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The Week son is at its high, and many trekkers were caught unaware. Officials also fear that many more bodies may be buried under the heavy snow and ice. The focus has now shifted from rescue to the grim prospect of retrieving more bodies feared to be lying on the popular trekking route, which goes as high as 17,769 feet. Nepalese army choppers circled the upper reaches of the popular trekking region to locate bodies on Saturday, while officials arranged to fly in a team of experts from Kathmandu to assist with the operation. Four days after the blizzard hit, all known, stranded surviving trekkers are now believed to be safe, officials said, with 385 people rescued after frantic calls for help. “We have not received any further calls for rescue or for information about stranded people,” said Binay Acharya of Trekking Agencies’ Association of Nepal. “We understand all remaining trekkers in the region are safe.” The dead include at least 26 hikers, guides and porters on the trekking circuit, three yak herders, and five people who were climbing a nearby mountain.
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At least 19 of the dead are tourists, from countries including Canada, Israel, Poland, Slovakia, India and Vietnam.
N Korea Admits to Labor Camps
A North Korean official has publicly acknowledged to the international community the existence of his country’s “reform through labor” camps. This acknowledgement appeared to come in response to a highly critical U.N. human rights report earlier this year. Diplomats for the reclusive, impoverished country also told reporters that a top North Ko-
rea official has visited the headquarters of the European Union and expressed interest in dialogue, with discussions on human rights expected next year. North Korea’s deputy U.N. ambassador Ri Tong Il said the secretary of his country’s ruling Workers’ Party had visited the EU, and that “we are expecting end of this year to open political dialogue between the two sides.” The human rights dialogue would follow. In Brussels, an EU official confirmed a recent North Korea meeting with the EU’s top human rights official, Stavros Lambrinidis, but said any dialogue currently planned is limited to human rights issues. Choe Myong Nam, a North Korean foreign ministry official in charge of U.N. affairs and human rights issues, said at a briefing with reporters that his country has no prison camps and, in practice, “no prison, things like that.” But he briefly discussed the “reform through labor” camps. “Both in law and practice, we do have reform through labor detention camps — no, detention centers — where people are improved through their mentality and look on their wrongdoings,” he said. Such “re-educa-
tion” labor camps are for common offenders and some political prisoners, but most political prisoners are held in a harsher system of political prison camps. Greg Scarlatoiu is the executive director of the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Scarlatiu pointed out that the mention of the reform camps was the first direct acknowledgement by a North Korean official speaking before an international audience. “While the North Korean human rights record remains abysmal, it is very important that senior North Korean officials are now speaking about human rights, and expressing even pro forma interest in dialogue,” Scarlatoiu said. “The North Korean strategic approach to human rights issues used to be to simply ignore reports by international NGOs, government agencies or U.N. bodies. Human rights used to just go away, out-competed by nukes, missiles, and military provocations.” While he called the acknowledgement of the reform through labor camps “a modest step in the right direction,” he stressed that this wasn’t an admission by North Korea of the harsher system of
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