NORTH KOREA

Kim's slave camps

North Korea's five concentration camps house 200,000

Hoeryong concentration camp holds 50,000 inmates

Satellite pictures of slave-labour camps

17 December 2002

Exposed--Kim's slave camps

By John Larkin

Far Eastern Economic Review (05.12.2002)/ HRWF International Secretariat (17.12.2002) - Website: www.hrwf.net - Email: info@hrwf.net - Pyongyang's infamous slave-labour camps have long been talked about, but the general public has never seen photographs of them. Until now. Satellite images ordered by the REVIEW show one such camp. A former prison guard there corroborates the images.

AHN MYONG CHOL traces his finger along the dirt road he took to escape from one of North Korea's most notorious slave camps. He has no trouble picking it out on the photograph, even though it was taken by a satellite far above the camp where he served as a guard for four years. "This is definitely it," says Ahn. "I finished my shift at 2 a.m. Then I drove my truck along this road to the railway station you see there, and followed the road to the Chinese border."

The solidly-built 33-year-old has spent much of the eight years since his defection to South Korea exposing the horrors of North Korea's forced labour camps for political prisoners. But his testimonies, including one with former inmates at a United States congressional committee hearing in 1998, have suffered from a key failing: No foreigners have ever seen the North Korean camps. They're hidden away in rugged mountains, camouflaged from prying eyes on the ground and in the air.

Satellite imagery of the camps that intelligence services in South Korea and the United States are believed to possess has not been released. With no physical evidence to refute North Korea's denials that these camps exist, the testimony of defectors has largely failed to lift the veil of mystery enveloping them. "These places don't officially exist," says another former guard, Choi Dong Chul, who worked at several labour camps before defecting to South Korea in 1995. "They're North Korea's biggest secret."

Until now. The REVIEW has obtained satellite photos of one of the biggest slave camps, nestled in the mountains of North Korea's rugged far northeastern frontier with China. The photos were purchased from DigitalGlobe, a U.S.-based commercial provider of satellite imagery, after the REVIEW handed over geographic coordinates for some of the camp's key facilities. The images were then corroborated on four separate occasions by Ahn, the only person known to have escaped from No. 22 Camp, where he worked from 1990-94. South Korea's Unification Ministry said in its annual White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea this year that the camp is still operating. Neither the ministry nor South Korea's National Intelligence Service would comment on the photos.

Taken in April and May this year, the satellite shots are the first images of a North Korean labour camp to be made public. They show a vast complex headquartered at the town of Haengyong with administrative buildings, farms, factories and prisoner quarters connected by dirt roads.

Encircling it all, according to Ahn, is a three-metre-high barbed-wire fence accompanied by minefields and mantraps. Inmates are crammed into clusters of huts. Each houses around 30 people, who provide slave labour for the farms and factories.

Some inmates are sent to the Chungbong coal mine, several kilometres away. Miners squeeze into narrow shafts to fill their daily coal quota. Many die of exhaustion, their energy sapped by pitifully small rations, or by vicious beatings from guards. The hospital south of the pithead rarely has qualified staff or medicines. Patients are often left to die, says Ahn.

Almost 210,000 prisoners were interned in 10 such camps in 1999, according to South Korea's intelligence agency, but five have since been closed after news of some of their locations leaked out. Ahn believes some 50,000 are held at No. 22 Camp, which is also sometimes referred to as Hoeryong camp after the county in which it lies.

The camp's horrors are well documented, thanks almost entirely to Ahn's 1998 testimony to a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He has also relayed this information to South Korean government agencies and the international and local press. In 1995, he published a book about his experiences as a guard at four slave camps. "The most reliable testimony [about the camps] comes from Ahn Myong Chol," says Christine Lee, an activist at the Seoul-based Citizens' Alliance for North Korean Human Rights.

For most camp inmates, their only crime seems to lie in being related to someone who got on the wrong side of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il or his late father, the country's founder, Kim Il Sung. The elder Kim decreed that three generations of a class enemy's family be wiped out to cleanse his socialist paradise. That directive still holds.

An offence can be as trifling as tearing up a newspaper photo of Kim Jong Il. But it's nonetheless a life sentence in the truest sense. Inmates transferred to or born in these camps will never leave. Even after death, they are buried within the camp's electrified perimeter.

As one of the biggest camps, Haengyong is a target of human-rights campaigners. "There's a fair amount of literature available now on camps like this written by defectors," says former U.S. Congressman Stephen Solarz, a member of the independent U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. "The existence of these camps and their conditions constitute a terrible indictment of the regime in North Korea."

The opacity of Kim Jong Il's North Korea has shielded him from much of the damage from international condemnation of his gulag system. But even if that condemnation came, Kim would be loath to dismantle the camps. They embody the reasons why it is so difficult for Kim to open up his country in a meaningful way.

A pillar of Kim's regime, the camps are also its Achilles heel. Forced labour accounts for a large amount of what remains of the national economy. The camps allow Kim to dispose of potential leadership threats and cow his people into fawning obedience. Releasing prisoners would pave the way for open dissent. Moreover, it would pollute his realm with enemies who would spread tales of barbarity at the camps.

"The labour camps are crucial to Kim's hold on power," says Kim Dok Hong, a top North Korean defector who has called for the toppling of the Kim regime since he fled to South Korea in 1997. "If he opens them up everyone will see that he has killed so many of his own people. He knows he can't do that."

The satellite photos transport Ahn back in time to a place he describes as his second home town. His job was to drive supplies around the camp's seven main zones. "It feels like I'm right back inside the camp," says Ahn. "I went back and forth every day with supplies, so I knew every inch of the camp. It hasn't changed at all."

His job took him to virtually every building except the prisoners' huts. For six months he guarded an explosives depot at Chungbong. "It's that building there," he says, pointing to a small walled facility. "One day our platoon officer got bored, so he called over some prisoners for us to beat up."

Ahn picks out the theatre at Haengyong where he watched James Bond movies. Across a courtyard is the building the inmates feared most, a detention centre for those discovered breaking camp rules. Here, inmates are tortured and sometimes executed, though Ahn admits he never set foot inside.

"There's a little hill near the detention centre and I was standing there once when I saw 50 prisoners. Once I saw a Japanese woman," he says, adding that she was being beaten at the time. He heard the woman, aged about 50, cry out in accented Korean and was told that she was Japanese. The incident occurred in 1993.

Ahn says he watched prisoners work on a tunnel a few hundred metres away, next to camouflaged anti-aircraft guns. He says heavy artillery was moved into the tunnel after the 1991 Gulf War, when the North Koreans were horrified by what America's precision bombing did to Iraq's defences. Not far from the cinema is the obligatory memorial hall to Kim Il Sung, fronted by a spacious garden. Across the river that divides Haengyong, Ahn identifies buses used to ferry guards to their posts.

From above, Haengyong looks like nothing more than a quiet small town. There's a reason for that, says Ahn. Even when he worked there, camp authorities were wary of satellites and took pains to camouflage the facility. "Anyone who doesn't know better would think this is just another village," says the defector.

Clearly this is no ordinary village. Ahn defected in 1994 after his father was jailed for criticizing Kim Jong Il. Less than a week later he was in South Korea after eluding a massive manhunt in northeast China. He has never tired of telling what he knows, partly to salve his own guilt. The photos bring some of those feelings back, but they'll help him to continue exposing North Korea's greatest shame. "From now on," Ahn promises, "there'll be no secrets."

North Korea's five concentration camps house 200,000

by Kim Kwang-in

Chosun Ilbo (05.12.2002)/ Far Eastern Economic Review (05.12.2002)/ HRWF International Secretariat (17.12.2002) - Website: www.hrwf.net - Email: info@hrwf.net - North Korea is known to operate five concentration camps now, accommodating a total of over 200,000. Once condemned as political criminals in the North, not only they themselves, but also their families are incarcerated in concentration camps without trial. With all contacts with the outside world cut off, they are subject to control in the supply of food and daily necessaries, marriage and childbirth, let alone undergoing serious violations of human rights.

With slight differences depending on region and season, the inmates get up at between 5:00am and 6:00am and work until 8:00pm, engaged in farming, coal mining and digging other minerals. After a day of hard work, they have to undergo ideological study sessions and roll calls before going to bed at around 10:00pm. Their staple diet consists of corns, potatoes, wheat and barley. The basic daily ration used to be 600g for mining areas and 500g for others, which has been slashed to 200-300g since the food crisis hit the country several years ago. As a consequence, the inmates, it is said, always suffer from hunger, catch and eat snakes, frogs and rabbits whenever possible, let alone tree barks and plant roots. Many inmates perish eventually after suffering from such diseases as pellagra, tuberculosis and hepatitis.

Concentration camps are mostly located in inland areas with rugged terrains. Completely cut off from the outside, few ordinary citizens know what the life is like in concentration camps. Depending on the mode of administration, concentration camps are divided into two: completely restricted and revolutionary areas. The former is a life camp; once you are in it, you cannot get out of it and you have to bury yourself there after death. Those accommodated in the latter area, comprised of family and singles zones, may be released if they pass examinations following ideological indoctrination through hard work for three years. Concentration Camp No. 15 located in Yodok, South Hamgyong Province, alone has both revolutionary and completely restricted areas; the remainder are all completely restricted.

Concentration camps came into being in the North in the wake of the country's liberation from Japanese colonial rule at the end of World War II in the process of banishing and accommodating in camps "adversary class forces" such as landholders, Japanese collaborators, religious people and families of those who migrated to the South. They were established later in earnest to incarcerate political victims in power struggles in the late 1950s and '60s and their families and overseas Koreans who migrated to the North. Their number saw a marked increase later in the course of cementing the Kim Il Sung dictatorship and the Kim Jong Il succession system. About a dozen concentration camps were in operation until the early '90s, the figure of which has been curtailed to five today due to increasing criticism of the North's human rights abuses from the international community and the North's internal situation

Hoeryong concentration camp holds 50,000 inmates

by Kang Chol-hwan

Chosun Ilbo (05.12.2002)/ Far Eastern Economic Review (05.12.2002)/ HRWF International Secretariat (17.12.2002) - Website: www.hrwf.net - Email: info@hrwf.net - Editor's Note: This is an account of the Concentration Camp No. 22, the largest of the five of its kind in North Korea, as told by Ahn Myong-chol, who served there as a guard for seven years before escaping from it and crossing the Tumen River into China in September 1994. Having since come to the South, Ahn published his memories of the camp titled; "They Are Weeping" in 1995.

Internally named "The Korean People's Guard Unit No. 2209" or "State Security Agency Pailsan District Unit," Concentration Camp No. 22, housed in Hoeryong, North Hamgyong Province, is the largest of its kind in the North. Having worked there for as many as seven years, I know every nook and cranny of the Hoeryong Concentration Camp. Being a "completely restricted area" from which inmates, once incarcerated, can never leave even after death, the Hoeryong Concentration Camp is perceived as the most notorious prison for political criminals in the country.

There are about 50,000 political prisoners and their families accommodated there, most of whom are completely alienated from society and lead beast-like lives. Encompassing Jungbong-ni, Kulsan-ni, Hyaengyong-ni, Naksaeng-ni, Saul-ri and Namsok-ni districts of Hoeryong City, the population of the Hoeryong Concentration Camp jumped from about 30,000 to around 50,000 in 1992 when it absorbed some inmates from the Concentration Camps. Nos. 12 and 14.

Circling the outskirts of the camp are 2.2-meter-high electrified wire fences, and deep pitfalls are dug along passages escapees are expected to take with bamboo spears planted in them. Against an emergency, guards are always deployed combat ready, with loaded AK-47 rifles charged, hand grenades and trained dogs. Since those dogs have been trained to pounce on prisoners, many inmates have been bitten to death by them.

The North Korean authorities set up the concentration camps in the late 1950s, and some inmates have managed to survive more than two decades. Most are landowners, capitalists and religious people; those who sided with the United Nations Command forces during the early stages of the 1950-53 Korean War; so-called "anti-party sectarians" who lost in political struggles in the 1960s and '70s; and those implicated in reactionary movements; along with their families.

Inside the camp, autonomous control is enforced with supervisors and team heads selected from among the inmates. Those accommodated are mobilized for forced labor from 5:00am to 7:00pm in winter, and till 8:00pm in summer. Physical labor is followed by Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il study sessions, total reflections on life sessions and instruction meetings. Nobody is allowed to move after 10:00pm. There are no portraits of the two Kims permitted in political prisoners' houses. The camp, comprising mostly of farmland, has inmates' villages, schools and hospitals, and guard posts are everywhere.

Since 300 grams of corns are supplied to political prisoners a day, malnutrition is rampant. Tortures and beatings occur daily; even public executions take place from time to time. Inmates caught attempting to escape are executed in public. The major products from Concentration Camp No. 22 are coal, farm and livestock produce with apricots, a unique product of Hoeryong, included.

The Jungbong District Coal Mine supplies coal exclusively to the Kim Chaek Ironmaking Integrated Business Corp. and the Songjin Steel Integrated Business Corp. Housing 20,000, the mine often suffers fatalities from malnutrition and excessive labor. Livestock produced in the camp is supplied to Pyongyang, and farm produce to the State Security Agency and the North Hamgyong provincial administration.

When they are first assigned to the concentration camp, the guards are told: "Political prisoners are our enemies and reactionaries whose three generations deserve eradication." Witnessing in person the horrible human rights abuses the inmates undergo and their miserable lives, however, some of them harbor a suspicion; "We (the guards) may be too harsh." Confirming the existence of the concentration camp today despite the elapse of eight years since I fled from it, I feel my heart break.