The Hidden Gulag - US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea

The Hidden Gulag Second Editionexecution grounds, and other landmarks in the camps. The report provides the precise locations—exact degrees of latitude and longitude—of the political prison camps that North Korea proclaimsdo not exist.Part One introduces the research methodology, sources, and information base used in the report andcontains a glossary of terms associated with repression in North Korea.Part Two describes the phenomena of repression associated with the North Korean kwan-li-so politicalpenal labor colonies where scores of thousands of political prisoners—along with up to threegenerations of members of their families—are banished, deported, imprisoned without any judicialprocess, and subjected to slave labor for mostly lifetime sentences in mining, logging or variousagricultural enterprises operating within a half-dozen sprawling encampments, enclosed in barbedwires and electrified fences, mostly in the north and north central mountains of North Korea. Thereport describes who the political prisoners are: real, suspected or imagined wrong-doers and wrongthinkers,or persons with wrong-knowledge and/or wrong-associations who have been deemed to beirremediably counter-revolutionary and pre-emptively purged from North Korean society.This part also provides an overview of the prison-labor camp system: the guilt-by-association collectivepunishment, forced disappearances and incommunicado detention without trial, systemic andsevere mistreatment, induced malnutrition, slave labor and exorbitant rates of deaths in detention,informants and intra-prisoner hostilities, executions and other extreme punishments, sexual relations,“marriage” and prison camp “schools,” the sexual exploitation of women prisoners, prisonerreleases, the economic role of the forced labor camps, and the complete removal from any protectionof law, along with the arbitrary and extra-judicial nature of the system.It outlines the successive waves of political imprisonment over the fifty-odd years the prison campshave been in operation, and provides a brief recounting of how, over several decades, informationabout the secret and officially denied prison camps has become knowable and known to the worldoutside North Korea.Part Two then presents the heart-rending stories and testimonies of fifteen former kwan-li-so prisoners—thelives and voices of “those who are sent to the mountains”—and several former guards at ahalf-dozen prison-labor camps who were interviewed for this report.The total number of those currently incarcerated in prison labor camps is estimated between 150,000and 200,000, as reported by North Korean state security agency officials who defected to SouthVIII