“When I see slaves shackled and dragged on TV, I see myself,” Choi Ki-sun told me. He was one of an estimated 50,000 prisoners seized by North Korea at the end of the Korean War in 1953.
“When we were dragged to labour camps, we were at gun point, lined up with armed guards around. What else could this be if not slave labour?”
Mr Choi (not his real name) said he continued to work in a mine in North Hamgyeong province alongside around 670 other prisoners of war (POWs) until his escape, 40 years later.
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It is not easy to get stories out of the mines. Those who survive, like Mr Choi, tell stories of fatal explosions and mass executions. They reveal how they existed on minimal rations while being encouraged to get married and have children who – like Mr Choi’s – would later have no choice but to follow them into the mines.
“Generations of people are born, live and die in the mining zones and experience the worst type of persecution and discrimination throughout their lifetime,” explains Joanna Hosaniak, one of the authors of a new report, Blood Coal Export from North Korea, from the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korea Human Rights (NKHR).
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The report outlines the inner workings of the state’s coal mines and alleges that criminal gangs, including the Japanese Yakuza, have helped Pyongyang smuggle goods out of the country earning untold sums of money – one report estimates the figure at hundreds of millions of dollars – which is thought to be used to prop up the secretive state’s weapons programme.
The Korean War prisoners who never came home
From North to South: The new life of a Korean defector
The report is based on the accounts of 15 people who have first-hand knowledge of North Korea’s coal mines. The BBC interviewed one of the contributors and we have independently heard from four others who claim to have suffered and escaped from North Korea’s coal mines. All but one person asked us to protect their identity to keep their remaining families in North Korea safe.
Pyongyang consistently denies allegations of human rights abuses and refuses to comment on them. It insists all POW’s were returned according to the armistice terms, with a government official previously saying that any who remained wished “to remain in the bosom of the republic”.
But Mr Choi says this is not true. He told us that he lived inside a fenced-off camp guarded by armed troops.
At first he was told that if he worked hard enough he would be allowed to go home. But eventually all hope of returning to the South faded.
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Workers as young as seven
The current system of forced labour in North Korean coal mines appears to have been set up after the Korean War. The report by the NKHR described it as “inherited slavery”.
South Koreans were taken to major coal, magnesite, zinc and lead mines mostly in North and South Hamgyeong Provinces, according to the human rights group investigation.
But not everyone who ends up in the mines is a prisoner of war.
Kim Hye-sook was told by guards that her grandfather went South during the war and that is why she was sent to work in the coal mine with her family as a teenager.
Her fate was determined by her “songbun” – or class, a judgement made on how loyal a family has been to the regime and how many are members of the Worker’s Party of Korea.
Connections to South Korea automatically puts a person in the lowest class.
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Ms Kim was just 16 when she started work in the mine. The NKHR report has accounts from survivors who said they started part-time work in the mine from age seven.
“When I first got assigned there were 23 people in my unit,” she recalled. “But the mines would collapse and the wires that pulled the mine trolley would snap and kill the people behind it.
“People would die from explosions while digging the mines. There are different layers, in the mines, but sometimes a layer of water would burst and people could drown. So in the end only six remained alive of the initial 23.”
‘Death is a good ending’
