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North Korea gassing its citizens: rights group
Last Updated Wed, 27 Apr 2005 08:30:27 EDT
CBC News
WASHINGTON - A human rights organization known for tracking down Nazi war criminals is taking aim at North Korea, saying the regime uses deadly nerve gas on its own citizens and may even be operating experimental gas chambers.
* INDEPTH: North Korea
The Simon Wiesenthal Center sent American rabbi Abraham Cooper, the centre's associate dean, to Asia to investigate the reports, which the North Korean regime denies.
Cooper interviewed a number of former North Korean officials who have since defected.
* RELATED: CBC Radio's Dispatches website
One man, a 55-year-old chemist, claimed he was in charge of an experiment to test the effect of deadly nerve gas on political prisoners.
"He said he was involved in the killing of two people – one who did not expire for 2½ hours, and the second didn't die till 3½ hours had passed," Cooper told CBC for a documentary airing Wednesday night on the radio program Dispatches.
Other defectors told him of "mass starvations, gruesome experimentations, and yes, as we now are beginning to learn and to confirm, gas chambers," he said.
Soon Ok Lee, a North Korean now living in the United States, said she spent years in a political prison camp before escaping.
"When I was in jail, there was at least once or twice in the prison camp, chemical testing on humans that I witnessed," she said.
Crimes against humanity alleged
Cooper said the Simon Wiesenthal Centre intends to pursue action against the North Korean regime, which it says might be guilty of crimes against humanity.
"We're not talking about mass murder, utilizing these gas chambers to mass-murder huge numbers of people," he said. "But on the other hand, you have in the North Korean regime folks who have learned from Hitler, from Stalin."
During the Second World War, Hitler's regime killed an estimated six million Jews, many of them in gas chambers. More than 10 million are estimated to have died as a result of Stalin's collectivization policies and political purges in the 1930s.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center was founded in 1977 by a Holocaust survivor to preserve the memory of those killed by taking action against racism and genocide around the world, as well as helping bring Nazi war criminals to justice.
"We are here today to put the 'N' back into 'Never again,'" said Cooper.
On Thursday, human rights activists in Asia, Europe and North America plan to stage demonstrations in a number of cities to draw attention to alleged rights violations in North Korea.
They are calling the effort "North Korea Freedom Day."
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