Japanese television aired on Friday what it said was rare footage of a North Korean prison camp for political prisoners, as six-way talks on Pyongyang’s nuclear program bogged down in Beijing.
The footage on Japan’s Fuji Television Network, said to have been smuggled out of the communist state, showed poorly dressed men and women laboring in snowy fields.
Prisoners in drab grey uniforms, the men with their heads bared and the women wearing only scarves despite temperatures said to be well below freezing, harvested cabbages and hauled heavy loads in the infamous Yodok 15 prison camp.
Fuji Television said the video was obtained from a defector who managed to secretly film the labor camp, located 62 miles north of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.
In one scene, women working in a snowy field furtively stuff cabbage leaves into their mouths, stopping when a guard -- dressed in a heavy coat and fur cap -- steps near.
Other footage showed pairs of men and women carrying what the daily Sankei Shimbun said were canisters of human waste slung from a pole across their shoulders.
Guards with rifles patrolled around the fenced-in camp, which had rows of barracks set together in the midst of bleak countryside.
Slave laborers
A report in October by the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea said North Korea had between 150,000 to 200,000 political prisoners working as slave laborers in prison colonies.
North Korean authorities have consistently denied these camps exist or that human rights violations have occurred.
The report said many prisoners were given just enough food to be kept perpetually on the verge of starvation and forced to do back-breaking labor such as mining for iron ore.
Talks on Pyongyang’s nuclear program went into their third day on Friday as top envoys from the United States, Russia, Japan, China, and both Koreas struggled to reach an agreement.