The U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea has just released a devastating report that includes satellite images of prison camps in which several hundred thousand North Koreans are held. As Anne Applebaum, who’s just published a book on the Soviet gulag, writes in today’s Washington Post, “If any of the democratic participants–the United States, South Korea, Japan–were to absorb fully the information the images convey, the knowledge would make it impossible for that country to conduct any policy toward North Korea that did not make regime change its central tenet.”
One of the people trying to bring these abuses to light is Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor who worked in North Korea, which eventually expelled him, and now he organizes protests while travelling around the world trying to raise awareness of abuses there. JoongAng Ilbo, in an intriguing profile, describes Vollertsen as the Philip Berrigan of our age, which sounds right.
