North Korea's darkest secret

There are concentration camps in North Korea. We can see them clearly, via high-resolution satellite images on Google Earth. There are six of them, according to South Korean intelligence, and the largest is bigger than the city of Los Angeles.

Of the six, four camps are ‘complete control districts’ where ‘irredeemable’ prisoners are worked to death in gruesome conditions, under threat of starvation, torture and public execution. While inside, they are shut off from the rest of the world so totally that those born within the high voltage barbed-wire perimeter are unaware even of who Kim Jong Il was.

The other two camps have ‘re-education zones’, from which ‘loyal’ prisoners can be released but only to spend the rest of their lives under constant state surveillance.

According to American journalist Blaine Harden — who is the Washington Post’s bureau chief in Tokyo and has specialized in ‘political implosion’ under weakened totalitarian rulers in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia — North Korea’s political prisons ‘have now existed twice as long as the Soviet Gulag and about twelve times longer than the Nazi concentration camps.’