Free North Korea Undercover by John Sweeney

placed in a cell which had no heating apart from for five minutes at night when apipe burbled with hot water. The windows were iced up. His feet froze, and stayed frozen for six weeks. His toes became hideously swollen, all his toenails fell out and he could only hobble because of the sores and ulcers on his feet.
    His main source of information was the prison screws, who let drop that he had been put in a punishment cell, which should not really have happened, but since he was a foreigner, and it was the first time a foreigner had ever been held at the camp, there was no isolation cell in which to hold him. As a foreigner, he was not to be allowed to come into contact with the other prisoners.
    The prison regime was always the same: the prisoner must sit cross-legged, perfectly still, for sixteen hours, from six o’clock in the morning until ten at night. He must be rock steady, immobile, looking straight ahead towards the bars of his cell. The bars were iron rods thatran from ceiling down to the floor. Between the cells was a corridor along which the guards patrolled. The prisoners had to stay awake all day. The official explanation was that a prisoner should be constantly examining his conscience. A prisoner must not stretch his legs. If he did so, he was beaten. Ali found this last rule unbearable. He lostall feeling in his left leg, and hefeared that he would end up paralysed.
    The cold, the filth, the hunger and the loneliness were beyond words. Barefoot, afflicted by lice, diarrhoea and fevers, knowing nothing of what was happening outside the bars that imprisoned him, Ali found himself living a Kafka story. To survive, he wrote poetry inside his head and recalled Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Beading Gaol.
    I never saw sad men who looked
    With such a wistful eye
    Upon that little tent of blue
    We prisoners called the sky.
    Worst of all, Ali feared that no one in the outside world had any idea where he was. It was a 1960s version of the oubliette, the medieval torture by which prisoners were dropped into a hole and forgotten.
    Once, he came across a French prisoner, a man who said that he was a French journalist who lived at 2, Rue d’Alembert, Paris, that his name was‘Pierre...’ but the stranger had spoken too much, and the guard smashed his rifle butt into him, so the surnameremains unknown. 6 In Paris, I knocked on the door of the building. No one knew of a Pierre who vanished forty years ago.
    From chatting to the screws and snatched conversations with other prisoners, Ali started to work out how many camps there were. He concluded that the gulag contained some 150,000 souls spread around some twenty camps.
    Ali is long dead, but Imanaged to track down his nephew, Carlos David, an artist who lives in Paris. Sitting in his tiny flat in Alfortville, decorated with a 1973 posterin Spanish, ‘Free The Poet Ali Lameda’, Carlos told me how word some how got back to Venezuela that Ali was locked up in North Korea. Elvira is the most likely source, but I have so far failed to trace her. Carlos’s father, Carlos Diaz Sosa, Ali’s brother-in-law, was a Venezuelan journalist turned diplomat. He used his contacts in Communist embassies to put the word out. For years, they heard nothing. Every entreaty was met with no response. They had no idea whether Ali was still alive. Then in 1973, North Korea started the long road towards becoming a member of the United Nations, and its Foreign Minister, looking around for votes, asked the Venezuelan legation in New York for their vote. The Venezuelans asked: What about Ali Lameda? The Foreign Minister asked: ‘Is that a rock on the railway track?’ The Venezuelans nodded. The Foreign Ministersaid he had no idea of the case, but would report back. Eventually, word came back from Pyongyang that Ali Lamedawas alive, and then pressure from Caracas grew. Carlos Diaz Sosa asked the Cubans to intercede but, it seems, Castro did not lift a finger, thanks to a doctrinal dispute