The One Free Korea blog links to a news report that states that "On December 20th, a mass group of 120 prisoners from the camp in Hwasung escaped"; the camp is "half the size of the state of Rhode Island", and holds 10,000 prisoners. One Free Korea adds:

In the history of North Korea, there has only been one known incident like this one — the mass uprising at Onsong, Camp Number 12, in 1987, when 5,000 people were killed. The punishment for escape is death, and former guards claim that they were offered generous bounties for killing escaping prisoners.

The significance of this, if true, is proof of the existence of an organized underground inside North Korea. As you will see below, Hwasong is a very long walk from China. Without help from an underground, these people would have had nowhere to go; they would all have been recaptured or killed almost immediately. If around 100 prisoners were still at large weeks after the fact, or made it at least as far as China, someone must have helped, hidden, and fed them.

Despite Ted Turner's fantasies to the contrary, North Korea is a nightmarish hellhole of a nation. As Christopher Hitchens wrote last year, "George Orwell's 1984 was published at about the time that Kim Il Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint".