[USFK Forums] Analysis: North Korea's gulag put to music [UPI]

[C. Y. Lee]

Uploaded by C. Y. Lee on Friday, March 24, 2006

Analysis: North Korea's gulag put to music

By Jong-Heon Lee
UPI Correspondent
Published March 23, 2006

If you don't have a chance to travel to North Korea to witness human rights abuses in prison camps, go to a cultural center in southern Seoul. There, you can get a rare glimpse into the hidden world of North Korea's gulag -- through a musical.

Written and directed by a defector who says his father was executed in a detention camp in the North, "Yoduk Story" depicts human misery endured by some 200,000 political prisoners detained in more than 10 gulags across the reclusive country.

The musical is set in one of those camps, Yoduk, situated in the country's remote northeastern area where some 50,000 political prisoners are believed to incarcerated. The show aims to convey their plight with South Koreans fortunate to enjoy democratic freedoms.

"With this work, I aim to let the world know the reality of North Korea's prison camps and to save the souls of the victims," said Jung Sung-san, the show's director, who endured prison confinement for listening to a banned South Korean broadcast. He defected to the South in 1995.

"I planned to make a theater of cruelty when I heard of my father's death in a camp. This musical is a way of getting the grief out for my father's death," Jung said, revealing that his father was hit on the head with stones until he died at a prison camp.

"I hope this musical highlights the humanitarian plight facing our Northern brethren," the 37-year-old defector-turned-director said.

The 150-minute musical explored the misery of daily life for Yoduk's inmates -- from families of purged senior officials to a South Korean prisoner of war whose tongue was cut by torture and a kidnapped Japanese woman.

The inmates also include a girl arrested for neglecting the country's "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung and a mad woman taken into the camp after a failed attempt to flee to Spain.

The musical centers on the tale of a 25-year-old North Korean woman who was a nationally decorated dancer only to be sent to Yoduk on false charges that her father, a senior Workers' Party official, along with other family members, had spied for South Korea. Under North Korean law, family members are punished for the crimes of their relatives.

She is tortured and raped by a prison guard, against a dark, operatic background of cruelty, hunger and despair. The guard himself later becomes a prisoner.

Surrounded by armed-guards, prisoners smear their faces with the blood of a fellow inmate executed for trying to escape from the gulag. Soldiers dance across the stage calling for death to traitors with a patriotic North Korean song blaring in the background.

"God! Please come to this place. Please rein in this place. The prison of hell -- Yoduk," inmates cried out to a visibly distressed capacity audience.

"During rehearsals, we wept in sorrow and anger about the harsh reality in the North," said Choi Yoon-jung who plays the lead role. "We could not believe the cruelty (that) happens there," she said.

"Yoduk Story is a work looking back on several years of my life full of painful tears in the detention camp," said Kim Young-sun, the show's choreographer who defected to South Korea in 2003.

Kim, 68, a former People's Army troupe dancer, was sent to the Yoduk camp in 1970 after her husband, an encyclopedia editor, disappeared and spent eight years there. Kim said she was one of the classmates of Song Hae Rim, an actress who later became the third and unofficial wife of North Korean Kim Jong Il.

"This work of two hours is not equal to describing all the sufferings. It's more horrible in reality. But I hope this show would serve as an occasion to draw attentions on human rights abuses in North Korea," she said.

"I was deeply impressed by this musical," Kim Jung-hyuk, 69, said at the end of the show. "I felt human rights abuse in North Korea is a real problem thanks to this show," he said.

Opposition lawmaker Park Jin described the musical as a "desperate message" on the human rights violations in the North. "An Artistic work sometimes carries more powerful message than political moves," he told United Press International.

"What we have to do for now is not words but actions to improve human rights conditions in North Korea. This is the message of this musical," he said.

Park also urged the Seoul to take substantial measures to address concerns about the North's human rights abuses.

South Korea has also maintained a low-key stance towards human rights abuses in North Korea for fear of creating friction with Pyongyang, already under increased pressure from the United States.

Director Jung said the government's possible pressure forced some investors to pull out of the plans and a theater canceled a planned staging of the show at the last minute, posing the biggest hurdle to the show.

Kim Young, managing editor of an Internet-based news outlet Dailian, said his company donated the stage to the Yoduk Story. "A number of individuals also joined the fund-raising campaigns for the musical," said Jung who once offered to put up his left kidney as collateral for a black-market loan.

Jung said the Yoduk Story is the first part of a four-part series of musicals he plans to make. The second will be "Son of Chicago," the story of an American prisoner of war who was detained by the North.



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