Mick Hartley

Total Control Camps

Last month we saw the report from the Committe for Human Rights in North Korea, The Hidden Gulag. We've seen the publication of Blaine Harden's Escape from Camp 14, the remarkable story of defector Shin Dong-hyuk. Never has life in the extensive prison camps of North Korea been so well documented. Yet indications are that, under the new leadership of Kim Jung-un, they are, if anything, getting worse:

North Korea's system of prison camps has turned more brutal in recent years but also more difficult to hide, according to new research based on defector testimonies and satellite imagery.

Two recent reports, by researchers in the U.S. and South Korea, portray an acute desperation and horror inside North Korea's notorious prison camps—a closed and secretive system inside one of the world's most closed and secretive states. More than 200,000 people are sentenced to live and work in grueling conditions there, many until they die, according to the accounts as well as private and governmental estimates.

There are indications that the population of this gulag-like system could grow. In December, shortly after the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, his son and heir to power, Kim Jong Eun, ordered that imprisonment for someone caught illegally leaving the country would also be extended to the person's older and younger relatives.

The latest reports are built around testimonies from a growing population of North Korean defectors, including former prisoners. Individual testimonies are largely impossible to corroborate and many defectors aren't named, in some cases out of concerns over possible retribution against family members.

Still, a consistent portrait emerges of North Korea's six giant kwan-li-so, or "total control camps," where people are sent, often without trial, for offenses including defacing a picture of one of North Korea's leaders, attending a church service or leaving the country without permission. Nearly all are in remote, mountainous regions. Some cover more ground than major cities in the U.S. and Europe.

Hunger and fear are constant. Failure to obey rules and guards' orders can lead to torture and even death. Most prisoners perform difficult labor, sometimes in mines and factories, during the day and spend nights in barracks or smaller quarters without heating and plumbing. Sexual abuse of women is common.

A former female prisoner in one such facility, Camp 18, recalled coming upon a fellow prisoner who, apparently crazed from hunger, had beaten her daughter to death and was cooking the body in a pot. The prisoner, who is identified only by a pseudonym, says she last saw the woman being seized by camp guards. Following this 2008 incident, the prisoner said she escaped to South Korea.

Her account is in a report published this month by South Korea's National Human Rights Commission. The full report is built on testimony from 800 defectors, including dozens who arrived in the South in the past year. The report also includes accounts from smaller prisons and "re-education centers" that are as horrific as those from the larger camps.

A woman who served time in the Jeungsan Re-education Facility, a smaller prison near the capital of Pyongyang, told the South Korean commission that thousands of prisoners are buried in a mountainside cemetery. The woman said she served on burial detail several times and that, because graves are so shallow, the ground "feels squishy when taking a step."...

North Korea's government has for years officially denied the existence of the prison camps. Official state media don't mention them. Earlier this week, its state news agency lashed out at State Department criticism about its human-rights record. North Korea said Washington relies on "rumors concocted by a handful of traitors and criminals to earn living expenses after running away from their country and families."

But technology has made the giant prisons impossible to hide. The new reports' authors buttressed witness testimonies with satellite images now accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Human-rights activists and amateur sleuths around the world have banded together with defectors to help document the camps and the buildings, agricultural fields and mines inside.

The reports are part of a wave of new attention on the harshest controls of the North's authoritarian regime, partly in the wake of Kim Jong Eun's recent crackdown on defectors' relatives. Word of the new dictator's order, disseminated through local political-party meetings, quickly spread to North Korean defectors in the South who often remain in touch with relatives back home through cellphones and other methods the North considers illegal.

Some satellite images and camp details here. The size is astonishing. Camp 22, we learn, with an estimated prison population of 50,000, is 31 miles long by 25 miles wide.

Evidently

John Cooper Clarke - or, as he's invariably titled, "punk poet John Cooper Clarke" - featured in an hour-long BBC4 programme last night, and turned out to be a wryly amusing interviewee. There were the usual famous-name interviews from the likes of Steve Coogan and Billy Bragg about what a national treasure he is, and how he took poetry to the working classes away from its "Lonely as a cloud" image, etc. etc., but that's the nature of these programmes. Given what a witty and engagingly self-deprecating talker Cooper Clarke is, though, more of him and less of his self-important fans would've been welcome.

The old heroin habit which knocked a decade or so out of his career is over, gone, finished. He's back performing and writing, in fine form. Or, as one Mancunian called out to the famously skeletal poet on the street, "Hey, Cooper Clark, get back on the smack you fat bastard."

I posted his two best-known pieces, Beasley Street and Chickentown, a while back. The "real" Chickentown has "fucking" in place of "bloody" as the poem's constant punctuation. As Cooper Clarke said, showing it on the BBC gives the bleeper-out man repetitive strain injury, but to their credit they did the full uncensored version this time.

Not, thankfully, a national treasure, but still a fine hour's worth of viewing - on iPlayer for 7 more days.

Here's an amusing Guardian interview with him from Tuesday. And here, from 2010, is the man in action, on killing Dracula, ("embedding disabled by request" unfortunately) - a lesson to all those smug stand-up comedians, from a master of the art.

Masira

Is this a new trend in street art? Gothic script comes to Markfield, South Tottenham:

Elsewhere in the skateboard park:

Not in service

Leaside, Tottenham:

Doc Watson 1923-2012

Guitar-picker extraordinary, and one of the most influential figures in traditional American music, Arthel "Doc" Watson has died aged 89.

Brian Braiker in the Guardian:

For a man who would become a standard bearer of authenticity and technical wizardry in Americana music, Watson was not even discovered until 1960, approaching middle age and playing old fiddle songs on an electric guitar for a rockabilly party band. Watson rode the folk revival wave of that decade, becoming one of its most recognisable and revered figures – his name commanding the same admiration as the likes of Earl Scruggs, Merle Travis and Bill Monroe.

He would go on to record more than 50 albums, win eight Grammy awards, including a lifetime achievement award, and influence multiple generations of younger musicians. But his astonishing virtuosity – all the more impressive given that he was blind since the age of one – was a genre of music unto itself, as trailblazingly modern as it was faithful to its roots, a style of playing that was mimicked by many and mastered by none.

Here he is from 1991, in a duet with Jack Lawrence, explaining in his spoken intro essentially how he became such a guitar pioneer - by transposing the parts usually played by the traditional lead instruments in an old-style Country band, like the fiddle. After Doc, the guitar would take centre stage:

That's how to flat-pick.

Also, previously here, a solo Deep River Blues, and Blue Railroad Train - though to be honest Doc was never the greatest vocalist. Plus a duet with Chet Atkins.

Athletes Foot

With the Olympics little more than two months away now, the struggle to cleanse the buildings on the other Hackney Wick side of the Lea, clearly visible from the Olympic Park and covered with unwelcome graffiti, gets underway in earnest. Gangs of workmen with rollers are being deployed to paint over the offensive artwork:

Unfortunately the graffiti artists keep adding new stuff as fast as the old disappears:

Some of it not altogether in keeping with the Olympic spirit:

Indeed the denizens of Hackney Wick - one of London's prime areas for artists because of its old warehouses and cheap rents  - are, I think it's fair to say, not generally keen on the forthcoming sporting festivities:

Which could just make for some interesting visual warfare on the streets round the Olympic Park this summer.

 

Rat cartoons

I'm not the only one to have noticed the vicious rat-themed invective coming out of North Korea against South Korean President Lee Myung-bak. Aidan Foster-Carter tries to make some sense of it in a piece at Comparative Connections (pdf):

Wading through filth is no fun, but duty must be done. In what follows we describe and try to interpret North Korea’s campaign, which as the trimester ended showed ominous signs of escalating from words to deeds in attacks on South Korea’s Global Position System (GPS) signals. In some obscure way, one intended function was probably to boost the callow Kim Jong Un.  [...]

He [Lee Myung-bak] was first likened to a rat by KCNA in several reports on April 20. One, headlined “DPRK People Vow to Wipe out S. Korean Regime”, quoted enraged citizens such as KPA officer Jo Hun Gil: “We can no longer stand the behavior of the Lee Myung Bak group of rats. Such a group should be beaten to jelly at once.” KCNA added: “He didn’t hold his temper to use vulgar words unable to repeat.” (sic) With steelworker Ham Kyong Guk, it was back to the old canine slur: “Lee Myung Bak is worse than a beast and little different from scum. This rabid dog should be cut to pieces for insult to the dignity of our supreme leadership.” Pang Sun Im of Pyongyang, a woman carrying knives, clinched it: “I have bought these sharpened knives to stab to death the rat-likeLee Myung Bak group. My family is enough to cut this rat and its clan to pieces. It is my desire to dash to the south right now to kill all of those rats.”

Words however were not enough. On April 26, KCNA noted that “Cartoons Satirizing Rat-like Myung Bak Enjoy Popularity in DPRK.” This deserves quotation at some length:

The cartoon “Tear rattish Myung Bak to pieces!” portrays the tightly-gripped neck and body of rat-like Myung Bak and his bloody tongue at a last breathing. “Beat to death the rattish Myung Bak group of traitors!” and “Wipe out rat-like Myung Bak!” depict a rat being bayoneted. “Make clean sweep of the rattish traitors!” shows Lee in flames. “Beat rattish Myung Bak to a pulp!” pictures a sharpened axe cutting off Lee's neck …. The cartoons also include “Wipe out rattish Myung Bak, a dirt of history!”, “Beat to death rattish Myung Bak, a human rubbish and bastard!” and “Death to rattish Myung Bak!”

See the cartoons here. A sample:

A heretic has sneaked into the Korean nation. Not content with having brought all sorts of misfortunes to the south of Korea, the rat-like Lee Myung Bak is running amuck to defame the dignity of the north. It is regrettable for his late mother not to witness the high treason the bastard without nationality has committed. Cut into pieces with sharpened axe this rat running riot with no fear of god, to make clean of the territory at an early date.

Delightful stuff. Foster-Carter comments:

In an influential article a decade ago, my compatriot Hazel Smith argued against stereotyping North Korea as bad and mad, claiming instead that Pyongyang’s behavior is rational. Such a view is hard to square with this latest farrago, whose juvenile smut-and-slasher porn belongs in the realm of psychopathology. B R Myers’ acute observation that North Korea infantilizes its population...may need extending: perhaps it infantilizes its leaders as well.  [...]

In sum, while one regrets dwelling on and in such sewage, it was necessary. The rat cartoons may raise a snigger, but I have not seen the whole anti-Lee campaign analyzed in any detail, as we have tried to do here. Bottom line: It isn’t funny, and it hits a new low for Pyongyang. But then, as David Niven said of Errol Flynn, you always know precisely where you stand with North Korea – because they always let you down....

Besides neither convincing nor impressing anyone, the DPRK’s shrill and rancid propaganda raises a further worrying question: Are the categories which they actually think with, behind the scenes, in Pyongyang just as crude and unsubtle as the terms that they employ in public? One would hope not, for all manner of reasons. But there is little evidence to the contrary.

Brutal

London's Top Brutalist Buildings, as compiled by Toby Bricheno at Londonist. Includes the usual suspects, like the Barbican and the Southbank, but inevitably misses out on some of the more obscure places, like Stoneleigh Terrace in Highgate.

A bonus couple, seen on my travels this morning. First, Glenkerry House:

Designed by Erno Goldfinger, opposite Balfron Tower (Trellick Tower's smaller East End cousin), and part of Poplar's Brownfield Estate. 

And, just across the East India Dock Road, the contentious Robin Hood Gardens:

Subject of a failed attempt by leading architects a few years back to have it listed, and now awaiting demolition....and already starting to look the worse for wear:

On the East India Dock Road, between the two, Banksy has the last word:

Create

A young mad scientist at work:

....in his bedroom.

By Dan MacKenzie.

Blue houses

Notting Hill: