Too Little, Too Late, But Better than Nothing: Amnesty International on North Korea’s Political Prison Camps

Six years after it breathlessly declared Guantanamo Bay “the gulag of our time,” Amnesty International has gotten around to concluding that North Korea “can no longer deny the undeniable:”

“These are places out of sight of the rest of the world, where almost the entire range of human rights protections that international law has tried to set up for last 60 years are ignored. “As North Korea seems to be moving towards a new leader in Kim Jong-un and a period of political instability, the big worry is that the prison camps appear to be growing in size.

Amnesty International believes the camps have been in operation since the 1950s, yet only three people are ever known to have escaped Total Control Zones and managed to leave North Korea. About 30 are known to have been released from the Revolutionary Zone at Political Prison Camp in Yodok and managed to leave North Korea. According to the testimony of a former detainee at the revolutionary zone in the political prison camp at Yodok, an estimated 40 per cent of inmates died from malnutrition between 1999 and 2001.

Having read Amnesty’s “report,” which is shorter than many posts I’ve written on this blog, I can’t help thinking that I must be missing something. Aside the article quoted above, Amnesty has issued a ten-page, double-spaced report, a press release, some b-roll video, and a petition, though I’d be fascinated to know where that will be delivered.

From these, I will extract three facts for your consideration: first, that the estimated population of the camp system is 200,000 men, women, and children; second, that in some of the camps, the annual mortality rate is 40%; and third, that the camps have been operating since the 1950’s. If we accept these statistics as true — or as close to true as Kim Jong Il permits us to tell — where on this earth are as many people are suffering and dying so miserably and unjustly than North Korea? By any objectively defensible standard of morality, Amnesty ought to have rededicated itself to closing down North Korea’s prison camps immediately after the Khmer Rouge was driven back into the jungle. But that did not happen.

I sure hope that’s not all Amnesty has to say about this, because collectively, all of this is still just a sliver of the information that multiple other sources have published years ago. Amnesty’s report comes eight years after David Hawk first began publishing images of the camps, and provides far less information, fewer photographs, and fewer witness accounts. Amnesty’s “revelations” also come four years after this humble site first published detailed satellite imagery of North Korea’s political prison camps, several of which had still never been seen by foreign eyes at that time. Curtis Melvin and GI Korea have placemarked and published (respectively) far more detailed imagery of the camps than Amnesty has. Korean NGO’s, such as the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights and the Korean Bar Association, also contributed far more to our understanding of the camps years ago. What excuse does the Human Rights Industry’s most lavishly funded and best-promoted conglomerate have for being years behind a handful of tiny, under-resourced NGO’s and bloggers in speaking out against the greatest human rights atrocities of the last quarter-century?

There is also a part of me that feels wrong to quibble; after all, an Amnesty press release gets picked up instantly by the New York Times, the BBC, the Daily Mail, and a news wire. (For that matter, it’s been great for my own traffic.) And to be fair to Amnesty, they’ve done much good in bringing needed attention to abuses in Syria, Libya, and China, and however sporadically, they have spoken up for the North Korean people over the years. Most recently, they joined the chorus of outrage directed at the W.H.O.’s imbecile of a Director, Margaret Chan, for her praise of North Korea’s health care system. And hey, at least they’re not following Jimmy Carter’s hypocritical advice that this “cannot be changed by outsiders,” though Jimmy has taken enough of a beating since his return from Pyongyang that I see even he is criticizing the deficiency of North Korea’s health care system now. I suppose I should be thankful for that much from a self-professed human rights advocacy group, so all that being said, I signed their petition and hope you’ll do the same, although I certainly didn’t give them any of my money (which I’d urge you to send here or here instead).

I say this for several reasons, the first of which is that Amnesty’s paltry report comes years after it’s news to anyone, and the second of which is that it contributes little to our knowledge of the North Korean camp system, other than to reaffirm that it continues to expand. Then, GI Korea pointed out that this year so far, Amnesty has published a grand total of nine reports about South Korea and just this one about North Korea. That’s an awfully damning statistic for Amnesty’s sense of perspective, and thus for its legitimacy as a global conscience. It especially highlights one problem that the Human Rights Industry has done far too little to correct — their tendency to criticize governments in direct proportion to which they allow access to the evidence of their own conduct. The problem with this is that the degree to which governments allow access and bother to read petitions from Amnesty International tend to be inversely proportional to the severity of the abuses those governments commit. The last decade of virtual silence from Amnesty does suggest that North Korea has found the right formula to sew up the eyelids of nosy outsiders.

Do not take any of this as argument that South Korea, the United States, or any other government ought to be above morally proportionate criticism. The questions surrounding Gitmo and the interrogation methods used there are legitimate questions with important implications for the character and security of our nation, and also for the human rights of those that the terrorists would murder next, although I do not accept that those questions are as simple as Amnesty’s street theater would suggest, or as sterile as the arguments of its legal scholars who question the lawfulness of killing Osama bin Laden, an act that almost certainly saved many innocent lives.

Whatever position you take on those questions, it is still objectively indefensible that the Human Rights Industry has expended such a disproportionate share of its energy, funds, and political capital on torturing the definition of the word “gulag,” or on defending the immunity of terrorists from civil societies acting in self-defense. This is not an indication of a pristine conscience, it is an indication that too many of us have lost our sense of moral perspective. And that is a global disgrace.