The Camps Are Still There
North Korea is easy to keep at a comfortable distance. The state presents itself in ways that practically beg for ridicule—the orchestrated mass performances, the photoshopped military hardware, the hair. We comply, because mockery is lighter than the alternative. It creates a kind of ambient irony around the country that functions like insulation: we’re laughing, which means we’re watching, which means we don’t have to do anything else.
Then you see the drawings.
A North Korean defector—one of the very few who’ve escaped the political prison camps and survived long enough to describe them—made detailed sketches of daily life inside. What they show is not the baroque horror of film adaptations or the abstracted statistics of human rights reports. The drawings are almost diagrammatic. A figure receiving a beating. A figure in a field. A figure watching an execution. The flatness of the line is the worst part. There’s no editorial framing, no attempt to make you feel anything in particular. This is what happens here. This is the shape of a day.
The camps—called kwalliso in Korean—hold somewhere between 80,000 and 120,000 people by the most credible estimates, though the true number is impossible to verify because North Korea denies their existence. Prisoners are held for political crimes, real or attributed. Their families are imprisoned alongside them, under the logic that disloyalty is inherited. Children born inside the camps grow up knowing nothing outside them. The daily schedule runs from 5am to 8pm of hard labor, followed by mandatory self-criticism sessions and propaganda study. Failing to meet production quotas—grain, potatoes, peppers—results in reduced rations or beatings or worse.
The international community in 2013 was engaged in the usual diplomatic theater. Six-party talks. Aid negotiations. Careful language about sovereignty and engagement. All of which requires treating North Korea as a state actor with recognizable state interests, which requires not looking too directly at the drawings.
The defectors who make it out still carry what they saw. Satellite imagery can show you the physical footprint of a camp, but it can’t show you a human being’s account of living in one. Sometimes a drawing does more than a report. And the fact that it’s still happening—that we’ve had this conversation, as a species, for decades, and the camps are still running—is its own kind of answer about what we’re willing to tolerate when it happens far enough away.