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North Korea recently introduced a new law that aims to stamp out any kind of foreign influence, severely punishing anyone caught with movies, clothing, or even using foreign slang. But why?
Yoon Mi-so says he was 11 when he first saw the execution of a man who was surprised with a South Korean film.
His entire neighborhood was forced to witness the execution.
“If you didn’t, it was considered treason,” he told the BBC from his home in Sel.
The North Korean guards wanted to make sure everyone knew that the the penalty for smuggling illegal videos was death.
“I have a vivid memory of the man who was blindfolded. I can still see his tears. It was traumatic for me. The blindfold was completely wet with his tears.”
“They put him on a stake, tied him up and then shot him.”
“A war without weapons”
Imagine being in a constant state of isolation with no internet, no social media, and just a few state-controlled TV stations designed to tell you what the country’s leaders want you to hear: it’s life in North Korea .
Kim Jong-Un considers foreign speech and certain hairstyles and clothing to be “dangerous poisons”.
And now its leader, Kim Jong-Un, has tightened the screws even further, introducing a drastic new law against what the regime describes as “reactionary thinking“.
Anyone caught by multiple media South Korea, United States or Japan now facing the death sentence. Those who watch can be sent in a prison camp during 15 to.
And it’s not just about what people see.
Recently, Kim wrote a letter to state media calling on the country’s Youth League to crack down on “unpleasant, individualistic and anti-socialist behavior” among young people.
He says he’s trying to end it foreign speech, hairstyles and clothes which he describes as “dangerous poisons”.
The Daily NK, an online publication in Salt with sources in North Korea, reported that three teenagers were sent to re-education camp for cutting their hair like K-pop idols and wearing pants. above the ankles. The BBC could not verify this information
Hunger
All because Kim is in a war that does not involve nuclear weapons or missiles.
Analysts say he is trying to prevent outside information from reaching the North Korean people at a time when life in the country is becoming increasingly difficult.
The isolation after the pandemic has hit hard the already struggling North Korean economy.
Thinks that millions of people are starving. Kim wants to make sure they continue to be fueled by the state’s carefully crafted propaganda, rather than glimpses of life according to the posh drama TV series set south of the border in Sel, one of the richest cities in Asia.
The country has been more isolated from the outside world than ever after sealing its border last year in response to the pandemic.
Vital supplies and commerce from neighboring China were almost completely crippled. Although some supplies are starting to arrive, imports are still limited.
It is self-imposed isolation It has exacerbated an already failing economy, in which money is funneled into the regime’s nuclear ambitions.
Earlier this year, Kim himself admitted that his people are facing “the worst situation we have to overcome.”
What the law says?
The NK Daily was the first to seize a copy of the law.
“He specifies that if a worker is discovered, factory manager can be punished, and if a child is inconvenient, the parents can also be punished. the mutual monitoring system 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 meant to “destroy” any dreams or fascination the younger generation might have for South Korea.
The idea, says Lee Sang Yong, is to destroy young people’s fascination with anything that comes from South Korea.
“In other words, the regime concluded that the introduction of cultures from other countries could create a sense of endurance“, He said.
Choi Jong-hoon, one of the few defectors who managed to leave the country last year, told the BBC that “the more difficult the times, the harsher the regulations, laws and penalties become.”
“Psychologically, when you have a full belly and you watch a South Korean movie, maybe it is for fun. But when there is no food and living is a struggle, people get on with it. angry.”
A function?
The previous severe measures have only shown how people were ingenious circulate and watch foreign films that are typically smuggled across the Chinese border.
For several years, the series have been shared through USB flash drives which are now as “common as rocks”, says Choi. They are easy to hide and are also password protected.
“If you type the wrong password three times in a row, the USB drive deletes its content. You can even configure it to occur after incorrect password entry if the content is highly sensitive.”
“There are also a lot of cases where USB is set up so that it can only be accessed once on a given computer, so you can’t connect to another device or give it to someone else. other. Only You can see it. So even if You would have wanted to broadcast it, you could not “.
Mi-so remembers how her neighborhood went to great lengths to watch movies.
He says they once borrowed a car battery and plugged it into a generator to get enough electricity to power the television. You remember seeing a South Korean drama called “Stairway to Heaven”.
This pica love story about a girl who first fights her stepmother and then cancer, seems to have been popular in North Korea about 20 years ago.
Choi says it was also around this time that fascination with foreign media really took off, aided by Cheap CDs and DVDs from China.
The beginning of the repression
But then the Pyongyang regime started to notice it. Choi recalls that state security raided a university around 2002 and found more than 20,000 CDs.
“It was at one university. Can you imagine how many there were across the country? The government was shocked. It was then. they hardened the punishments“, dice.
Kim Geum-hyok says he was just 16 in 2009 when he was captured by guards from a special unit created to track down and arrest anyone who shared illegal videos.
The TV channels that can be seen in North Korea are state controlled.
He had given DVDs of South Korean pop music that his father had smuggled from China to a friend.
They treated him like an adult and took him to a secret room for questioning, where the guards refused to let him sleep. He says they gave him punches and kicks repeatedly for four days.
“I was terrified,” he told the BBC from Sel, where he currently lives.
“I thought my world was coming to an end. They wanted to know how I got this video and how many people showed it to them. I couldn’t tell my dad brought these DVDs from China. What could I say? It was my dad. I didn’t say anything, I just said, “I don’t know, I don’t know. Please let me go. ”
Geum-hyok belongs to one of Pyongyang’s elite families, and his father eventually managed to bribe the guards to free him. Something to be nearly impossible under Kim’s new law.
Larger fields
Many of those arrested for similar crimes at the time were sent to labor camps. But this did not prove to be sufficiently dissuasive, so that the increased sentences.
“At first, the sentence was about a year in a labor camp. It has grown to over three years. Now, if you go to a labor camp, more than 50% of young people are there. because they watched foreign media. “, assures Choi.
“If someone watches two hours of illegal material, it will be three years in a labor camp. It’s a big problem.
Various sources have told us that the size of some prison camps in North Korea has extended over the past year and Choi thinks the new laws are going into effect.
“Watching a movie is a luxury. You have to eat first before you even think about watching a movie. When times are tough even for eating, sending just one family member to a labor camp can be devastating.”
Why do people keep doing it?
“We had to risk a lot to see these soap operas. But no one can overcome our curiosity. We want to know what was going on in the outside world“Geum-hyok told me.
For Guem-hyok, finally learning the truth about his country has 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 Westerners were lying. Wikipedia is lying, how can i believe that? But my heart and my brain were divided. ”
“So I watched a lot of documentaries about North Korea, read a lot of newspapers. And then I realized that they were probably true because what they were saying made sense.”
“After realizing that a transition was happening in my brain, it was too late, I couldn’t go back“.
Guem-hyok finally fled to Sel.
Mi-so is living her dreams as a fashion consultant. The first thing he did in his new country was to visit all the places he saw on “Stairway to Heaven”.
But stories like his are getting rarer and rarer.
Leaving the country has become almost impossible with the current order of “shoot to kill” at the strictly controlled border. And it’s hard not to expect Kim’s new law to have a more frightening effect.
Choi, who has had to leave his family in the north, believes that watching a series or two won’t destroy decades of ideological control. But he thinks the North Koreans suspect that state propaganda is not the truth.
“The North Koreans have the seed of a claim in their hearts, but they don’t know who it is for,” he said.
“This is a statement without direction. It hurts my heart that they can’t understand it even when I tell them. someone is waking them up, enlightening them. “
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