Amid all the talk of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, it is worth remembering the conventional means by which the North Korean communist regime brutalizes its own population. Two hundred thousand political prisoners languish in North Korean camps, where they labor from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m., when they break for ideological indoctrination sessions. So reports Chosun Ilbo, the South Korean newspaper that maintains an excellent English-language Web site at http://english.chosun.com. In 1987 at Concentration Camp No. 12 at Onsong, North Hamgyong Province, more than 5,000 prisoners were killed in a 1987 massacre. The camp has since been closed. Two North Koreans who escaped to the South, Ahn Myong-cho and Mun Hyon-il, told Chosun Ilbo of the atrocity last month. The massacre occurred, the defectors said, when a political prisoner working as a coal miner turned on a State Security guard in protest against excessive torture. Hundreds of camp inmates joined a rebellion. Then, as Chosun Ilbo tells it, the guards of Concentration Camp No. 12, “reinforced by the guards and equipment of a nearby concentration camp and armed with machine guns, encircled the camp, fired at rioters at random, and eradicated all the 5,000 rioters, according to the sources. With the riot suppressed, rioters’ bodies were either burned, or buried in groups in the nearby hills.”

This is the nature of the regime that those arguing for a soft line now want to prop up with more bribes in exchange for more promises to refrain from nuclear activity. The North Korean nuclear threat is grave, but so too is the nature of the regime there, even if it is armed merely with barbed wire, machine guns, and the disregard for freedom and human life that marked totalitarian regimes from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union.