North Korea's Camps

"This World" last night on BBC was fascinating and terrifying. We actually got to see inside North Korea as Olenka Frenkiel and her camera crew were carefully shepherded around by a pair of minders, visiting pre-selected sites such as the tomb of Kim Il Sung, a collective farm where everyone was out dancing (there was a lot of dancing) and a school where young children volunteered their contempt for George Bush. However outside North Korea, interviews with ex-prisoners and ex-officials detailed a horrific regime of concentration camps. The Observer had this:

In the remote north-eastern corner of North Korea, close to the border of Russia and China, is Haengyong. Hidden away in the mountains, this remote town is home to Camp 22 - North Korea's largest concentration camp, where thousands of men, women and children accused of political crimes are held.

Now, it is claimed, it is also where thousands die each year and where prison guards stamp on the necks of babies born to prisoners to kill them.

Over the past year harrowing first-hand testimonies from North Korean defectors have detailed execution and torture, and now chilling evidence has emerged that the walls of Camp 22 hide an even more evil secret: gas chambers where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings.

Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They are left to an agonising death while scientists take notes. The allegations offer the most shocking glimpse so far of Kim Jong-il's North Korean regime.

The witnesses claims were confirmed by "letters of transfer" documents smuggled out detailing the prisoners names, their crimes, and the nature of the experiments carried out on them.

Horrific stuff, but remember, this is the BBC. We went over to Washington, where an aged North Korean exile was holding a press conference outlining why Bush should not enter into dialogue with Kim Jong Il. Olenka Frenkiel's commentary informed us that the US wasn't interested (the camera focused on a man - a Korean in fact - sitting with closed eyes) because, after all, there's no oil in North Korea.

There's no oil in North Korea.

There's a whole BBC world-view captured in that phrase. It's not relevant, the implications are simply false, but they just had to say it.

How does it work inside the Beeb I wonder? Did the programme get sent back by the Head of Documentaries or whoever with the comment that it was fine as far as it went, but you can't have a political programme like that without some sort of swipe at the US? Or was it a simple "lacks balance", a Beeb code for needing some anti-American spin? Or does it operate at the peer level? - poor old Olenka dreading being shunned at the Beeb canteen: "Here comes poodle Olenka. Hey Olenka, how's your pal Dubya?"

I don't know, but for me it left a sour taste at the end of an important and compelling programme.