WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED
ACTIVISTS MAP LIKELY SITES WHERE NORTH KOREA DUMPED PRISONERS ‘LIKE TRASH’
• For two years, from a cramped office in central Seoul, activists and volunteers from five countries have been doing something never tried before: creating interactive maps of places where North Korea is thought to have executed and buried prisoners.
Over the years, defectors from the isolated country have testified to widespread human rights violations there, including what United Nations investigators have determined were extrajudicial executions of political prisoners and others. But there has never been a co- ordinated attempt to locate where those killings actually took place because the country remains off limits to outside rights investigators.
On Wednesday, activists affiliated with the Transitional Justice Working Group, a human rights group based in Seoul, announced their initial findings, identifying more than 300 sites where executions are thought to have occurred and 47 sites believed to have hosted cremations and burials, places where as many as 15 people may have been executed and their bodies dumped together or left “like trash.”
“It is not unreasonable to assume that mass grave sites in existence today will still be there years from now,” said Sarah A. Son, the group’s research director. “As we have seen in many other post-conflict settings around the world, people will want to know what happened to family members, and an accurate historical record will need to be created as part of the process of recovery, particularly on a scale such as that in North Korea.”
Armed with Google Earth satellite imagery, the group has interviewed 375 North Korean defectors, asking them to help locate sites so that international rights officials can one day visit them to investigate, exhume bodies, secure forensic evidence and possibly bring charges against perpetrators. With the maps, the group said it aimed to provide “a sense of the scale of the human rights violations, their locations, and their victims and their approximate numbers.”
“We don’t know when there will be a trial or other steps to hold perpetrators of the human rights abuses accountable, but that time will come, and we want to be as ready as possible,” said Dan Bielefeld, a web developer and human rights activist from Milwaukee. “Our location-based map of suspected sites is a start down that road.”
The activists said they were inspired by the UN’s commission of inquiry, which in 2014 reported prison camps, systematic torture, summary executions and other widespread rights violations in North Korea.
The report led UN member states to adopt a resolution asking the Security Council to refer the North Korean leadership to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, for prosecution of possible crimes against humanity.
The North vehemently denied the findings, and its allies China and Russia have stalled any attempt to bring the North before the tribunal.
The activis t s ’ group, whose mapping project was financed by the National Endowment for Democracy, based in Washington, did not include the interactive maps in its report for fear North Korea would tamper with the sites. But it allowed a repor- ter to examine them on condition that locations of the sites would not be revealed.
More than 200 locations where killings are suspected, marked with blue squares, were clustered in Hamgyong-bukdo, a northeastern province of North Korea. Most of the defectors interviewed are from that province. ( A vast majority of 30,000 North Korean defectors living in South Korea come from the provinces bordering China.)
When Bielefeld zoomed in on one town, 53 blue squares appeared within 2.5 miles of a hillside site where burials are suspected. When he clicked on a square, a brief summary popped up: a public execution by firing squad on charges the victim stole parts of mining equipment. The victim was shot by three officers from the Ministry of People’s Security.
Each square was linked to digital testimonials, including audio files, from defectors. Some testimonials gave detailed firsthand accounts with the name and profession of the victim.
In one testimonial, a defector cited a neighbour who saw security officers hacking a victim to death in a garage. The neighbour later confirmed from a relative working as a security officer that such extrajudicial killings were common in the garage. Bielefeld put a blue square on the building on his program based on the open- source OpenStreetMap.
Public executions took place most often between 1 994 and 2000, during which North Korea struggled to control its people suffering in a nationwide famine, it said.
“They hanged people in crowded places like markets and left the bodies there for hours to instill fear among the people,” said Oh Se Hyek, a North Korean defector who conducted the interviews for the mapping project.