Camp 22 Shut Down?

The Daily NK claims it first started hearing the rumors in March of this year:

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]

This raises plenty of questions, most of them dark. The first of them concerns the fate of the prisoners. Would the regime really bother to send them to camps deeper inside North Korea’s interior, such as 14, 15, or 16? If a security breach caused the regime to close down a camp with an estimated population in the tens of thousands, would the regime really take the greater security risk of moving that many prisoners over a long distance through North Korea’s winding mountain roads, through towns and villages? Finally, did the warden escape to tell his story?

The most obvious question is whether the report is true. It’s doubtful that we’ll know for some time, but I doubt that it’s merely an idle rumor. What it might be is disinformation the regime intentionally planted through the Daily NK’s sources. The North Koreans know how badly discussion of the camps harms their ability to get what it wants from potential foreign enablers at all levels, from diplomats to investors to journalists. I’m sure that millions of people have viewed these pages alone. The enablers — rightly, I think — are branded as repellent by association, because their money perpetuates a regime that treats people this way. North Korea has both a motive for disinforming us that the most infamous camp in North Korea has closed, and its tendency to deceive the outside world abroad — from the Cheonan conspiracy theories, to pretty much everything you can read about life in North Korea here — is more the rule than the exception. This will soon provide us an interesting thought experiment: watch all the news outlets that willfully ignored Camp 22 (I mean you, New York Times, AP, and Hankyoreh) suddenly find this a worthy topic of discussion. Of course, it will be difficult for them to characterize this as a reformist measure. As reported, this is really a miniature regime collapse.

I’ll see what satellite imagery I can get my hands on in the coming weeks. I know what signs I’ll be looking for, but I’m not going to say right here what those signs are, because I know the North Koreans are reading this, too.

As the Second Edition of The Hidden Gulag tell us, there are plenty of closed camps in North Korea. The most infamous may be Camp 11 at Onsong, thought to have been closed after a 1987 uprising. Activists are currently debating the credibility of reports that Camp 18 was also closed, possibly last year. Curtis — and one questions Curtis at one’s peril — seems very certain that he’s seen Camp 18 in North Korean TV broadcasts, and infers from this that North Korea wouldn’t have shown it on TV if it was still a camp. I’m not sure I’d make that inference myself, and some of the more recent satellite imagery, though not conclusive one way or another, did not suggest that the government had stopped maintaining the fence lines around Camp 18, or that woodcutters’ trails crossed it. I’m not convinced, but my mind is open to new evidence.

Update, October 15, 2012:  I’ve since obtained very new imagery of Camp 22. The imagery does not corroborate those reports, and refutes them in part.