{"id":23734,"date":"2013-06-21T20:44:52","date_gmt":"2013-06-21T11:44:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/en.dailynk.com\/en\/?p=23734"},"modified":"2020-01-17T08:46:04","modified_gmt":"2020-01-16T23:46:04","slug":"laos-9-thrust-into-propaganda-fray","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dailynk.com\/english\/laos-9-thrust-into-propaganda-fray\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;Laos 9&#8217; Thrust into Propaganda Fray"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[imText1]<br \/>\n23 days after their sudden repatriation from Laos through China, nine teenagers have been thrown into the public eye in North Korea. Chosun Central News Agency revealed news of them on June 20th, covering a press conference held in Pyongyang during which the nine alleged that they were kept in China and taken to Laos against their will.<\/p>\n<p>The piece alleges that the nine had been living at the home of a South Korean minister in China for between five months and three years before they were taken by car across the Chinese border into Laos. However, the Laotian government, realizing that the nine were being kidnapped and taken to South Korea, helped them to return to Pyongyang.<\/p>\n<p>The home of the minister, Jang Ha Jin, and his wife was in Dandong, just across the Sino-North Korean border from Sinuiju, the piece notes.<\/p>\n<p>It also alleges abuses committed against the nine, saying that their freedom in China was circumscribed and they were beaten with an umbrella or baseball bat if they failed to memorize religious texts properly. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey wrote \u2019General Kim Jong Il is eternal\u2019 and \u2018Long live the Chosun Workers\u2019 Party\u2019 in their notebooks, and when the couple saw the writing, they called them \u2018commies\u2019 and \u2018communist spies,\u2019 took off their shoes and beat them mercilessly,&#8221; it adds.<\/p>\n<p>The nine are alleged to have explained that although they had left the motherland, they couldn\u2019t forget the love of the North Korean leader, and were unable to erase the image of his portrait from their hearts. <\/p>\n<p>Ever since the nine were repatriated at the end of last month, it had been expected that they would be instrumentalized for use in state propaganda in some way. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[imText1] 23 days after their sudden repatriation from Laos through China, nine teenagers have been thrown into the public eye in North Korea. Chosun Central News Agency revealed news of them on June 20th, covering a press conference held in Pyongyang during which the nine alleged that they were kept in China and taken to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":151,"featured_media":23736,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wikipediapreview_detectlinks":true,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v27.7 (Yoast SEO v27.9) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>&#039;Laos 9&#039; Thrust into Propaganda Fray - North Korea News \u2014 Daily NK | Latest DPRK Updates 2026<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.dailynk.com\/english\/laos-9-thrust-into-propaganda-fray\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"&#039;Laos 9&#039; Thrust into Propaganda Fray\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"[imText1] 23 days after their sudden repatriation from Laos through China, nine teenagers have been thrown into the public eye in North Korea. 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