North Korea is using the dead bodies of thousands of enslaved prisoners dying at the labor camps as 'human fertilizer' on the infamous 'Flower Hill'. The startling revelation was made in the recently published report by Washington DC based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK).
The HRNK based its report on the several satellite images of the Chŭngsan No 11 Detention Facility taken at various intervals in the past. The detention facility is located at 30 miles east of the capital Pyongyang in the South P'yŏngan Province. The report stated that owing to the extremely harsh conditions, an estimated 2,000 prisoners died or were executed each year.
Prisoners Being Forced to Rear Pigs For Kim's Meals
The report states that the prisoners at the concentration camps were caught while trying to flee North Korea after facing years of starvation and poverty. Most of the citizens caught while trying to escape consists of women and children.
The Sun reported that the prisoners are forced to rear pigs inside the camps which are then "exclusively used to feed the privileged classes within the capital city of Pyongyang". The inmates also work in fish farms and harvest salt 730 meters to the southwest of the camp where many die, the report said.
Explaining the horrendous situation at the camp, HRNK Senior Satellite Imagery Analyst and principal report author Joseph S. Bermudez, Jr. said: "The Chŭngsan No 11 Detention Facility is unique among North Korea's notorious prisons not only for its length of service but for a combination of its dispersed organization, and the reportedly high death rate due to malnutrition and brutality."
"Its inmates are directly tasked with providing meat, fish, and salt to the power-holding elite in Pyongyang — the very group that imprisoned them."
Camp Survivors Reveal Dead Bodies Being Used as Fertlizers
The committee also included the harrowing accounts narrated by those who managed to escape the camps, called re-education centres in the hermit kingdom. The report stated that a lot prisoners die due to appalling conditions or from the torture inflicted.
The report also quotes an unnamed camp survivor, who revealed that the decomposing bodies were used to create fertile ground for growing of flowers. "They ran out of land to bury the bodies because so many people died. People call this mountain the 'flower hill' because Azalea blooms every spring and covers the entire mountain. The buried bodies act as natural fertilizers and help the flower trees to bloom. The flowers are especially red and the trees are green," she said.
Another survivor, while revealing that their wasn't enough land to bury the bodies, said that her job was to carry the bodies to the "flower hill" mass grave, which already had 5,000 bodies buried.
"They had to dig holes for the dead that were so small and shallow that the bodies had to be bent to fit. On some occasions the deceased person's knees stuck out of the ground," she told the committee.
"The very presence of secret burial grounds and crematoria at camps scattered throughout the country indicates that the authorities assume and expect a high death rate in detention," said HRNK executive director Greg Scarlatoiu.
