All of the kwan-li-so camps are located in remote areas, protected by electrified fences and guard posts. The penalty for attempting to escape is death. Until March 2008, only portions of these camps were visible to Google Earth viewers. Recent additions to Google Earth’s high and medium resolution coverage of North Korea now make it possible to delineate these camps more-or-less completely.
The camps do not exist merely to punish and isolate potential dissidents; they are also the foundation of the North Korean regime’s system of domestic terror. The system enforces obedience and suppresses thoughtcrime by threatening not just the life of the dissenter, but also the lives of his loved ones, according to Oh Gyeung Seob, a research fellow at the Sejong Institute.
One can begin to grasp the immensity of the camps’ size and cruelty, and to corroborate least some of what the witnesses have told us, by comparing their accounts with the strikingly clear imagery of Camp 22, where the excellent resolution makes it possible to identify individual people in the satellite imagery.
http://freekorea.us/camps/
