Survivor of North Korean gulags makes wrenching drawings of what happens inside“Pump torture. After sitting, you stand about a hundred times.”

A United Nations panel has accused North Korea of crimes against humanity, including systematic extermination, “murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence … and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation.”

The report is based on a year of public hearings with about 80 witnesses as well as confidential interviews with another 240 victims, including people who’d spent time in North Korean prison camps and experts.

Kim Kwang-il, a 48-year-old man who spent two years in a prison in North Korea, defected to South Korea in February 2009 and subsequently had professional artists draw sketches based on his recollections of torture and the conditions of prisoner life. Some of these were included in the report.

The U.N. obviously heard enough to decide that the pictures genuinely illustrate the atrocities being committed. They are similar to images published by former prisoners in 2012.

Kim Kwang-il told the UN that he “actually got worse treatment than the pictures that are shown in the book.”

That’s hard to imagine.

“Solitary confinement punishment. Capturing mice from inside the cell.”

Survivor of North Korean gulags makes wrenching drawings of what happens inside2

“The corpses are taken to the crematorium.”

Survivor of North Korean gulags makes wrenching drawings of what happens inside3

“The mice eat the eyes, nose, ears, and toes of the corpses.”

Survivor of North Korean gulags makes wrenching drawings of what happens inside4

“Out of starvation and hunger, find snakes and rats and you eat them.”

Survivor of North Korean gulags makes wrenching drawings of what happens inside5

“Scale, airplane, motorcycle.” Survivors told the UN that they had to stay in painful stress positions with arms extended until they collapsed out of exhaustion.

Survivor of North Korean gulags makes wrenching drawings of what happens inside6

“Detention center.”

Survivor of North Korean gulags makes wrenching drawings of what happens inside7

In this position, called “pigeon torture,” prisoners are reportedly beaten on the chest until they vomit blood.

Survivor of North Korean gulags makes wrenching drawings of what happens inside8

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