NP - Slave Labor

[David Morris]

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,3-2001270707,00.html

MONDAY AUGUST 06 2001

Kim sells workers to gulags in debt deal

FROM GILES WHITTELL IN MOSCOW

IN AN extraordinary effort to maintain its status as an honest debtor, North 
Korea is to repay loans worth billions of pounds to Russia by sending 
thousands of workers to toil in closed logging camps in eastern Siberia.

The spectre of the gulag came to haunt President Kim’s Moscow summit with a 
report that, in order to service a $5.5 billion (£3.5 billion) Soviet-era 
debt, he will enlarge a scheme blamed for the torture and summary execution 
of some of his country’s most desperate refugees.

Pyongyang’s barter of labour for loans dates from the 1960s and has produced 
an archipelago of labour camps in some of Russia’s most remote forests, 
where human rights activists claim that inmates are tortured for petty 
crimes, pursued if they try to escape and are sometimes shot if captured and 
returned to North Korea. About 90 per cent of the dictatorship’s debt to 
Moscow was serviced with “free” labour last year, a Russian Economics 
Ministry spokesman told the RIA Novosti news agency, adding that Mr Kim 
intended to repay his outstanding Russian debts in the same way over the 
next 30 years. The first detailed claims of abuse in one of the leaststudied 
corners of the Russian labour camp system did not emerge until nearly a 
decade after the start of perestroika. A report by Amnesty International in 
1994 alleged that North Korean secret police still operated freely in a 
string of camps in the Badzharsky Mountains northwest of Khabarovsk, where 
inmates signed three-year contracts to cut timber, the profits from which 
were split between the Russian and North Korean Governments.




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