Escape from Camp 14

2011-05-03'>http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/images-reveal-scale-north-korean-political-prison- camps-2011-05-03.

2

Kang Chol-hwan and Pierre Rigoulot, The Aquariums of Pyongyang (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 79.

3

These eyewitnesses, including Shin, have been interviewed by David Hawk, a researcher for the US Committee on Human Rights in North Korea. Their stories and satellite photos of the camps can be found in Hawk’s periodically updated report, ‘The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps’, first published in 2003.

4

Korean Bar Association, ‘White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea 2008’ (Seoul: Korea Institute for National Unification, 2008).

5

American television journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee spent nearly five months in North Korean prisons after crossing illegally into the country in 2009. They were released after former President Bill Clinton flew to Pyongyang and had his picture taken with Kim Jong Il.

6

Hyun-sik Kim and Kwang-ju Son, Documentary Kim Jong Il (Seoul: Chonji Media, 1997), 202, as cited in Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh, The Hidden People of North Korea (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 27.

7

Author interview with Chun Jung-hee, head nurse at Hanawon resettlement centre in South Korea. The government-funded centre has measured and weighed North Korean defectors since 1999.

8

Author interviews with defectors between 2007 and 2010. The system is also well described by Andrei Lankov in North of the DMZ (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2007), 67–69; and by Hassig and Oh in The Hidden People of North Korea, 198–99.

9

Details on the lifestyle of Kim Jong Il are gathered in Hassig and Oh, 27–35. See also Google Earth photographs compiled by Curtis Melvin, on his blog, North Korean Economy Watch, http://www.nkeconwatch.com/2011/06/10/friday-fun-kim-jong-ils-train/.

10

Andrew Higgins, ‘Who Will Succeed Kim Jong Il’, Washington Post (16 July 2009), A1.

11

Kang and Rigoulot, The Aquariums of Pyongyang, 100.

12

Kim Yong, Long Road Home (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 85.

13

Andrea Matles Savada, ed., North Korea: A Country Study (Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1993).

14

Yuk-Sa Li, ed., Juche! The Speeches and Writings of Kim Il Sung (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1972), 157. Quoted in the Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs 1, no. 1 (Spring 2003), 105.