Hey everyone,
I spent most of the weekend reading about the Korean War because I wanted to get some insight on what lead to the miserable state of affairs we have today. Somehow my mind wandered and I decided to see if I could see the rumored North Korean Gulag using satellite images from Google Maps. A quick search in Google yielded a bunch of blog posts and articles on the subject which helped me pinpoint the precise locations of these camps. At first I searched around manually, which was difficult because North Korea remains unmarked on Google Maps. I was able to find Camp 18 – Bukchang and Camp 22 – Haengyong easily since they were so large.
One of the hard parts about the search was that even though I knew the general locations of these camps, it was hard to distinguish regular villages from concentration camps. One of the indicators that made it obvious in the case of Bukchang was that everything was fenced in:
A Small Portion of Labor Camp 18
Link: Camp 18 – Bukchang – Google Maps
Furthermore, I wasn’t aware of the boundaries of some of these camps, which made it difficult to tell if the screen was still centered on the camp, or some other site such as a village. I later found out that Bukchang (seen above) covers about 60 square kilometers – about the size of San Marino – and that’s quite small compared to the rest of the camps:
Camp 25 – Chongjin: .25 km2 (about the size of a large building complex)
Camp 18 – Bukchang: 60 km2 (about the size of San Marino)
Camp 14 – Kaechon: 60 km2 (about the size of San Marino)
Camp 15 – Yodok: 146 km2 (about the size of Washington D.C.)
Camp 22 – Haengyong: 225 km2 (about the size of Amsterdam)
Camp 16 – Hwasong: 550 km2 (about the size of Budapest)
As you can see, these camps take up huge areas of land – some of which are larger than cities that contain millions of people. So, as I was scrolling around, I realized that the multiple clusters of buildings I found all belonged to the same camp. The image above contains only shows a small portion of Camp 18. The link above will take you to Google Maps where you can scroll around to get the scope of the camp’s size.
Aside from Camps 18 and 22, the rest were somewhat difficult to locate by simply scrolling around Google Maps looking for prison-like buildings (Chongjin consists of a single complex). It wasn’t until a day later that I realized that other people had already populated Google’s database with the precise locations of these camps, so all I had to do was type in the name of the camp and the search engine would take me to its precise location. None of the articles or blogs I read had links to Google Maps where you could scroll around, so I decided to add them here.
Here’s Camp 25 – Chongjin:
Link: Camp 25 – Chongjin – Google Maps
Here’s Camp 22 – Haengyong:
Link: Camp 22 – Haengyong – Google Maps
Here’s Camp 16 – Hwasong:
Link: Camp 16 – Hwasong – Google Maps
Here’s Camp 14 – Kaechon:
Link: Camp 14 – Kaechon – Google Maps
Here’s Camp 15 – Yodok:
Link: Camp 15 – Yodok – Google Maps
I recommend that you read all of the Wikipedia articles on these camps if you have time – and from there you’ll find links to survivor testimony, autobiographies, and so on and so forth. It’s hard to imagine that in this day and age we’ve got this Stalinesque gulag…but at least we’ve got the technology to know that these things are going on. Most of the information of what goes on in these camps comes from survivors of Yodok, since it’s the only camp out of the above that releases its inmates. As for the rest of the camps, you can count the number of survivors with your fingers.
Gene Dan's Blog 