Revealed: The First Published Images of Camp 12, Chongo-Ri, North Korea

Recently, Chosun Ilbo reporter and North Korean gulag survivor Kang Chol Hwan published this story about a remote labor camp in North Korea, its recent expansion to support a crackdown on defectors, and the horrific conditions there:

The Chongori reeducation center in North Hamgyong Province that went through the greatest change. The center has been reorganized as a concentration camp exclusively for arrested defectors. It has reportedly turned into a living hell, where labor is much heavier than at ordinary reeducation centers and where torture and beatings are routine. [….]

[N]ow, anybody who has crossed the border has unconditionally been sentenced to up to three years of forced labor at Chongori, under instructions that they are to be punished as traitors. [….]

One defector who had a hair’s breadth escape from Chongori, has said, “Chongori is a living hell. Yodok (the notorious prison camp) is a much better place.”

At Chongori, inmates are doomed to die of malnutrition. Forced to work for 14 hours a day, they are given only two whole potatoes and a handful of cornmeal a day. Few inmates stick it out for more than three months, no matter how healthy they are, because beatings are a daily routine there, he said. [Chosun Ilbo]

After reading Kang’s story, David Hawk contacted me to see if I could identify Chongo-ri in satellite images. I immediately asked Curtis Melvin if he had a Korean language map of North Korea, but he did better. He sent me this overlay from MSN Encarta:

Switching off the overlay, we find ourselves here:

Let’s get in closer:

Unfortunately, the camp is not covered by Google Earth’s high resolution. Below 5,000 feet, things start to get blurry fast. By contrast, some of the high-res imagery of Camp 22, about 25 miles northeast of Camp 12, is clear at under 1,000 feet.

My wife provided another essential clue when she assisted me with a Korean-language google search, which pulled up the Korean version of this Daily NK article. I’d already seen the article and had in mind that labor-rehabilitation Camp (kyo-hwa-so) Number 12 was supposed to be in the same area, though I’d forgotten that the name “Jeongeo-ri” was also mentioned as the name of the camp described in the Daily NK story. Survivor Lee Jun Ha had given a very detailed set of directions to Camp Number 12, where he’d been imprisoned:

The No. 12 Reeducation Camp can be found about four kilometers east along the mountain slopes from a small rural town called “Jeongeo-ri,” which is itself about 12 kilometers from Hoiryeong in the direction of the big east coast port of Chongjin. Travelling to Chongjin by bus, you can see Jeongeo-ri on the left side and Poongsan-ri on the right. Heading off for Jeongeo-ri from the main street, you pass under a railway bridge. There lies the entrance to Jeongeo-ri.

If you keep going along this road for about 1.5 kiltometers, you will find a checkpoint. This checkpoint is manned by the security forces of the No. 12 Reeducation Camp. Pass through the checkpoint, walk for about 30 minutes, and the Camp itself will drift gently over the horizon. [Daily NK, Account of Lee Jun Ha]

I should clarify that Lee was no political prisoner — he admits that he was in Camp 12 for killing his alcoholic uncle by bashing his head into a wall during a fight. Lee claims that he didn’t intend to kill him. The most recent date he mentions in his diary is 2003, meaning that the reorganization of Camp 12 for repatriated defectors is probably more recent than Lee’s time there. The Google Earth imagery does not say when these images were taken. (I’ve already made inquiries about purchasing some commercial satellite imagery, in cooperation with the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.)

Based on Lee’s directions, I’d been searching a location to the north of Chongo-ri’s actual location. After many hours of hunting, I’d found another location that fit some parts of Lee’s description, but not others. The location I had found, however, just didn’t seem right. It also had a key detail that left me unpersuaded that I’d found the camp: the huts there had walls around them. After failing to find any location that seemed right, I shelved my search for the time being.

Now, let’s unpack Lee Jun Ha’s narration. First, we’ve already found that “Chon’go-ri” on the Encarta overlay puts us here.

The distance from Hoeryong is actually closer to 26 kilometers — more than twice as far south as Lee said, but distances are easy to misjudge if you’re not driving, and driving is a very rare privilege in rural North Korea.

Lee places the camp four kilometers east of Chongo-ri, but the actual distance is closer to 2.5 kilometers:

After that, however, things begin to fit very well. First, Lee tells us that Chongo-ri is across the road from another village, and that after you turn east, you go under a railroad bridge:

Down the road, we find the checkpoint Lee described:

Again, Lee appears to misjudge the distance. It’s actually a little less than a kilometer. Continuing down the road, we come to an orderly grid of huts without gardens or exterior walls, typical of those in North Korean camps:

Finally, the clincher — Lee says that there is a large copper mine 1.5 kilometers southeast of the main building:

Lee’s overestimation of distances is nothing if not consistent. The actual distance is about half a kilometer.

While we can’t identify the mineral product from satellite photography, the gray color of the ore is a clue. For one thing, we know this isn’t a coal mine. For another, copper is usually mined from sulfide ores, which I remember from my mine geologist days for their distinctive gray color. It’s true, of course, that other minerals may also occur in the “porphyry” deposits where copper is commonly found. So we can say that the color of the ore in this image is consistent with a copper deposit, though not only a copper deposit. What appears to be green-tinted water at the bottom of the pit is also characteristic of a copper mine.

According to Lee, the camp’s population was relatively small — just 2,000 prisoners and an almost equally miserable guard force of 300:

Among the 300, 60 are enlisted sentries- people directly pulled out of the army to join the Jeongeo-ri Prison. Another 10 are 30 to 35 year-old sentries who live with their families; another 10 of them are unmarried sentries of “sergeant major” rank. The remaining 220 are security officials with stars on their shoulders, from second lieutenant up to captain.

The enlisted sentries are selected from among the freshest young junior middle school kids who have joined the army not via military recruitment but through the People’s Safety Agency. It’s not a good job, so only people with no financial or political backing are picked to be prison sentries. For in reeducation camps, sentries go through almost as much grief as prisoners.

This is because they are duty-bound to monitor the prisoners, which means that they always have to follow the prisoners around come rain or snow. When the prisoners climb mountains to gather firewood, they have to be at the top too. Where the prisoners go, the sentries are never far behind.

While the camp’s boundaries are faintly visible in a few places, mapping them with any degree of certainty may have to wait for better imagery. But Lee does give this very interesting detail:

The concrete walls of the main camp make a 120 meter-long square. Beyond the walls are places for each section; prison cells, a warehouse, carpentry section, drafting section, public affairs section, the kitchen, tree felling section, hospital, pharmacy, a cargo labor section, an auto repairs section and so forth.

Another similar compound is apparent from the imagery of Camp 14. From the low resolution imagery, I can’t confidently match the area Lee is referring to an area in the imagery. The rectangular areas marked “1” and “2” in this image are approximately 130-150 meters by 120 meters:

The southern edge of area “2” measures 135 meters; the east wall is almost exactly 120 meters.

[Update: Here is a high resolution image from an eye altitude of 500 feet. The image shows what appear to be walls and guard towers. Look for the shadows of the towers:

End update.]

Lee describes something of the camp’s history as well:

By keeping my ears open I learned that Jeongeo-ri Prison was founded in 1970 as “No. 22 Juvenile Reformatory,” and that back then the concrete walls of the prison were just 6 meters high.

Then in the mid-1980s the name was changed to “No.12 Reeducation Camp” and the concrete walls rose to eight meters. Even now, you can clearly distinguish the added wall, piled up more than 20 years ago.

Lee Jun Ha has written a 23-part (so far) prison diary about his life in Camp 12. His story may predate the expansion of the camp. Still, I’ve linked all of the installments here:

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12

Part 13 Part 14 Part 15 Part 16 Part 17 Part 18 Part 19 Part 20 Part 21 Part 22 Part 23

I will leave you with this excerpt from Lee’s diary:

I followed clumsily behind taking glances here and there. To the right written in large black letters were two frightening warnings “Those caught trying to escape will be shot!”, and “Escape is suicide!” Shaking with fear, I continued to follow. Off to the left I saw a group of inmates with sanitation tags on their arms haphazardly loading logs onto a big truck labeled “ËœIndependence #82′.

Or I thought they were logs, anyway. As I looked closer I realized they were corpses. My heart rose into my throat and I went stiff. Only one thought came to me, “I’m a dead man; that rumor about 80% of all prisoners either starving or being worked to death is not just a rumor after all. [Daily NK, Account of Lee Jung Ha]

Update 9/15: The latest installment of Lee’s prison diary recounts the execution of a prisoner who tried to escape.