North Korea keeps a village for those born with the genetic condition called dwarfism, which are considered undesirables in the country and are kept from reproducing.
Those who live in the "dwarf village" are faced with harsh Stalinist-type abuses, which is another example of human rights violations in the brutal dictatorship,
The Washington Free Beacon is reporting.
The village called Yeonha-Ri was revealed by those who have defected from North Korea, who say that it is located in Ryanggang Province, where the residents are forced to support themselves through farming.
The treatment of those born with dwarfism, in which a person suffers from a genetic defect that causes a person to develop a short body and disproportionate limbs, comes from a North Korean held superstition that the defect is caused by either a personal or ancestral sin.
Under North Korean law, anyone who is under four-feet tall is forced to live in this designated village.
The original plan, according to one of the defectors, was to kill those born with dwarfism, but out of concern for what the international reaction would be to such "cleansing" the nation's officials opted for this special farming village.
The ultimate goal is to keep those born with dwarfism from reproducing, and for that reason everyone who lives there faces forced sterilization.
Because they are not given the same food rations as other North Korean citizens, they are also more prone to starvation.
Ji Seong-Ho, another North Korean defector, wrote in an
opinion piece for the Guardian, that he was mistreated for being disabled after he lost a leg and a hand, saying that Kim Jong-un's regime believed that its disabled population "deface[s] the image of the North Korean regime."
The United Nations issued a report in 2014 charging North Korea with "grave human rights violations and crimes against humanity," which it described as "ingrained in the institutional framework of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea."
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