North Korea is guilty of crimes reminiscent of those committed by Nazi Germany — and “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong-un can be tried for monstrous offenses that have no “parallel in the contemporary world,” a scathing UN report charged Monday.
The brutal Pyongyang regime has killed “hundreds of thousands” of its own people since the 1950s and has mounted a horrific history of torture, rape and forced starvation, it said.
The report, based on the testimony of 320 survivors of the regime, experts and other witnesses, describes a nation brainwashed since birth — and said the suppression has gotten worse since Kim had his own uncle executed in December.
Among the findings of the 372-page report:
- There are as many as 120,000 political prisoners in North Korea, and the number has declined only “owing to deaths.”
- Dead prisoners were allowed to rot and be eaten by rats — or their bodies were burned and turned into fertilizer.
- Female prisoners routinely underwent forced abortions — and some had to drown their own newborns.
- Prisoners endured punishments such as “pigeon torture,” in which they were suspended by hooks while their hands were cuffed behind them. One victim said he was held in that position for three days, “enduring excruciating pain.”
- Inmates were also used for martial-arts practice and forced to live on rats, snakes and grass because they were given virtually nothing to eat.
- Mass starvation forced thousands to flee to China and those who returned were beaten and underwent grotesque body searches.
“They are wrongs that shock the conscience of humanity,” Human Rights Commission chairman Michael Kirby said.
Comparing the crimes to those of Adolf Hitler’s Germany, he told Reuters: “Some of them are strikingly similar.”
Kim’s uncle Jang Son-thaek was a stabilizing “control tower,” the report said. He was executed because, among other crimes, he was seen “half-heartedly clapping” when Kim was promoted before his father, Kim Jong-Il, died.
The younger Kim punished even more trial offenders — such as a journalist who was sentenced to six months in a “training camp” because he misspelled Kim’s father’s name.
One former inmate, Kim Young-soon, spent nine years in jail with her family because she knew a “state secret” — that Kim’s father was having an affair.
“It is a place that would make your hair stand on end,” she said Monday of North Korea.
The UN commission said the world can no longer ignore what is going on in North Korea after the searing indictment released Monday.
“We cannot say we didn’t know,” Kirby said. “We now do know.”
The report said the ruling Kim family lavished the impoverished nation’s few resources on themselves. A former North Korea official described his work at the well-financed Kim Il-sung Longevity Research Institute, “established with the sole purpose of ensuring long lives and good health for” Kim’s father and grandfather.
Paranoia and envy of South Korea also drive the Kim family, the yearlong investigation found. The report said in 2013, Kim ordered the Korean People’s Army to build a “world class” skiing resort — apparently because South Korea would have such facilities when it hosts the 2018 Winter Olympics.
But Kim and his regime are unlikely to ever face prosecution for crimes against humanity because the case would have to be referred to the International Criminal Court by the UN Security Council. China, Kim’s closet ally, has a veto on the council.