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February 10, 2007

Ghost City: 39.75N, 126.31E

By the green river, there is a grey city.  The city, I  infer from this map, is called  Tokchon, and it lies on the headwaters of the Taedong, above Pyongyang, and above the slave-worked coal mines of Camps 14 and 18.  The city is coated in soot, a deathly blanket reminiscent of scenes we haven’t seen since the fall of Ceausescu’s Romania.    Click for a full-size image. Search the streets for signs of life, and you will find few. ...

Categories Google Earth
February 6, 2007

Mass Escape at N. Korean Concentration Camp; 120 Escape

[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] 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...

Categories Google Earth/Human Rights/Inside NK/Resistance/The Camps
October 19, 2006

Interview: L. Gordon Flake, Executive Director, Mansfield Foundation

Gordon Flake (bio)  is two things that make his opinions interesting and valuable to me.  First, he’s a fluent Korean speaker, and those of us who aren’t are always at some disadvantage to those who do when we are gathering the facts we process into our views.  Second — and Gordon may not agree with this characterization — his views  strike me as classically  liberal. His views are probably more independent and less jaundiced by partisan bias or  ambitions  than...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Blogs & Blogging/Famine & Food Aid/Google Earth/Human Rights/Korean Politics/Korean Society/Media Criticism/NK Economics/Proliferation/Refugees/U.S. & Korea/Washington Views
October 1, 2006

La Place Des Miserables: 39.713N, 126.895E

This is one district, called Pyongchang-ri, of the infamous Camp 15, now known worldwide as Yodok. Here, according to survivors, children labor, starve, sicken, and die beside their parents — thousands of them each year. The entire camp is massive, and not all of it is within Google Earth’s high-resolution coverage. This picture gives a partial overview; you can see another photograph of this district here, and more photos here.  Yodok was the place Kang Chol-Hwan documented in “The Aquariums...

Categories Google Earth/Human Rights/Korean Society/The Camps
September 4, 2006

The Gates of Hell: 42.471N, 129.824E

These are the gates though which prisoners enter Camp 22 in North Hamgyeong province. Camp 22 is the largest and worst of North Korea’s prison camps, with some portions set aside as a “life imprisonment zone” for prisoners who will never leave. Escaped prisoners and guards report that prisoners are killed in a gas chamber in the camp’s administration area, approximately 8 miles down the road in the background (no high-resolution photograph of the administration area is available on Google...

Categories Google Earth/Human Rights/The Camps