North Korean official media denies that the camps exist and claims that all of its people lead “the most dignified and happy life.”

Yoon Sang-Hyun, from the ruling Grand National Party, said the North had 10 camps holding about 200,000 prisoners until the late 1990s when it closed down four of them amid mounting international criticism.

“Currently, it holds 154,000 prisoners in six places,” he was quoted as saying by Yonhap news agency. [AFP]

I don’t know what a South Korean lawmaker is going on when he suggests that North Korea’s gulag inmate population might actually have fallen to 154,000, but when I first read it, my first thought was that it was good, if true. Then I paused long enough for some darker possibilities to occur to me.

Seoul had reportedly been aware of the camps since 2005 but had not disclosed the information for fear of harming inter-Korean relations, the conservative Dong-A daily said.

Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun have been spared the burden of answering to anyone but God, but plenty of South Koreans will say they did not know. Others, confronted with the images of what they’ve enabled, will begin to deny it the moment the images appear on television screens. We’ve seen it since 1945, and we’ve seen it all over again since 2001.

Related: Here’s another dispatch from Lee Jun Ha’s prison memoir, though it’s worth repeating that Camp 12 is one of the smaller camps, not among the six mentioned above, and that Lee was in prison for homicide, not as a political prisoner. Recently, however, Camp 12 has reportedly become a destination (often, the final destination) for North Koreans who are caught attempting to cross the border illegally, or who are caught by China after crossing it and sent back to die in North Korea.

We are all eagerly awaiting Ban Ki Moon’s Nobel Peace Prize for all he has done to right this great evil.