The Associated Press reports that on Friday, Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), a North Korean state propaganda outlet, released a statement claiming that “we are the biggest victim of” Otto Warmbier’s death.
The statement reads in part, per the AP:
“Although we had no reason at all to show mercy to such a criminal of the enemy state, we provided him with medical treatments and care with all sincerity on humanitarian basis until his return to the U.S., considering that his health got worse,” the agency quoted an unidentified Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.
The spokesman said “groundless” speculation of torture and beatings could be refuted by American doctors who came to North Korea at the time of Warmbier’s repatriation and “recognized that his health indicators like pulse, temperature, respiration and the examination result of the heart and lung were all normal.” The report did not mention Warmbier’s neurological status.
“The fact that Warmbier died suddenly in less than a week just after his return to the U.S. in his normal state of health indicators is a mystery to us as well,” the spokesman said.
“To make it clear, we are the biggest victim of this incident and there would be no more foolish judgment than to think we do not know how to calculate gains and losses,” he said.
“The smear campaign against (North Korea) staged in the U.S. compels us to make firm determination that humanitarianism and benevolence for the enemy are a taboo and we should further sharpen the blade of law,” the spokesman added.
As heinous as this statement is, it’s not remotely surprising. North Korea is a nation run by a despot; a nation that starves its own citizens and tortures them in concentration camps. Leader Kim Jong Un had his own uncle, Jang Song-thaek — as well as his uncle’s closest aides — executed in brutal fashion.
The New York Times reports:
Ri Ryong-ha and Jang Su-gil, were torn apart by antiaircraft machine guns, according to South Korea’s National Intelligence Service. The executioners then incinerated their bodies with flamethrowers …
Jang Song-thaek “was executed at the same place and in the same way as his deputies, the South Korean intelligence agency said.”
Regarding North Korea’s concentration camps, Fox News writes of Jun Heo, “who was just a teenager when he was sent to one of the country’s concentration camps”:
Jun Heo … said to Fox News that being beaten black and blue and tortured within an inch of your life was routine. There were about 20 people stuffed into each small cell, he said. The men and women were separated, unless a woman had a baby son. Everyone over the age of 17 was forced to work hard labor in farms from 6:30 a.m. until at least 8 p.m. Cries and screams became the soundtrack of life, but it was after nightfall when the most excruciating howls could be heard, Heo said.
Hapless prisoners, trying to sleep, would wail in pain as their bony bodies broke down from starvation, while at midnight the “secret police” came to take women to be raped.
Barbarism is the norm in North Korea, and Otto Warmbier was yet another victim of the regime’s savagery.
As The Washington Post notes: “Several neurologists agreed that there is no way to know for certain what caused Warmbier’s coma — it could have been anything from an allergic reaction to a drug overdose to strangulation or some other kind of torture.”
In the end, however, the exact way in which Warmbier died doesn’t much matter. The Washington Post quotes Duke University neurology professor, Daniel Laskowitz, who sums up the circumstance succinctly:
It’s almost a moot point … they took a healthy kid, put him under horrible conditions, mental and physical anguish … they left him at risk, didn’t treat him properly, didn’t tell anyone — Whatever the proximal cause was, is not even that relevant.
The simple and relevant fact is that Otto Warmbier was murdered by the Kim Jong Un regime.
He was the victim; they are the perpetrators.