[For images of North Korea's nuclear sites, click here; for updates and commentary on North Korea's latest nuclear test, click here; for images of other concentration camps, click here and here; for more Google Earth imagery of North Korea, click here.]
[Update 11 Feb 07: North Korea denies it]
Sources residing in the district of Chongjin, North Hamkyung informed on the 1st and 5th “On December 20th, a mass group of 120 prisoners from the camp in Hwasung escaped and so the National Safety Agency and the People’s Protection Agency are in a state of emergency” and said “Lately, additional checkpoints have been established at various locations in North Hamkyung inspecting permits for both vehicle and personal travel.
In the history of North Korea, there has only been one known incident like this one — the mass uprising at Onsong, Camp Number 12, in 1987, when 5,000 people were killed. The punishment for escape is death, and former guards claim that they were offered generous bounties for killing escaping prisoners.
One source said “A close acquaintance and officer from the Safety Agency told me that some prisoners had ran away from a political concentration camp in Hwasung. The source informed “The figure seems to exceed 120 people” and “since the end of last year, the atmosphere in North Hamkyung has been tense and the province has been in a state of emergency.
The prisoners did this by cutting the wire and clubbing a guard, and when they got out, someone outside was there with at least one getaway car. The regime’s security forces have put up numerous roadblocks to try to recapture the prisoners. They have reportedly recaptured 21 of them, who are virtually certain to face a firing squad. Elsewhere, the report suggests that others were recaptured in China.
The significance of this, if true, is proof of the existence of an organized underground inside North Korea. As you will see below, Hwasong is a very long walk from China. Without help from an underground, these people would have had nowhere to go; they would all have been recaptured or killed almost immediately. If around 100 prisoners were still at large weeks after the fact, or made it at least as far as China, someone must have helped, hidden, and fed them.
Further, on the day of escape, one prisoner visited his home in Chongjin, North Hamkyung to escape with his family but was arrested by border guards while in attempt.
It’s a safe bet that this entire family was arrested.
I discovered Camp 16 accidentally, while google-earthing North Korea recently. I stumbled upon it because it’s not far from Musudan-ri, the place from which North Korea did its missile tests last July.
Snooping through the mountains, I saw this, and soon realized what I was looking at.
Wanting to confirm my judgment, I went to David Hawk’s photographic exhibits from “The Hidden Gulag,” and confirmed that the latitude and longitude were a match. I followed this fence line for the entire perimeter, and realized that this place is gargantuan.
It measures 18 miles by 16 miles. That’s nearly half the size of the state of Rhode Island [Correction: a quarter of the size of the state of Rhode Island, and more than four times the size of the District of Columbia]. That jagged yellow line that cuts off the northwest corner is the Chinese border.
Closer in, the fence line is clearly visible. I marked the guard posts, which are only faintly visible until you zoom in to a lower altitude.
Here are two of the larger groups of barracks in Camp 16:
Here’s the camp’s South gate:
According to the story, the camp holds 10,000 prisoners. They could be there for anything from the expression of dissent, to finding themselves on the wrong side of a factional dispute, to being the wife or child of someone who said the wrong thing one day.
Survivors of these camps report that each year, about 20 to 25% of the prisoners die.
Men. Women. Kids.
[...] Wow. Can’t blame North Korea for not making large jails. [...]
i got your blog a mention on the british right-of-centre internet tv site
http://www.18doughtystreet.com tonight.
so the word has spread another bit. good work on your part Joshua for letting us all know about this.
and the chap on the show Iain Dale, read out the freekorea.us url for folks to check it out.
(thanks Iain!)
Hey, thanks!
This seems to be bogus in terms of politics. Every country in the world has a prison like this (I mean deporting stations or shelters). We should not use this as a tool pinching N. Korea. Other than that, we have to help them and encourage them to open their gate. Also, one very important thing that most western people do not know is united Korea will be very strong and recover all dostorted history and old lands, which is most of northern parts of china. This is not kidding. Please learn one country’s history and background and culture before condemning it. Korea was divided by big countries such as US and USSR not Koreans. We will see what will happen next soon and this will be the time of the recovery of the world conscience. Korea conceals hidden right ideology for the future and this will open new next world, which most people do not know about and look down corrently. Korea will be the final destination of the God and recovery of the human being.
Need more info on this? please let me know
Jamie,
Based on your rhetorical hyperventilations about distorted history and stolen lands, I’m going to take a wild guess and say you’re a South Korean leftie netizen (the intersection of nationalism and socialism has a particularly distinguished history).
When you say that “every country in the world” has a prison like this, you just don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Read the comments. Read what the survivors and the guards say. What other country’s prisons are killing grounds for racially impure babies? What other country’s prisons hold thousands of kids? What other country kills whole families in gas chambers? Or has an annual mortality rate of 20%? Is it so difficult for you to admit that Koreans alone are engaging in that kind of inhuman barbarity today? Can’t you see that Koreans alone can redeem their nation’s honor by speaking out against it?
You’ve now been trying to bribe North Korea into “opening its door” since 1997. Care to tell us how that’s been working out? The only accomplishment is that South Korea now has the dubious honor of profiting financially from the enslavement of North Koreans at Kaesong (when they pay you in food and you can’t quit, you’re a slave). The idea that this is making North Korea open and free is as vile a lie as “Arbeit Macht Frei.”
I’ve had 60,000 visits on this post from Digg, and from chat rooms in Japan, the United States, France, Spain, the Netherlands, … even Bulgaria. Hell, I even got linked from a porn site (not that I’m judging anyone; at least people came to read the post). The one country that was almost completely unrepresented in viewing this post is South Korea. I ask you: doesn’t it bother you in the slightest that South Koreans care less about their fellow Koreans than Bulgarians? Or that porn surfers have more social concern for the North Korean people than your country’s netizens? Is this what you speak of when you refer to Korea’s unique “hidden right ideology for the future?” I mean, just listen to yourself. Do you actually believe that nationalist supremacy crap? No wonder Korea has become such a breeding ground for racism and anti-Semitism. There’s a whole big world outside your well, little frog! And it does not all worship Korea!
Perhaps you’re referring to those two ugly heaps of 새 똥 between Korea and Japan that mean so much more than 23 million starving North Koreans.
Having lived in South Korea for four years and followed that country’s politics carefully ever since, I’m convinced that South Koreans simply do not care how many North Koreans die. Do. Not. Care.
And never will, until the world sees the pictures and asks why they didn’t. Shame on Korea.
Joshua,
Your verbal slapdown of the Korean leftie was hilariously spot-on.
I should have wished him/her luck invading Manchuria, but we still have troops there. I wonder how fast would could get them out if we had to. Note to Robert Gates: this person is “not kidding” about the Korean reconquest of “most of northern parts of china.”
Hmmm. Kim Won Ung, is that you again?
Holy gerbil. I wonder what that camp’s capacity is and is it full? Are they all political prisoners? God, if any country should not have nukes, it should be N Korea. Matt Stone and Trey Parker are right, Kim Jon II is one fucked up paranoid asshole.
Take this to heart, you freaking liberal professors, nutty hippy students, and socialist government officials everywhere. Communism will NEVER work. Can you understand?
Personally, I think we should isolate N. Korea and let it rot to the point until its people are ready to raise to revolt. Armed or not. It has to end some day. Hopefully, during my life time.
[...] … and Camp 16, near North Korea’s nuclear and missile testing ranges, of which I posted more pictures here. [...]
I don’t think anyone outside North Korea really knows if Camp 16 is at full capacity. Not even the reports quoted in “The Hidden Gulag” are consistent. One report says it’s where the families of the condemned are sent. There was a rumor from one prisoner in another camp, who heard that it was closed, although the GE pictures show vehicles, intact buildings, and maintained fence lines, all signs that suggest recent activity. It’s very hard to say.
Camp 16 is one of the least-known camps, and I don’t know of a single survivor or former guard to have described it first-hand. Not even the HRNK site had pictures of it. I actually think this blog is the first to public pictures of the place.
[...] 120 prisoners escape at Camp 16 [...]
[...] There are other bright spots on the web. OneFreeKorea found something that appealed to the Digg mob, images of North Korean death camps via. Google Earth. Last week, I found a site that translates North Korea/Abduction news for the Japanese audience. The DailyNK had a redesign and are beginning to use embedded videos on their site. I would also like to add DPRK studies and Helping Hands Korea for doing an awesome job. Because of all these sites, I will never run out of things to blog about. [...]
[...] December 2006: The Daily NK reports that on December 20th, 120 prisoners escaped from Camp 16, Hwasong, North Hamgyeong Province. The escape shows signs of help from an underground organization, including the use of a getaway car. Weeks later, scores of prisoners were still at large, presumably having found food and shelter that allowed them to move from that remote area to urban areas and into China. [Daily NK; see also OFK images of the camp]. [...]
thank you so much for the awareness! there are so many people who have yet to even hear about the horrors in the NK gulags. ive put your links all over and sent them to as many people as i can think of. but thank you so much for this article. amazing. and i downloaded google earth and searched for some gulags for about.. 2 hours.. and only found about 3. thanks again!
dude what a waste of time this article stunk like urine
Unfortunately, I feel that all of NK’s inmates are pretty much doomed. Not only do the masses not care about the camps, I think I read somewhere that NK is fully prepared to eradicate every last inmate should the country be invaded. And even if I misread that, I’ve no doubt that they would actually try something like it, and also destroy the camps to hide any concrete evidence we don’t already have.
I’m not advocating invasion, and I don’t know who is. Still, the Nazis wanted to eradicate all signs of their camps, but couldn’t. The camps are quite large. If the regime collapses, most likely due to internal instability, one can only hope that the regime won’t have that opportunity.
Because if the status quo continues, they will all die.
I’m on the verge of switching my vote to invasion. I’ve been a supporter of a large scale covert operation to subvert the government to bring about collapse by a variety of means. Now, after digging into the material more, I’m close to saying the military option should become a real item under serious consideration.
The only person I’ve heard strongly favor overt efforts to bring the regime down — meaning using the military — was a Russian prof who was a Korean linguist. He said he had grown up under a system that was similar to the North’s though not even as bad as it, and he said we should take Pyongyang out and the North Koreans would thank us for it.
The end is going to come by collapse and collapse is most likely going to be a bloodbath too – internal to the North alone or not.
So, unless we decide to do like SK and China – and avoid collapse at all costs by making sure Kim Jong Il’s regime has enough to survive on ——– all we are really doing is leaving the Zero Hour for the bloodbath open ended….
[...] The Daily NK reports: Sources residing in the district of Chongjin, North Hamkyung informed on the 1st and 5th On December 20th, a mass group of 120 prisoners from the camp in Hwasung escaped and so the National Safety Agency and the … – more – [...]
[...] [Update: Welcome Weekly Standard readers. Please take note of some of the other North Korea Google Earth goodies here: the concentration camps at Camp 22 (of gas chamber infamy) and Camp 16 (the site of a recent mass escape), North Korea’s “ghost cities,” and Kim Jong Il’s palace complex northeast of Pyongyang, which comes with its own “pyramid scheme.”] [...]
[...] * Can we really separate nukes from human rights? North Korean defectors say that the regime used political prisoners to help prepare its nuclear test. The report is given plausibility by the proximity of the nuclear test site to Camp 16. You will recall that this site may have been the first to publish pictures of that camp on the Web, though it was no more than a matter of finding the place on Google Earth. [...]
[...] And you’ve seen my posts on Camp 22 and Camp 16 by Google Earth, right? Yeah, I thought so. Sorry for mentioning it yet again. [...]
i think the nazis are stupid
what the point in killing six million people and then shooting himself
if people gave up the would be less wars
why couldnt we get on with each other
everybody thinks theyre higher classed than us we are all the same and we are ging to stay the same…… so get used to it people
urrrrrr………….
PEOPLE WILL YOU JUST GET ON WITH EACH OTHER WE ARE GROWN UPS FOR GODS SAKES ACT LIKE IT
PEOPLE WHO READ THIS YOU SHOULD SAY SORRY TO YOUR FAMILYS JUST INCASE ANYTHING LIKE THIS HAPPENS TO YOU!!!
I HOPE THEY FIND LIL MADDIE GOD HELP THOSE PEOPLE WHO HAVE TAKEN HER
SEE PEOPLE ARE SOOOO SICK MINDED TAKING KIDS OF THEYRE HOLIDAYS AND TAKING TO ANOTHER COUNTRY
STUPID STUPID STUPID
SEEE YOU THINK GROWN UPS WOULD HAVE GROWN UP BUT THEY HAVENT
ITS NOT HARD TO GET ALONG WITH PEOPLE
THEY SHOULD GET ALL THOSE PRISONERS OUT OF THEYRE CELLS AND CLEAN UP THE STREETS DO SOMETHING USEFUL
THINK ABOUT THIS PEOPLE
GROW UP
CYA
X
[...] To further put a face on evil I have decided to an OFK like job and see if I can locate Camp No. 14 on Google Earth. Here is where the city of Kaechon is located: [...]
Joshua, your doin great work. I’ll keep an eye on this site. Lets all hope for a quick end of this horror goin on in NK. As a christian i’m prayin for this and the fall of the regime, and it will fall. Also because of people like you, taking action in stead of watching. God bless!
* srz, typo in mailadress
Hi there,
I live in Poland and our history education here is mainly based around the attrocities of world war 2, and I am absolutely astounded that exactly the same thing is happening this very moment and the UN is doing absolutely zilch about it!
I also have a question:
Why are people being deported back to North Korea from South Korea/China?
I’m sure the information that these people have could be useful in overthrowing this barbaric regime..
1. UN action is being blocked by China, which opposes letting the UN become an effective advocate for human rights in general or China/N. Korea in particular. China has been successful at this, and its membership on the UN Human Rights Council pretty much proves how ineffective it has helped the UN to be.
2. South Korea does not deport people back to North Korea, but its consulates, specifically the one in Shenyang, try not to let in North Koreans and are suspected of helping Chinese police catch them.
3. China deports North Koreans back to North Korea because it doesn’t want the refugees and it wants to keep Kim Jong Il in power. It wants Kim Jong Il to continue to keep Korea divided. A divided Korea, with each part separately under strong Chinese influence, serves China’s interests. It doesn’t care how many North Koreans have to die for those interests. None of these atrocities would be happening if it were not for China enabling them with malice aforethought.
Thank you for your interest, and I hope you’ll spread the word about this issue.
Our (Western) media is involved in making it so “that exactly the same thing is happening this very moment”.
In WWII, news leaked out here and there about what was going on around the Nazi and fascist movements in Germany and under German influence. Today, we have even more information — I can go to Google Earth or similar site and get detailed images of NK’s concentration camps. We have video of the state-imposed starvation. We have video interviews with people who were prisoners and prison guards in the concentration camps.
But, the most we get out of the popular culture and the popular news media are an occasional documentary once every 2 or 3 years – and those excellent documentaries are given air time for a short moment – they gain some articles in the big time press – and then they are yesterday’s news….
…..the media and pop culture does absolutely nothing to remind people that those atrocities are going on each and every day. Each new documentary is like a “revelation” about what is going on……..and then 2 weeks later, the revelation has become forgotten again….
I maybe still in school but i’ve won national and international AIDS/HIV awareness competitions and if you need any posters/leaflets/flyers I would be more than happy to help
[...] 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.” [...]
[...] *  Last weekend, I updated my post on Camp 22, the cruelest of North Korea’s concentration camps, interlacing it with YouTube clips of witnesses accounts. They’re a powerful reinforcement to the words I’ve written and the Google Earth photos I’ve published.  A big, big thank-you to USinKorea for finding those clips. That post already gets a significant amount of traffic, often from people who often seem to have known little of North Korea beforehand. Frequently, my visitors’ log shows that they’re clicking their way through all of the links to the photographs. This is one place where I can claim that I’ve likely changed a few thousand minds. If you haven’t done so already, I’d be deeply appreciative if you’d “Digg” that post.  Another, earlier post made it to Page One of Digg and attracted 60,000 hits in two days — traffic still streams in from chat rooms months later – so consider the possibilities for getting this message out. [...]
[...] read more | digg story [...]
[...] * North Korea is building or repairing the fences around its nuclear test site in the northeast.  What reports like these don’t mention, however, is that directly to the northeast of that test site lies Camp 16, one of North Korea’s more horrendous concentration camps. And if the Daily NK’s December 2006 report of a mass escape is true, it might be that the North Koreans are actually repairing the camp’s fences, not the test sites. Hopefully, an intrepid and informed journalist who is reading this will find out which side of the test site is the focus of those upgrades. [...]
wow the more i dig into north korea, the darker it gets. its awsome to know that theres some type of underground thing there though. God is really working there.
[...] Dire qu’on pensait ne jamais revoir ça depuis la fin de l’ex-URSS… freekorea.us/?p=6442#more-6442 [...]
[...] One Free Korea — a website dedicated to freedom in the whole peninsula; this site contains satellite images of one of the largest prison camps. [...]
[...] One Free Korea — a website dedicated to freedom in the whole peninsula; this site contains satellite images of one of the largest prison camps. [...]
Been looking this stuff up for quite a while. And still, nothing is being done about it.
Good on the world for looking out for fellow humans, eh?
The majority just sit back, say they care, and don’t do a bloody thing.
Keep up the useless work, keyboard jockeys.
Wow. I never new this about NK. What a shit hole.
I have a feeling that Hillary Clinton, our next secretary of state, will be instrumental in making a high profile visit to North Korea by way of the northern provinces (instead of flying into Pyongyang from Beijing), exposing the death camps, especially the notorious camp 22, as the whole world watches – who knows, whatever diplomatic means she can employ may undermine the present DPRK regime without a single shot being fired. Keep up the good work! Your work in this area is making the difference!
It’s terrible. I hope that there is an uprising by the free thinkers of the state. Obviously there will be more than speculated, people cannot tell what you are thinking unless you voice it. I’m worried that such a place now has nuclear power, and the potential to start a nuclear war. From what I’ve read, he seems the type that will use such power for his own means, and he seems to lack compassion for even his own subjects.
Awesome posts you guys. I took a tour into the DPRK last October and felt like I was on the “Truman Show”, always being watched as if everything was scripted, as it probably was. Been tossing an optimistic idea around, concerning a possible peaceful change in the DPRK. I have been sticking my nose up in Kim’s Juche philosophy for awhile, simply (very simply) put, Man is responsible for his own destiny… this is done in order to put more of the burden of food production on the individual… in other words… don’t blame the State if you starve again. Be self-sufficient in your daily needs. This Juche philosophy was put in place to ease the burden of the government and in a sense, deny its own “responsibilities”… In other words… Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for yourself…
Consider… did/ does this Juche philosophy instill into the individual more of an important role in the life of the nation. Would a future DPRK which is truly “Democratic” use this already “cultic” belief and blend it in with one of private ownership and commerce.
“An Individual’s ambition leads to the common good”. – Adam Smith
“An Individual is Responsible for his/”her” own destiny”. – Kim Jung Il
Makes me wonder if Kim himself didnt set the stage for a possible Democratic upheaval. Hard to say.
Anyway, you guys keep up the good work!
hey this was a very nice article that you have created ! keep up the good work!!
Hey Josh, Nice tracking. what if we paid a satellite mapping company to MAP Nk for an year. Can any one guess how much it costs… money is easy if the cause is great enough to be given..
goodluck and cheers
Anil
Is it tank in this courtyard? Map: 41.325441,129.665011
Its a lot of mass graves around this buildings, that’s strange, because not many “private” houses around the buildings.
Usually all the mass graves are to find just behind the houses/ larger villages, but here?
Where does all the people come from who are in these graves?
Just south of the courtyard there is strange circle formations in the fields…
Strange formations, map: 41.339378,129.650409
Someone has cut the railway track off and took a piece of steel?!
Map: 41.367461,129.691522
Could this be a city prisons? 41.769159,128.837206 and maybe here 42.354156,129.659421 at least it has some very nasty walls… and a mass grave outside the walls.
But no real prison buildings, just one building (no village around), gigantic walls and mass graves..?
Mass grave field within the Camp 22; 42.548081,129.925416
Speaking as a U.S. citizen, I am, for one of the few times in my life, ashamed of my country. We can invade third-world hellholes that manage to annoy us. We can topple legitimate, if obscenely horrific, dictatorships, pop missiles at targets in supposedly allied countries, commit piracy on the high seas but we stand back and watch this obscenity continue.
It’s time to get over it. If we’re going to play world’s policeman and maintain some thin pretense of a moral high ground, this is where we need to start, not harassing oil-producing countries. Or, if we’re going to pull that silliness, maybe we should show a profit. Better off staying home if we can’t do something worthwhile.
Just read an article on The Atlantic bemoaning our failure to provide “humanitarian aid” to NK. Guess we should have air-dropped wheat and butter into 40′s Germany too.
Okay, done venting. Keep the faith and thanks for a great resource.
May I use your sat. images (with attribution, of course) for my story on North Korea and UN human rights council
Of course. Would you please include a hyperlink to the sourced materials? Thank you.
Thank you so much! I work for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Russian Service. So, the article will be in Russian. And I will translate some of your findings, if you don’t mind. Thank you so much for your work! I will put the hyperlink for sure. I don’t think that this information is available in Russian at all. All the best, Irina.