Archive for The Camps

OFK in the WaPo

February 12, 2013 Human Rights, Sanctions, The Camps 2 comments

Many thanks to my friend Prof. Sung Yoon Lee for offering me the opportunity to co-write this with him, especially since he frankly did most of the writing this time.  It’s a pleasure to write with Prof. Lee.  He’s a terrific writer, and our views align so closely that there’s no need for painstaking negotiations over wording and content.  Really, I don’t know of anyone who (1) understands the pathology of North Korea better, and (2) can express it so well in my native language (which he speaks better than me, to tell the truth).

After you’re done with that, don’t miss this paper Prof. Lee wrote as part of a symposium for the National Bureau of Asian Research.  In the pages of Foreign Policy, Dan Blumenthal highlights it as “a much-needed dose of reality about what exactly we are dealing with.”  Must reading.

I also have to compliment the WaPo folks for a particularly speedy and professional job of editing this for publication.  I’ve been an editor, and I know how hard it is to boil something down to the space limits without harming the author’s intent.

In case you’re keeping score, that’s one-two-three times I’ve been linked by the Post today, which must be some kind of record.  For that, I owe many thanks to Adam Cathcart and, of course, Max Fisher.  After all these years, I’d grown accustomed to being dismissed as a crank raving from the margins.  I hope I won’t miss that old familiar feeling.  I mostly hope that all of this effort will eventually matter where it counts.

Update:  Geez.  Get a load of The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board, sounding like us:

This should not mean trying once again to engage North Korea in negotiations: More than 15 years of such efforts have demonstrated that the United States lacks the leverage to induce the regime to give up its nukes. If any country has such leverage, it is China, which supplies its neighbor with fuel and food. U.S. diplomacy should be aimed first at pressuring Beijing to take responsibility for the growing menace on its doorstep. New Chinese leader Xi Jinping has the opportunity to change a policy that, in backing the Kim regime in the interest of “stability,” has made the Korean peninsula steadily more dangerous.

Though sanctions on North Korea are already tight, the Obama administration should look for new ways that the U.S. financial system can be used to cut off the regime’s access to international banks. It should work to bring greater attention to the human rights calamity in the North.

That’s the next best thing to an endorsement. I never thought I’d live to see that.

Major expansion of Camp 25

February 11, 2013 The Camps 3 comments

I have updated the Camp 25 page with new imagery of the camp, whose land area was approximately doubled by a major expansion prior to May 2012.

Big hat tip to Curtis.

In Poor Taste

February 10, 2013 Humor/Satire, The Camps 4 comments

Quite a few readers have been coming in over the last two days from this New York Times Op-Ed by Adam Johnson, author of the acclaimed The Orphan Master’s Son.  Johnson links to the Camp 14 page and asks how anyone could be so tasteless as to post a satirical review of a North Korean concentration camp.  Johnson thinks that in the same sense as the maps review something disturbing and inhuman about North Korea, the reactions reveal something disturbing and inhuman about us. Writing at Foreign Policy several days ago, Blaine Harden had also asked, “Should we really be making jokes about North Korean prison camps?”  Both pieces are well worth a read in full, and reach slightly different conclusions.  I have spent the last week vacillating between those conclusions myself.

As a fan of South Park and those sketchy Untergang parodies on YouTube, I feel underqualified to denounce anyone else’s tasteless sense of humor, but there’s a line that I think these reviews cross.  The distinction, I think, Read more

The Whole World Is Watching

January 30, 2013 Activism, Human Rights, The Camps 8 comments

Since I started this blog nearly ten years ago, I’ve had one primary objective — to do my small part to make it impossible for people with more influence than me to ignore North Korea’s crimes against humanity.  This week, for the first time, this quixotic campaign does not seem like such an exercise in futility.  Today, everyone on earth seems to be talking about Google maps and satellite imagery of concentration camps in North Korea, even posting fake “reviews” of the camps, which often cross the line of questionable taste.

It’s gratifying, after all the effort that it took, to be able to claim a significant contribution to the study and publication of that imagery.  We are, nevertheless, still a long way from doing much good for the people in those camps.

camp-22-southwest-gate-with-people

[People gathered in the courtyard at the southwest entrance to Camp 22

on April 27, 2002.  Who were they?  How many of them are still alive?]

But we are closer to the goal, because the regime is now on notice that the whole world is watching.  It can’t expand, establish, or significantly modify a camp without attracting global interest, the the state’s whole system of terror rests on the capacity of these camps.  Today, reporters who ignore these camps can be called out for bias, and the U.N. has finally been shamed into at least token acknowledgement, however ineffectual it will prove to be.

Our next Secretary Secretary of State, who has said next to nothing about the camps for the last ten years and was widely rumored to be angling for a visit to Pyongyang, is the latest of the latecomers.  Last week, he felt compelled to mention them at his prepared speech for his confirmation hearing:

American foreign policy is also defined by food security and energy security, humanitarian assistance, the fight against disease and the push for development, as much as it is by any single counter terrorism initiative – and it must be. It is defined by leadership on life threatening issues like climate change, or fighting to lift up millions of lives by promoting freedom and democracy from Africa to the Americas or speaking out for the prisoners of gulags in North Korea or millions of refugees and displaced persons or victims of human trafficking. It is defined by keeping faith with all that our troops have sacrificed to secure for Afghanistan.  America lives up to her values when we give voice to the voiceless.

To be sure, this is a token throwaway clause, buried inside the sort of sentence that defines the term “long-winded” — really, I can only marvel at the lung capacity one can build by being so pompous.

Wiser folk parse the words of politicians at their confirmation hearings the way they might parse the words of convicts at their sentencing hearings.  The words ring about as sincere as the speaker’s personal history suggests them to be.  In fact, no politician of either party with a prominent foreign policy role has had less to say about human rights in North Korea over the last decade than John Kerry, who ought to be thanking Chuck Hagel for the gift of an easy confirmation.  But saying a little is better than saying nothing at all, and it will give us something to point to when, nine months from now, he asks Barack Obama to give him a long leash to negotiate Agreed Framework III, an agreement that will inevitably offer regime-sustaining aid and offer no hope to the victims of the camps.

Camp 14 Update: Look What Curtis Found

January 23, 2013 The Camps 8 comments

Ah, North Korea — as gifted at publicity as it at humanity.  Perhaps just as Blaine Harden was sending the manuscript for Escape from Camp 14 to his publisher, shortly before the book would generate intense interest among those on the Outer Earth who still did not know about North Korea’s gulags, North Korea may have been scratching out a new prison compound contiguous to Camp 14′s northern boundary.  In due course, Curtis spots it:

Camp 14A
A few observations about this:

1.  The perimeter is consistent with the signs characteristic of a kwan-li-so, a political prison camp; however, there is no witness corroboration of what this compound is. It could be a military base, although the perimeters of military bases, usually have a different appearance.  Or, it could be a temporary detention center or a kyo-hwa-so, a reeducation camp.

2.  There are no direct road links between this compound and Camp 14.  The only road links pass outside both compounds.  That suggests to me that this area is not administered jointly with Camp 14, and most likely holds a different classification of prisoners.  The location is probably a matter of geographical convenience — this is a good part of North Korea to hide people.

3.  The compound is small — probably large enough to hold a few hundred prisoners, if this is a prison, and if it’s filled to capacity. That estimate may change after I count the huts.

4.  The camp was scratched out of the earth sometime between December 2006 and September 2011. Here’s a close-up of one section of the boundary. This image was taken in December 2006:

Camp 14A close-up Dec 2006

Here’s the same spot in September 2011:

Camp 14A closeup Sept 2011

I considered the possibility that this camp may now hold people from Camp 22, if indeed Camp 22 has been closed.  The reports of Camp 22′s closure, however, post-date the construction of this camp’s perimeter.  Furthermore, the reports of Camp 22′s closure describe it as a sudden, unplanned reaction to the defection of the camp’s warden, after this compound was created.

See also Korea Real Time.

Ya Think? U.N. human rights chief suspects “crimes against humanity” in prison camp called “North Korea”

January 16, 2013 "United" Nations, Anju Links, Human Rights, The Camps 3 comments

Nearly seven years after Jared Genser’s Failure to Protect and nearly nine years after David Hawk’s The Hidden Gulag, a senior U.N. official has gotten around to calling for “an in depth investigation” of what “may amount to crimes against humanity” in North Korea’s prison camps, and elsewhere in the larger prison sometimes called “The Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea:”

U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay called on Monday for an international investigation into what she said may be crimes against humanity in North Korea, including torture and executions of political prisoners held in shadowy camps.

She voiced regret that there had been no improvement since Kim Jong-un took power a year ago, succeeding his late father, and said it was time for world powers to help bring about change for the “beleaguered, subjugated population” after decades of abuse.  [Reuters, Stephanie Nebahay]

No improvement?  That seems a little bit unfair to a leader who has given his people a dolphinarium, dancers in Mickey Mouse costumes, an ICBM, and a state-of-the art fitness center to protect them from Asia’s growing obesity epidemic (and successfully! … with one notable exception).

“Because of the enduring gravity of the situation, I believe an in-depth inquiry into one of the worst – but least understood and reported – human rights situations in the world is not only fully justified, but long overdue,” Pillay said in a rare statement on North Korea.

Really, now — it seems like just nine short years ago that the world heard about this.  In the meantime, the U.N. has been very busy not visiting North Korean refugees in China, informing us that North Korea’s health care system is the envy of third-world nations everywhere, barely monitoring the distribution of its food aid, and helping Kim Jong Il move his supernotes to a safe at U.N. Headquarters.

The reclusive country’s network of political prison camps are believed to contain 200,000 people or more and have been the scene of rampant violations including rapes, torture, executions and slave labor, according to Pillay, a former judge at the International Criminal Court.

These “may amount to crimes against humanity”, she said.

Living conditions in the camps are reported to be “atrocious” with insufficient food, little or no medical care and inadequate clothing for inmates, she said.

“The death penalty seems to be often applied for minor offences and after wholly inadequate judicial processes, or sometimes without any judicial process at all,” Pillay said.

“People who try to escape and are either caught or sent back face terrible reprisals including execution, torture and incarceration, often with their entire extended family.”

Pillai’s call coincides with the beginning of two-year non-permanent terms on the Security Council for South Korea and Australia, which, despite North Korea’s recent opening of an embassy in Canberra, had been lobbying for more pressure against the atrocities in the North. Writing at Korea Real Time, Alastair Gale contrasts that approach with South Korea’s:

For outsiders, one puzzling question is why South Korea doesn’t apply more pressure on North Korea over human rights, including those of South Korean nationals held in the North. Legislation addressing the problem occasionally gets submitted to parliament but is routinely blocked by left-of-center parties over concerns it will upset the North. There was no substantial debate over human rights in North Korea during the race for South Korea’s presidency last year.

This position is all the harder to understand — and will be all the harder for future generations to explain — in light of the fact that South Korea is pushing for strong U.N. action over North Korea’s missile test.

For the record, the reaction of North Korea’s U.N. Ambassador was to “totally reject” Pillai’s allegations, to deny that “such kind of crimes” occur in North Korea, and call for an investigation of the ”king of human rights abuses, the United States.”  As persuasive as that may be, it doesn’t approach the level of this KCNA classic, talking about the Saenuri Party’s effort to finally pass a North Korean human rights law:

There has never been and can never exist the enemy-touted “human rights issue” in the DPRK under popular masses-centered socialism.

All the people enjoy genuine freedom and exercise their rights as the masters of the state and society as the independent rights and creative activities of human beings are guaranteed institutionally.

South Koreans admired the true picture of the DPRK where human rights are fully respected and guaranteed.

U.N. General Secretary Ban Ki Moon, who is of unknown origin, has yet to comment on the allegations of crimes against humanity on his watch, either in his current position or as South Korean Foreign Minister at the height of the Sunshine Policy.  When asked about Pillai’s statement, Ban simply looked up from Xi Jinping’s lap, smiled, and wagged his fluffy white tail.

 

Camp 22 Update

January 11, 2013 The Camps One comment

A reader pointed me to these newer images of Camp 22, via HRNK.  The images show evidence of the destruction of at least one guard post and one guard tower.  I wouldn’t say this has completely changed my mind, but it’s significant and weighs in favor of the camp’s closure, alongside over signs such as the vegetable gardens and the continued reports of the Daily NK.

You can add all of this to my analysis here and here.  All of this is worth watching, so I will.

So if Camp 22 did close, what happened to the tens of thousands of people who were housed there?  Not one of the reports I’ve read suggests that they were released.

Update, Jan. 12, 2013:   Curtis forwards this intriguing article in KCNA:

Premier Choe Yong Rim, member of the Presidium of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, learned about the work of various sectors in Hoeryong City, North Hamgyong Province.

Working people of factories and enterprises in Hoeryong City, whose appearance has changed beyond recognition under the great love of leader Kim Jong Il, have achieved successes in production and construction, true to the behests of President Kim Il Sung and the leadership of the dear respected Marshal Kim Jong Un.

[....]

He discussed the measures for the operation of factories and enterprises which are conducive to supplying materials needed for sprucing up the city and improving the people’s diet true to the behests of Kim Jong Il.

He looked round the Jungbong Coal Mine.

The premier met miners and encouraged them to boost production, being aware that they are responsible for the lifeline of the national economy.

Now, remember, this is KCNA, the “news” service that has reported that Kim Jong Il was born under a bright star and a double rainbow, that his death affected weather patterns, and that North Korean archeologists had found the ancient lair of a mythical beast. It’s arguably the world’s least credible news service, and in this case, KCNA also has clear motives to lie about Camp 22, so take this report with a barrel of salt.  Having said that, they are saying that a senior official went on an inspection visit to Hoeryong and visited the nearby Chungbong Coal Mine (English transliterations vary), which is in the middle of what either was or still is Camp 22.

The mention of the Chungbong Coal Mine by itself is interesting. North Korea hasn’t traditionally talked about places inside prison camps, although by now they must realize that millions of foreigners have seen them on Google Earth, which calls for more sophisticated approaches to global opinion.

camp-22-chungbong-coal-mine-overview

[The Chungbong Coal Mine inside Camp 22, via Google Earth]

I see three possibilities: (1) the report is a fabrication; (2) the camp is not closed, and Choe visited it to inspect operations and perhaps help create the impression it is closed; (3) the camp is closed, and Choe was inspecting to ensure that the evidence has been covered up and is being masked.

The mass murder mystery continues.

Welcome, Reuters and N.Y. Times Readers Entire World

January 9, 2013 Google Earth, The Camps 11 comments

Well, thank you, Reuters Asia Correspondent Paul Eckert.  That was a very nice story, and I’m glad to see that the Times picked it up.

This story needs to be told, and unfortunately, right now, only a few of us are telling it.  My hope is that one day, reporters will work directly with defectors and professional imagery analysts to tell it instead, and I can find a new hobby.

Update: Overnight, the Reuters story was picked up by news sites all over the United States, Britain, and India, and translated into Spanish, Finnish, Russian, Czech, and Japanese. The servers seems barely capable of keeping up with the traffic, so please be patient. Things should be back to normal in a day or two. It’s more than worth it to get this issue into the news.

For those who are wondering what you can do to help, I’d recommend two particularly effective non-partisan, non-sectarian, international groups: the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, which does scholarly research, and LiNK, which helps North Korean refugees. You could even set up Wikipedia pages (see this and this) in your native language.

Update, Jan. 11, 2012:  So as of today, this has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, Romanian, Italian, Finnish, and Japanese, and also ran in newspapers in India, the U.K., the Philippines, New Zealand, South Africa, and Ireland. The Chosun Ilbo also got hold of it eventually, and appears to think my name is Joshuya, that I’m a human rights lawyer (not quite), and that I lived in Korea in the 90s (actually, until 2002). Also, no link? Really? But at least someone in South Korea is talking about this topic.

HRNK publishes Camp 22 imagery

October 24, 2012 The Camps 5 comments

HRNK seems to have gotten its hands on imagery of Camp 22 without the restrictive end-user license terms that came with the imagery I’d analyzed here.  Now, you can examine it for yourself at HRNK’s site and compare it to Google Earth imagery on your own.  If you spot something, say it in the comments.

For what it’s worth, I see at least one change at Camp 22 that’s significant enough to be worth continued watching, to see what other changes emerge.  The Daily NK continues to work its sources and develop leads.  Who knows what they might help us spot?  In the end, however, the thing I can’t reconcile with the reports of Camp 22′s closure is the crops.  If either report is true, who planted and tended them all year?

See also:  Evan Ramstad at the Korea Real Time blog.

UPDATE: The Daily NK reports that the area is now being farmed by “low class families” from nearby counties, but this still doesn’t explain how the crops were planted at a time when the camp was being emptied of its last prisoners. Here, again, is the Daily NK’s original report:

“At the start of March they started transferring the sick and malnourished, and then in April they moved all the healthiest ones,” he explained, adding that the camp officers and then their families moved in May, and that the camp was completely empty by the start of June.

So who planted those crops?

New satellite imagery shows few changes at Camp 22

October 15, 2012 Anju Links, The Camps 5 comments

Those of us who watch North Korea spend a lot of time speculating, either because the truth is unknowable or because it’s not of interest to many of those who report the news for a living, or even to most of the top executives of the human rights industry. But when I read the reports of Camp 22′s closure, I decided not to settle for speculation this time.  These reports were simply too horrible, and too consequential, to be left at that.

————————————–
According to a report by the Daily NK, a Seoul-based online newspaper with a network of clandestine reporters inside North Korea, Camp 22 was shut down between March and June of this year, with surviving prisoners moved to other camps further from the Chinese border. The report claimed that the camp was closed after the warden escaped into China, and that the regime closed the camp for fear that its location near the border posed an excessive risk that the secrets of Camp 22 would be revealed by escapees.

A source from North Hamkyung Province informed Daily NK on the 27th, “Camp 22 in Hoiryeong was totally shut down in June. It was decided that it should be closed down after the warden who ran it and another officer ran away to China.”

The source said that all the camp inmates were transferred to other camps, and that as far as he is aware none were released. “At the start of March they started transferring the sick and malnourished, and then in April they moved all the healthiest ones,” he explained, adding that the camp officers and then their families moved in May, and that the camp was completely empty by the start of June.

“Although it is true that nobody knows where they went,” he went on, “given that people saw the families of officers in the local market selling quite a lot of corn before they left, the guess is that they left the province. The land Camp 22 was on and all the buildings have been transferred to the ownership of Hoiryeong City.” [....]

Given that it was triggered by a case of high-level defection, the closure appears to represent an attempt on the part of the state to cover its tracks lest the defections lead to more widespread knowledge of the nature of the North Korean political prison camp network. [Daily NK]

Other reports indicate that at least one other officer, and possibly their families, also fled.  This Korean language report from Radio Free Asia claims that in January 2010, the regime slashed rations for the prisoners, confiscating most of the food they grew inside Camp 22 to feed the military, while imposing unreasonable food production quotas on the prisoner work units.  According to the report, some prisoners lived on as little as 200 grams of corn a day, but many more died. By the spring of this year, of an estimated 2010 population of 30,000 prisoners (a lower but plausible estimate compared to other NGO estimates), just 3,000 were left alive, which represents a death rate of 90%.

The report claimed that at one point, the guards were burning hundreds of bodies a day in a crematorium like the one you can see in the imagery of Camp 25. The surviving prisoners were sent to Camp 16, along North Korea’s northeast coast, near its nuclear and missile testing sites. The Radio Free Asia report claimed that as the regime completed its liquidation of Camp 22′s prisoners, it tried to destroy evidence that the camp had ever existed. If that had been true, I would have expected to see evidence of it in newer satellite imagery.

————————————–
The fact that these camps — and Camp 22 in particular — do their outrageous work day by day, largely unmolested by the world’s outrage, is an exterior force compels me to keep sinking my time and money into telling the world that it exists. But imagery is expensive, so I asked for some financial help, and two of you — two people I’ve never met — stepped forward (thank you), and I had new imagery of Camp 22 before it was even a week old.  The imagery I have now was taken Saturday, October 6th, by a French satellite whose products are distributed by Astrium Geo and retailed by Digital Globe.  Digital Globe, on hearing my purpose for the imagery, seems almost to have rearranged celestial bodies to find brand-new imagery.

I examined the imagery over the weekend, and it looks like the same old dreary business-as-usual at Camp 22. As bad as that is, it’s a lot better than the alternative. I can tell you what the imagery shows, but unfortunately, there isn’t much I can show you because of an very restrictive end-user license agreement that allows me to post just one small 500 meter by 500 meter extract.  I’m going to hold even that back for now until those I’ve corresponded with, including the Daily NK, have a chance to investigate further and add enough detail to either refute or corroborate.

In analyzing this new imagery, I often referred to older, open-source imagery to help give me views of the same places during different seasons, and to help interpolate and extrapolate trends in economic activity in Camp 22. The next most recent open-source imagery is from March of 2010, via Google Earth.  Google Earth also has older imagery, from 2002 (most of the imagery you see here is 2002 imagery).  There is also imagery available on Bing Maps.  It doesn’t indicate when it was taken, but by carefully observing the progression of the mine waste dumps at the Chungbong Coal Mine, you can say that it’s post-2002 and pre-2010.

Taken together, all of this imagery — including the imagery from last Saturday — shows no evidence of significant change to Camp 22′s operations. There are no signs of major salvage, demolition, or reconstruction efforts since 2010. Buildings that you’d expect to contain incriminating features looked the same last Saturday as they did two years ago. A few buildings in the largest housing area were knocked down, but the open-source imagery proves that this took place well before 2010, and even before the Bing Maps imagery was taken, when the area, by all accounts, was still a political prison camp.

In the areas of the camp’s fence line shown in the new imagery, there is no evidence that fence lines have been breached. Caveat: with my limited budget, I chose to purchase imagery of the camp’s main facilities and didn’t purchase much of the periphery. Still, if the latest reports were accurate, I’d suspect that the regime would not keep wasting electricity on a fence line. Hoeryong is one of the poorest, most chaotic places in North Korea, where many residents survive by scrapping metal, and especially copper. If the regime had turned the power off, what would stop them from scrapping the copper and steel wire? Or from invading the camp to harvest timber, or grow crops on the cleared areas? Some reports hold that the boundaries are also protected by man-traps, and even mines, which might explain why the fences haven’t been breached in these areas. Or, maybe the regime continues to control access to the camp grounds to keep its secrets inside. This may merit a follow-up visit next spring. If others are interested in purchasing additional imagery of the fence line, I’d consider that, but expect a high risk-to-return ratio.

Economic activity at the camp appears to be steady. The mines and farms of Camp 22 are not mechanized. If the camp had experienced mass death and the evacuation of its population, you would think that industries as labor-intensive as agriculture and mining would show signs of at least a temporary slowdown, and that the regime would not have been able to replace all of that labor so quickly. Judging by the pace at which waste rock is piling up at the mine dumps, however, mining activity continues at approximately the same pace as operations in 2010, or perhaps slightly faster.  Of course, the imagery doesn’t tell how recently the activity occurred. If all of this work had been done before, say, January 2011, I wouldn’t know the difference. Similarly, patterns of agricultural activity are mostly unchanged. The fields are being harvested as you read this.  You can’t quite see the individual people with their scythes, but you can see the irregular nibbling of each worker as she moves forward and the shocks she leaves in her wake.  Most of the ripe crops still haven’t been harvested. It’s surprisingly green in northeastern North Korea in early October. As of last Saturday, only a few trees had begun to turn.

There is, however, one subtle-but-potentially significant difference.  I’m going to withhold just what that is from publication for now, to give those who are tracking down this report an opportunity to do so without being accused of merely seeking out evidence to validate my observations. At the very least, it suggests a change in the way the camp operates.

In the end, the imagery is inconclusive at best, but the balance of evidence says that Camp 22 is doing the same terrible work that it has been doing for years:

(1) Economic activity at Camp 22 has not changed significantly.  Its mines and farms continue to be worked actively using labor-intensive, unmechanized methods.

(2) There were only minor constructions and demolitions at Camp 22 between March 2010 and October 2012.  That is roughly the same time period when the aforementioned reports claim that most of the camp’s population starved and the camp itself was shut down.

(3) Camp 22 still appears to be a controlled-access area surrounded by a fence line that is unbroken, except for its designated gates.  There is no evidence that local inhabitants have breached the fence line to salvage it or anything inside it.

So what about these reports?  They could simply be false — the product of rumors, disinformation, or a combination of both.  The RFA report is particularly difficult to reconcile with the imagery. Either or both reports may be based on a misunderstanding, such as the closure of another camp in the area that shut down, although this seems unlikely.  The RFA report of a camp with 30,000 inmates would suggest that we’re talking about a very big camp, and no other camps in this area are nearly as big as Camp 22.  It’s significant here that local inhabitants know exactly what Camp 22 is, and what happens there. The regime may have simply moved in new people to replace the ones who lived there before.  It’s possible that these new workers aren’t prisoners, but merely citizens relocated from other places, but then how did the crops get planted and tended as Camp 22, having been cleansed of its work force, shut down for good during the planting season?  The extrinsic evidence fails to corroborate the latest reports; however inconclusively, it also refutes them in part.  I’ve reached out a few people who may be in a position to probe for more information.  If and when I get it, I may have more to say about this. For now, the evidence counsels skepticism.

One of those I’ve reached out to is Chris Green of the Daily NK, a publication I admire unreservedly for trying to speak the truth about the parts of North Korea that much of the world press has forgotten. There is great risk in trying to break an information blockade this ruthless, and the Daily NK’s correspondents are taking far greater risks than that here and there, a report won’t pan out quite as originally reported. Indeed, if a major wire service eventually steps up to fill the void I’m intermittently and imperfectly filling now, the Daily NK might eventually have access to its own satellite imagery, and to better training and equipment for its brave correspondents inside North Korea.  That would be a vast improvement over any more faustian bargains with Kim Jong Un to sell us propaganda for his regime.

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