North Korea 's concentration camps can be seen on Google

Those who have lived to tell the world about Camp 22, located in the bleak northeastern tip of North Korea, can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and all of them are former guards or staff. Incredibly, it's about the size of Los Angeles.

Of all of North Korea’s network of labor camps and detention facilities, large and small, Camp 22 is the most terrible. There are reports of inhuman experiments carried out on men, women, children, and even infants sent there. The BBC reports that North Korea’s system of spying, thought-control, isolation, and terror may have no equal in human history. That is how Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il kept the secrets of Camp 22 inside its ten-foot wire fences and distinctive blocky guard posts for decades. That changed when satellite photography went public. Since then, Google Earth has revealed the world’s most secret places to armies of amateur “squints.” Satellite photography was available to the human rights researcher David Hawk when he set to work on “The Hidden Gulag,” his ground-breaking study of North Korea’s forced labor camps. Hawk’s interviews with survivors and former guards alone would not have had the same impact had those witnesses not been able to point to those photographs and say, “This is the detention center,” he said. “If someone goes inside this building, in three months he will be dead or disabled for life. In this corner they decided about the executions, who to execute and whether to make it public.' “This is the Kim Il Sung institute, a movie house for officers. Here is watchdog training. And guard training ground.” Pointing to another spot, he said: “This is the garbage pond where the two kids were killed when guard kicked them in pond.” Absolute certainty will have to wait for the day when Camp 22 is liberated. For Google Earth newbies, you can download the program here. Google Earth’s high-resolution imagery covers less than half of Camp 22, it is said to hold 50,000 men, women, and children. One can only see one portion of the camp with Google Earth’s high-resolution photography. A camp the size of Los Angeles The yellow scale line to the right of the fence line is just shy of 14 miles. According to “The Hidden Gulag,” the whole camp is 31 miles long by 25 miles wide. That works out to over 700 square miles, but if one makes allowances for the camp’s irregular shape, a rough estimate of 500 square miles seems more likely. That would make it as big as the city of Los Angeles. Where high-resolution photography is available, it’s not hard to see the fence line punctuated at intervals of about 1200 feet by guard posts, buttressed, in places, by smaller guard shacks.There are unusual ditches, which could be “land mines and man-traps.” It’s impossible to draw any firm conclusion, but these ditches could be “tiger traps” whose coverings have weathered away. It’s certainly hard to imagine what other reason there could be for digging trench lines like this along the fence line of a forced labor camp. The camp is in a remote area, surrounded mostly by forest. In a few areas, however, just beyond the fence, the lives of North Korea’s peasant farmers, such as they are, go on. They cannot read foreign newspapers, listen to foreign broadcasts, possess cell phones or radios that can pick up unauthorized broadcasts, express unauthorized opinions, or travel abroad without fear of entering this gate. The state owns everything, including the meager rations they grow, and on which they live. Still, for farmers in North Korea, survival is a little easier than it is for workers in the blighted factory towns where unemployed survivors of the Great Famine still live by stripping the ruins of copper wire. Just the same, one suspects that the farmers know what’s good for them. Most likely, they stay away from the fence, keep their eyes on the soil, and never mention it. The camp’s presence is impossible to ignore completely when it intrudes into the lives of those who live near it, of course. While living in Seoul, a Korean-American teacher, Joseph Songhoon Lee, taught a defector who had lived just outside the camp’s gate. Lee described the defector’s experiences in a recent article for the Washington Post: "He graduated from School 34 a few weeks ago and is studying at Sungkyunkwan University, one of the nation’s top colleges. He grew up a few minutes away from one of North Korea’s most notorious political prisons, Prison 22 in Hyeryung, Ham-Kyung Province, at the northern tip of North Korea. Because food and alcohol are scarce in the countryside, the prison guards went to my house for libations. “They always drank heavily,” he told me. “And when they got drunk, they would mumble about how sorry they felt for what they did to prisoners.” / see