The  Scotsman  UK

NORTH KOREA: Children Forced to Watch North Korean Executions

Starving North Koreans have been publicly executed for stealing food and others have died of malnutrition in labour camps, Amnesty International said in a report today.

The human rights group urged the North Korean government to "ensure that food shortages are not used as a tool to persecute perceived political opponents."

The report - released in Bombay at the World Social Forum, an international gathering of anti-globalization activists - records the chilling testimonies of North Korean refugees interviewed in South Korea and Japan and interviews with international aid groups during 2002 and 2003.

Titled Starved of Rights: Human Rights and the Food Crisis in the Democratic People�s Republic of Korea, the report accuses the Pyongyang government of distributing food unfairly, favouring those who are economically active and politically loyal.

"Some North Koreans, who were motivated by hunger to steal food grains or livestock, have been publicly executed," London-based Amnesty International researcher Rajiv Narayan said.

"Public notices advertised the executions and school children were forced to watch the shootings or hangings," he said.

Public executions were at their highest from 1996 to 1998, when famine gripped North Korea, the report said.

North Korea�s isolated Stalinist regime has relied on foreign aid to feed its people since revealing in the mid-1990s that its state-run farming industry had collapsed.

The Amnesty report appears to confirm fears of the United States and others that food supplies are being diverted to the North�s huge military or given as rewards to supporters of North Korea�s leader Kim Jong Il.

"We were always so hungry and resorted to eating grass in spring," said one person, identified only as Kim, who served four years in a labour camp on treason charges.

Kim spoke of meals being taken away as punishment if detainees were caught speaking to each other.

"I saw people die of malnutrition," said Kim. "When someone died fellow prisoners delayed reporting his death to the authorities so that they could eat his allocated breakfast."

The names of those interviewed were changed due to fears that the families they left behind would be punished, Amnesty researcher Narayan said.

Human rights activists have criticised North Korea for its harsh labour camps, where people are detained after fleeing to China to escape famine and political repression at home.

China has a treaty with Pyongyang that obliges it to return fleeing North Koreans, but allows them to leave for the South if their cases become publicly known.

Refugees told Amnesty researchers how food usually comprised of potato skin and beans.

"Those caught hiding vegetables had to beat each other," said one person identified by the name Cho. If they didn�t hit each other hard enough, Cho said, they would be beaten by the labour camp guards.

Another person identified as Lee said the food shortage forced him to go to China. "I had to choose whether to live or die I wanted to live and so decided to leave North Korea."

The United Nations� World Food Program said this week it had been forced to cut off food aid to 2.7 million North Korean women and children during the country�s harsh winter due to a lack of foreign donations.

A key issue for the North�s biggest food donors - the United States and South Korea - has been Pyongyang�s restrictions on allowing foreign agencies to monitor who receives food aid.

The Amnesty report called for "free and unimpeded access" for humanitarian groups to all parts of North Korea.