North Korea Human Rights Advocate

Situated in a northeastern tip of North Korea, Camp 22 is widely purported to be the largest and almost certainly the most brutal system of labor camps and detention facilities.

 Camp 22 is said to hold some 200,000 men, women, and their children  accused of political crimes. Though the conditions inside the camp remained secret inside its ten-foot electrified wire fences and bleak guard posts for decades, this changed when satellite photographies became available to the public.

Google Earth’s high-resolution photographies cover less than half of Camp 22, but some of the public internet-users found several suggestive images that delineate the general overview of Camp 22.

One unforgettable image, there were two girls and they were trying to take out a piece of noodle from one polluted water pond where they put the garbage. And one guard kicked the kids into the small pond, and they drowned. The pond was very deep, and I felt really sad about that.
[from MSNBC news report here]

Ahn reports that of the 1,500 to 2,000 prisoners who died each year from malnutrition alone, most were kids. This figure does not include deaths from disease, torture, execution, or from the casual murders. He recollects:

I saw numerous prisoners killed, especially by beating. I saw one person age between 40 and 50 — he’s old enough because the average age of prisoner is between 40-50 — he was working in brick factory. And as he was older he was moving slowly, he was not working well. And the team master tramped on his loin, and the bone was broken. He was hit by an iron rod that is used to start vehicle engines, and I heard the next day he died.

The information about Camp 22 has been neither covered by international media nor explicitly addressed by any single government in international community. Neither the former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, nor his High Commissioner for Human Rights, nor his High Commissioner for Refugees mentioned or did anything much while torture and killing went on at Camp 22. Unfortunately, Ban Ki-moon, Mr Annan’s successor, also seems to overlook this situation in North Korean Camp 22.

Moreover, those few reporters who do get the chance to visit North Korea seldom explore far from the westernized and well developed capital, Pyongyang.  This is how the North Korean regime has shamelessly concealed one of the worst and most heinous wrongdoings in human history over the last few decades, and the inexpressibly agonizing lives of countless prisoners have been fogotten out of sight and out of mind.