North Korea is known to operate five concentration camps now, accommodating a total of over 200,000. Once condemned as political criminals in the North, not only they themselves, but also their families are incarcerated in concentration camps without trial. With all contacts with the outside world cut off, they are subject to control in the supply of food and daily necessaries, marriage and childbirth, let alone undergoing serious violations of human rights.

With slight differences depending on region and season, the inmates get up at between 5:00am and 6:00am and work until 8:00pm, engaged in farming, coal mining and digging other minerals. After a day of hard work, they have to undergo ideological study sessions and roll calls before going to bed at around 10:00pm. Their staple diet consists of corns, potatoes, wheat and barley. The basic daily ration used to be 600g for mining areas and 500g for others, which has been slashed to 200-300g since the food crisis hit the country several years ago. As a consequence, the inmates, it is said, always suffer from hunger, catch and eat snakes, frogs and rabbits whenever possible, let alone tree barks and plant roots. Many inmates perish eventually after suffering from such diseases as pellagra, tuberculosis and hepatitis.

Concentration camps are mostly located in inland areas with rugged terrains. Completely cut off from the outside, few ordinary citizens know what the life is like in concentration camps. Depending on the mode of administration, concentration camps are divided into two: completely restricted and revolutionary areas. The former is a life camp; once you are in it, you cannot get out of it and you have to bury yourself there after death. Those accommodated in the latter area, comprised of family and singles zones, may be released if they pass examinations following ideological indoctrination through hard work for three years. Concentration Camp No. 15 located in Yodok, South Hamgyong Province, alone has both revolutionary and completely restricted areas; the remainder are all completely restricted.

Concentration camps came into being in the North in the wake of the country's liberation from Japanese colonial rule at the end of World War II in the process of banishing and accommodating in camps "adversary class forces" such as landholders, Japanese collaborators, religious people and families of those who migrated to the South. They were established later in earnest to incarcerate political victims in power struggles in the late 1950s and '60s and their families and overseas Koreans who migrated to the North. Their number saw a marked increase later in the course of cementing the Kim Il Sung dictatorship and the Kim Jong Il succession system. About a dozen concentration camps were in operation until the early '90s, the figure of which has been curtailed to five today due to increasing criticism of the North's human rights abuses from the international community and the North's internal situation

(Kim Kwang-in, kki@chosun.com )