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 likely, the prisoner population:

If those working at the camp are prisoners, the prisoner population within the camp has likely expanded over the period examined. The camp population maintains the agricultural fields, orchards, and livestock, and work in the camp’s logging activities and wood products, light industrial facilities, and mines. [HRNK]

Bermudez’s report is documented extensively with detailed, annotated imagery.

From the context of the whole report, Bermudez seems convinced that Camp 16 is indeed a prison camp. Presumably, his caution is a function of having no eyewitness confirmation; however, in 2013, Amnesty International published this account:

In an interview conducted in November 2013, Mr. Lee (full name withheld), who was a security official in kwanliso 16 in the 1980s until the mid-1990s, told Amnesty International of other forms of executions he had witnessed where inmates were forced to dig their own graves and then killed by hammer blows to their necks by prison authorities. In another instance, he had seen prison authorities strangling and then beating inmates to their death with wooden sticks. He also recounted that several women inmates disappeared after they had been raped by officials and he concluded that they had been executed secretly. [Amnesty International]

This witness left North Korea long before the beginning of nuclear testing at Punggye-ri. Like me, Bermudez was interested in whether the evidence in the imagery supported reports that North Korea uses prisoners from Camp 16 at the adjacent Punggye-ri nuclear test site. Like me, he found nothing in the imagery to support that, although he notes:

It is important to reiterate the analytical caution presented in previous reports (such as North Korea: Imagery Analysis of Camp 155 and North Korea’s Camp No. 25 Update6 ) produced by HRNK and AllSource. North Korean officials, especially those within the Korean People’s Army and internal security organizations, clearly understand the importance of implementing camouflage, concealment, and deception (CCD) procedures to mask their operations and intentions. It would be reasonable to assume that they have done so here. [HRNK]

Of course, my analysis was also based on the geographical convenience of moving prisoners directly from Camp 16 to Punggye-ri, in that the west side of Camp 16 is the east side of Punggye-ri. If the kuk-ga anjeon bowibu guards wanted to bring prisoners from Camp 16 to Punggye-ri, wouldn’t the most convenient and secure way to do that be to drive them out a gate on the western side of the camp? Perhaps, but not necessarily. Most of the camp’s population is located on the southeastern part of the camp, near the main gate. There is a road that goes from that vicinity westward to Punggye-ri, outside the camp’s boundaries. It wouldn’t be that great an inconvenience to simply load the prisoners onto trucks, drive them out the gate, and then a few miles to the west, and then to the north, around the camp’s southern and southwestern circumferences.

The other big question I hope we’ll answer one day: was Camp 16 the ultimate destination for the survivors of Camp 22? If so, how many survivors arrived at Camp 16? Until we get more information from witnesses to either Camp 16, Camp 22, or Punggye-ri, all we can do is watch, and follow the evidence to wherever it takes us.