According to a human rights report released on Wednesday, North Korea has publicly executed at least seven people in the last decade for watching or spreading K-pop videos from South Korea. It cracks down on what its leader, Kim Jong-un, considers a “vicious cancer.”
Since 2015, the Seoul-based Transitional Justice Working Group has interviewed 683 North Korean defectors to assist in map locations in the North where Kim Jon killed people and buried them in state-sanctioned public executions. According to the group’s most recent assessment, Kim’s administration has carried out 23 such executions.
Death penalty
Kim has assailed South Korean entertainment — songs, movies, and TV dramas — since assuming power a decade ago. Thus, claiming that it corrupts North Korean brains. Those who disseminate South Korean entertainment could face the death penalty under a law passed last December. Kim’s crackdown has included public executions of anyone found guilty of watching or spreading forbidden content.
In the isolated totalitarian regime, determining the exact scale of public executions remains impossible. However, the Transitional Justice Working Group concentrated on executions that have occurred after Mr. Kim’s ascension, particularly those in Hyesan, a North Korean city and important commerce hub on the Chinese border.
Thousands of North Korean defectors have resided in or passed through Hyesan on their way to South Korea. The 200,000-person city serves as the main entry point for outside information. Hence, including South Korean entertainment smuggled across the border from China on computer memory sticks. As a result, Hyesan has been a focal point in Kim’s efforts to combat K-pop infiltration.
According to the report, all but one of the seven executions for watching or disseminating South Korean movies occurred in Hyesan. Between 2012 and 2014, there were six in Hyesan. Citizens were mobilized to observe the gruesome sights, in which officials referred to the condemned social evils before they were each executed with nine shots fired by three troops.
“The families of those being executed were often forced to watch the execution,” the report said.
Only government broadcasts
Kim Jong rules North Korea. A personality cult and a state propaganda system aides him. It dominates practically every aspect of life in the country. All radios and televisions programs are to only receive government broadcasts. People are unable to access the internet on a worldwide scale. However, some North Koreans can sneakily watch South Korean films and dramas. Defections to the South have continued as the North’s economy has struggled due to the pandemic and international sanctions.
However, the number of defectors coming to South Korea has decreased dramatically in recent years. Therefore, acquiring new intelligence on the North has grown more difficult. In the face of the pandemic, Mr. Kim’s government has tightened border controls even more.
North Korea Punishments for K-pop
However, a villager and an army officer were publicly murdered this year in places further upstream. It was for spreading or having South Korean entertainment, according to Daily NK. It is a Seoul-based website that gathers news from clandestine sources in the North.
Smuggled out of North Korea are a few secretly filmed video clippings of public trials and executions. Last year, they took a North Korean student before a large crowd of people, including fellow students. He got punishment for possessing a USB drive. It contained “a movie and 75 songs from South Korea,” according to footage broadcast on the South Korean TV station Channel A.
Shin Eun-ha told Channel A of a public execution she and her classmates forcefully watched from the front row when she was in second grade in North Korea. “The prisoner could hardly walk and had to be dragged out,” she said. Also, adding, “I was so terrified that I could not dare look at a soldier in uniform for six months afterward.”
Mr. Kim has made an effort to look more open to outside influences. Thus, allowing state television to broadcast the “Rocky” theme song and to show Mickey and Minnie Mouse characters onstage. When he was engaging in summit diplomacy with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in 2018, he even invited South Korean K-pop stars to Pyongyang. But, at home, he has tightened his grip on K-pop, particularly since his discussions with President Donald J. Trump fell apart in 2019 and the North’s economy has deteriorated in recent years.
North Korea will crumble like a damp wall due to K-pop
North Korea’s administration appears to have taken precautions to keep information about its public executions safe from the outside world, despite increased international scrutiny of the country’s human rights violations.
According to the Transitional Justice Working Group, it no longer appears to kill inmates in marketplaces instead of transferring the sites farther away from the Chinese border or town centers and scrutinizing onlookers more rigorously to prevent them from photographing the executions.
Mr. Kim has also attempted to project a public image as a humanitarian leader by pardoning those sentenced to death on occasion; especially when a huge crowd gathers for a public trial, according to the group.
Mr. Kim, on the other hand, appears to have an opponent that he can’t ignore: K-pop.
North Korea has often retaliated against what it sees as a South Korean invasion of “anti-socialist and nonsocialist” influences. It prohibits the spread of South Korean slang among the country’s youth, such as “Oppa”. It gained international fame as a result of Psy’s “Gangnam Style” song and video.
North Korean state media also warned that if the impact of K-pop is not under control, it will cause the country to “crumble like a damp wall.”