Category: The Camps

Reader Andy Green* has spotted a significant expansion of Camp 12, Cheongo-ri. [Before: Christmas Day, 2008. What were you doing that day?] [After: April 13, 2013] Andy speculates, reasonably I think, that the expansion is a barracks. You can see that the perimeter wall and guard towers were also expanded around the new buildings. If it is a barracks, it probably couldn’t hold more than a few hundred prisoners. This isn’t the answer to the question of what happened to...

Professor Lee and I have an opinion piece up at CNN.com on the camps, for those who are interested. Many thanks to the good professor for inviting me to this dance.

A new report by Amnesty International is providing our first eyewitness account of conditions at Camp 16, images of which were first published at this very blog back in February of 2007, using clues provided in David Hawk’s The Hidden Gulag. In April 2012, I followed up with an extensive analysis of Camp 16 imagery, in an attempt to collect and publish all of the open-source information about this largest and least-understood of all of North Korea’s prison camps. Even...

The newest update on Camps 18 and 22 from the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) continues to draw news coverage, most recently in the form of this grim report by Chico Harlan of The Washington Post. Harlan reports that the camps’ population is now likely between 80,000 and 120,000, much lower than the previous estimate of 200,000. Part of this decline reflects a correction of previous overestimates of the population. I’d mentioned here and here, for example, my...

I have updated the Camp 25 page with new imagery of the camp, whose land area was approximately doubled by a major expansion prior to May 2012. Big hat tip to Curtis.

Ah, North Korea — as gifted at publicity as it at humanity. Perhaps just as Blaine Harden was sending the manuscript for Escape from Camp 14 to his publisher, shortly before the book would generate intense interest among those on the Outer Earth who still did not know about North Korea’s gulags, North Korea may have been scratching out a new prison compound contiguous to Camp 14’s northern boundary. In due course, Curtis spots it: A few observations about this:...

A reader pointed me to these newer images of Camp 22, via HRNK.  The images show evidence of the destruction of at least one guard post and one guard tower.  I wouldn’t say this has completely changed my mind, but it’s significant and weighs in favor of the camp’s closure, alongside over signs such as the vegetable gardens and the continued reports of the Daily NK. You can add all of this to my analysis here and here.  All of this...

HRNK seems to have gotten its hands on imagery of Camp 22 without the restrictive end-user license terms that came with the imagery I’d analyzed here.  Now, you can examine it for yourself at HRNK’s site and compare it to Google Earth imagery on your own.  If you spot something, say it in the comments. For what it’s worth, I see at least one change at Camp 22 that’s significant enough to be worth continued watching, to see what other...

I have updated the Camp 22 page to reflect the latest reports of its closure. According to one of those reports, out of an estimated 2010 population of 30,000 prisoners, all but 3,000 were starved to death and burned to ashes in a crematorium. The latter detail comes from a Korean-language Radion Free Asia report that reports details the Daily NK didn’t, so it suggests multiple sourcing. The people I’ve reached out to in the last few days sound convinced...

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...