North Korea Has a "Good Gulag"

Journalists may get 'good' gulag
By Donald Kirk

WASHINGTON - The term "hard labor" when applied by a North Korean court to the 12-year sentences meted out to journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee is hardly the same as the "hard labor" given to hundreds of thousands of prisoners scattered through a vast gulag system from which there is generally no escape and no reprieve, according to a range of experts.

The kind of existence that awaits Ling and Lee as they begin their detention is not at all clear, but no one believes they will really have to suffer through dawn-to-dusk days slaving in fields and mines, beaten by guards and sometimes tortured, as routinely happens to prisoners in North Korea.

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