Special to WorldTribune.com

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com

NEW DELHI — Within India’s long borders, as many as 65 million people are slaves.

That’s according to the U.S. State Department’s annual “Trafficking in Persons” report, which classifies India as having more slaves than any other country on earth. “The forced labor of an estimated 20 to 65 million citizens constitutes India’s largest trafficking problem,” states the report.

“Men, women, and children in debt bondage are forced to work in industries such as brick kilns, rice mills, agriculture, and embroidery factories. A common characteristic of bonded labor is the use of physical and sexual violence as coercive means. … Those from India’s most disadvantaged social strata, including the lowest castes, are most vulnerable,” it says.

Every day, here and everywhere else you go, you see women and kids working on construction sites carrying bricks in baskets on their heads. You get hardened to the sight of women holding babies, begging at intersections. Intimidation, class and caste repression conspire in a system under which people are forced to work for almost nothing.

You can, however, talk to people in India, ask what’s going on and hope that eventually the country will advance to the level where slavery disappears. That much is quite different from North Korea, where no one can talk to anyone.

“Within North Korea, forced labor is part of an established system of political repression,” says the State Department report. “The North Korean government is directly involved in subjecting its nationals to forced labor in prison camps. North Koreans do not have a choice in the work the government assigns them and are not free to change jobs at will. North Korea is estimated to hold between 100,000 and 200,000 prisoners in political prison camps in remote areas of the country.”

Nor are those enslaved inside North Korea the only North Koreans subjected to forced servitude. The Pyongyang regime also earns money off the backs of citizens working for foreign regimes “with their movement and communications constantly under surveillance and restricted by the North Korean government.”

The great difference between India and North Korea is that India acknowledges the problem and appears to be trying to do something about it. The country is so huge, so diffused, that the most well meaning officials and activists seem almost powerless.

North Korea, with a population of about 25 million compared to India’s 1.2-plus billion, has no such excuse. Instead, officials stubbornly deny human rights issues.

In response to criticism by a Canadian expert of North Korea’s horrifying human rights record before a United Nations committee, the North’s ambassador to the U.N. charged that Canada was a land of broken promises guilty of repressing its own people. The ritualistic response was typical of North Korean denials over the years.

In visits to North Korea, I have often seen North Korean “volunteers” assisting in cleaning parks and statues, of soldiers gathering the harvest. At the west coast city of Nampo, a briefing video and brochures boast of soldiers who “volunteered” to help build the barrage across the mouth of the Daedong River, enabling ocean-going vessels to get to the port.

Pictures show Kim Il-Sung congratulating soldiers for their hard work. How many died in the project, conducted in the early 1980’s, and how many of these “volunteers” were volunteers? Why are soldiers forced to work on farms and other projects? They too are slaves with no choice but to follow orders.

Women may suffer more than men. The sex trade ensnares millions around the world but worsens for North Korean women when they have to cross the border into China to escape starvation and abuse at home.

“Some North Korean women were reportedly lured, drugged, or kidnapped by traffickers upon arrival,” says the State Department report, and “were subsequently compelled into domestic service through forced marriages to Chinese men, often of Korean ethnicity, or were forced into prostitution in brothels or through Internet sex sites.”

Arrest by the Chinese heightens the terror. “If found by Chinese authorities,” the report goes on, “victims are deported to North Korea where they are subject to harsh punishment, including forced labor in DPRK labor camps.”

It’s difficult to believe that slavery still exists anywhere. Wandering around India, one sees conditions that appear desperate as people struggle to survive on almost nothing. Nowhere, however, are conditions so harsh and so likely to kill those caught up in the system, as in North Korea.

It’s easy to forget what’s happening when you’re unable to see for yourself. We know enough, however, to recognize that North Korea is a slave state, perhaps the world’s worst. What to do about it, how to combat the horrors of life there, are other questions to which no one has answers.

Donald Kirk, has spent most of the year in India as a Fulbright-Nehru senior researcher affiliated with Jawaharlal Nehru University’s School of International Studies. He’s at kirkdon@yahoo.com.

  “Trafficking in Persons”, Daedong River, DPRK labor camps, Kim Il-Sung, sex trade, Slavery in the year 2013: The differences between North Korea and India