N Korea youths held in detention camps for watching foreign films

NORTH KOREA is reportedly detaining young people in re-education camps for secretly watching South Korean films.

The crackdown on clandestine viewing of foreign media comes as the regime fears that its “ideological purity” will be eroded, reported the Daily NK.

A source in North Pyongan Province told the South Korea-based news website that the North’s youth were increasingly using illegal memory cards for entertainment and to satisfy their curiosity about the outside world.

“But those caught are being sent to youth labour-reform centres and kept there for about a year for re-education,” said the source. The strategy appears to be part of a wider effort to shape youth opinion in favour of Kim Jong-un’s authoritarian regime.

In his New Year’s Day address, the dictator underlined that a “vigorous struggle should be waged to tighten moral discipline throughout society.”

Despite the recent rapprochement between Pyongyang and Seoul in the wake of the recent Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korean media remains strictly prohibited in the North. However, recent defections suggest that it has already gained popularity in the closed state.

A 24-year-old soldier who made a daring dash for freedom across the heavily militarised border last year later revealed that he was a big fan of K-pop band Girls Generation.

The US-based Human Rights Foundation is helping North Korean defectors flood their former homeland with flashdrives of news bulletins and documentaries to counter state propaganda.

Alex Gladstein, the group’s strategy officer, told The Sunday Telegraph that up to 10,000 flashdrives were successfully smuggled across the border last year. Waging this information war was “the only way to inspire change,” he argued. “So it’s really like a third way, and this is to liberate minds.”