North Korea denies that its political prison camps exist. It has denied them for decades, in public statements, in replies to the United Nations, and in every interaction with the outside world. The problem for the regime is that the camps can now be seen from space. Satellite photographs show fences, guard towers, housing blocks, mines, and fields in remote mountain valleys, and analysts can watch those sites change over time. The first part of this VICE News investigation starts there, with the evidence that made denial impossible, and then moves to the people who can explain what the photographs mean: defectors who lived in the camps, former guards who worked in them, and investigators who spent years collecting testimony. Taken together, the images and the voices tell a single story. North Korea built a vast network of labor camps to punish political enemies and frighten the rest of its population, and it kept that network running long after the Cold War that created it had ended.
The camps at the center of this investigation are known as kwanliso, a term that covers the harshest political prisons in North Korea. They are not ordinary prisons, and they are not places where people serve a fixed sentence and go home. Prisoners are held in remote settlements, cut off from the rest of the country, and many are held for life. Their families are often held with them, under the system of guilt by association that punishes relatives for the alleged crimes of one person. Children born in the camps grow up behind fences, and they are taught that their families are traitors to the state. The camps are run by the security services, and they combine forced labor, hunger, and surveillance into a system designed to break people and to warn everyone else. A person who hears about the camps does not need to be told what will happen if they speak out against the regime. The camps are the answer.
Seeing the Camps From the Outside
For a long time, the outside world knew about the camps mainly through defector testimony, and the North Korean government could dismiss that testimony as lies told by people who had betrayed their country. Satellite imagery changed that balance. Commercial satellites photographed the camp areas again and again, year after year, and human rights researchers learned to read those photographs. They could identify perimeters and guard posts, housing and workshops, agricultural fields and mining operations, and they could compare images from different years to show camps expanding, contracting, or shifting. The images did not prove what happened inside a particular building, but they proved that the sites existed, that they were large, that they were guarded, and that they were not what the government claimed they were. When a government says a valley contains a farm or a village, and satellite photographs show fences, towers, and a perimeter that no ordinary village has, the denial becomes difficult to maintain.
Defectors and Former Guards
Images alone, however, cannot describe a day in a camp, and this is where the people VICE assembled become essential. Defectors describe forced labor in mines, forests, and fields, often for long hours in dangerous conditions, with little food, little medical care, and little hope of release. They describe hunger as a constant condition, not a temporary hardship, and they describe prisoners eating whatever they could find to survive. They describe beatings and public punishments, including public executions, carried out as warnings to other prisoners. They describe an atmosphere of informers and suspicion, in which prisoners were encouraged to report on one another, and in which trust was dangerous. Former guards, who are rarer and harder to interview, add another layer. They describe the rules they were told to enforce, the fear they themselves lived under, and the way the system treated prisoners as if their lives had no value. Their accounts are not identical in every detail, and they should not be, because people remember different things. They agree, however, on the central facts: the camps were real, they were brutal, and they were designed to punish and to frighten.
The United Nations Finding
The most authoritative assessment of the camps came from the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on human rights in North Korea, which reported in 2014. The commission was chaired by Michael Kirby, a retired Australian judge, and it gathered testimony from defectors, satellite imagery, and documents. It concluded that North Korea was committing crimes against humanity, including in its prison camps, and it described human rights violations without parallel in the contemporary world. It found evidence of murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions, and other inhumane acts, and it called for the matter to be referred to the International Criminal Court. That rejection is part of the story, because it shows a government that will not allow investigation, will not admit wrongdoing, and will not accept accountability. The commission’s report did not close the camps, and it did not change the regime. It did something else. It created an official record, based on testimony and imagery, that the world cannot easily ignore.
Why the Camps Outlived the Cold War
One of the central questions in this chapter is why the camps survived the end of the Cold War. The Soviet Union collapsed, and its prison camp system collapsed with it. North Korea did not follow that path. Its leadership passed from Kim Il Sung to his son Kim Jong Il, and then to his grandson Kim Jong Un, and each leader kept the camps, and the control system around them, in place. The reason is political. The Kim family built its rule on the idea that loyalty to the leader was the highest duty, and that dissent was treason, and the camps were the ultimate enforcement of that idea. A government that rules through fear needs a place to send the people it fears, and it needs the rest of the population to know that place exists. The camps are not only a punishment. They are a warning, and a warning works only if people believe it.
The lesson of this investigation is that evidence matters, even when it does not immediately change anything. Satellite images, defector testimony, former guards, and a United Nations report did not close the camps, but they made it impossible for the regime to claim, with a straight face, that the camps do not exist. VICE’s first episode in this series does not end with a solution, because there is no simple solution to a system as entrenched as North Korea’s. It ends with a clearer picture of the system itself, and with a question that viewers cannot avoid. If we know what is happening in those valleys, and we have the photographs and the testimony to prove it, what do we do with that knowledge? The film does not answer that question for its audience. It leaves it where it belongs, with the people who have now seen the evidence for themselves.