Although North Korea is outwardly promoting an image of relative “opening” through its participation in the Olympics and recent invitation to South Korean K-pop artists to perform in Pyongyang, sources in other areas of the country are reporting that within North Korea, the authorities are intensifying their crackdown on the spread of outside information.
“Residents of Chongjin had to attend a lecture on March 2 entitled, ‘Severe punishment for anti-state criminals and how to properly report them,'” a source in North Hamgyong Province told Daily NK on March 21. “The lecture stressed the need to eliminate situations where people make contact with the outside world, such as illegally crossing the border, making international phone calls, or receiving remittances from abroad.”
“These lectures were delivered at factories, collective farms, People’s Unit (inminban) meetings, and elsewhere across the country, and focused not only on existing communication occurring in the border region, but also on preventing these established avenues from spreading further into other parts of the country,” he added.
It appears that the North Korean authorities are attempting to shut down common routes of information dissemination such as phone conversations between residents and defector family members, which sometimes occur when remittances are being arranged.
One major reason for the North’s increased sensitivity despite its outward charm offensive is that the spread of information pertaining to its planned meetings with the US and South Korean leaders and overtures towards denuclearization damage the regime’s ability to promote a separate message to its domestic audience. In other words, a breakdown in the information firewall threatens their historically effective two-front information strategy providing different messages to the regime’s domestic and international audiences.
In addition to the information crackdown, the authorities appear to be targeting the remittances market, where defectors living in South Korea or other countries arrange for the delivery of money through brokers to family members still residing in North Korea.
Along with punishing brokers and confiscating their money, a source in Ryanggang Province described a new policy outlined during the lecture officially labeling as “traitors” those defector families who are the intended recipients of remittances.
According to North Korea’s Criminal Law, revised in 2015, the crime of “illegal international contact” (Article 222) comes with a sentence of up to one year of “disciplinary labor” or up to five years of “reform labor.”
But under the new provisions laid out during the lecture, people labeled as “traitors” could receive even more severe punishment, as some charged with “treason” have been sent to political prison camps.
The Ryanggang Province-based source said that the lecture was additionally significant due to the fact that it was the Ministry of State Security – not the Propaganda and Agitation Department – that has provided the lecture content this time. He also pointed out that the authorities “are not allowing a single person avoid attending this lecture, as they have organized more lectures and forced everyone to attend a follow-up session if they couldn’t attend initially.”
The authorities may be hoping that the lectures will scare the population into rejecting outside information and allow the regime to recalibrate its domestic message, but it remains to be seen how thoroughly they will follow through with the crackdown.
