North Korea's fat little dictator is a stupid fucking asshole.

Wall Street Journal - As Trump Plans North Korea Summit, Defectors Tell Harrowing Stories

Torture and starvation in political prison camps, public executions and forced abortions persist.

By Alastair Gale June 4, 2018

Early in the reign of North Korea’s current supreme leader, merchant Kim Young-hee shared a flea-infested prison cell for a year with more than two dozen other women, enduring regular whippings from guards. Her crime was helping her sister’s child flee one of the world’s most repressive dictatorships.

Conditions have only grown harder. Kim Jong Un, the nation’s third-generation dictator, has tightened border controls to prevent escapes since taking power at the end of 2011. Those caught risk prolonged imprisonment. North Korean women sent back from China have been forced to have abortions if the fathers were Chinese, defectors say.

Torture and starvation are routine in a vast network of North Korean prison camps operated since the 1950s with a total land area about 20 times the size of Manhattan. Around 100,000 people are held in five camps, according to the United Nations. Camps in central areas have added new facilities to house more prisoners, satellite images show.

The repression has been largely ignored as Mr. Kim seeks to rehabilitate his international image with a swing to diplomacy. As President Donald Trump prepares for a planned summit meeting with Mr. Kim on June 12—the first between a U.S. and North Korean leader—it isn’t clear whether he will raise the issue of Pyongyang’s human-rights violations, or if doing so would lead to any improvement.

Mr. Trump has indicated that he sees human rights as a major concern, including in a speech to the South Korean legislature in November in which he described prisoners as “enduring torture, starvation, rape and murder on a constant basis.” But at a meeting on Friday with one of Mr. Kim’s top lieutenants, the president said they didn’t discuss human rights.

Tales from the gulag are grim. One inmate of a North Korean labor camp from 2015 to 2016 described having to bend bodies in half to fit as many as possible in an incinerator, according to a recent survey by a South Korean state-run think-thank. It wasn’t clear how the prisoners died, but disease, starvation and work accidents can kill swathes of inmates.

In October 2016, four men and three women were executed by firing squad at an airfield in a border city near China, one defector said in the survey. In February 2015, five men were shot to death at a sports stadium just north of the capital in front of a few thousand locals, according to another defector in the same report. The survey was based on the testimony of 137 defectors who entered South Korea in 2017.

Ms. Kim pulled her shirt collar open to reveal red gouges across her shoulder. The female smuggler who arranged the escape of her sister’s child was sent to a labor camp, she said, and after her release shared stories of starvation and beatings.

Life became harder under the new leader after 2011. Officials demanded bribes of expensive items such as rabbit skins to allow traders like her to operate. The wealth gap was increasing. Ms. Kim, who survived by selling potatoes in larger towns and bringing back MSG to sell in hers, escaped herself in 2014.

“The state treated poorer people like dogs,” she said.

Ms. Park, another defector interviewed by the Wall Street Journal who asked not to be named to protect family still in North Korea, was jailed for escaping but made the decision to leave again in 2012. This time she had a backup plan. Like a friend who had been caught crossing the Yalu River into China a few days earlier she took along a cyanide pill just in case.

Since her first escape about five years earlier, fewer smugglers were willing to help those trying to flee, she said. The price of escape had risen to $2,000 from less than $100.

As senior U.S. officials prepare for the summit there’s been little talk of pressing the North Korean leader over human rights, something that also didn’t come up at the recent meeting of leaders of North and South Korea.

The main U.S. goal will be to secure a commitment to denuclearization. Some experts say Pyongyang’s frequent anger at criticism of its human-rights record could complicate that objective if Mr. Trump confronts Mr. Kim.

Opening with a call for the gulags to be closed would be a “bridge too far,” said Robert King, the U.S. envoy for human rights in North Korea under the Obama administration. The regime would likely see that as a challenge to its political system, he said.

“This is beginning of process that has to go on for some time,” he said.

Failing to raise human rights would signal weakness on a critically important problem, countered Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a Washington -based organization

Bringing up human rights with Mr. Kim “is the right thing to do morally, ethically, legally and politically,” he said.

North Korea routinely rejects accusations of human-rights abuses and denies it operates prison camps. It refused to allow U.N. officials to enter the country for a research project into human rights published in 2014, and slammed the final report as an attack engineered by Washington.

However, it accepted some recommendations made by the U.N. in a separate 2014 report, including improving gender equality and general public awareness of human rights. U.N. officials say they have seen little clear sign of progress, but Pyongyang did allow a U.N. special rapporteur for the disabled to visit last year.

For those outside the country with a direct stake in North Korean human-rights issues, such as families of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, engagement between Washington and Pyongyang raises hopes of a breakthrough.

Mr. Trump highlighted the case of one abductee, Megumi Yokota, in a speech to the U.N. in September. North Korea says Ms. Yokota died years ago, but her parents continue to campaign for her release.

Ms. Yokota’s mother, Sakie Yokota, said she was wary of North Korea simply using dialogue as a way to relieve sanctions pressure, but she hoped the time had finally come to resolve the abduction issue through talks.

“I am hopeful, but at the same time, I am afraid,” Sakie Yokota said.

Write to Alastair Gale at alastair.gale@wsj.com