NORTH KOREA COURT SENDS TEENAGERS FOR HARD LABOUR
Their ‘crime’? Secretly watching South Korean television
CHILLING footage smuggled out of North Korea shows the moment two teenagers are sentenced to hard labour for watching South Korean TV.
Apparently filmed in 2022, the video shows the two 16-year-old boys being handcuffed by uniformed officers in front of hundreds of students at an unidentified outdoor stadium.
They were arrested for not ‘deeply reflecting on their mistakes’ after they were caught watching a channel banned in the North.
The boys, who are wearing grey uniforms, are seen standing before a panel of officials before being sentenced to 12 years of forced work. A sea of young students in matching uniforms watch them being handcuffed and taken away.
Footage from inside North Korea is rare, with Kim Jong Un’s regime banning the release of any video and photos of life in the isolationist country.
The clip – obtained by the BBC from the Sand institute, which works with North Korean defectors – was reportedly shown to North Koreans as a warning of what would happen if they watched ‘decadent recordings’.
In the ‘educational’ video, a narrator can be heard parroting state propaganda. Referring to South Korea, the official says: ‘The rotten puppet regime’s culture has spread even to teenagers. They are just 16 but they ruined their own future.’
Choi Kyong-hui of the Sand institute said Pyongyang sees the spread of Korean dramas and K-pop music as a danger to its ideology.
‘Admiration for South Korean society can soon lead to a weakening of the system,’ she said. ‘This goes against the monolithic ideology that makes North Koreans revere the Kim family.’
North Korean youngsters caught watching foreign movies face being sent to a disciplinary labour centre. A second offence would mean being sent to a correctional camp for five years – along with their parents.
A sweeping ‘anti-reactionary thought’ law introduced in 2022 made distributing South Korean entertainment punishable by death.
And that year two teenagers were executed by firing squad for watching and selling films from across the border. Thought to be aged 16 or 17, they were shot on an airfield in front of terrified residents of the city of Hyesan on the border with China. A third boy of the same age was executed alongside them for murdering his stepmother.
Kim views South Korea as an American puppet state and is sensitive to any of its media reaching his people.
But despite strict controls, such items are often smuggled in on USB drives or SD cards.
These are typically brought over the border from China and then bartered.
A defector told the BBC: ‘For North Korean people, Korean dramas are a “drug” that helps them forget their difficult reality.’
‘They ruined their own future’