Background on Camp 22
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 guard posts for decades. Camp 22 is around 87 sq miles in area. It is surrounded by an inner 3300 volt electric fence and an outer barbed wire fence, with traps and hidden nails between the two fences. The camp is controlled by roughly 1,000 guards and 500–600 administrative agents. The guards are equipped with automatic rifles, hand grenades and trained dogs. In the 1990s there were an estimated 50,000 prisoners in the camp. Prisoners are mostly people who criticized the government, people deemed politically unreliable (such as South Korean prisoners of war, Christians, returnees from Japan) or purged senior party members. Based on the guilt by association principle (Korean: yeonjwaje) they are often imprisoned together with the whole family including children and the elderly. All prisoners are detained until they die and prisoners are never released. The camp is divided into several prison labor colonies: Kwon reported about human experimentation carried out in Haengyong-ri. He described a sealed glass chamber, 3.5 m (11 ft) wide, 3 m (9.8 ft) long and 2.2 m (7.2 ft) high, where he witnessed a family with two children dying from being test subjects for a suffocating gas. Ahn explained how inexperienced medical officers of Chungbong-ri hospital practiced their surgery techniques on prisoners. He heard numerous accounts of unnecessary operations and medical flaws, killing or permanently crippling prisoners.
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Barbed wire fencing surrounding the camps. You can see the spikes emerging from the fence as well, to prevent escapes.
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Examples of Experimentation
This image shows a North Korean prisoner after being decapitated for "talking back" to the officer wearing a grin. Many other deaths like this were put upon intentionally, including a lot of medical experimentations by unexperienced new surgeons. The doctors in the settlements are young and come straight from medical college. When they are first assigned here, they have no experience and little practice. The families of security and guard officers know that they are extremely incompetent and do not trust them. A North Korean scientist says he used experimental chemical weapons on prisoners and stood there taking notes while they died in agony. Dr Kim tells us: "The purpose of this experiment was to determine how long it takes for a human being to die - we wanted to determine how much gas was necessary to annihilate the whole city of Seoul." One former North Korean woman prisoner tells how 50 healthy women prisoners were selected and given poisoned cabbage leaves, which all the women had to eat despite cries from those who had already eaten. All 50 were dead after 20 minutes of vomiting blood and anal bleeding. Refusing to eat would have meant reprisals against them and their families.
Kwon Hyok, a former prison Head of Security at Camp 22, described laboratories equipped respectively for poison gas, suffocation gas and blood experiments, in which 3 or 4 people, normally a family, are the experimental subjects. After undergoing medical checks, the chambers are sealed and poison is injected through a tube, while “scientists” observe from above through glass. Kwon Hyok claims to have watched one family of 2 parents, a son and a daughter die from suffocating gas, with the parents trying to save the children using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for as long as they had the strength. Defectors have smuggled out documents that appear to reveal how methodical the chemical experiments were. One stamped 'top secret' and 'transfer letter' is dated February 2002. The name of the victim was Lin Hun-hwa. He was 39. The text reads: 'The above person is transferred from ... camp number 22 for the purpose of human experimentation of liquid gas for chemical weapons.'
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Analysis
These images have an extreme impact on the people of the US and other countries right now, mostly because we know that this is still going on and nothing is being done to stop it. These images impact many middle-aged adults and even parents to see a baby being tortured as well. The display of multiple images elaborates the extremity of the battles people fight, and the lack of pictures for this camp should scare us. Lack of pictures shows that it's SO secretive that not even cameras can help prove what is happening. These pictures explain a lot about not only the country of North Korea, but our country as well. The North Koreans clearly don't value their people and their well being while we puff out our chests and explain how great we are to our people. However, the United States has had its past mistakes in fair treatment to people, and it was only 60 years ago that we began to treat all Americans fairly. This propaganda should be pushing the American officials to stop these camps (and tortures which are happening as we speak) instead of simply turning the other shoulder. In this situation, it is important to give a really good background since this topic hasn't been discussed in class, which is why I began with an informational paragraph and then went on to explain the experimentations. Personally, what was most intriguing to me was to find out that these camps are still very much alive in North Korea, and haven't slowed down a bit. North Korea’s concentration camps have now existed more than 12 times longer than the Nazi camps and twice as long as the Soviet gulag. Many estimate the number incarcerated in the North Korean camps at 200,000, but no one can know for sure. These images are excellent and effective as propaganda because they make us want to create change. As humans, we should react when seeing an image of a baby crying in a pile of dead bodies. Our response is the most important, and if the propaganda is successful, we will make a difference.