N. Korean reveals childhood torture

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SEOUL — He says he was tortured as a teenager. He watched as his mother and brother were executed, and until he was 20 years old, North Korean Shin Dong-hyuk had heard of neither Kim Il-sung nor Kim Jong-il.

In a testimony to stunned journalists yesterday, Mr. Shin, the first North Korean defector to the South who was born in the North's notorious gulag, revealed a nightmarish world in which inmates and their children suffer lifetime incarceration, are kept ignorant of outside society and undergo forms of torture that are medieval in their barbarism.

"In my heart, I thought: 'Parents committed crimes, but why were innocent children punished?' " he said at a press conference introducing his autobiography "Escape to the Outside World."

"I want to tell the world of this."

Slight, and with a humble manner, he shook as he showed cameramen his extensive scars. His story has shocked even analysts who monitor Pyongyang's human rights abuses.

North Korea claims it is a "worker's paradise," and that it has no political prisoners.

But outside authorities have evidence it operates a vast gulag system thought to hold more than 200,000 political prisoners and their families.

"We didn't believe it," said Kim Sang-hun, head of Seoul's Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, of Mr. Shin's story.

"It took many months before we were convinced he was what he said he was," said Mr. Kim, who debriefed and now cares for Mr. Shin.

Mr. Shin's mother was imprisoned in "Total Control Camp No. 14" in central North Korea, for political crimes. As reward for good work, she was allowed to marry. The couple's "honeymoon" was five nights together before being separated again. Mr. Shin was born in 1982.