The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps
Prisoners’ Testimonies and Satellite Photographs
Satellite Imagery of the North Korean Gulag
Matthew McKinzie, Natural Resources Defense Council
The U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and the Natural Resources
Defense Council (NRDC) recently obtained high-resolution, commercial satellite images
of seven North Korean prisons and prison camps. These photographs date from the time
period 2001 to 2003, and were obtained from the archives of the DigitalGlobe and
Space Imaging corporations. DigitalGlobe donated their satellite imagery to the
Committee, and NRDC produced the maps in this section of the report.
Commercial, high-resolution satellite imagery has only been publicly available as a
research tool since late 1999, with the launch of the Denver-based Space Imaging
Corporation's Ikonos satellite. The Ikonos satellite currently orbits the earth every 98
minutes at an altitude of 423 miles. Ikonos satellite images are typically photographed
in strips 11 kilometers wide and with a resolution of one meter. Denver-based
DigitalGlobe’s QuickBird satellite was launched in 2001, and can achieve a remarkable
resolution of 61 centimeters.
With meter and sub-meter resolution satellite imagery, objects such as buildings, forests,
orchards, fields, fences, rivers, railways, trails, and roads are easily recognizable. Indeed,
these photographs were shown to former North Koreans who were imprisoned in these
places, and who were able to identify specific features in the photographs and to
describe their purposes. Using the satellite imagery, interviews with former prisoners
were conducted in Seoul, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, and the derived annotations
have been overlaid on the photographs reproduced in this section of the report.
Commercial, high-resolution satellite imagery, and the testimony of North Korean defectors
who were exposed to the gulag, are revealing windows into this closed society.
Annotated satellite images of seven sites in the North Korean gulag offer a glimpse into
the different sorts of work that prisoners are forced to perform. Activities at Kwan-li-so
No. 15 “Yodok,” for example, are largely concerned with food production. Kwan-li-so
Nos. 14, 18, and 22 are mining camps. These sites are very large, consisting of several
villages spread over more than a hundred square kilometers. The smaller sites —
Kaechon, Nongpo and Sinuiju — have factories or workshops where prison laborers are
forced to produce bricks, clothing, shoes, or other goods.
The satellite images presented in this report represent a fraction of the photographs of
North Korea now in the archives of DigitalGlobe and Space Imaging. In the coming
years, this tool will be used to understand and expose the human rights and humanitarian
situation in this still-closed society, formerly known as the “Hermit Kingdom.”
|
