Hopes spike on North Korean camp
'closure' By Christopher Green
Perhaps few things better indicate the
parlous state of human rights in the DPRK
(Democratic People's Republic of Korea, North
Korea) than the country's network of political
prison camps. Hidden in some of the least
accessible, mountainous parts of the country, this
network of camps, amply documented by refugees and
satellite imagery analysts alike, is used to
arbitrarily detain an estimated 0.5% to 1% of the
entire population.
Given the gravity of
the situation, it was natural that excitement
would greet reports last summer that the DPRK
government had
closed one of six camps
believed to remain in existence: Camp 22, which
lay near the border city of Hoeryong.
Accounts published at the time revealed
details of the movement process, which took the
three months from March 2012, when the harsh
winter weather eased off, until June the same
year.
Prisoners were moved over two nights
in Spring, sources reported; first, agents from
the Ministry of State Security locked down the
small border city, and then prisoners were locked
in sealed trucks and taken to Hoeryong's main
train station. From there they were transferred to
freight cars and transported south toward the port
city of Chongjin. Residents of two nearby
counties, Saebyeol and Eundeok, were brought in to
maintain the site, continuing with the farming and
mining activities that have long sustained the
area.
Many of the 1,500 plus refugees who
escaped across the Tumen River during 2012 were
from the region, and most said they had heard
about the closure of Camp 22. The final decision
to abandon the camp was apparently taken shortly
after Kim Jong-eun came to power at the end of
2011. Some, though by no means all, said that it
was inspired by the defection of the camp warden,
which would have been a catastrophic security
breach if true.
Though the reason behind
the closure has still not yet been compellingly
established, subsequent analysis of satellite
imagery by the US Committee for Human Rights in
North Korea did uncover further evidence of the
closure itself. In particular, it showed that a
building said by former inmates to be the camp's
infamous detention and interrogation facility had
been razed to the ground. Given that the building
will have been the scene of many of the most
egregious human-rights abuses that went on in the
camp, this represents first class evidence of an
essential step in efforts to cover up what went on
there.
Irrespective of the rationale, a
number of experts are predisposed to view the
closure as a positive step forward. Just last
week, former Soviet diplomat Dr Alexandre
Mansourov went on record at analysis website 38
North to say that the closure may be evidence of a
more developmental North Korean approach,
commenting in an op-ed piece that it "could have
been initiated to erase the evidence of past
injustices and atrocities, or may be [an early
sign] of political decompression set in motion by
the new regime".
However, optimism is
fraught with danger where North Korea's
ethno-nationalist dictatorship is concerned, and
alternative explanations abound. Sadly, the
greater likelihood is that the Ministry of State
Security, the state entity that operates the
political prison camp system, concluded that it is
no longer capable of guaranteeing the security of
border areas of North Hamkyung Province.
In this scenario, the question of whether
or not the warden of Camp 22 defected matters
little: that the camp lay just 8 kilometers from
the outskirts of Hoeryong City and a stone's throw
from the Chinese border will have been concern
enough, and the battle was surely lost once the
ruling Korean Workers' Party decided in 2010 that
the downtown core of the city should be remodeled
into a tourist destination, one in keeping with
the municipality's impeccable revolutionary
heritage as the hometown of none other than Kim
Jong-il's mother, Kim Jong-suk.
Interestingly, there may now be another,
even more disastrous situation for optimists to
contend with, as evidence has emerged that another
of the network of camps, the more readily defended
Camp 14 at Kaechon, has recently been enlarged.
Building on an already formidable
reputation for squeezing information from
satellite images that others simply cannot see,
Curtis Melvin, the steward of North Korea Economy
Watch, has seemingly discovered an additional
detention facility to the west of the original,
which opened in 1960 but has been rendered
infamous in recent years by Escape from Camp
14 hero Shin Dong-hyuk,.
As Melvin
himself has noted, it is too soon to be absolutely
sure what this mysterious outgrowth of Camp 14
really is. It may, in fact, be nothing at all.
However, if it turns out to be a new section of
Camp 14, then it may yet take us one step closer
to knowing what happened to the prisoners formerly
interned in Camp 22. Alas, it will also take us
one almighty step further away from finding cause
for optimism about the future under KWP
First-Secretary Kim Jong-un.
Chris
Green is the Manager of International Affairs
for Daily NK, an online publication covering
internal North Korean affairs based in Seoul,
Assistant Editor of the online web journal SinoNK,
and a PhD candidate at Cambridge University.
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