The Marmot’s Hole

The Chosun Ilbo reports that the The U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea has released a 125-page report documenting our northern neighbor’s extensive system of concentration camps. The report doesn’t appear to be available for download quite yet, but according to the Chosun write-up on it, it may prove eye-opening:

The 125-page report, titled “The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps,” reveals through testimonies from about 30 North Korean defectors that the North has extensive concentration camps, such as the “Education Camp,” or regular prison, and the “Management Camp,” or political criminal camp. It also describes camps that were unknown until recently, including the “Concentration Center” and “Labor Training Camp.”
According to the report, the Concentration Center is where migrants repatriated from China are temporarily housed and punished. There, they are investigated and divided into groups. The Labor Training Camp is where defectors with minor offenses or citizens who are discontented are put to forced labor for three months to one year.
The report analyzed and compared the defectors’ testimonies with pictures of North Korean concentration camps. The images were provided by two U.S. companies, DigitalGlobe and Space Imaging. The report reveals in detail the uses of the concentration camps according to building. Until now, only a few pictures of political camps in Hoiryeong and Yodeok had been shown in South Korea.

UPDATE: NYT piece on the report here. And the original report can be downloaded at:

http://www.hrnk.org/thehiddengulag-press.pdf
(Thanks, Barry)