be during an international crisis: directly on the spot. Indeed, says Alan Romberg, a former U.S. State Department official now with the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, "Pyongyang has spit in [China...
...were reporting for Al Gore's Current TV when they were detained. North Korean activists like Seoul-based Kim Sang Hun, who has interviewed nearly two dozen former prisoners, says the journalists "won't see the real conditions" in the North's prison system because even Pyongyang knows the situation in the country's penal system is something to be ashamed of - a humiliating condition that the Americans would only bear witness to once they were released. Kim thinks the journalists probably will not endure corporal punishment and could, in fact, be out of North Korea soon, depending...
...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 and disease and was forced to attend public executions. "I attended...
...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 watched...
...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's embassy in Pyongyang, and over the weekend, some news outlets reported that former...