North Korea Says 'Gassing' Allegations Are Smear To Justify War

NZ Stuff | November 23 2004

SEOUL: North Korea conducted lethal chemical experiments on humans until 2002 as part of a programme to develop weapons of mass destruction, a human rights group said yesterday, quoting former scientists from the communist state.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre said the scientists gave first-person testimony describing gassing of political prisoners in the North from the 1970s until 2002.

"We can basically, I think collectively conclude that North Korean political prisoners are gassed," he told reporters.

Cooper said the testimonies, if true, indicated the existence of functional gas chambers, where enemies of state were eliminated with no sense of remorse.

"That makes a mockery of the lessons that civilisation alleges that it has learned since the end of World War 2".

Cooper urged the international community and the South Korean government to look hard at the allegations.

"Such barbaric practices, if proven, should lead to legal action against its instigators and perpetrators," Cooper said.

The South Korean government had questioned the validity of previous reports on human chemical testing in North Korea.

North Korea has previously denied the reports, calling them a US "smear campaign" designed to justify war against it.

Two of the scientists cited were those who had previously provided testimony that resulted in a BBC television report earlier this year about gassing of political prisoners in experimental gas chambers in the North, Cooper said.

The third was a former chemist in North Korea who had been involved in experiments using gas that killed immediately and another type that killed slowly, he added.

The latter claimed to have worked only with animals, but the result of "successful" tests would then be turned over to colleagues who "experimented on human guinea pigs," Cooper said.

The witness fled the communist state in 2002 and now lived in South Korea, Cooper said.

Victims in the experiments described by the other two witnesses were put into a glass cell hooked up for audio, Cooper said quoting one of the witnesses.

"It didn't just take two and a half hours for a prisoner to die. There was two-way communication in terms of audio," he said, adding this implied the scientists were also monitoring the degree of suffering during a slow death.

"I don't think there is any question that such practices continue to take place."

The alleged experiments, while similar to gassing of Jews by the Nazis during World War 2, were different in that they were part of a programme to develop weapons of mass destruction, he said.

Cooper said a lack of denial of the experiments at a meeting with a South Korean Foreign Ministry official yesterday suggested Seoul had independent verification of such experiments.

But Foreign Ministry spokesman Lee Kyu-hyun denied this. "We do not have independent sources who can confirm the experiments," he said.

Pyonygang has admitted to operating a nuclear weapons programme based on plutonium technologies and is also accused of secretly operating one based on uranium, something it has denied.

The programmes are at the centre of slow-moving, six-country negotiations by the two Koreas, the United States, Japan, Russia and China aimed at stopping the North's programmes.

North Korea's official media yesterday denied a Japanese media report that it had sold fluorine gas - used to manufacture weapons-grade uranium - to Iran.

"Explicitly speaking, there had never been any negotiation or dealing between the DPRK and Iran as regards the nuclear issue," the North's KCNA news agency said, using its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

---------------------------

E mail your comment on this article to newstips@propagandamatrix.com and have it posted here.