Just What North Korea Needed: Another Death Camp

Just when I thought that North Korea couldn’t possibly find worse ways to spend its drug-and-gun money than nuclear weapons or the Ryugyong Hotel:

Amid signs of mass defections as the international community began putting pressure on North Korea in the wake of its latest nuclear test, the regime in early May gave orders that no resident was to be allowed to flee the country, followed by a massive crackdown.

The National Defense Commission gave village-to-village indoctrination lectures on a massive scale, apparently prompted by fears that the times when the order alone was enough were gone. Anybody who crossed the Apnok (Yalu) or the Duman (Tumen) River without permission would be considered a traitor, villagers were told. [Chosun Ilbo]

This is a change, very much for the worse. In past years, so many North Koreans were forced to cross the border to find food that the regime relaxed punishments for those who, after a suitable amount of interrogation, were not suspected of contacting foreigners or missionaries, converting to Christianity, or attempting to defect permanently.

The Chongori reeducation center in North Hamgyong Province that went through the greatest change. The center has been reorganized as a concentration camp exclusively for arrested defectors. It has reportedly turned into a living hell, where labor is much heavier than at ordinary reeducation centers and where torture and beatings are routine. [….]

At Chongori, inmates are doomed to die of malnutrition. Forced to work for 14 hours a day, they are given only two whole potatoes and a handful of cornmeal a day. Few inmates stick it out for more than three months, no matter how healthy they are, because beatings are a daily routine there, he said.

Judging by the description, the new camp is probably somewhere in the vicinity of Camp 22.

The report also claims that the regime is cracking down especially hard on cell phones. It’s one of a series of recent reports suggesting that conditions in North Korea have grown much worse recently, and that internal dissent may be bubbling again.

This hard-line policy isn’t entirely new. It was signaled in early 2008 with the summary executions of two separate groups of defectors — there were women and children among them — including one that was returned by South Korea.

Hat tip to GI Korea.