Holocaust Now: Looking Down Into Hell at Camp 22
Those who have lived to tell us about Camp 22, located in the bleak northeastern tip of North Korea, can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and all of them are former guards or staff. Of all of North Korea’s numerous labor camps and detention facilities, large and small, Camp 22 is one of the largest, and almost certainly the most terrible, if only for the inhuman experiments witnesses say were done to the men, women, children, and even infants sent there.
[Click the thumbnails in this post to see them full-size]
[The scale of North Korea’s Concentration Camp System. 0:42]
[Source: BBC, “Access to Evil“]
North Korea’s system of spying, thought-control, isolation, and terror may have no equal in human history. That is how Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il kept the secrets of Camp 22 inside its ten-foot wire fences and distinctive blocky guard posts for decades. That changed when satellite photography went public. Since then, Google Earth has revealed the world’s most secret places to armies of amateur “squints.” Satellite photography was available to the human rights researcher David Hawk when he set to work on “The Hidden Gulag,” his ground-breaking study of North Korea’s forced labor camps. Hawk’s interviews with survivors and former guards alone would not have had the same impact had those witnesses not been able to point to those photographs and say,
“This is the detention center,” he said. “If someone goes inside this building, in three months he will be dead or disabled for life. In this corner they decided about the executions, who to execute and whether to make it public.
“This is the Kim Il Sung institute, a movie house for officers. Here is watchdog training. And guard training ground. Pointing to another spot, he said: “This is the garbage pond where the two kids were killed when guard kicked them in pond.
This also allows us to begin our tour from a base line of more-or-less known fact. Absolute certainty will have to wait for the day when Camp 22 is liberated. For Google Earth newbies, you can download the program here. Each screen grab also shows the scale, coordinates, altitude, and attitude, in case you want to have a look for yourself.
Google Earth’s high-resolution imagery covers less than half of Camp 22, the portion that you will view — and escape — from the warmth and comfort of your home today. As I write this, North Korea has declared four days of celebration for Kim Jong Il’s 65th birthday, and it is just possible that the inmates of Camp 22 will be permitted a few days of rest from the mines and farms there, where the prisoners usually labor 12 or more hours a day, seven days a week.
Camp 22 is said to hold 50,000 men, women, and children. We can only see one portion of the camp with Google Earth’s high-resolution photography.
The yellow scale line to the right of the fence line is just shy of 14 miles. According to “The Hidden Gulag,” the whole camp is 31 miles long by 25 miles wide. That works out to over 700 square miles, but if one makes allowances for the camp’s irregular shape, a rough estimate of 500 square miles seems more likely. That would make it as big as the city of Los Angeles. Where high-resolution photography is available, it’s not hard to see the fence line punctuated at intervals of about 1200 feet by guard posts (below, left), buttressed, in places, by smaller guard shacks like these (below, right).
I couldn’t explain these unusual ditches until I noted this MSNBC report, claiming that the camp is surrounded by “land mines and man-traps.”
It’s impossible to draw any firm conclusion, but these ditches could be “tiger traps” whose coverings have weathered away. It’s certainly hard to imagine what other reason there could be for digging trench lines like this along the fence line of a forced labor camp.
[Kwon Hyuk describes the camps’ electric fences and spiked moats. 0:52]
[Source: BBC, “Access to Evil”]
The camp is in a remote area, surrounded mostly by forest. In a few areas, however, just beyond the fence, the lives of North Korea’s peasant farmers, such as they are, go on.
They cannot read foreign newspapers, listen to foreign broadcasts, possess cell phones or radios that can pick up unauthorized broadcasts, express unauthorized opinions, or travel abroad without fear of entering this gate. The state owns everything, including the meager rations they grow, and on which they live. Still, for farmers in North Korea, survival is a little easier than it is for workers in the blighted factory towns where unemployed survivors of the Great Famine still live by stripping the ruins of copper wire. Just the same, one suspects that the farmers know what’s good for them. Most likely, they stay away from the fence, keep their eyes on the soil, and never mention it.
[Update, 4/2007: The camp’s presence is impossible to ignore completely when it intrudes into the lives of those who live near it, of course. While living in Seoul, a Korean-American teacher, Joseph Songhoon Lee, met and taught a defector who had lived just outside the camp’s gate, perhaps near the area imaged above. Lee described the defector’s experiences in a recent article for the Washington Post:
[B] graduated from School 34 a few weeks ago and is studying at Sungkyunkwan University, one of the nation’s top colleges. He grew up a few minutes away from one of North Korea’s most notorious political prisons, Prison 22 in Hyeryung, Ham-Kyung Province, at the northern tip of North Korea. Because food and alcohol are scarce in the countryside, the prison guards went to [B’s] house for libations. “They always drank heavily,” he told me. “And when they got drunk, they would mumble about how sorry they felt for what they did to prisoners.
I redacted information identifying the defector at Mr. Lee’s request. End Update.]
The guard posts are the most distinctive feature of the North Korean camps to a Google-Earther. Here, for example, are Camp 14 (left) and Camp 18 (right), near the town of Sunchon …
I first posted pictures of Camp 16 (below, left) here. It’s near North Korea’s nuclear and missile testing ranges. Camp 15 (below, right) near the town of Yodok, became infamous after survivor Kang Chol Hwan described it in “The Aquariums of Pyongyang.”
[Former child prisoner and author Kang Chol Hwan describes how prisoners were forced to stone each other to death at Camp 15. 1:01]
[Source: Discovery Channel, “Children of the Secret State“]
[Clandestine footage of Camp 15, Yodok. 0:50]
[Source: CNN, “”]
You can’t help but think that some of these places would be beautiful if their stories were less sad. Camp 16, according to “The Hidden Gulag,” is a place of exile for families of the condemned. In North Korea’s Confucian society, in which every word of the late Great Leader Kim Il Sung is worshipped as holy scripture, the regime strictly obeys his order to root out class enemies for three generations. That’s why North Korea doesn’t just arrest the person who sings a South Korean pop song or makes an unguarded remark about the food supply. It arrests that person’s husband or wife, parents, and children, too.
[Survivor describes North Korea’s system of heredetary punishment of entire families. 0:54]
[Source: BBC, “Access to Evil”]
For the children of Camp 22, life is short and hard.
One unforgettable image, there were two girls and they were trying to take out a piece of noodle from one polluted water pond where they put the garbage. And one guard kicked the kids into the small pond, and they drowned. The pond was very deep, and I felt really sad about that.
Ahn reports that of the 1,500 to 2,000 prisoners who died each year from malnutrition alone, most were kids. This figure does not include deaths from disease, torture, execution, or from the casual murders he recollects:
I saw numerous prisoners killed, especially by beating. I saw one person age between 40 and 50 — he’s old enough because the average age of prisoner is between 40-50 — he was working in brick factory. And as he was older he was moving slowly, he was not working well. And the team master tramped on his loin, and the bone was broken. He was hit by an iron rod that is used to start vehicle engines, and I heard the next day he died.
For others, death is a gradual process of human breakage and dismemberment:
At that time the tunnel was passing near the pig pen of the camp, and about 500 political prisoners were participating and there was one female named Han Jin Duk, 26 years old. I was in charge of giving food to the pigs. And my supervisor, when he saw the woman, she was beautiful. And he raped her, and he was found by the watchman officer. And he was investigated. My superior, his rank was reduced and the woman was sent to the detention center And then I didn’t see her for one year.
One day I was going to the place to load the coal, I met her. And I noticed she was exactly that woman, and I asked her, how you could survive. And she told me, that yes, I survived. But she showed me her body, and it was all burned by fire.
After six months I met her at the corn storage in Kusan district and found her putting on a used tire on her knees because her legs were cut off. Because of a coal mine wagon ran over her knees. And all she could do now was separate the corn grains from the cob.
[Camp survivor describes torture he experienced in the camps. 1:52]
[Source: BBC, “Access to Evil”]
And as we will see, Camp 22 may hide greater horrors than even this.
Two of Camp 22’s gates are visible from the air. Looking closely at this gate, the southernmost of the two (below, left), you can actually see a group of people standing in the courtyard, and another behind one of the buildings. Are these guards? Or is this a new crop of prisoners being brought in? Further north is the main gate (below, right), which lies on the road to the town of Hoeryong.
Just a few meters from the gate is the place through which trains enter and leave Camp 22, carrying coal from the Chungbong Coal Mine inside the camp to the power plant at Chongjin and the steel mill at Kimchaek. Here you can see another guardpost, and a curious catwalk over the tracks. This, I speculate, is to allow guards to make sure that no prisoner can hide inside any of the coal cars.
Following the tracks west, I even found one of the coal trains.
This is the Chungbong Coal Mine, inside the camp. If you compare the image on the left to the previously published one on the right, there isn’t much doubt that it’s the same one the witnesses identified to David Hawk, who published this photograph of the mine with his report.
Closer in, we can see the mine in more detail: a row of hand-cars just outside the tunnel entrance, and piles of mine timbers. The resolution is even good enough for us to see oxcarts passing each other on the road south of the mine. In other places, you can even see individual people walking on the road. The oxcarts give some idea of the size of the huts in which the prisoners live.
My image of a concentration camp’s housing is of neat rows of barracks like this. When I first saw the satellite photos of Camp 22, they were not what I expected. From the air, it could almost be any ordinary village or neighborhood, but for the fence that surrounds it, and for the reports of the witnesses. Prisoners, some of them with their families, mostly live in small huts.
As with most of North Korea’s labor camps, housing is clustered in fairly small groups. Many other prisoners are housed in much smaller villages, like these:
There’s really no telling why North Korea houses its prisoners this way, but it makes sense from the perspective of cold logic. As even the Nazis learned, camps are more secure if they’re less concentrated. Two dozen prisoners in a small village present much less of a threat of rebellion than, say, the large group of prisoners who rose up in the Onsong Camp in 1997. The uprising ended with 5,000 dead, and Kim Jong Il reportedly ordered every trace of the place scraped off the face of the earth. It’s easier to guess why prisoners are housed in huts; the camps’ main method of control is to keep inmates on the verge of starvation and extend them small rewards for informing on each other. That, and the hut-style housing, limit the opportunities to think unauthorized thoughts.
[Kwon Hyuk describes torturing and killing entire families at Camp 22 as punishment for the infractions of one family member or neighbor. 1:18]
[Source: BBC, “Access to Evil”]
Where, you may wonder, are the bodies buried? Ahn Myong Chol answers:
Not only here but all other places, even in the small hills they bury bodies. And when we cut the trees down, sometimes we find a buried body. Not only here, but all around here are buried bodies.
In the hills here, if there is some flat area, it is covered with graves. And if people start to farm there, they find bodies or bones.
Ahn doesn’t describe a specific location, but if you look at the thinly wooded hills around the housing areas, that’s where they’re probably buried. All I can make is an educated guess, but I’ll guess that this hill is a likely site.
I called my guess “educated:” traditionally, Koreans bury their dead in round graves on high places. Relatives care for the graves of their loved ones. Proper Korean graves are covered with carefully trimmed grass. Clearly, proper burials are not always possible at Camp 22, but if you look closely at this hill, which sits just next to the larger housing area pictured above, you can actually make out a few light, round patches of disturbed earth.
[Ahn Myong Chol tells about North Korea’s killing fields, and how mutilated bodies were left to decompose in the woods. 1:58]
[Sources: Discovery Channel, “Children of the Secret State”; National Geographic Channel, “Inside North Korea“]
I served in South Korea with the U.S. Army for four years, from 1998 to 2002. As I was serving in Korea, more survivors of the camps began to describe the conditions there. We already heard about the completely preventable famine that killed about 2 million North Koreans while Kim Jong Il built a nuclear arsenal and bought artillery, submarines, missiles, and MiG’s. For the soldiers, in a way, none of this really mattered much. Most soldiers tend to be fairly apolitical. For those who kept up with the reports, it only reinforced what we knew, but could not really change, about the brutality of life inside North Korea. What struck me more was why South Koreans didn’t care. This comment on my blog typifies the mixture of denial and justification so many South Koreans, especially the young, applied to the horrors in the North. It’s a wierd witch’s brew of nationalism and socialism that, in its various forms, periodically incinerates lives by the millions.
Just after I left Korea, while I was still on active duty, I read two reports that haunt me to this day. One was this BBC report, citing the accounts of multiple survivors, that North Korea kills the babies of refugee women China forcibly repatriates:
One woman told of being forced to assist injection-induced labours and then watching as a baby was suffocated with a wet towel in front of its mother. Many former prisoners told of babies buried alive or left face down on the ground to die. They were told by guards this was to prevent the survival of half-Chinese babies. If fleeing North Koreans are discovered by Chinese police, they are almost always returned home.
None of this was enough to interfere with China scoring the 2008 Olympics, or with its favorable trade relations.
At the time I read this, my son, who is half Korean, was two months old. It was one of two times in my adult life I can recall having broken down and wept. The other was when I read this:
‘I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,’ he said. ‘The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.’
Hyuk has drawn detailed diagrams of the gas chamber he saw. He said: ‘The glass chamber is sealed airtight. It is 3.5 metres wide, 3m long and 2.2m high_ [There] is the injection tube going through the unit. Normally, a family sticks together and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners. Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass.’
‘It would be a total lie for me to say I feel sympathetic about the children dying such a painful death. Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all.’ [The Guardian]
According to the “scientist” who claims to have participed it, this also happened at Camp 22.
[How families die in the gas chamber at Camp 22. 4:12]
[Source: BBC, “Access to Evil”]
There are no high-resolution images of the camp’s administration areas, where this is most likely to have happened, but “The Hidden Gulag” published this photo.
You can see photos of the camp’s North and South sections, where are beyond the Google Earth coverage, here and here. The gas chamber reports were the basis of the BBC Television Documentary “Access to Evil.” They are not the only reports about Camp 22 that evoke the legacy of Josef Mengele. In March 2004, Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center wrote an op-ed for the Singapore Straits Times that cited the reports of a former engineer at the camp, Kang Byong Sop. Kang claimed that “political prisoners were trucked in twice a week for experiments,” and said that he saw “human hands scratching a round glass window inside a chamber that was locked with a heavy metal door.” Cooper called on North Korea to allow international inspections of Camp 22. Failing that, he did the next best thing; he flew to Seoul to interview the witnesses.
Since then, another report, attributed to British intelligence sources and published in the arch-conservative World Net Daily, made an equally horrific accusation.
“Hundreds of prisoners die there each week, the victims of biological or chemical experiments to test out [chemical and biological] weapons for North Korea’s CBW arsenal,” claims an MI6 report.
In one intelligence file is the allegation that newborn babies are taken from their mothers and injected with biological agents or given injections of chemicals that blister the skin, leaving huge keloids, the sores seen on the bodies of Hiroshima victims.
The U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea believes that 400,000 people have died in North Korea’s labor camps during the last three decades. Just for comparison, Cleveland, Oakland, Omaha, and Toulouse each have just over 400,000 people. There are still an estimated 200,000 people in the camps today.
There is no way to know for certain how many of these reports are true. Kim Jong Il’s regime won’t let anyone visit the camps, except for those who go there to die. The regime denies that the camps even exist. Neither the Red Cross, nor aid workers with the World Food Program, nor the U.N. Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in North Korea has been let anywhere near the place. Human rights organizations go through the motions of publishing occasional reports criticizing the regime’s human rights record, but their few calls to inspect or close the camps attract little media attention.
Not a single government or international institution has been willing or able to confront the horrors of Camp 22. In 2004, Congress unanimously passed this law, which includes a “sense of Congress” resolution that the United States should make an issue of human rights in its dealings with North Korea. No evidence suggests that the Administration’s diplomats ever even brought the issue up. They also ignored a law requiring U.S. embassies and consulates in places like China, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam to take in North Koreans who often go that far to escape their homeland.
On February 14th of this year, the U.S., South Korea, Japan, and Russia signed a deal with North Korea that aspires to remove it from the “terrorism” list, return to normal trade relations, and even full diplomatic relations. Some would say this is the only way to change North Korea, but it’s been tried. South Korea poured $7 billion in aid into the North over the last ten years. Kim Jong Il spent the money on weapons, millions of ordinary North Koreans starved, and Kim Jong Il never been more ruthless or better armed. Nothing in the agreement or the statements of the parties offers so much as a word of hope to the people in Camp 22, who will probably never hear of it. They will probably end up as forgotten and buried inconveniences.
U.N. General Secretary Kofi Annan recently apologized for doing nothing while 800,000 Rwandans were murdered. Meanwhile, the killing went on at Camp 22. Neither Annan, nor his High Commissioner for Human Rights, nor his High Commissioner for Refugees said or did much of anything. The world has forgotten the North Korean people … at least the ones without nuclear weapons. Annan’s successor, Ban Ki Moon, built his career as South Korea’s Foreign Minister by ignoring North Korean atrocities.
The media have also failed to tell this story. The few reporters who go to North Korea seldom venture far from the capital, Pyongyang. When they do go, Internal Security Bureau minders drive them all along pretty much the same circuit of palaces, tombs, and monuments. None ever gets within miles of Camp 22, and few ask. Still, they bring us back footage of tombs and monuments and strident quotes from their minders and tell us how much more we now know about North Korea than we did before. Until the international media decides to cover the story of Camp 22, it will remain out of sight and out of mind. Now you know the story, but you’ll continue to be one of the few.
Thank you for taking a few minutes to give a thought to the people who live and die in Camp 22. Your thoughts and mine will not save them, of course, but it’s almost too much to imagine that thousands of human beings would die there without anyone mourning them, for in Camp 22, even mourning the dead is forbidden.
Update, 4/2007: Here’s a corrected Digg link (thanks). If you want to join or contribute to groups that help the North Korean people or advocate for their human rights, see this post.
Update, 4/2012: If this shocked you, wait till you see how the Associated Press is portraying daily life in North Korea these days, and the role of a member of Human Rights Watch’s Board of Directors in glorifying Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.
235 Responses
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Happy Lunar New Year, Joshua.
Keep blogging. This post was depressing but necessary.
Joshua, please keep this post on top for a while.
I’m really glad you included the links to some organizations at the bottom, especially LiNK. They are having an “afternoon conversation” at USC on February 27th (if I recall correctly) that I will definitely be attending.
great post
hope somebody writes a book about the North Korean Holocaust. People ned to have access to a book that that informs them in great detail about the crimes of the North Korean regime.
Christian –
Several books have been written. In fact, I’ve noticed that, since I became interested in North Korea in 2002, that there is actually a large amount of information about the nightmare it is. I try to tell my friends all the time about this kind of stuff, and I would consider them abnormally compassionate and globally-aware.
They still barely care. No one seems to care that much.
Thank you for the information. We need to keep speaking out for the rights and freedom of the North Korean people. Thanks for the list of organizations too, I have given to LiNK before.
No one in the West really cared that millions died in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam (or fleeing from these countries) after the complete takeover of Indochina by the communists. Or that tens of millions died in China, the USSR and Cuba (etc.) as well after Marxist revolutions. I sense a pattern here.
James Chen:
to be fair, no one in the East seems to care about NK, either.
what blows me away is these are not based on estimates or assumptions. we have pictures and witnesses for heaven’s sake. but that is what happened during the holocaust and not until we actually opened the gates to auschwitz and buchenwald did we come face to face with the full scale o the horror. and even then…..thanks for the post.
Please thank me by digging. I’m very thankful for the diggs from some of you, but 15 diggs is woefully inadequate to get this story the kind of wider circulation I hope most of us agree it merits. The searching for the images, uploading, losing the post, rewriting, and reformatting took a whole day, which is a day I spent blogging instead of playing in the snow with my kids. I guess I’m having a real “why bother?” crisis at this point. I apologize for how guilt-trippy this already sounds, but producing information that has infinitessimal impact simply does not justify such an investment of time. That’s especially so when I don’t accept ads or donations and pay for my own bandwidth.
Take a couple of days off, Joshua.
I’m serious.
By “West”, I am referring to Western-style democracies.
i have made a group on the facebook for promoting this article under the name of ‘us center for human rights in nk’. i hope it wont be a problem and i hope that a lot of my friends from different networks will digg this article. thank you so much for the hard work.
Soree, Thank you very much. I have seen a significant amount of traffic coming in from “facebook” sites at different schools. Deeply appreciated….
Thank you for posting this. The crisis in North Korea deserves much more attention that it’s getting right now. A book about the concentration camps (which I highly recommend) is “Eyes of the Tailless Animals” by Soon-Ok Lee. I had the privilege of hearing her speak around 6 summers ago.
You guys are doing great work… Don’t give up – Try harder.
Try not to get caught up in US politics, remember the issues you cover are beyond partisan politics.
Evidence and more importantly, awareness of the evidence will impact a Democrat just as much as a Republican.
The work you do will be recognized in history… Don’t give up – Try harder!!!
Eerie how quickly I located a few of the camps you depict above. Google Earth–wow.
Thanks for this post.
I’m in Australia researching the failure of the international community to protect NK refugees. Thanks for the reminder of the horrors inside the NK concentration camps which serves as a motivation to persevere and not become complacent.
This was one of the hardest things I’ve read and digested in a long time. It was so painful that I almost threw up. I am passionate about this NK human rights issue. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you for all your hard work in making us more aware than before.
Sumin, I am doing similar research in Australia at the moment… exactly looking at middle powers (in)ability to address North Korean issues… contact me harold.broken@gmail.com
i think that this is a really bad thing
Thx Josh for putting it up . It is a really sad thing
most incidents you posted were like 1980s+ … do the camos still exist till today ?
sorry I meant Camps
I don’t know which reports you refer to, Louis, but recent reports do suggest that the camps still operate.
These aerial photographs are all less than five years old. By all accounts I’ve heard, Camp 22 still exists, and the photographs obviously show activity there. By some accounts, Camp 16 was reduced in size, or shut down, while others hold that 16 is the dumping ground of families of condemned prisoners and still operates. There are no known survivors of the camp to tell us for sure, but the GE photos suggest that it
was still active when the photos were taken. The roads and buildings appear to be maintained, and you can see vehicles on the roads. If not, you would expect the building materials — roof tiles and timbers — to have been stripped. Finally, there is the fresh report of an escape that suggests that it’s still open and used as a camp.
Around 2005, a Chosun Ilbo report by Camp 15 survivor and journalist Kang Chol-Hwan suggested that some smaller camps were closed down and consolidated into just six of the larger ones. Camps 16 and 22, especially the latter, are large camps. Others that are probably still active are labor-punishment camps 1, 14, 15, and 18, the labor-reeducation camps 22, 77, and others, and numerous temporary detention site s for homeless orphans, the handicapped, transients, and some repatriated refugees. Most of the latter are fairly small and not easy to spot from the air unless they have been identified by a person familiar with the location.
Just a note on nomenclature: there are two Camps numbered 22. One is a kwan-li-so labor-punishment camp, and the other is a kyo-hwa-so labor-reeducation camp. This post refers to the former.
Joshua, I sincerely appreciate the effort you put into your post. Though it was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to read, it was educational and…necessary. I will pass it along to all my friends and family with the hope that it will open their eyes as it has mine. Before recent research, I had some knowledge of the horrific conditions in NK, but I didn’t know the scale or intensity until now. Your post has inspired me to move beyond self-education and to make a concerted effort to provide help, however possible. Thanks again.
God Bless,
Eric
Thank you for those kind words.
This page has a significant typographical error. The paragraph discussing Rabbi Abraham Cooper appears twice. I recommend correcting the error. As for the rest of the information, it is chilling, shocking, and demands immediate international attention and action.
i have a feeling that there is nothing to do to stop the activities … The most I can do now is to pray that less people enters the camps ..
Fixed, thanks.
Altough most of us pray that this evil regime will come down at some point, I think we’ll have to accept that this will take an extremely long time to come into fruition.
In an earlier post, I commented, that NK will most likely turn out to become another Burma. A NK with perhaps a bit more freedom, yet the clique still in place adopting a strict rule. (see under ‘ A History of NK Resistance).
Some people post here that NK is in its fourth phase of disintegration implying its breakdown and consequently its ‘freedom’ is imminent.
To these folks I can only say : wake up ! NK as it is will be with us for a long time to come.
Unfortunately.
TellTell, You refer to this post, on the history of resistance…
https://freekorea.us/2007/03/06/can-they-do-it-a-brief-history-of-resistance-to-the-north-korean-regime/
… and this one, which sketches out the phases of collapse:
https://freekorea.us/2006/09/07/kaplan-identifies-the-problem-so-how-do-we-solve-it/
I have pointed to several specific examples that look like Phase Four in the Northeast, but that’s a different thing from saying that Pyongyang, Wonsan, or North Korea as a whole is in Phase Four (for example, I suspect that Pyongyang is in Phase Two). On the contrary, if you look at the “resistance” post, which I updated last month, you will see me arguing that because North Korea has effectively isolated its regions from one another, it can probably contain localized uprisings in the short and medium term.
If the latest reports we see are accurate, however, the Northeast is starting to see limited but more active resistance against the regime: the mass escape at Camp 16, the mass desertions by the border guards in Hoeryong, jailbreaks in Hoeryong, the merchants’ protest there, and of course, perhaps hundreds of thousands who fled the Northeast into China and risked their lives to do it. Now, I think it’s debatable whether that’s an imminent threat to Kim Jong Il’s rule, but it clearly indicates that things are fraying, and it puts additional strain of the regime’s forces. If this trend continues uninterrupted by some major intervening act, it will eventually spread and end the regime’s control.
Stage 4 is about regimes’ efforts to cut off such trends. This regime has launched some crackdowns in those areas to reconsolidate its fraying control. I can’t say to what degree those efforts will succeed in the short term, or whether they’ll merely drive them underground for a short intermission, but the regime’s countermeasures will likely sow resentment and more dissent in the long term. I can’t predict if this will translate to armed resistance in the near future — nor can you predict that it won’t — although it has in the past, as I’ve documented.
If I had to give my best guess, I’d lay odds that barring a major new infusion of regime-sustaining aid, we’ll see at least one significant popular uprising in the Northeast within the next 2-3 years. I think the most likely places for it are areas near China: Hoeryong, Chongjin, Onsong, Tanchon, Rajin, and Sinuiju (the latter three being strategically “critical” for various reasons).
In all likelihood, this uprising will be crushed initially, but things become very unpredicatable after that. Even a successful suppression could involve regime-on-regime combat, a coup attempt by officers who want to hedge their bets, a mass migration that would reach China’s borders, a localized mutiny by troops who refuse to fire on citizens, the purging of “soft” factions that would further shrink the regime’s base, the beginnings of a costly insurgency by surviving resisters, or most likely, another severe blow to popular support for the regime that would lead to even more widespread manifestations of dissent later on.
Crushing resistance would come at a higher price for the regime than it did in the 1990’s, because word would slowly but surely reach other areas of the country. Radios and cell phones are more available in the border regions these days. There is also a small but growing presence of clandestine journalists and “guerrilla cameras.” Some refugees would escape to tell the tale. Some senior regime officials might talk to journalists while visiting China, or talk to their friends in Chinese intelligence.
This is why broadcasting matters. It could break down some of those regional barriers and catalyze the spread of forbidden ideas. Broadcasting would not create dissent among the contented and loyal, nor would it transform dissent into open resistance, but it would solidify and focus the doubts of “double-thinkers” and catalyze their propagation into regions that might be “swing” districts now.
I don’t think anyone can claim to predict what “will” — or “will not” — happen in North Korea, just as it was impossible to do so in the cases of Albania or Romania in 1989, or the Soviet Union in 1990. The events that followed in both places defied a rational calculation of the odds. All of those events hinged on unpredictable and intangible human thoughts, mainly those that ensued in the minds of soldiers when ordered to open fire. In the USSR, Romania, and Albania, some did fire. Many others did not. In China and Burma, most did fire (and some probably didn’t). The different results could have hinged on the neurons in just a few dozen minds. The right broadcasting could have made a difference in how those neurons were prepared to react at the critical moment.
If you didn’t factor in the uncertainty of human intangibles and only considered armaments, the democratic revolutions of the 80’s and 90’s seemed very inprobable just days before they occurred. And in fact, they were not inevitable, either. Recall Albania’s nationwide network of bunkers allowing the regime to supposedly hold out in perpetuity, or the Securitate’s storied tunnels and food stores under Bucharest.
So we speak here not just of a military balance but of broader socioeconomic trends that, unless changed by new outside forces, are leading in a predictable and bloody direction. Those socioeconomic pressures haven’t been eased by aid to the North Korean regime as provided; rather, they’ve been contained and have simply grown, as they will probably continue to grow. I cannot say — and do not say — precisely when and how they will fracture the vessel that contains them. But we can match current reports with a given model of a political and social process.
The people who wear suits and work as high officials have to do something .. someone like Bush
testing, testing
Sorry about the “testing” entry. I tried to submit some comments earlier and kept getting rejected and they were long so i wanted to test before I resubmitted another comment
Louis said, “…. there is nothing to do to stop the activities…”
While it’s probably impossible to do anything concretely and immediately for those poor people in these concentration camps right now, there are tremendous amount of different things we can do to make a difference.
1–You can pass along this as well as other websites that deal w/ NK Human Rights issues to as many people as possible thus raising the awareness.
2–You can buy a bulk of “SEOUL TRAIN” DVDs and pass them out to your family/friends, better yet, you can hold a screening in your own community, college, church, etc. If you ask Jim Butterworth, the producer, he will probably give you a discount for multiple purchases. http://www.seoultrain.com This website is also a great resource for those who want to do more as it gives great directions on “what to do, how to do”, etc.
3–You can support by donating whatever you can to HELPING HANDS KOREA as they’re right there in the front lines helping the NK Refugees in China and NK. http://www.helpinghandskorea.org. There is also another great organization called LiNK, Liberty in North Korea, which can use our support. Their web address escapes me at this moment but I believe this website has a link to it.
4–North Korea Freedom Coalition is having a NORTH KOREA FREEDOM DAY in April 2007 and they need many volunteers and participants. http://www.nkfreedom.org
5–You can write to Pres. Bush, Secretary Rice, your Senators and Reps and ask them to pressure both China and NK in dealing w/ this Human Rights violation issue (China is involved in that they actively searches out NK Refugees and forcibly repatriate them back to NK where they are sent to these concentration camps. This is just as bad as the regime, in my opinion). http://www.congress.org and look up “AUSCHWITZ IN NORTH KOREA” under the “soapbox” section.
6–You can write to the UNHCR, the United Nations High Commissioners on Refugees, and demand that they do more for the NK refugees in China as they have not done much in the past, if anything at all. Again, if you look up Seoul Train website, they list their address.
I know the problem seems so huge and we wonder what can one little person do but we are not just one little person. There are literally thousands of people around the world who are concerned about this North Korean human rights violation and if we ALL shout long enough and loud enough, we will be heard. But we have to DO something. WE can’t be “just” aware anymore. There is a quote on Chosun Journal site and it goes something like this, “…NK orphans cannot eat raised awareness”. It’s always the innocent children who suffer the most and it’s because of these little ones that i feel compelled to do something. Pray, yes, it’s VERY important and all these things that we can do seem so indirect in helping those in the concentration camps but all these things that we do eventually will lead to the destruction of the regime and the concentration camps.
Thank you, Joshua, for your HARD work. We’re w/ you and appreciate all that you do. Now, I hope this will go thru.
Well , Thx Sandy for replying .. But all the organisations and Volunteer Groups can only go so far in trying to free North Korea … They are helping to the fullest now and can’t go any further . Almost no one in the world dares go against Mr.Kim Jong-il … He owns the 4th larges Military Force in the world … South Korea is helping but their efforts are wasting . They deliver rice to korea but the military sells them for a profit … I remembering reading a reply from one of you here saying something like : ” No one in the East seems to care about NK ” .. Well , the west dun really encourage the west to help … The East isn’t that strong and powerful enough … but there are organisations from the east helping …
Now how should I put it …. okay .. Imagine Kim Jong-il is 1 great guy and we are just mosquitoes … if we the mosquitoes just attack him 1 by 1 or small groups by small groups going against him … it wont work .. What we need is that every single group of mosquitoes going together and fight as one .. But that isn’t happening .. Different organisations are angry with each other …. So its hard
Thank you, Louis, for your thoughts. Yes, its hard. I do remember reading that comment about no one in the East caring and found it to be profoundly and disappointedly to be true. I have found it, even in my own little community of Korean-Americans, that they really don’t caring much. I have found that people are polite enough to listen to my rant and rave but simply do not care enough to DO something about it. But then I wonder if even I am doing enough……
I was just thinking about this latest “talk” w/ NK…..Dealing w/ Kim, Jong-Il is like dealing w/ an irrational 2 yr old the way they throw temper tantrums and “walk out”, etc. I just pray this atrocity will end soon.
If it will end .. it will take more than 40 years … unless it goes on and on
Thank you, Amanda. If you wouldn’t mind doing do, I’d deeply appreciate it if you’d “digg” the post (see links at the top and bottom of the post).
LONG LIVE KIM JONG-IL, PRINCE OF PEACE, OUR GLORIOUS LEADER!!
The myth of this “Camp 22” is one woven with threads of capitalist lies! There IS NO Camp 22, stop scapegoating our glorious leader!