Google Earth puts North Korea labour camps on the map. Wednesday 23 January 2013 12.55 Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt's visit to North Korea this week has been met with sharp criticism, but the global internet search giant indirectly is helping to make history by revealing one of the reclusive country's darkest secrets.
Google Earth, the company's popular satellite imagery product, might be the last thing Mr Schmidt will want to showcase for his hosts, because it presents a bird's eye view of many things that secretive North Korea wants to keep hidden. Human rights activists and bloggers have taken a Google programme used mostly for recreation, education and marketing and applied it to map a vast system of dozens of prison camps that span North Korea, a country slightly smaller in area than Greece and home to 23 million people. As many as 250,000 political prisoners and their families toil on starvation rations in the mostly remote mountain camps, according to estimates by international human rights groups. North Korean 'prison camps' Amnesty International has called for the UN to establish an inquiry into human rights violations in North Korea after satellite images uncovered evidence of an expansion of an area thought to be a prison camp, north of Pyongyang.
Amnesty researchers found that between 2006 and 2013 North Korea has constructed a new 20km perimeter around the Ch’oma-Bongvalley, located 70km north of Pyongyang. The new perimeter is said to include civilian villages and encloses inhabitants within it. Amnesty analysts also identified the construction of new buildings that appear to house workers, which they say is likely to be associated with an expansion of mining activity in the region.
North Korea blurs lines between prison camps, villages: Amnesty. North Korean political prison camp where love does not exist. ::::: Mapping North Korea’s Secret Prison Camps. North Korean defector says Kim Jong Il stole her life. REPORTING FROM SEOUL –- At age 74, Kim Young-soon has every reason to dance on Kim Jong Il’s grave.
The North Korean dictator destroyed her life, and killed her family. For years, she wanted nothing but revenge; not just to see him dead, but to watch him suffer. In the 1970s, on a whim, the mercurial strongman sent her entire family to the Yodeok Political Offenders' Concentration Camp. The move was a virtual death sentence because few of the unfortunates sent there ever return alive. She only found out years later what her crime was. PHOTOS: Kim Jong Il through the years Born in 1937, Kim Young-soon was a trained dancer and a close friend with Sung Hye-rim, the first wife of Kim Jong Il.
Pyongyang officials worried that the sordid details of the union wouldn’t exactly make school textbook reading. They rounded up everyone who ever knew Sung Hye-rim and sent them to prison. She spent a decade in cruel confinement, and she was lucky. Her parents died in the prison camp. North Korean labor camps in Siberia. Part of complete coverage on By Shane Smith, VICE.COM updated 2:33 PM EST, Thu December 15, 2011 VICE.COM: Labor camps exist in SiberiaVICE.COM: Most workers at camps over age 40VICE.COM: Labor camps connected to Kim Jong Il.
The Korean holocaust - The Independent Collegian - University of Toledo. Camp 22. Hoeryong concentration camp (or Haengyong concentration camp) is a political prison camp in North Korea.
The official name is Kwan-li-so (penal labour colony) No. 22. The camp is a maximum security area, completely isolated from the outside world.[1] Prisoners and their families are held in lifelong detention. North Korean Gas Chamber Gulag: Camp 22. North Korean Killing Fields 1. TR 3/2004: P. Grubach: Does North Korea have "Nazi Gas Chambers?" Does North Korea have "Nazi Gas Chambers?
" By Paul Grubach Investor's Business Daily is a widely read and very influential mainstream financial publication in the United States. In the February 11, 2004, issue, p. A 14, there is an editorial about the North Korean Communist regime of Kim Jong-Il. The story it tells is strikingly similar to the "Hitler-Nazi gas chamber" legend of WWII.
The editorial claims that his government has apparently adopted the "Nazi gas chamber" method of mass murder. Revealed: the gas chamber horror of North Korea's gulag. In the remote north-eastern corner of North Korea, close to the border of Russia and China, is Haengyong.
Hidden away in the mountains, this remote town is home to Camp 22 - North Korea's largest concentration camp, where thousands of men, women and children accused of political crimes are held. Now, it is claimed, it is also where thousands die each year and where prison guards stamp on the necks of babies born to prisoners to kill them. Over the past year harrowing first-hand testimonies from North Korean defectors have detailed execution and torture, and now chilling evidence has emerged that the walls of Camp 22 hide an even more evil secret: gas chambers where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings.
Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They are left to an agonising death while scientists take notes. Kwon Hyuk, who has changed his name, was the former military attaché at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing. North Korea's Gas Chambers. Press Office - This World North Korea. News / Boston Globe / Opinion / Op-ed / An Auschwitz in Korea. Or so, at any rate, we like to tell ourselves.
As Samantha Power discovered upon returning to the United States after two years as a war correspondent in Bosnia, the lesson of "never again" is invoked far more often than it is applied. "Everywhere I went," Power recalled in a speech at Swarthmore College in 2002, "I heard `never again.' Steven Spielberg's `Schindler's List' had been a smash hit. The Holocaust Museum had opened on the Mall in Washington. College seminars were taught on the `lessons' of the singular crime of the 20th century. Auschwitz Under Our Noses (washingtonpost.com) Within prison walls. Kwon Hyok is one of about 4,000 North Korean defectors living in Seoul, South Korea.
Most escaped because of hunger, fear, torture, imprisonment or a simple hatred of the regime. But Kwon Hyok is not one of those. North Korean Prison Camp Escapee Tells of Horrors, Worries About Those Left Behind. SEOUL -- In Camp No. 14, the North Korean political prison where Shin Dong-hyuk was born and where he says he watched the hanging of his mother, inmates never saw a picture of Kim Jong Il.
"I had no idea who he is," Shin said, referring to the leader whose photograph is displayed nearly everywhere in North Korea. Inmates did not need to know the face of their "Dear Leader," as Kim is called. Behind electrified fences, they tended pigs, tanned leather, collected firewood and labored in mines until they died or were executed. The exception is Shin, who is 26 and lives in a small rented room here in Seoul. North Korean Prison Camps. BORN AND RAISED IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP. North Korean Thanksgiving menu: mothers eating children. By Jack Minor – While Americans face many struggles this year with the economy and unemployment being major issues, it is often easy to forget that even in the midst of these struggles things could be much worse. Kim Hye Sook, could possibly be the longest serving prisoner to escape from a North Korean prison camp.
In her first American interview, with the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), Sook said things were so bad that mothers would eat their own children. Sook escaped from the camp in 2003; however the details are being kept secret for security reasons. This summer, Kim released a book describing the events she faced in the camp. Sook was sent to the camp at 13 and finally escaped when she was 41 years old. Sook along with members of her family were sent to Re-Education Center no. 18, also known as “Bukchang.” Bukchang is estimated to contain over 50,000 prisoners and is one of six political prisoner camps operated by the North Korean government. The U.S. Images reveal scale of North Korean political prison camps. One Free Korea » North Koreas’ Largest Concentration Camps on Google Earth.
The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea estimates that North Korea holds approximately 120,000 people in its system of concentration and detention camps, and that 400,000 people have died in these camps from torture, starvation, disease, and execution. These reports, in the context of estimates that North Korea has allowed between 600,000 and 2,500,000 of its people to starve to death while its government squandered the nation’s resources on weapons and luxuries for its ruling elite, suggest that North Korea’s oppression and politically targeted starvation of its people collectively constitute the world’s greatest ongoing atrocity, and almost certainly the most catastrophic anywhere on earth since the end of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979. Click any of these images to enlarge them. The National Security Agency (bowibu) runs most of the camp system.
Others are operated by the inmin pohan seong, a/k/a anjeon bu, or Peoples’ Security Agency. 1. This list is certainly not exclusive. North Korea: Satellite photos show death camps they still deny even exist. More than 200,000 men, women and children are held in the campsMany are hidden in mountains and valleysSouth Korean government sending religious leaders on sortie to North Korea tomorrow and could meet Kim Jong-IlPeople are taken from the streets or their homes and imprisoned for general 'political crimes' as well as involvement in the arts By Martin Robinson Updated: 18:33 GMT, 20 September 2011 The North Korean government may deny their existence, but photos taken from space have revealed in unprecedented detail the concentration camps that are used imprison more than 200,000 citizens.
Men, women and children are forced to work seven days a week as slaves and eat 'rats, frogs, snakes, insects' and even faeces to battle starvation in the camps. Previously there have been blurred images taken by satellite but new detailed pictures from South Korea's Unification Ministry allow a closer look at the sites - and also prove they have grown. 'We had no food. 'The camp definitely looks bigger. Concentration camps in North Korea. Genocide in North Korea.