Interviews with Ahn Myeong Chul

Members of the [Workers’] Party and the small number of people living around the political prison camp area probably know they exist. But ordinary North Korean residents will not have much knowledge about the political prison camps.

[The Workers’ Party of Korea is the communist party that has run North Korea since the state was established in 1948.]

If your neighbor’s entire family disappeared in the middle of the night, you would feel some amount of terror, but you wouldn’t know exactly what happened to them, how they’re being punished, and where they have been taken.

The reason party members know about them is because when power is given to party members, they are also given the message that if you do something wrong; you will be subject to punishment.

This is one way the authorities try to ensure strict loyalty to the party and to the regime.

Ahn Myeong Chul was born in North Hamgyong Province in North Korea. As a teenager, he was the only person from his province selected to serve as a political prison camp guard. Ahn worked in several camps for a period of eight years where he was brainwashed into believing that political prisoners were enemies of the state unworthy of sympathy. As many as 130,000 men, women and children are imprisoned in North Korea’s vast system of gulags.

Although Ahn witnessed executions, starving children, and extreme torture, it was not until he became a prison truck driver that he questioned the system. Ahn would converse with prisoners he transported and was astonished to learn they knew nothing about the reasons for their imprisonment. It was his introduction to the country’s system of “guilt-by-association” punishment; in North Korea, whole families are incarcerated for the offenses of a single family member.

While on leave in 1994, Ahn learned that his father, a member of the ruling Workers’ Party, had committed suicide after questioning the regime’s rationing system. Ahn’s mother and siblings were imprisoned for his father’s offenses. Fearing that authorities would come for him, he fled to China and eventually reached safety in South Korea.

Since his escape, Ahn has become a North Korean human rights activist. He has provided testimony at the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and is now the secretary general of the organization Free NK Gulag.