Camp 15: The Theresienstadt ploy?

The Daily NK reports that Camp 15, described by refugee-journalist Kang Chol Hwan in The Aquariums of Pyongyang and by more recent witnesses to The Washington Post‘s Chico Harlan, is no more, and that the prisoners have been sent to other camps:

Detainees held until recently at North Korea’s notorious political prison camp in Yodeok County have been moved to two alternate camps, an inside source from North Hamkyung Province has alleged to Daily NK.

“That political prison camp that used to be in Yodeok County in South Hamkyung has already been broken up. There’s not a trace of it left,” the source, who is with the military in the northerly province, claimed in conversation with Daily NK on the 7th. However, the disbanding of Camp 15 does not seem to have brought liberty for many of its inmates. According to the same source, “The political prisoners who were there have been divided up and moved to camps 14 and 16.” [….]

“It seems that closing Camp 15 was the next step after they closed Camp 22 at Hoeryong in June 2012,” the source went on to propose. “The majority of the buildings and facilities they used have been razed.”

The Daily NK reports that Camp 15 is in such a remote area that relatively few local residents are in a position to corroborate or witness anything, but the report is consistent with a previous report published in The Chosun Ilbo. I’ve long feared, and recently speculated openly, that North Korea might be preparing for a sham inspection of a camp to try to refute the allegations of camp survivors, in the same way the Nazis fooled the Danish Red Cross in 1944 with a sham inspection of the concentration camp at Theresienstadt.

It is widely believed that the goal of the North Korean authorities in closing down Yodeok is to allow international observers to visit the site in order to popularize the notion that “North Korea doesn’t have any political prison camps.” In keeping with this hypothesis, Pyongyang recently granted permission for the UN’s point man on North Korean human rights, Marzuki Darusman, to visit the country, and made a video casting doubt upon the testimony of Shin Dong Hyuk through his father.

Meanwhile, on October 28^th the NIS, South Korea’s state intelligence agency, reported to the National Assembly that a prison camp at Mt. Mantap in Kilju County, the area of North Hamkyung Province that houses North Korea’s underground nuclear test site, has recently been substantially expanded. The NIS reported that North Korea were planning to move the residents of Yodeok to the expanded camp. The expansion has not been independently verified.

The most recent available imagery from Google Earth was taken in May of this year, and shows the camp to be intact.

Other online sources also show an intact Camp 15. In the coming days, I’ll try to find out what I can about this story, and what evidence supports the report. If the camp has really vanished with “not a trace of it left,” that will be visible in the imagery. On the other hand, it hardly seems to serve North Korea’s purpose to show foreign visitors a lot of empty rubble. There would have to be a lot of new construction, too.