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

The Hidden Gulag Second Editiona North Korean, Mr. Kim Duk-hwan, whomarried a Russian woman while studying inMoscow, but who, upon return to North Korea,disappeared into detention; and two other NorthKoreans who were believed to have been forciblyrepatriated from Russia to the DPRK. Thesecases are summarized herein, as they demonstratethe systemic and on-going continuity ofthe conditions about which we now have muchmore voluminous documentation.Prisoners’ Memoirs and TestimonyPrisoner testimony, initially only in the Koreanlanguage, started to emerge publicly in themid-1990s, after two former prisoners fromthe “re-revolutionizing zone” of Kwan-li-so No.15 (Yodok), Kang Chol-hwan and An Hyuk,escaped to South Korea via China in 1992 andpublished their prison memoirs in Seoul. 64 In1994, a former prison guard, Ahn Myong-chol,who had worked at four different prison-laborcamps, defected to South Korea and was ableto provide a great deal of first-hand information.In 1996, the Seoul-based Korea Institute ofNational Unification (KINU) began publishingan annual White Paper on Human Rights in NorthKorea, which contains reporting that draws onthe extensive interviews conducted by the SouthKorean government with all North Koreansprovided with asylum by the Republic of Korea.In the late 1990s, as the production and distributionsystem in North Korea broke down, greaternumbers of Koreans fled to China, primarily insearch of food. Some of these had been imprisonedin either the kwan-li-so or the kyo-hwa-so.64 In 2001, Kang Chol Hwan’s memoirs, co-authored with PierreRigoulot, was published in English as Aquariums of Pyongyang: TenYears in the North Korean Gulag, Basic Books, New York.A number of those who fled to China, particularlyafter 2000, made their way to South Koreaand published accounts or interviews in SouthKorean journals or magazines.The First Satellite Photographs of thePrison CampsThe first public satellite photographs of theprison camps appeared in December 2002 in theFar Eastern Economic Review, a now defunctbut formerly influential weekly news magazine.It published satellite photographs of Kwan-li-soNo. 22 at Hoeryong, North Hamgyong province.John Larkin, a Seoul-based, Korean-speakingcorrespondent for the Far Eastern EconomicReview, was able to obtain coordinates oflatitude and longitude of Kwan-li-so No. 22from old Soviet-made maps of North Korea onwhich, in consultation with former guard AhnMyong-chol, Larkin was able to precisely locatethe sprawling encampment at Hoeryong. AfterLarkin obtained satellite photos from a commercialfirm, Ahn was able to locate and identifybuildings at the penal-labor colony where he hadbeen a guard. 6565 Apparently, both the United States and South Korean governmentslong had even better satellite photographs of the prison-laborcamps. When Kang Chol-hwan first came to Seoul in 1992, he wasshown satellite photos of the Kwan-li-so No. 15 “Yodok” and wasable to pick out his former house in the images. But these intelligenceagencies have never released their photographs to the pressor public.44