North Korean human experimentation
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Human experimentation in North Korea is an issue raised by some
North Korean defectors Since the division of Korea after the end of World War II, North Koreans have fled from the country in spite of legal punishment for political, ideological, religious, economic, moral, personal, or nutritional reasons. Such North Koreans are ...
and former prisoners. They have described suffocation of prisoners in
gas chamber A gas chamber is an apparatus for killing humans or other animals with gas, consisting of a sealed chamber into which a poisonous or asphyxiant gas is introduced. Poisonous agents used include hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide. History ...
s, testing deadly
chemical weapon A chemical weapon (CW) is a specialized munition that uses chemicals formulated to inflict death or harm on humans. According to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), this can be any chemical compound intended as a ...
s and surgery without
anesthesia Anesthesia is a state of controlled, temporary loss of sensation or awareness that is induced for medical or veterinary purposes. It may include some or all of analgesia (relief from or prevention of pain), paralysis (muscle relaxation), ...
.


Sources

Human experimentation in North Korea has been described by several North Korean defectors, including former prisoner
Lee Soon-ok Lee Soon-ok (born 1947 in Chongjin, North Korea) is a North Korean defector and the author of '' Eyes of the Tailless Animals: Prison Memoirs of a North Korean Woman'', her account of being falsely accused, tortured, and imprisoned under poor c ...
, former prison guards Kwon Hyok and Ahn Myung-chul, and others. In Lee's testimony to the U.S. SenateSoon Ok Lee, "Testimony of Ms. Soon Ok Lee", Hearings & Meetings,
United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary The United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, informally the Senate Judiciary Committee, is a standing committee of 22 U.S. senators whose role is to oversee the Department of Justice (DOJ), consider executive and judicial nominations ...
, June 21, 2002
archived
September 22, 2008, at archive.today. and in her prison memoir '' Eyes of the Tailless Animals'' (published in 1999) she recounted witnessing two instances of lethal human experimentation. An episode of the
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
television programme '' This World''Olenka Frenkiel
"Within prison walls"
BBC News BBC News is an operational business division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs in the UK and around the world. The department is the world's largest broadc ...
, January 30, 2004
archived
May 25, 2012, at archive.today.Olenka Frenkiel
"Human guinea pigs"
BBC News BBC News is an operational business division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs in the UK and around the world. The department is the world's largest broadc ...
, July 28, 2004
archived
July 13, 2012, at archive.today. detailed some of the allegations. The accusations have been described as "very plausible" by a senior US official quoted anonymously by
NBC News NBC News is the news division of the American broadcast television network NBC. The division operates under NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, a division of NBCUniversal, which is, in turn, a subsidiary of Comcast. The news division's v ...
. Lee's accounts have been questioned by Chang In-suk, former head of the North Korean Defectors’ Association in Seoul, as well as a number of former North Korean citizens on NKnet who believed that Lee's accounts were "unlikely to be true".


Testing of deadly poisons

Lee described an experiment in which 50 healthy female prisoners were selected and given poisoned cabbage leaves. All of the women were required to eat the cabbage, despite cries of distress from those who had already eaten. All 50 died after 20 minutes of vomiting blood and anal bleeding. Refusing to eat the cabbage would allegedly have meant reprisals against them and their families. Kwon Hyok, who has stated he was a former head of security at
Camp 22 Hoeryong concentration camp (or Haengyong concentration camp) was a prison camp in North Korea that was reported to have been closed in 2012. The official name was Kwalliso (penal labour colony) No. 22. The camp was a maximum security area, comp ...
, described laboratories equipped with glass gas chambers for suffocation gas experiments, in which three or four people, normally a family, are the experimental subjects.Antony Barnett
"Revealed: the gas chamber horror of North Korea's gulag"
Guardian Unlimited TheGuardian.com, formerly known as Guardian.co.uk and ''Guardian Unlimited'', is a British news and media website owned by the Guardian Media Group. It contains nearly all of the content of the newspapers ''The Guardian'' and ''The Observer'', ...
, January 1, 2004
archived
March 14, 2018, at archive.today. After the people undergo medical checks, the chambers are sealed and poison is injected through a tube, while scientists observe from above through glass. In a report reminiscent of an earlier account of a family of seven, Kwon claims to have watched one family of two parents, a son and a daughter die from suffocating gas, with the parents trying to save the children using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for as long as they had the strength. Dr. Kim, a chemist who led these experiments before defecting from North Korea, confirmed these reports and stated that the experiments' purposes included observing the poison gas's effects on victims' mental state and determining how much gas would be needed to kill everyone in an area. Kwon's testimony was supported by documents from Camp 22 describing the transfer of prisoners designated for the experiments; the documents were identified as genuine by Kim Sang-hun, a London-based expert on Korea and human rights activist. Toxicologist
Alastair Hay Alastair Watt Macintyre Hay (born April 1947) is a British toxicologist, and a Professor of Environmental Toxicology; he works primarily in the fields of chemical warfare and biological warfare (CBW). Education Hay gained a Bachelor of Science de ...
stated that Kim's testimony is detailed and scientifically accurate enough that it is likely to be true. A press conference in
Pyongyang Pyongyang (, , ) is the capital and largest city of North Korea, where it is known as the "Capital of the Revolution". Pyongyang is located on the Taedong River about upstream from its mouth on the Yellow Sea. According to the 2008 populat ...
, organized by North Korean authorities, denounced the allegations and claimed that the corroborating documents had been forged. Shin Eon-sang, South Korea's Assistant Minister for Unification Policy, stated that " e authenticity of the evidence is difficult to assess" because North Korean defectors' "claims are in most cases exaggerated." Kwon's account was also questioned by the
Yonhap News Agency Yonhap News Agency is a major South Korean news agency. It is based in Seoul, South Korea. Yonhap provides news articles, pictures and other information to newspapers, TV networks and other media in South Korea. History Yonhap (, , translit. ' ...
based in South Korea, which argued he had never served in a political prison and had no access to the information he claimed. Kwon and Kim claim that the South Korean National Intelligence Service told them not to talk about North Korean human experimentation to avoid harming South Korea's relations with North Korea, and harassed them and denied them passports when they refused.


Other experiments

Former prison guard Ahn Myung-chul has reported that young doctors practice surgeries on prisoners without
anesthesia Anesthesia is a state of controlled, temporary loss of sensation or awareness that is induced for medical or veterinary purposes. It may include some or all of analgesia (relief from or prevention of pain), paralysis (muscle relaxation), ...
. Ahn Myung Chul
"Prisoners Used for Medical Operation Practice"
''
Daily NK ''Daily NK'' is an online newspaper based in Seoul, South Korea, where it reports on various aspects of North Korean society from information obtained from inside and outside of North Korea via a network of informants. North Korea is ranked 179 ...
'', January 18, 2006
archived
January 20, 2013, at archive.today. He also described deliberate efforts to study physical resistance by starving prisoners to death. According to him, "The people who carry out these executions and these experiments all drink before they do it. But they are real experts now; sometimes they hit prisoners with a hammer, on the back of the head. The poor prisoners then lose their memory, and they use them as zombies for target practice. When the Third Bureau is running out of subjects, a black van known as 'the crow' turns up and picks out a few more prisoners, sowing panic among the rest. The crow comes about once a month and takes forty or fifty people off to an unknown destination."Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Panné, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski,
Stéphane Courtois Stéphane Courtois (born 25 November 1947) is a French historian and university professor, a director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), professor at the Catholic Institute of Higher Studies (ICES) in La Ro ...
, ''
The Black Book of Communism ''The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression'' is a 1997 book by Stéphane Courtois, Andrzej Paczkowski, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Margolin, and several other European academics documenting a history of political repression by co ...
: Crimes, Terror, Repression'',
Harvard University Press Harvard University Press (HUP) is a publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University, and focused on academic publishing. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses. After the retir ...
, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, , page 557


See also

* Illicit activities of North Korea International *
Unit 731 , short for Manshu Detachment 731 and also known as the Kamo Detachment and Ishii Unit, was a covert Biological warfare, biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that engaged in unethical h ...
, Japan *
Project MKUltra Project MKUltra (or MK-Ultra) was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), intended to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used in interrogations to weak ...
*
Nazi human experimentation Nazi human experimentation was a series of medical experiments on large numbers of prisoners, including children, by Nazi Germany in its concentration camps in the early to mid 1940s, during World War II and the Holocaust. Chief target po ...
*
Poison laboratory of the Soviet secret services The poison laboratory of the Soviet secret services, alternatively known as Laboratory 1, Laboratory 12, and Kamera (which means "The Cell" in Russian), was a covert research-and-development facility of the Soviet secret police agencies. Th ...
*
Unethical human experimentation Unethical human experimentation is human experimentation that violates the principles of medical ethics. Such practices have included denying patients the right to informed consent, using pseudoscientific frameworks such as race science, and tortu ...
*
Unethical human experimentation in the United States Numerous experiments which are performed on human test subjects in the United States are considered unethical, because they are performed without the knowledge or informed consent of the test subjects. Such tests have been performed throughout ...


References


External links


"Former guard: Ahn Myong Chol North Korean prison guard remembers atrocities."

"A survivor: Soon Ok Lee 7 years of torture in N. Korean prison camp."
{{DEFAULTSORT:Human Experimentation In North Korea Human rights abuses in North Korea Medical experimentation on prisoners Torture in North Korea N