15 teenagers in Yanggang Province were
recently put on public trial for watching American films and branded “traitors
tainted by non-socialist ideology,” Daily NK has learned from sources who were
forced to attend the proceedings, which are conducted by the State Security
Department to instill fear in the population and send a ghastly warning to
others secretly engaging in activities prohibited by North Korea’s drastic penal code.
On the 21st, a Daily NK reporter spoke
with a source in Yanggang Province, who told us that on Saturday, January 16th,
a public trial was held in Hyesan City in front of the Hyesan Cinema. There, 16 and 17
year-old-students were placed on trial for watching American films before being
handed over to the provincial Ministry of People’s Security [MPS, who act as
North Korea’s police force] unit, for the preliminary hearing.
Two additional sources in the same province
corroborated this news.
“These were just kids who were giving into
their natural curiosity and made a careless decision to watch and pass around
these films, which were interesting simply because they were [the more
familiar, South] Korean ones. But then this happens,” our source lamented.
She said that the children were all in
their second and third years of senior middle school [in effect, high school] and watched and shared the films with others before getting caught by a
neighborhood informant [reporting to the State Security Department], sparking
off the entire incident. Local residents forced to gather and attend the public
trial furtively shot the students pitying looks, despite the atmosphere of the
trial, which was “more frigid than winter.”
Fresh cases labeling
the viewing of South Korean films treasonous and the subsequently grim punishments that were meted out has driven down the number of North Koreans
viewing South Korean films more recently. The source speculated that the
students might have watched the American movies thinking that the state’s tunnel
vision on quashing South Korean cultural content would shelter them from severe
repercussions.
She added that state fear tactics do little
if anything to stamp out the inherent desire people have to absorb anything and
everything from the outside world. In fact, they often pique the interest of
the populace all the more. Nothing can change the fact that most North Koreans
overwhelmingly find homegrown films stiff and monotonous and prefer the diverse content preferring to watch foreign films. At the trial, no mention was made of the origin of
the disk that held the American film in question, but “everyone knew that it
came [smuggled] in from China,” the source pointed out.
However, people do admit that punishing
sensitive children harshly as a warning to others is by turns terrifying and infuriating. Criticism of the “hypocrisy of the regime”
arose behind closed doors among many who were made to watch the show trial. “It
should be the Party cadres who watch them regularly [on trial],” a number of
spectators pointed out afterwards.
“Show me anyone of those accusers who
hasn’t watched a foreign film at least once,” parents of some of the students
told Daily NK’s source in private.
North Korean defector Hyun Mi Yon (43),
who was sent to a re-education camp [kyohwaso] in 2014 for the crime of watching a
South Korean drama while in the North, said, “When I was being interrogated by
the MPS for watching a South Korean drama, I witnessed all of the personnel, right up to the chief, watching these dramas themselves. The
interrogators would say to residents caught watching the [South Korean] dramas,
‘Wow, you’ve seen all the latest South Korean stuff!’”
According to testimony by both defectors and those still residing in North Korea, after Kim Jong Un took over the country, surveillance units
comprising personnel from various law enforcement bodies doubled down on
punishments and crackdowns for those caught watching media from beyond the
country’s borders, with a particular focus on rooting out South Korean
programming content.
Such draconian measures derive from the
regime’s perennial attempts to hinder the flow of outside information, which
the leadership well knows to be a powerful force in diminishing people’s
loyalty to and belief in the political and social structure of the country.
