From the BBC:
“Why Kim Jong-un is waging war
on slang, jeans and foreign films”
(Illegal, many in the North watch
South Korean programmes)
North Korea has recently
introduced a sweeping new law which seeks to stamp out any kind of foreign
influence - harshly punishing anyone caught with foreign films, clothing or
even using slang. But why? Yoon Mi-so says she was 11 when she first saw a man
executed for being caught with a South Korean drama. His entire neighbourhood
was ordered to watch. "If you didn't, it would be classed as
treason," she told the BBC from her home in Seoul. The North Korean guards
were making sure everyone knew the penalty for smuggling illicit videos was
death. "I have a strong memory of the man who was blindfolded, I can still
see his tears flow down. That was traumatic for me. The blindfold was
completely drenched in his tears. "They put him on a stake and bound him,
then shot him."
'A war without weapons' Imagine
being in a constant state of lockdown with no internet, no social media and
only a few state controlled television channels designed to tell you what the
country's leaders want you to hear - this is life in North Korea. And
now its leader Kim Jong-Un has clamped down further, introducing a sweeping new
law against what the regime describes as "reactionary thought". Anyone
caught with large amounts of media from South Korea, the United States or Japan
now faces the death penalty. Those caught watching face prison camp for 15
years. And it's not just about what people watch. Recently, Mr
Kim wrote a letter in state media calling on the country's Youth League to
crack down on "unsavoury, individualistic, anti-socialist behaviour"
among young people. He wants to stop foreign speech, hairstyles and clothes
which he described as "dangerous poisons". The Daily NK, an
online publication in Seoul with sources in North Korea, reported that three
teenagers had been sent to a re-education camp for cutting their hair like
K-pop idols and hemming their trousers above their ankles. The BBC cannot
verify this account. All this is because Mr Kim is in a war that does not
involve nuclear weapons or missiles. Analysts say he is trying to stop outside
information reaching the people of North Korea as life in the country becomes
increasingly difficult. Millions of people are thought to be going hungry. Mr
Kim wants to ensure they are still being fed the state's carefully crafted
propaganda, rather than gaining glimpses of life according to glitzy K-dramas
set south of the border in Seoul, one of Asia's richest cities. The
country has been more cut off from the outside world than ever before after
sealing its border last year in response to the pandemic. Vital supplies and
trade from neighbouring China almost ground to a halt. Although some supplies
are beginning to get through, imports are still limited. This self imposed
isolation has exacerbated an already failing economy where money is funnelled
into the regime's nuclear ambitions. Earlier this year Mr Kim himself admitted that
his people were facing "the worst-ever situation which we have to
overcome".
What does the law say? The
Daily NK was the first to get hold of a copy of the law. "It states
that if a worker is caught, the head of the factory can be punished, and if a
child is problematic, parents can also be punished. The system of mutual
monitoring encouraged by the North Korean regime is aggressively reflected in
this law," Editor-in-Chief Lee Sang Yong told the BBC. He says this
is intended to "shatter" any dreams or fascination the younger
generation may have about the South. "In other words, the regime
concluded that a sense of resistance could form if cultures from other
countries were introduced," he said. Choi Jong-hoon, one of the few
defectors to make it out of the country in the last year, told the BBC that
"the harder the times, the harsher the regulations, laws, punishments
become". "Psychologically, when your belly is full and you
watch a South Korean film, it might be for leisure. But when there's no food
and it's a struggle to live, people get disgruntled."
Will it work? Previous
crackdowns only demonstrated how resourceful people have been in circulating
and watching foreign films which are usually smuggled over the border from
China. For a number of years, dramas have been passed around on USB
sticks which are now as "common as rocks", according to Mr Choi.
They're easy to conceal and they're also password encrypted. "If
you type in the wrong password three times in a row, the USB deletes its
contents. You can even set it so this happens after one incorrect input of the
password if the content is extra sensitive. "There are also many
cases where the USB is set so it can only be viewed once on a certain computer,
so you can't plug it in to another device or give it to someone else. Only you
can see it. So even if you wanted to spread it you couldn't." Mi-so
recalls how her neighbourhood went to extreme lengths to watch films. She
says they once borrowed a car battery and hooked it up to a generator to get
enough electricity to power the television. She remembers watching a South
Korean drama called "Stairway to Heaven". This epic love story
about a girl battling first her step-mother and then cancer appears to have
been popular in North Korea around 20 years ago. Mr Choi says this is
also when fascination with foreign media really took off - helped by cheap CDs
and DVDs from China.
The start of the crackdown But
then, the regime in Pyongyang started to notice. Mr Choi remembers state
security carrying out a raid on a university around 2002 and finding more than
20,000 CDs. "This was just one university. Can you imagine how many
there were all over the country? The government was shocked. This is when they
made the punishment harsher," he said. Kim Geum-hyok says he was
only 16 in 2009 when he was captured by guards from a special unit set up to
hunt down and arrest anyone sharing illegal videos. He had given a
friend some DVDs of South Korean pop music that his father had smuggled in from
China. He was treated like an adult and marched to a secret room for
interrogation where the guards refused to let him sleep. He says he was punched
and kicked repeatedly for four days. "I was terrified," he told
the BBC from Seoul where he currently lives. "I thought my world
was ending. They wanted to know how I got this video and how many people I
showed it to. I couldn't say my father had brought those DVDs from China. What
could I say? It was my father. I didn't say anything, I just said, "I
don't know, I don't know. Please let me go." Geum-hyok is from one
of Pyongyang's elite families and his father was eventually able to bribe the
guards to set him free. Something that will be near impossible under Mr Kim's
new law. Many of those caught for similar offences at the time were sent
to labour camps. But this didn't prove to be enough of a deterrent, so the
sentences increased. "At first the sentence was around a year in a
labour camp - that changed to more than three years in the camp. Right now, if
you go to labour camps, more than 50% of the young people are there because
they watched foreign media," says Mr Choi. "If someone watches
two hours of illegal material, then that would be three years in a labour camp.
This is a big problem." We have been told by a number of sources
that the size of some of the prison camps in North Korea have expanded in the
last year and Mr Choi believes the harsh new laws are having an effect. "To
watch a movie is a luxury. You need to feed yourself first before you even
think about watching a film. When times are hard to even eat, having even one
family member sent to a labour camp can be devastating."
Why do people still do it?
Kim Geum-hyok (L) and Yoon Mi-so
(R)
"We had to take so many chances
watching those dramas. But no-one can defeat our curiosity. We wanted to know
what was going on in the outside world," Geum-hyok told me. For
Guem-hyok, finally learning the truth about his country changed his life. He
was one of the few privileged North Koreans allowed to study in Beijing where
he discovered the internet. "At first, I couldn't believe it [the
descriptions of North Korea]. I thought Western people were lying. Wikipedia is
lying, how can I believe that? But my heart and my brain were divided. "So
I watched many documentaries about North Korea, read many papers. And then I
realised they are probably true because what they were saying made sense. "After
I realised a transition was going on in my brain, it was too late, I couldn't
go back." Guem-hyok eventually fled to Seoul. Mi-so is living
her dreams as a fashion advisor. The first thing she did in her new home
country was visit all the places she saw in Stairway to Heaven. But
stories like theirs are becoming rarer than ever. Leaving the country
has become almost impossible with the current "shoot-to-kill" order
at the tightly controlled border. And it is difficult not to expect Mr Kim's
new law to have more of a chilling effect. Mr Choi, who had to leave his
family behind in the North, believes that watching one or two dramas will not
overturn decades of ideological control. But he does think North Koreans
suspect that state propaganda is not the truth. "North Korean
people have a seed of grievance in their heart but they don't know what their
grievance is aimed towards," he said. "It's a grievance
without direction. I feel heartbroken that they can't understand even when I
tell them. There is a need for someone to awaken them, enlighten them."
^ It seems things are getting
much worse for the ordinary people of North Korea and rather than work to help
make their lives a little easier Kim and his Communist Dictatorship are doing
the opposite of what should be done. The majority of Dictatorships collapse
because the people inside them start to want their basic freedoms (food, shelter,
etc.) and the people of North Korea have long been without those. ^
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.