Rising attention on North Korea’s prison camps

A few years ago, I spent what felt like an hour or two on Skype with The Washington Post‘s Blaine Harden, sharing and explaining satellite imagery of North Korea’s prison camp system. No doubt, Harden talked to plenty of other people, too, and the result was an excellent report and interactive graphic about the camps. A few months later, Harden turned over the Post‘s North Korea coverage to Chico Harlan, and now we know why. Harden went on sabbatical to write a book about Shin Dong Hyok, who claims to have escaped from Camp 14. I look forward to reading the book, not just because it’s been so great for my traffic, but also because I’ve seen Harlan at work, and I think he’s skeptical enough to have assessed Shin’s story objectively and critically. Although Shin bears the physical scars of having endured some pretty horrible treatment, his story has always seemed just a little too incredible to be true. I want to see how Harlan raises and answers questions about how Shin — having neither clothing, food, money, nor knowledge of how North Korea’s broader medium-security lockdown operates — made it all the way from the Taedong to the Tumen to the Han.

Harden: Talking to Shin in person, his story sounds believable. It’s because of the intensity and precision of his memory. His body, too, is a map of what he endured, with burns on his back and legs, and his partially-severed finger. His arms are bowed from childhood labor. Confirming the details of his story is impossible, if you mean going to Camp 14 and asking questions of his captors and torturers. [CNN]

The unseen victims of North Korea have a way of doing that to some of us — we see the monstrosity of it all, we wonder why more people don’t know, and we commit ourselves to telling people on our own, in ways that are more persistent than most commitments we make to ourselves. When the same thing happened to Barbara Demick, the result was the best book about North Korea I’ve ever read. It happened to Melanie Kirkpatrick of the Wall Street Journal, too, and one of these days, she’s going to publish what’s sure to be a first-rate book on North Korean refugees and how China treats them. If it happens to enough of them, maybe my Angry Hulk persona can recede away, and I can leave this work to professional writers who buy their ink by the barrel.

I know what you must be thinking: how can this possibly be true if KNCA says it isn’t? After all, KCNA is so widely regarded for its reliability that the Associated Press allows its correspondents to write news stories under an AP byline! Incidentally, you still have time to see the AP’s 100th anniversary commemorative exhibit on the life of Kim Il Sung — co-sponsored by our trusted friends in KCNA! Which means you also have time to send me pictures I can post here. (And keep dropping me those dimes, please.)

Harden’s is not the only recent work I can recommend to you on this topic. Here in the Wall Street Journal, international human rights lawyer Jared Genser co-authors a call for the United Nations, which presumably also has Google Earth, to investigate the camps. (It’s really unfortunate that with all of the trouble in this crazy world of ours, there isn’t a living soul in the U.N. with the influence to make a Korean human rights issue a global priority.) Maybe Genser will succeed where Vaclav Havel and Elie Wiesel failed, but I wish him well in at least causing us to reexamine what we’re getting for our money, a lot of unpaid traffic fines, and the use of all that prime Manhattan real estate. Genser is also working with South Korean NGOs to publicize the horrors in the camps.

The petition calls for the UN Human Rights Council to employ its special procedures mechanism to help shut down the North Korean political prison camp system. Jared Genser, an international lawyer with a long history of providing legal counsel to international figures including Nelson Mandela, asserted at the event, “The environment in the gulag is horrific, making the suffering of the prisoners one of the most serious human rights and humanitarian disasters in the world today.

Those things called for by ICNK under the petition include; â–² access to political prison camps for the UN; â–² investigation of the size and scope of the political prison camp system; â–² conclusion that the prison camps constitute a crime against humanity; â–² North Korea to cooperate to provide compensation to victims and families of the dead; â–² all UN agencies to take what additional action they can to engage North Korea on the issue. [Daily NK]

Finally, on April 10th, the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea will launch its long-awaited update to The Hidden Gulag. I have personal reasons to look forward to this, because I’m expecting the report to contain images of three camps I “discovered” on Google Earth — Camp 12, Camp 16, and Camp 25, which according to David Hawk, has been confirmed by other witnesses.