When Korea was divided, most people assumed the northern half would eventually find its way to become a normal country.
But the regime taking shape in Pyongyang wasn’t building a country.
It was building a machine designed to control every person inside it completely, permanently, and without mercy.
Korea did not choose to be divided.
In August 1945, two American military officers, Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel, sat down with a National Geographic map and drew a line across the 38th parallel in about thirty minutes.
No Koreans were in the room.
No Koreans were asked for their opinion.
A country of 25 million people was split in two by men who had never even been there.
The Soviet Union took control of the north.
The United States took control of the south.
Within three years, both sides had their own governments.
But only one of them was building what would become a prison state.
The man chosen by the Soviets to lead North Korea was Kim Il-sung.
He was 33 years old, had fought as an anti-Japanese guerrilla, and had spent years studying Stalinist methods of control.
He was not chosen by the Korean people.
He was chosen by Moscow.
By 1948, he had declared the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and was rapidly tightening his grip on power.
His rise was so fast and so thorough that it worried even some Soviet officials.
Kim Il-sung understood something many leaders do not.
Fear by itself is not enough.
People also need to believe.
So he built something that looked almost like a religion.
He called it Juche, usually translated as “self-reliance.
” Officially, it meant Korea would depend on no foreign power and control its own future.
In reality, it meant the country’s future belonged entirely to him.
His portrait was placed in every home.
Children were taught to bow to his image before meals.
Teachers credited him for good harvests and even clear weather.
None of this happened naturally.
It was carefully planned and organized from the top down.
And it worked.
But belief alone was not enough.
The regime needed a way to separate loyal citizens from disloyal ones, and more importantly, a way to punish entire families for generations.
So in the early 1950s, Kim Il-sung introduced the Songbun system.
Every citizen was given a social classification based on how loyal their family was considered to be.
The system originally contained 51 categories but was later simplified into three main groups: “core,” “wavering,” and “hostile.
” The hostile group included families who had owned land before the revolution, people with relatives in South Korea, religious families, and anyone accused of disloyalty since 1945.
Songbun was inherited.
You could not challenge it.
A judgment made against a grandfather could affect his grandchildren for the rest of their lives.
By the late 1950s, Kim Il-sung had started removing political rivals.
Not through trials.
Not through exile.
They simply disappeared.
The regime needed a place to send people it could not execute publicly and could not safely release.
It needed a place that spread fear without anyone being allowed to talk about it.
That place became the Kwanliso.
The political prison camp system was operating by the early 1960s.
By the 1980s, at least six major camps existed across North Korea’s remote mountain regions.
They were built far from cities and hidden from the outside world.
Camp 14, near Kaechon in South Pyongan Province, covers about 155 square kilometers, making it larger than Washington D.
C.
Camp 22, near the Chinese border in North Hamgyong Province, held an estimated 50,000 prisoners at its peak.
Camp 16, located in Hwasong County, has been confirmed through satellite images reviewed by Amnesty International.
None of these camps appear on official North Korean maps.
The government still denies they exist.
A person does not need to commit a crime to enter these camps.
Under the principle known as Yeon-jwa-je, or guilt by association, three generations of a family can be punished for the actions of one person.
A man makes a careless comment criticizing the government.
Within days, his wife, children, and parents may all be arrested.
They may have done nothing wrong and known nothing about what he said.
The best-known account of life inside a Kwanliso comes from Shin Dong-hyuk.
He was born inside Camp 14 in 1982.
He did not know the outside world existed.
For him, the camp was the entire world.
From childhood, he was taught that prisoners existed only to work.
Food was given according to how much work a person completed.
If you worked less, you got less food.
Less food made it harder to work.
It was a system designed to slowly destroy people.
A former guard named Ahn Myong-chol escaped North Korea in 1994.
Later, he told investigators that guards were trained to see prisoners as less than human.
He described prisoners being beaten with iron rods, starved as punishment, and forced to watch public executions inside the camps.
He admitted that he had taken part in these abuses himself.
He was only nineteen years old when he started working there.
In 2013, the United Nations created a Commission of Inquiry to investigate human rights abuses in North Korea.
It was led by former Australian judge Michael Kirby.
For a year, the commission collected testimony from survivors, defectors, and former officials.
The final report, released in February 2014, was 372 pages long.
It compared North Korea’s prison camp system to the atrocities committed in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Gulag system, not as a political comparison but as a legal and structural one.
The report estimated that between 80,000 and 120,000 people were being held in political prison camps at that time.
Public executions are not sudden events.
They are carefully planned.
Notices are often given days beforehand.
Citizens in the area are ordered to attend.
Schools bring students in groups.
Factory workers are marched from their workplaces.
If someone is absent, people notice.
Questions are asked.
So nobody stays away.
The Database Center for North Korean Human Rights in Seoul has recorded more than 1,300 confirmed public executions between 1970 and 2020.
Researchers believe the real number is much higher.
In 2022, the Korean Institute for National Unification reported that executions were regularly carried out across all nine provinces of North Korea.
The crimes that can lead to public execution reveal exactly what the regime fears most.
Distributing South Korean media has been punishable by death since 2012.
Owning a Bible can result in a death sentence.
Contacting the outside world through an unauthorized phone can lead to execution.
Trying to escape the country can lead to execution.
During the famine years, even stealing food could lead to execution.
The actual crime often matters less than the message.
In December 2013, Kim Jong-un ordered the execution of his own uncle, Jang Song-thaek.
For years, Jang had been one of the most powerful men in the country.
He helped guide Kim Jong-un after the death of Kim Jong-il in 2011.
During a Politburo meeting, Jang was arrested in front of senior officials and accused of treason, drug use, corruption, and trying to sell national resources to China.
Four days later, he was dead.
The message was aimed at the ruling elite.
No one was untouchable.
Not even family members.
In 2014, Hyon Yong-chol, the Minister of the People’s Armed Forces, was reportedly executed with an anti-aircraft gun.
The choice of weapon was deliberate.
The larger the weapon, the less of the body remained afterwards.
Every form of control in North Korea depends on one thing.
People must not know that another way of life exists.
The regime understood this from the beginning.
Controlling information was just as important as controlling people.
All media in North Korea belongs to the state.
The country’s three television channels broadcast only content approved by the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Korean Workers’ Party.
The main newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, has been published every day since May 1945 and has never published criticism of the Kim family.
There are no independent journalists.
Foreign reporters are rarely allowed into the country, and when they are, every part of their visit is controlled.
They see only what the government wants them to see.
The internet, as most people know it, barely exists in North Korea.
Instead, the country uses a closed network called Kwangmyong, launched in the early 2000s.
It provides access only to approved websites, limited academic materials, and government email services.
It is not a connection to the world.
It is a closed system built by the state.
Radios sold legally in North Korea came pre-set to government stations and were physically modified so they could not receive foreign broadcasts.
Every radio and television had to be registered with local authorities.
Owning an unregistered device was a crime.
For many years, this system was extremely effective.
The first major crack appeared along the Chinese border.
During the late 1990s, smuggled media began entering the country.
First came VHS tapes, then DVDs, and later tiny SD cards that could be hidden almost anywhere.
The most popular content was not political material.
It was South Korean television dramas.
Love stories, family dramas, and crime shows spread across the country.
But these programs showed something dangerous: ordinary South Koreans living in modern homes, driving cars, eating in restaurants, and speaking freely.
That image was more threatening to the regime than any political speech.
The government’s response became much harsher during the 2010s.
Special surveillance teams known as “Grouper Teams,” working under the Ministry of State Security, carried out surprise home searches looking for foreign media.
In 2020, the Reactionary Thought and Culture Rejection Act officially made the distribution of South Korean content punishable by death.
Simply watching it could result in up to 15 years in a labor camp.
A second law passed in 2021, called the Youth Education Guarantee Act, made it illegal for young people to use South Korean slang or speech patterns.
The government was now policing the way people talked.
The fact that these laws had to be passed reveals something important.
Governments do not create laws against things that are not happening.
Foreign information had been entering North Korea for years.
By the time Kim Jong-un began imposing severe punishments over USB drives and media files, millions of North Koreans had already seen glimpses of life outside the country’s borders.
There is no legal way to leave North Korea.
The border with South Korea is one of the most heavily fortified places on earth.
It stretches 250 kilometers and is lined with mines, fences, watchtowers, sensors, and around a million soldiers on both sides.
Since the 1953 armistice, almost no defectors have escaped that way.
Instead, people flee north across the Tumen or Yalu rivers into China.
The border is heavily guarded.
North Korean soldiers have shoot-to-kill orders for unauthorized crossings.
During winter, frozen rivers can be crossed in minutes.
During warmer months, strong currents can kill people before guards even open fire.
Many drown.
Many are shot.
Those who reach China often find themselves facing a different danger.
China does not recognize North Koreans as refugees.
It classifies them as illegal economic migrants.
As a result, people caught in China are often detained and sent back.
They are handed directly to North Korean security officials.
Survivors describe brutal interrogations involving beatings, sleep deprivation, and stress positions.
Anyone found to have met South Koreans, missionaries, or consumed foreign media faces especially severe punishment.
Long prison sentences are common.
Executions also occur.
Women are especially vulnerable.
Many are targeted by human trafficking networks soon after crossing into China.
Some are sold as wives into rural communities.
Others are forced into prostitution.
A 2019 investigation by the Korea Future Initiative estimated that more than 70 percent of North Korean women entering China experience some form of trafficking.
Women who become pregnant by Chinese men and are later returned to North Korea have reported forced abortions.
Testimony collected by the UN and human rights groups also describes babies with Chinese fathers being killed after repatriation.
For those who avoid capture, the route to freedom usually continues through Southeast Asia.
Many travel through Laos and into Thailand, often with help from underground networks run by missionaries, NGOs, and defector groups.
The journey can take months or even years.
If they reach Thailand and surrender to authorities, they are usually transferred to South Korea through long-established diplomatic channels.
The number of defectors arriving in South Korea rose steadily between 1998 and 2012, reaching 2,700 in 2011.
After taking power in late 2011, Kim Jong-un strengthened border security with more guards, more fencing, and harsher punishments.
The numbers dropped sharply.
In 2021, only 63 people reached South Korea.
COVID-19 border restrictions made escape nearly impossible for several years.
By early 2024, around 34,000 North Korean defectors had resettled in South Korea since the late 1990s.
But reaching Seoul does not end the struggle.
Defectors suddenly find themselves in a fast-moving society filled with information, choices, and freedoms they have never experienced.
The habits that helped them survive in North Korea often make life harder in South Korea.
The government’s Hana Won program provides three months of training and support, but many defectors say it is not nearly enough.
Depression, trauma, and social isolation are common.
Some eventually return to China.
The world has known about much of this for a long time.
The 2014 UN Commission of Inquiry report did not reveal something entirely new.
It confirmed what researchers, survivors, and human rights groups had been reporting for years.
In April 2014, Judge Michael Kirby presented the findings to the UN Security Council.
He described crimes against humanity carried out over decades under the authority of the North Korean leadership.
He recommended referring North Korea to the International Criminal Court.
China and Russia blocked the effort.
Kim Jong-un never faced any legal proceedings.
The report was filed away.
The United Nations has passed resolutions condemning North Korea’s human rights record every year since 2005.
North Korea rejects them as political attacks.
Little changes.
Elizabeth Salmon, the UN Special Rapporteur on North Korea since 2022, has never been allowed into the country.
Like others before her, she relies on interviews with defectors and annual reports that rarely lead to action.
Sanctions have been the main tool used by Western governments.
The United States and the UN expanded sanctions significantly in 2016 and 2017, targeting coal, iron, seafood, textiles, financial services, and overseas labor.
North Korea’s response was not to slow down.
It accelerated its missile program.
In 2022 alone, it carried out 37 ballistic missile tests, including several intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of theoretically reaching the United States.
For Kim Jong-un, nuclear weapons are not a bargaining tool.
They are a survival strategy.
He watched Muammar Gaddafi give up Libya’s weapons programs and later die during the 2011 civil war.
He watched Saddam Hussein fall and be executed.
He drew his own conclusion.
Nuclear weapons are what keep him alive, and no sanctions package has changed that calculation.
China remains the one country with real leverage over North Korea.
It supplies around 90 percent of North Korea’s imported energy and handles most of its foreign trade.
Without Chinese support, North Korea would face enormous pressure.
But Beijing sees a stable North Korea as preferable to a collapse that could send millions of refugees into China and possibly create a unified Korea allied with the United States.
Human rights concerns have never outweighed those interests.
The generation that grew up after the famine of the 1990s is different from the generation before it.
They were raised around the Jangmadang markets.
They learned to trade, negotiate, and survive in areas the state could not fully control.
Many have watched South Korean television.
Some have spoken with Chinese traders or relatives who escaped years ago.
The ideas built by Kim Il-sung, the belief in Juche, the near-religious status of the leadership, and the claim that South Korea is poor and oppressed still exist, but many people now know things that challenge those beliefs.
Kim Jong-un understands this.
The anti-culture laws, restrictions on South Korean speech, and campaigns against so-called anti-socialist behavior all point to a leadership that feels threatened.
Governments do not ban words unless those words are already spreading.
The harsher punishments suggest growing concern.
The defector community in South Korea has also become more visible.
Yeonmi Park, who escaped in 2007 at age 13, has spoken before the UN, the British Parliament, and audiences across the United States.
Thae Yong-ho, a former North Korean diplomat who defected with his family in 2016, later became a member of South Korea’s National Assembly.
He spent years inside the system and now speaks openly about how it works.
Groups in South Korea continue sending information into North Korea through balloons carrying USB drives, shortwave radio broadcasts, and other methods.
Pyongyang reacts strongly to these efforts.
In June 2020, North Korea demolished the inter-Korean liaison office in Kaesong after balloon launches by defector groups.
The explosion was shown on state television.
The message was directed not only at South Korea but also at North Koreans watching from home.
In 2023, a South Korean court issued an arrest warrant for Kim Jong-un and other officials over crimes committed against defectors.
The warrant cannot realistically be enforced, but it became part of a growing legal record.
The UN, South Korean courts, and human rights organizations continue collecting testimony and preserving evidence.
That record will remain even after the current regime is gone.
Today, the prison camps still exist.
Public executions still happen.
The border remains one of the most dangerous in the world.
More than 26 million people continue living inside this system, trying to survive one day at a time.
For more than seventy years, the regime has tried to hide these realities from the world.
But defectors, survivors, journalists, researchers, and investigators have kept documenting what happened.
The idea that nothing can be done is not true.
People are doing something.
Slowly, imperfectly, and often at great personal risk.
The harder truth is that it still is not enough.
