Beggars' Island

The Americans who run it call it Beggars' Island. Koje is a rocky, dun-colored dollop, 20 miles southwest of Pusan in the Korea Strait. On this island, in a cluster of barbed-wire compounds, the U.N. keeps its war prisoners--110,000 North Koreans and 17,000 Chinese--plus about 40,000 civilian internees.

"Each compound," says one high-ranking officer, "seethes with intrigue--half figuring ways to escape, the rest pressure groups fighting each other. Killings? Plenty of them. The victims are usually beaten to death with tent poles." So far, on Beggars' Island, some 30 or 40 prisoners have been murdered by their fellows, and the beatings are innumerable. In one night last week, in one compound alone, there were seven beatings. Some of these fights can be traced to competition for homosexual favors, but most are battles be tween Communists and antiCommunists. Some 13,000 Chinese and 6,000 North Koreans have signed petitions, many in blood, against repatriation. Some have tattooed themselves with anti-Communist slogans.

In all the Chinese compounds, the anti-Reds manage to keep U.S., U.N. and Nationalist Chinese flags flying. At the entrance to Compound 86 there is a sign in Chinese characters: "Kill! Kill! Mao Tse-tung, the Russian puppet."

The camp's worst riots took place last fall. In mid-September the prisoners in one compound went on a rampage and drove their guards from the enclosure. Before the guards could be sent back in at bayonet point and behind a barrage of concussion grenades, the Communists dragged one suspected renegade to the fence, pulled out his tongue, cut it off with tin shears, then beat him to death.

Packed Living. Colonel Maurice J. Fitzgerald, Koje's debonair commander, has a 7,000-man force, including a first-rate U.S. outfit and two smaller South Korean units. Though not otherwise boastful about camp conditions, U.S. officers take pride in the fact that guard brutality to prisoners is at a minimum: the trouble is prisoner to prisoner.

One big difficulty is language. In the intelligence section there are five Chinese Nationalists from Formosa, and 22 more to run the educational classes, which hope to teach prisoners the ways of democracy. Only one officer on Colonel Fitzgerald's staff--a Korean-American captain--can speak either Korean or Chinese. Said one officer to TIME Tokyo Bureau Chief Dwight Martin: "If we want to question a prisoner, we have to keep him isolated until we're through with him. If we return him to the compound, he'll slip off in the mob and change his name." Said another: "We could have Mao Tse-tung and Kim II Sung both in the same compound and never know it."

Some of the prisoners are packed into crude, earth-floored barracks, and the rest live in tents. About 8,000 P.W.s are harbored in each compound, about twice as crowded as they should be. They sleep on straw mats, and each man has two blankets. They are fed three times a day--rice, beans, fish, pepper mash, soy sauce. This is a nourishing, 2,800-calorie diet, on which many prisoners have gained weight.

Ambitious Tunnel. In Compound 66, where 2,600 fanatical, hard-core North Korean Communist officers are penned up, there are no political fights. Proud, swaggering, aloof, they keep themselves neat, and sing Red marching songs with totalitarian gusto. Their enclosure is surrounded by three barbed-wire fences instead of the usual two.

It was Compound 66 that engineered Koje's most ambitious attempt at escape. The North Korean officers tunneled ten feet straight down, then laterally out under the wire barricades. They were within a few feet of coming out into a dry creek bed when a U.N. team, digging a trench, uncovered their tunnel.

These fanatics, strangely located within almost a stone's throw of native Korean huts, are able--by messages hurled or shouted--to exercise a high degree of effective political control over their comrades elsewhere on the island. One U.S. authority is. convinced that they personally directed Beggars' Island's bloodiest riot last fall.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.