Ling, Lee Sentences Raise Interest in North Korean Labor, Concentration Camps (Updated)

Again, the North Koreans demonstrate their talent for attracting the wrong kind of attention.  Following the conviction of U.S. journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee, news outlets have begin publishing sidebar stories and printing background quotes about what life is really like in a North Korean labor camp.  The L.A. Times has a full length story about it, complete with a quote by David Hawk and a diagram of what appears to be Kyo-Hwa-So Number 1, near the city of Kaechon.

While Pyongyang has not said where the women will serve their time, their future likely includes the possibility of hard labor, starvation and torture in a penal system many consider among the world’s most repressive, said David Hawk, author of the 2004 study “The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps.”

Ling and Lee may be sent to a “kyo-hwa-so” or re-education reformatory “that is the equivalent of a felony penitentiary in the U.S., as opposed to a county jail or misdemeanor facility,” he said.

“It’s extremely hard labor under extremely brutal conditions,” said Hawk. “These places have very high rates of deaths in detention. The casualties from forced labor and inadequate food supplies are very high.”

I confess that even I would be surprised if Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee end up in one of these camps, although I put nothing past the North Koreans.  It would mean that short of regime collapse, they will never live to see their families again.  North Korea would never allow an American, much less a journalist, to see the inside of one of those camps and live to tell about it.  More likely, they’ll be sent to some place that’s spartan, but hardly comparable to a real North Korea kwan li so (concentration camp) or kyo hwa so (labor reeducation camp).

“The first thing that passed through my mind when I heard about the verdict was that, from an American perspective, this is tantamount to a death sentence,” said Scott Snyder, director of the Center for U.S.-Korea Policy for the Asia Foundation, a Washington-based think tank.

“There aren’t a lot of guarantees in that type of environment. It’s different from any prison that exists in the modern-day United States. This is a very sobering challenge for a new administration.”

North Korean defector Kim Hyuck, who spent a total of seven months between 1998 and 2000 in a “kyo-hwa-so,” said that the percentage of prisoners who die from the harsh conditions would be unimaginable in the west.

“It is not an easy place,” he said of the camps. “Centers for men and women are separate. But even [the] women’s place is not comfortable at all. . . . When I was in the center, roughly 600-700 out of a total 1,500 died.”

Hawk said many of the re-education camps are affiliated with mines or textile factories where inmates labor for long hours, shifts that are often followed by work criticism sessions and the forced memorization of dry North Korean policy doctrine.

The literal meaning of a “kyo-hwa-so” in Korean is “a place to make a good person through education,” said Hawk, who interviewed a dozen gulag survivors for his study for a group known as the U.S. Committee for Humans Rights in North Korea.  [L.A. Times, John M. Glionna]

Here is the Kaechon camp on Google Earth (medium resolution only):

Even Yahoo! Buzz had a feature story with a prominent link.  And for those who still haven’t seen them, here are more images of North Korea’s concentration camps.

Update:   ABC News has a long, detailed article about the camps, as does Time.  The New York Times prints a scathing denunciation of North Korea’s “bankrupt” judicial system.

Whatever the case, they do not deserve to be sent to a brutal labor camp where, according to international human rights activists and North Korean defectors, detainees endure beatings, hunger and inhumane workloads. With no access to lawyers or due process, the two journalists did not have anything approaching a fair chance to defend themselves.

We don’t know how much their ordeal is being driven by North Korea’s succession saga or escalating tensions with the United States over Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program. We know that there is no excuse for their detention or this outrageous sentence.  [N.Y. Times Editorial]

The Times then calls for (sigh…) more negotiations.

Me (sarcasm on):  Preposterous!   Why, didn’t the National Lawyers’ Guild report that those horror stories were all myths?