According to North Korea, the big news is that Dear Leader II (doesn't that roll of the tongue nicely) finally has a girlfriend-nay-wife. A real, live, human wife. Her name is Comrade Ri Sol Ju, and no one can be sure whether that's her name, when they actually got married, her age or where her home planet is located. Something must be a little off with her to agree to marry Kim Jong Un, despite his overwhelming and infectious charm.
Even though a North Korean state-wedding is thrilling, right up there with Will and Kate, but where the new couple chooses to honeymoon, isn't what the world should be focused on, but instead what is going on in the shadows of the couple.
Shin Dong-hyuk is the only known person to have escaped from a total-control zone grade internment camp in North Korea.
The story of his life in the camp and his eventual escape was the subject of journalist Blaine Harden's book, Escape from Camp 14.
The book exposes the shocking horror of North Korea's hidden gulag.
Shortly before his mother's public execution for an escape attempt, Shin recalls the guards questioning him as to whether he knew anything about the attempt. He maintained that he knew nothing.
To make sure that he was being truthful, the guards put hooks in him and slowly lowered his then emaciated teenage body over an open fire, causing severe burns, that took months to heal.
Torture is not uncommon in the prison camp.
For six decades, the North Korean gulag system has proven itself to be the biggest crime against humanity in the world.
Yet, we still don't know much about them. In fact according to the government in North Korea - the camps don't even exist.
But Google Maps tells us a different story.
The entire body of research and acknowledgment that went into the Jewish holocaust, apartheid, the Great Purge in the Soviet Union is completely nonexistent. In fact, most South Koreans ignore the topic completely, outside of the activist groups.
In 2009, for the blink of an eye, it was thought that Laura Ling and Euna Lee, two journalists who were sentenced to 12 years in the labour camps after unknowingly crossing the border from China into North Korea, might be the beacon of hope for the atrocities taking place. But that didn't materialize.
"In a media culture that feeds on celebrity, no movie star, no pop idol, no Nobel Prize winner [has] stepped forward to demand that outsiders invest emotionally in a distant issue that lacks good video," Harden writes. Tibet has Richard Gere, Haiti has Sean Penn, Bosnia has Angelina Jolie. North Korea has no one.
But the facts remain.
Few prisoners live past 40. Partly due to the heavy incessant workload they are tasked with and partly because of the near-starvation diet of corn, cabbage and salt prisoners are fed. Over time, the prisoners lose their teeth and their gums blacken.
Nicknamed the hermit kingdom the country is so desperate for income they have begun to outsource their own people, but not like Microsoft does.
Instead, they've set up smaller labour camps across the remote Siberian countryside, where people are brought in for three month contracts and then they go back to North Korea.
Imagine, if the Canadian government filled three BC Places, and 150,000 people were sent to labour camps, for undetermined amounts of time, starving and tortured.
It's simply wouldn't happen, and yet, the rest of the world and it's agencies have allowed the crimes to take place in the hermit kingdom.
Imagine if the holocaust lasted for 60 years.
It's hard to believe that it lasted for as long as it did, but decades? It's an unbelievable thought.
Canadians (and every other country for that matter) could take the lead in shaming Pyongyang and stop sitting on our collective hands, by pushing for the UN Commission of Inquiry to investigate what is actually going on in North Korea.
As Jonathan Kay of the National Post pointed out: "There is no guarantee that such efforts to shame North Korea would alter its barbaric policies, of course... Eventually, when North Korea falls, and the true scope of its gulag horror is made plain, observers will ask what the civilized nations of the world did. Let us make sure that Canada's answer isn't 'nothing.'"
-- Associate news editor, Ashley MacDonald
