Aegis Trust

Last week's Economist had a piece on North Korea remarkable for the numbers of mays, mights and maybes it employed.  Not the fault of the author of course but a reflection of how little we know about life above the 38th parallel.

Ever since the sinking of the South Korean warship the Cheonan, determined by an international report to have been caused by a North Korean torpedo, the world's media has renewed its attempt to fathom out what's going on within a state which is going through a slow motion succession crisis.  (Or is it?  No one really knows for sure.)

Another route in to understanding North Korea has been taken by Barbara Demick in her book, Nothing to Envy, Real Lives in North Korea.  She attempts to recreate the lives of six ordinary people from the city of Chongjin using interviews from defectors.  She starts conventionally enough with the famous satellite image of North Korea at night - blacked out through economic collapse, in stark contrast to street lights and neon of the South.  But she then takes us off in a completely different direction - showing how, for two young lovers in ultra-conservative North Korea, the darkness allows romance to blossom.

The tragedy is that both slowly realize they want to defect as the man made famine led to hundreds of emaciated corpses in the street, yet such is the fear generated by the informers employed by state security, that neither feels able to confide in each other.

Highly recommended.

Imagine if Google Earth had existed in the 1930s and we could see Stalin's Gulag or Nazi concentration camps (I'm deliberately referring to concentration camps, not the death camps like Belzec).

These satellite photos of the North Korean gulag have been publicly available for years - with almost no public coverage.  They're part of the estimable US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea's report:   The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps Prisoners’ Testimonies and Satellite Photographs.

I was reminded of the report by this new Google Earth project North Korea Uncovered (this is a Google Earth layer - which requires you to download Google Earth).  There are a reported 200,000 political prisoners lost in the Gulag - a slow burning crime against humanity which makes some other, widely reported, atrocities pale in comparison.