Horror of North Korean Prison Camps Exposed at U.N. Panel Hearing | Washington Free Beacon

Shin Dong-hyuk, a former North Korean defector, attends a public hearing at Yonsei university in Seoul, Aug. 20, 2013. 

REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji

BY: Reuters
August 20, 2013 3:52 pm

By Ju-min Park and Michelle Kim

SEOUL (Reuters) – Public executions and torture are daily occurrences in North Korea’s prisons, according to dramatic testimony from former inmates at a U.N. Commission of Inquiry that opened in South Korea’s capital on Tuesday.

This is the first time that the North’s human rights record has been examined by an expert panel, although the North, now ruled by a third generation of the founding Kim family, denies that it abuses human rights. It refuses to recognize the commission and has denied access to investigators.

Harrowing accounts from defectors now living in South Korea related how guards chopped off a man’s finger, forced inmates to eat frogs and a mother to kill her own baby......

FULL ARTICLE HERE: Horror of North Korean Prison Camps Exposed at U.N. Panel Hearing | Washington Free Beacon

"Berlin Wall" Speech - President Reagan's Address at the Brandenburg Gate - 6/12/87 - YouTube

"Berlin Wall" Speech - President Reagan's Address at the Brandenburg Gate - 6/12/87 - YouTube

Cuba's little capitalists are ready to rumba

Raul Castro betrays the Faith, and Fidel is too tired to shoot him. Wailing and gnashing of teeth heard from graves in Highgate Cemetery in London as heretics allow Cubans tiny slivers of free enterprise. Meyer Lansky actually crawls out of his grave with bags of casino chips, last seen staggering toward Havana.

Desmond Boylan  /  Reuters/ Customers are entertained as they dine inside the newly licensed restaurant "El Bedouino" in Havana, April 1, 2012. The restaurant is an example of how life is changing in Cuba since President Raul Castro launched a string of limited economic reforms.  

HAVANA — When Ojacy Curbello and her husband opened a restaurant at their home in Havana in late December, not a single customer showed up

It was a disheartening debut for Bollywood, the first Indian restaurant in the Cuban capital. Curbello worried that their dream of cashing in on recent reforms in this Communist-run country would collapse.

The next day customers began trickling in. As word spread, the trickle became a flood. Many nights the couple had to turn people away or serve them at the family dining table and call in extra help. Today they are planning to increase the 22-seat capacity by expanding their 1950s home and putting tables and a bar in what is now their bedroom.

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A Child of the North Korean Gulag

‘Because I am surrounded by good people, I try to do what good people do. But it is very difficult. It does not flow from me naturally. . . . I am evolving from being an animal. But it is going very, very slowly.” Shin Dong-hyuk was speaking to Blaine Harden, a reporter for Frontline and a contributor to The Economist who has served as the Washington Post’s bureau chief in East Asia. Harden has recently authored the gripping memoir Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West.

As Harden recounts, Shin was born in 1982 in Camp 14 in North Korea, a “no exit” political camp largely populated by entire families. It is one of six camps that may hold a total of 200,000 prisoners, the biggest of which occupies an area larger than Los Angeles. These camps are clearly visible in satellite reconnaissance photos, but North Korea denies that they exist.

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THE ECONOMIST: Revolution in retreat

 

WHEN ON JULY 31st 2006 Cuban state television broadcast a terse statement from Fidel Castro to say that he had to undergo emergency surgery and was temporarily handing over to his brother, Raúl (pictured with Fidel, left), it felt like the end of an era. The man who had dominated every aspect of life on the island for almost half a century seemed to be on his way out. In the event Fidel survived, and nothing appeared to change. Even so, that July evening marked the start of a slow but irreversible dismantling of communism (officially, “socialism”) in one of the tiny handful of countries in which it survived into the 21st century.

Raúl Castro, who formally took over as Cuba’s president in February 2008 and as first secretary of the Communist Party in April 2011, is trying to revive the island’s moribund economy by transferring a substantial chunk of it from state to private hands, with profound social and political implications. He has abolished a few of the many petty restrictions that pervade Cubans’ lives. He has also freed around 130 political prisoners. His government has signed the UN covenants on human rights, something his brother had jibbed at for three decades. Repression has become less brutal, though two prisoners have died on hunger strikes. Cubans grumble far more openly than they used to, and academic debate has become a bit freer. But calls for democracy and free elections are still silenced. The Communist Party remains the only legal political party in Cuba. And Raúl Castro has repeatedly dashed the hopes of many Cubans that the hated exit visa, which makes it hard (and for some, impossible) to leave the country, will be scrapped.

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