SEOUL – North Korea has publicly executed at least seven people in the past decade for watching or distributing K-pop videos from South Korea, while cracking down on what its leader, Kim Jong-un, calls a “vicious cancer” a human rights report released on Wednesday.
The group, Transitional Justice Working Group, based in Seoul, interviewed 683 North Korean defectors since 2015 to map places in the north where people were killed and buried during state-sanctioned public executions. In its latest report, the group said it had documented 23 such executions under Mr Kim’s government.
Since taking power ten years ago, Mr. Kim attacked South Korean entertainment — songs, movies and TV dramas — which he says corrupts the minds of North Koreans. Under a law passed last December, those who distribute South Korean entertainment could face the death penalty. One tactic of Mr. Kim’s approach was to create an atmosphere of terror by publicly executing people found guilty of viewing or distributing the banned content.
It remains impossible to determine the true extent of public executions in the isolated totalitarian state. But the Transitional Justice Working Group focused on the executions that have taken place since Mr Kim took off and on the executions that have taken place in Hyesan, a North Korean city and a major trade center on the border with China.
Thousands of North Korean defectors to South Korea have lived or moved in Hyesan. The city of 200,000 is the main gateway to outside information, including South Korean entertainment stored on computer memory sticks and smuggled across the border from China. As such, Hyesan has become a focus of Mr. Kim to stop K-pop infiltration.
Of the seven executions for viewing or distributing South Korean videos, all but one took place in Hyesan, the report says. The six in Hyesan took place between 2012 and 2014. Citizens were mobilized to watch the horrific scenes, where officials called the condemned social evil before each being put to death by a total of nine shots fired by three soldiers.
“The families of those who were executed were often forced to watch the execution,” the report said.
mr. Kim rules North Korea using a cult of personality and a state propaganda machine that controls almost every aspect of life in the North. All radios and televisions are set up to receive government broadcasts only. People are blocked from using the global internet. But some North Koreans still manage to secretly watch South Korean movies and TV dramas. While the economy of the north has stalled amid the pandemic and international sanctions, the spillovers have continued to the south.
However, the number of defectors arriving in South Korea has fallen sharply in recent years, making it more difficult to gather new information about the north. Mr Kim’s government has also further tightened border restrictions during the pandemic.
But Daily NK, a Seoul-based website that collects news from clandestine sources in the north, reported that a villager and an army officer were publicly executed this year in cities deeper inland for distributing or possessing South Korean entertainment.
And a few secretly filmed video clips of public trials and executions have been smuggled out of North Korea. In footage shown on South Korean TV station Channel A last year, a North Korean student was led in front of a huge crowd, including fellow students, and was convicted of possessing a USB flash drive containing “a movie and 75 songs from South Korea.”
Shin Eun-ha told Channel A about a public execution she and her classmates had to watch from the front row when she was in second grade in North Korea. “The prisoner could barely walk and had to be dragged outside,” she said, adding, “I was so terrified that six months later I didn’t dare look at a soldier in uniform.”
Mr. Kim has at times tried to be more flexible with the outside culture, letting state television play the theme song from “Rocky” and showing the characters of Mickey and Minnie Mouse onstage. He even invited South Korean K-pop stars to the capital Pyongyang in 2018, when he was involved in top diplomacy with South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in. But at home, he has also escalated his crackdown on K-pop, especially after his talks with President Donald J. Trump collapsed in 2019 and the North’s economy has deteriorated in recent years.
Amid growing international scrutiny of human rights violations in North Korea, the government appears to have taken steps to prevent information about the public executions from being leaked to the outside world.
It no longer appears to be executing prisoners in marketplaces, moving the sites further from the border with China or city centers, and inspecting onlookers more closely to avoid filming the executions, Transitional Justice Working Group said.
Kim has also tried to build a public image as a benevolent leader by occasionally pardoning people on death row, especially when the size of a crowd gathered during a public trial is large, the group said.
But K-pop seems like an enemy that Mr. Kim can’t ignore.
North Korea has repeatedly lashed out at what it describes as an invasion of “anti-socialist and non-socialist” influences from the South. It tackles South Korean slang that spreads among its youth, including “oppa,” who became internationally known for the song and video of Psy’s “Gangnam Style.”
The North’s state media has also warned that if left unchecked, K-pop’s influence would cause North Korea to “crumble like a damp wall.”