Camp 22 Update

In an update to its previous imagery analysis, the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea seems to be migrating to the view that Camp 22 was closed in 2012, but if that’s the answer, the next question it raises is what happened to the prisoners there, once estimated to number as high as 30,000. The Washington Post asks that question in an editorial today:

In a way, the camp was a city in its own right, albeit a locus of inhumanity rather than a bustling metropolis. Camp 22 was one point in North Korea’s constellation of concentration camps that run on unadulterated cruelty, a secret world where prisoners are fed poison for experimentation, women are forced to kill their own children and entire families are murdered in gas chambers.

As the world sits by, North Korea has imprisoned as many as 200,000 people in these camps. Although human rights violations remain unfortunately common in many nations, these camps form a category of their own in today’s world. North Korea’s gulag is a place where people aren’t people but rather objects for exploitation and elimination.

The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea released a report this week detailing the harrowing reality of Camp 22. Satellite imagery suggests the camp recently closed. Good news? Not exactly. According to the report, after a food shortage in 2009-10, Camp 22’s population shrunk to somewhere between 3,000 and 8,000 people from around 30,000 in previous years. Thousands of prisoners seem to have evaporated into thin air — perhaps via Camp 22’s crematoria.

Truthfully, I don’t know how accurately these populations can be estimated, but it’s clear by now that thousands of prisoners disappeared from Camp 22, and that if they were released, we’d have heard their stories by now. By all accounts, the last surviving prisoners were loaded onto trains in the middle of the night and sent to points unknown.

The Post also takes note of the testimony of North Korean refugees to the U.N. Commission of Inquiry in Seoul. I suppose I should have written more about this; I’ve come to the conclusion that the COI’s report could be significant if it leads to the passage of another U.N. sanctions resolution, which in turn would make it easier for many in Congress and the administration to support tougher human rights sanctions legislation and condition the lifting of those sanctions on closing the camps down … without the use of crematoria. That’s also why China and Russia will probably prevent that from happening. For that matter, Europe is also profiting from its trade with the perpetrators of these atrocities and may not want effective action, either.

The hardest reaction to explain or excuse continues to be the apathy of most South Koreans. One day, a new generation of Korean nationalists will have to airbrush that out of history. North Korea has called the testimony slander, but otherwise has largely ignored the proceedings.

Here in the United States, North Korea is still not such a pariah that it can’t serve as a backdrop for a reality TV circus, a sort of reversed-polarity version of Borat in which Dennis Rodman stands in as a parody of us all, just a week after North Korea refused to receive our Special Envoy for Human Rights, and months after Rodman asked North Korea to release Ken Bae (which North Korea also ignored).

One reason I didn’t write about the COI testimony is that I was simply busy with other things, but another must be that I found the accounts both too familiar and too depressing to inspire much thought–expect that here we are, ten years after most of these accounts stopped being news, still trying to pierce the factual ignorance of the State Department, the ambivalence of multiple administrations, the hopeless impotence of the U.N., the corruption of some of our media, and the inexplicable disinterest of much of the Human Rights Industry. The sad fact is that it doesn’t serve any powerful constituency’s pecuniary agenda to make an issue of this.

Update, Sept. 8:  I’ve removed three comments from this and one other thread in keeping with the comment rules policy (see “About” link).  Two were using sock puppets of one IP address, and the third, pretending to engage one of the sock puppets in discussion, posted within minutes of the others, suggesting that it was either the same person or coordinated. The latter comment’s IP address also matched that of another commenter who was banned for using sock puppets and being a troll.

(If you wonder why I moderate comments, just read any Washington Post comment thread.)

Based on the stilted prose, the comments appear to have been posted by a non-native English speaker, maybe even one of these hired trolls we’ve been warned about. Obviously, I can’t do much more than speculate about who left the comments, but in the last item of this post, you’ll see a screen grab I took of a visit to this site from Pyongyang, which I had saved for just such an occasion.

All I can say is that someone is upset that people around the world are talking about Camp 22 and wants to change the subject to something else.