DPRK

That is, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. North Korea. I'm a member of the newly re-formed North Korean Human Rights Club on campus, and I borrowed a book about its prison camps recently from another member. It's based on interviews conducted with North Korean refugees who escaped from the camps, and details in some 260 pages the horrific practices which the former prisoners testified to having witnessed or experienced there. The pages have titles like "A Child Brutally Beaten for a Minor Offense" and "Prisoners Eating Salamanders, Frogs and Anything Else To Stay Alive." I was struck by these sentences in the introduction, as they confirm a notion I'd been forming for several months:

"...[W]e are convinced that the most abominable and horrifying crimes against humanity, worse than those of Nazi concentration camps, Soviet gulags, or anything else, have been perpetuated in North Korea for decades. Although the twentieth century has witnessed terrible bloodshed from ethnic cleansing and genocide, political oppression, and religious hostilities, none has surpassed, we believe, the crimes of North Korea in terms of length, systematic practice, terror, and secrecy. We are convinced that the worst crimes in the world today are being committed daily in North Korea. "

We're preparing a short presentation for an event next weekend, and I and several others are writing a brief...well, not speech, but you know, thing that you say aloud in front of a crowd, to summarize the state of affairs in North Korea and the most important background information. I'll post it when we finish it.