Hidden Gulags in North Korea

The San Diego Union Tribune is reporting this interesting article about the North Korean gulag system. The article has interviews with defectors from North Korea who served time in the gulags. They provide a insightful look into the gulag system. Here is a fact I found amazing:

The concentration camp is a kind of closed town where a number of camps are linked together by a road. At least two of the camps, Hoeryong and Hwasong in Hamkyong Province, are larger in area than the District of Columbia.

A prison larger than Washington, DC? That is one large prison. Here is another piece of the article I found interesting:

In the 1990s, imprisonment befell some North Korean students and diplomats who had been studying or posted in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe and had been exposed to the collapse of socialist rule. According to Yong Kim, he saw some old white men in his gulag who he believed were American POWs from the Korean war of early 1950s. Also believed to have been placed in the prison system were a large number of South Koreans, including many fishermen, captured or abducted by North Korea over the years.

This would be absolutely horrible if we abandoned POW’s from the Korean War to a life of hell in a North Korean gulag. They white prisoners may be Russians or people who have defected to North Korea who needed to be reeducated. Hopefully these claims will be investigated by the government. Personally I find it hard to believe they could have survived so long in a gulag. Anyway interesting reading about the every day life of your average prisoner in North Korea, worth checking out.

Kaechon, a mining camp of about 15,000 prisoners, is about 25 to 31 miles long by 19 miles wide. According to Kim Yong, one of the camp’s survivors, daily meals consisted of 20 to 30 kernel of corn and watery cabbage soup. This image was provided by Space Imaging Asia, courtesy of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.

(Hat Tip to Simon’s World for the link.)