Most North Koreans believe in the party line issued and controlled by Kim Jong-un, and with the largest standing army on earth, there is a smug arrogance in this horrifically impoverished land. For those who have doubts about this regime, and are dumb enough to express their feelings or get captured trying to make a break for it, there is the North Korean gift that just keeps on giving. If such party miscreants escape the firing squad (the kinder, gentler penalty), there is the lifetime of room and board alternative: one of the North’s many luxurious prison camps, likened to WWII German concentration camps is the quality of life they offer… and these camps have been in operation longer than any other similar facilities in any other nation on earth in modern times. Stalin and Hitler, eat your long-since-deceased hearts out!
Oh, did I forget to mention that such dissents are very likely to find that their crime will result in a punishment not just for them, but the dissent’s entire family. Yup, the family is rounded up and incarcerated as a solid deterrent to anyone else thinking that expressing dissatisfaction with the regime will only potentially harm the actual perpetrator. Indeed, there are children who are born in these camps who never leave. From cradle to grave, incarceration is the only world they will ever know. Estimates place 200,000 inmates in these political punishment factories, scattered around the country, some the size of London, England or Los Angeles, California. While there are no photographs of what goes on within, a few escapees have provide insights to the vicious lives inside (there are sketches from escaped inmates like the one above), and the camps’ locations are now available on Google Maps.
Starvation, slave labor, sexual abuse, inadequate shelter or protection from the cold, medical experimentation, summary executions and torture and horrific living conditions are par for the course. Misery is mandatory. Fairness and hope have left the building. Among the few that have escaped, stories abound about how rats were purged from the camp because inmates chased them down for food. Assuming they live so long, few women can stand straight after age 45, their backs hunched from the heavy loads they have carried for a lifetime. Inmates are often tied up and tortured to death simply for the guards’ “stress relief” or amusement.
One recent story that is hard to believe but appears to be sufficiently substantiated deals with the mass starvation of inmates in one camp that may have resulted in the extermination of many thousands of human beings. “The Aug. 27 report by Washington-based group Human Rights In North Korea, or HRNK, says that North Korea's Camp 22, a vast gulag located near the Chinese border and reported to be larger than Los Angeles, was thought to have once held between 30,000 to 50,000 prisoners, most of whom were suspected of being disloyal to the regime or were related to people who had shown disloyalty.
“The camp may have closed sometime in 2012 after a series of bad harvests (combined with a currency devaluation in 2009) created a food shortage that caused a ‘large number of prisoners’ to perish, the report says, citing a Radio Free Asia article written by a North Korean reporter who defected from the country.
“When Camp 22 shut down, an estimated 7,000-8,000 prisoners were transferred from the gulag's compounds, situated in the remote northern county of Hoeryong, to other labor camps. The report says that trains holding inmates were seen departing the area at night, heading south. Many prisoners are thought to have been moved to Camp 25 near Chongjin City or to North Hamgyeong Province's Camp 16, about which virtually nothing is known.” Huffington Post, September 6th. How many perished? 10,000? 20,000? We have no way of knowing for sure.
I’m Peter Dekom, and I really wonder why Dennis Rodman smiles so much when he hangs with his new best friend, Kim Jung-un?
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