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August 28, 2017

State Department issues new reports on N. Korean gulags, religious repression

Last week, State issued two new reports on North Korea. The first of these reports, mandated by section 303 of the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act of 2016, terms itself a report on North Korea’s prisons. In fact, it only describes the worst tier of them — the dreaded kwan-li-so, or political prison camps, several of which are places where the condemned never leave. CAMP 16 HWASONG 41.314103,129.342054 There is little information available on the total control zone Camp...
Categories Human Rights/Religion/The Camps
July 28, 2016

At Cheongo-ri, one or two prisoners die of hunger or disease each day*

The Korea Institute for National Unification, or KINU, has produced a number of thorough and detailed reports on human rights in North Korea. Recently, KINU released a new report by research fellow Lee Sang-sin on torture in North Korean’s political prison camps. There’s no English translation of the report posted on KINU’s web site yet, but two news reports give us a preview of some of its findings. Not surprisingly, despite the fact that North Korea has a law against torture,...
Categories The Camps
December 17, 2015

HRNK: Camp 16 “has likely expanded” in recent years

The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea has published a detailed new report on Camp 16, the subject of this extensive OFK post from April 2012. It’s always validating when the findings of an experienced professional imagery analyst like Joseph Bermudez are generally consistent with mine. Picking up at about the same time my post left off, Bermudez finds that “[d]uring the period under study, there has been an increase in the number of housing units and support buildings,” and most...
Categories The Camps/WMD
October 14, 2015

The first time I had to bury a person I was fighting back my tears, but another inmate …

whose name was Bok-soon, who was in charge of herbal medicine, told me to spit and trample on the corpse. I asked her why, and she said it was a kind of ritual to drive out the ghost of the dead person so they would not come after me. It told the ghost that ‘I won’t die here like you’. That day on the way back, I was weeping alone. One of the male inmates, who was making wooden boards...
Categories The Camps
October 1, 2015

@GloriaSteinem @ChristineAhn & @WomenCrossDMZ: When will you call on Kim Jong-Un end the rape & murder of women prisoners?

The European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea’s new report on forced labor is rightfully attracting media attention for calling out 18 countries — Algeria, Angola, China, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Malta, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Nigeria, Oman, Poland, Qatar, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates — for using North Korean slave labor. (In fairness, they might have included South Korea on the list, too.) What reporters should not overlook, however, is the section of the report on slave...
Categories Human Trafficking/The Camps/Useful Idiocy
September 25, 2015

Twenty women Senators do what @GloriaSteinem and @WomenCrossDMZ won’t: Stand up for women in N. Korea’s gulag

With the possible exceptions of Mosul and Raqqa, there may be no worse place on earth to be a woman today than inside North Korea’s prison camps. There, according to a U.N. Commission of Inquiry, “the conditions of subjugation of inmates, coupled with the general climate of impunity, creates an environment, in which rape perpetrated by guards and prisoners in privileged positions is common.” The Commission found that “[w]ithout exception, pregnant victims are subject to abortion or their child is killed at birth.”...
Categories Activism/Human Rights/The Camps/Useful Idiocy
September 4, 2015

N. Korea Glasnost Watch: Video shows men sent to camps for copying American movies

The Telegraph has obtained guerrilla footage of two men, one 27 and one 30, being tried and sentenced to nine months in a labor camp for copying and selling American movies. The North Korean judge, or official, says that one of the defendants is “a person immersed in the corrupt ideology of capitalism” and tells the crowd that the criminal acts were “revealed by agents in South Korea operated by our party.” During the full 12 minutes of footage, filmed secretly...
Categories Censorship/Subversion/The Camps
July 2, 2015

N. Korean biowar researcher defects, will testify about human experimentation

[Update, 4 Aug 2015: I inquired with well-connected friends in Europe about when this testimony was likely to take place. Those friends instead questioned the accuracy of Yonhap’s report. Last week, I wrote to a Yonhap correspondent, and asked whether Yonhap stands by the story. Although the correspondent passed my question along to the author of this report, I have not heard back from Yonhap. The lack of a response is further reason to question the accuracy of Yonhap’s story.]...
Categories Europe/Human Rights/The Camps/WMD
January 18, 2015

Forgive Shin Dong Hyok the man, but not Shin Dong Hyok the activist

What had always puzzled me the most about Shin Dong Hyok’s account of growing up in and escaping from Camp 14 was how someone raised in such isolation from the rules of North Korean society could have had the resources and survival skills to infiltrate all the way from the Taedong River to the Chinese border, and then successfully cross it. How did he replace his prisoner clothing? How did he find money to bribe railroad police and border guards?...
Categories Activism/The Camps
December 15, 2014

NK Econ Watch on Camp 15

For several weeks, we’ve read reports that North Korea had razed Camp 15 to “prove” to foreign visitors that survivors’  accounts of the camp were false. Curtis has since examined imagery from October 20th, and declared himself “unsure of the recent status of the camp.” Clearly, reports that said no trace of the camp still existed were incorrect. That story never made sense to me, for two reasons. First, North Korea understands that the whole world is watching it on Google...
Categories The Camps
November 19, 2014

Kang Chol-Hwan does a Reddit AMA

“One of the biggest misconceptions I think people have of North Korea is that they are simple and naive,” he said. “But I feel that North Koreans as a group of people have gone through a lot of hardship, and their ability to survive in difficult situations are a lot higher that what people think. People think that unification will be a basketcase for North Koreans, but they will definitely be able to manage. People also think North Koreans will...
Categories Reconstruction/Refugees/The Camps
November 14, 2014

KINU survey: Conditions in N. Korean labor camps worsen

So apparently, that was still possible, then: The heinous conditions faced by malnourished and overworked North Korean inmates in reeducation camps has led to a growing number of deaths, according to a report released on Thursday. Data from the paper reveals that prisoners within these facilities may be living in an environment prone to egregious human rights violations– just as in political prison camps. Findings from the report were announced by Lee Keum Soon, Director of the Center for North...
Categories The Camps
November 10, 2014

Camp 15: The Theresienstadt ploy?

The Daily NK reports that Camp 15, described by refugee-journalist Kang Chol Hwan in The Aquariums of Pyongyang and by more recent witnesses to The Washington Post‘s Chico Harlan, is no more, and that the prisoners have been sent to other camps: Detainees held until recently at North Korea’s notorious political prison camp in Yodeok County have been moved to two alternate camps, an inside source from North Hamkyung Province has alleged to Daily NK. “That political prison camp that used to be...
Categories Anju Links/The Camps
October 28, 2014

Charm offensive: N. Korea threatens to nuke U.S., hands out Halloween candy

As near as I can figure, Kim Jong Un’s stages of grief over his potential indictment for crimes against humanity have included denial, homophobia, mendacity, engagement, racism, and (again) terrorism, not necessarily in that order. The North Korean model differs from the Kübler-Ross model in its inclusion of several additional stages, and also, for its lack of an “acceptance” stage. In any case, North Korea, one of the world’s most isolated and opaque countries, seems to be taking the threat of at least some action seriously....
Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights/The Camps
October 8, 2014

North Korea denies having prison camps, admits “reform through labor camps”

Choe Myong Nam, a North Korean foreign ministry official in charge of U.N. affairs and human rights issues, said at a briefing with reporters that his country has no prison camps and, in practice, “no prison, things like that.” But he briefly discussed the labor camps. “Both in law and practice, we do have reform through labor detention camps — no, detention centers — where people are improved through their mentality and look on their wrongdoings,” he said. [AP] The...
Categories The Camps
July 28, 2014

Roberta Cohen in the WaPo, on preventing a massacre in N. Korea’s gulag

Writing in The Washington Post, Roberta Cohen, Co-Chair of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, writes about how to prevent the execution of “standing orders at North Korea’s political prison camps (the kwanliso) to kill all prisoners in the event of armed conflict or revolution.” It was Kim Il-sung, North Korea’s founder, who gave the kill-all order. His son Kim Jong-il reaffirmed it. Ahn Myong-chol, a former guard, testified before the U.N. commission that, in the event of upheaval,...
Categories The Camps
February 20, 2014

Crowdsourcing the hunt for North Korea’s prisons and prison camps

The world didn’t awaken to the horrors in North Korea in time save Kim Jong Il’s victims or hold him accountable, but it may be doing so in time to give Kim Jong Un some pause as he prosecutes his bloody purges. Various reports from inside North Korea — reports that are impossible to verify — say that he has carried out mass arrests and executions, both in Pyongyang and near the border regions that represent the greatest threat to...
Categories The Camps