North Hamgyong Province’s branch of the Ministry of State Security recently called in local city and country security officials and urged them to crack down ideologically on people to prevent defections, Daily NK has learned.
Speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons, a source in the province told Daily NK on Friday that the security bureau “called officials from local city and county security departments to the bureau’s meeting room in mid-November and pressed them to intensify ideological indoctrination activities to prevent defections attempts in the winter, when it’s easier for people to defect.”
According to the source, the provincial branch of the Ministry of State Security ordered the local officials to visit neighborhood watch units and lecture people about the “poor treatment fugitives [defectors] receive in South Korea, as well as about the horrible end that awaits people who illegally cross the border into China.”
In particular, the ministry’s provincial branch told the officials to emphasize in their lectures how North Koreans who sneak into China must constantly hide from the moment they enter the country, endlessly hunted by the Chinese police until they are ultimately caught and escorted back to prisons in the North, and that “only disgrace awaits those who abandon their country and leave.”
The agency also told the officials to specifically identify the names, sexes, and North Korean residences of defectors living in South Korea, and to deeply impress on people the lives of woe those defectors now live.
In short, the order called on officials to discourage defections by presenting examples of the difficulties defectors face, telling audiences that while defectors flee to South Korea thinking they will make money and live well, money does not simply fall from trees.
The provincial security bureau also called on officials to propagate lines such as, “South Korea’s intelligence service and state agencies trick fugitives to the South with a few pennies and then discards them like a pair of old shoes,” “If you go to South Korea, factories and state agencies won’t accept you because you talk funny,” and, “Ethnic Koreans from China are treated better, while North Korean fugitives in the South receive subhuman treatment and contempt as traitors who betrayed their hometowns and nation.”
The security bureau also urged officials to tell people that those for the river to freeze so they can abandon their country, unable to overcome their current difficulties at home, will certainly be found out and punished, the source said.
“The provincial security bureau ordered local city and county security department officials to make lecture materials geared to recent trends and circumstances based on what was said at the meeting and use those materials in their lectures before neighborhood watch units, and to strike hard on people planning to illegally cross the border using illegal foreign-made mobile phones.”
Translated by David Black. Edited by Robert Lauler.
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