Inmates at Pyongsan Political Prison Camp in North Hwanghae Province are being forced to work in uranium mines, Daily NK has learned.
“Pyongsan Political Prison Camp is basically a uranium mining camp,” a source in North Korea told Daily NK on Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons. “The prisoners usually take part in primary physical labor only, including expanding the mine tunnels, putting up mine posts, extracting the uranium and transporting it to storage places. They do not participate in technical activities such as refining or concentrating the ore.”
According to the source, Pyongsan Political Prison Camp — run by the Ministry of Social Security — is home to about 11,000 people. Daily NK reported in 2021 that the authorities were building a new political prison camp in Pyongsan, North Hwanghae Province, and inmates would be mobilized to produce uranium concentrate.
Inmates in Pyongsan reportedly suffer from long periods of intense forced labor in unsafe conditions.
“The tunnels are supported by posts for dozens of meters so that you can walk in them, but after that, you have to crouch to enter them and, later, crawl,” the source said. “Every prisoner has a zone assigned to them and is allotted individual workloads.
“Three armed production managers guard the mine entrance and wait until the prisoners emerge with their bags of ore,” he continued, adding: “They work 12 to 16 hours a day, and sometimes even extended periods of 20 hours.”
Article 16 of North Korea’s socialist labor law sets the work day at eight hours. The law even lowers this to six or seven hours, depending on the difficulty or particular conditions of the work.
The WHO and ILO published a joint study in 2021 on the relationship between long working hours and the risk of death, finding that working over 55 hours a week was very harmful to one’s health.
However, Pyongsan Political Prison Camp inmates perform intense labor for up to 20 hours daily in terrible conditions. Most of all, prisoners could be exposed to radiation while extracting the uranium ore, but the North Korean authorities reportedly provide no proper explanations or even minimum safety equipment.
“As for safety equipment, the camp simply hands out work uniforms twice a year in summer and winter,” the source said. “These fall apart after just a week, so you have to patch them up and patch them up again.”
“They think safety equipment is something you give to ordinary people, not inmates,” he said.
Managers of political prison camps have no duty to protect prisoners stripped of their civil rights as citizens. Because they treat them as animals or things rather than humans, they even use the Korean counting words for animals or things — mari or gae — rather than the one for people, myeong, the source said.
“Prisoners have no right to refuse work, and a refusal amounts to a declaration of death,” he said. “You can’t refuse to work because managers beat and punish prisoners for failing to work quickly or just for displaying a poor work attitude.”
Pyongsan Political Prisoner Camp also reportedly fails to provide sufficient rest or food.
“You can rest at home or a temporary tent near the worksite,” said the source. “Food provision policy is seasonal or dependent on camp conditions, but at Pyongsan, inmates ate nothing but salted broth with boiled greens for about 20 days during the barley hump this April and May.”
Translated by David Black. Edited by Robert Lauler.
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