North Korean video shows 16-year-old boys being sentenced to hard labour

The country’s repressive government, led by dictator Kim Jong-un, filmed the unsettling scene in 2022 as it paraded two handcuffed 16-year-old boys before an audience of young students inside a stadium, the BBC reports.

The British broadcaster’s Korean arm has now managed to obtain the footage, which offers a rare glimpse of the regime’s repressive policies in action. North Korea bans the distribution of such evidence to the rest of the world, and only releases carefully stage-managed images of Kim, who took power upon the death of his father Kim Jong-il in 2011.

The BBC was given the video by South and North Development (SAND), an organisation that works with North Korean defectors.

The footage has reportedly been distributed inside North Korea as a message to the populace.

The teenagers were accused of watching South Korean television, known as K-dramas, which reach a large global audience but are banned in the North.

“The rotten puppet regime’s culture has spread even to teenagers,” a narrator in the video says over the footage, referring to the South Korean government.

“They are just 16 years old, but they ruined their own future.”

Meanwhile North Korean soldiers shown in the footage berate the boys for failing to “deeply reflect on their mistakes”.

Adding to the sense of public humiliation, the boys are named and their addresses are given.

The BBC reports the clip was disseminated by the North to discourage citizens from watching “decadent recordings”.

And that appears to be part of a broader crackdown on North Koreans who watch entertainment produced in the South.

While K-dramas have long been banned, the punishment for watching them used to be more lenient – relatively speaking – with children generally being sent to youth labour camps for a period under five years.

In 2020, the regime passed a law increasing the potential punishment. Watching South Korean television is now punishable by lengthy hard labour or even death.

The head of SAND, Choi Kyong-hui, explained why the regime was scared of South Korean culture spreading.

“Admiration for South Korean society can soon lead to weakening of the system,” she said.

“This goes against the monolithic ideology that makes North Koreans revere the Kim family.”

Speaking to BBC Korean, unnamed defectors from North Korea said the K-dramas show those who watch them in the North that the government’s propaganda is hollow.

“In North Korea, we learn that South Korea lives much worse than us,” said one defector.

“But when you watch the South Korean dramas, it’s a completely different world. It seems like the North Korean authorities are wary of that.”

Another explained that, for North Koreans, K-dramas “are a ‘drug’ that helps them forget their difficult reality”.

A reality that has been remorselessly shaped by the regime.

Surge of North Koreans defecting

Meanwhile, South Korea says there has been a recent surge in people defecting across the border, with 196 last year – more than triple the figure from the year before.

Tens of thousands of North Koreans have fled to South Korea since the peninsula was divided by war in the 1950s, with most going overland to neighbouring China first, then entering a third country such as Thailand before finally making it to the South.

The number of successful escapes dropped significantly from 2020 after the North sealed its borders – purportedly with shoot-on-sight orders along the land frontier with China – to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

In 2021 only 63 people made it to the South, a more than 90 per cent decrease from 2019, when 1,047 defectors arrived. Just 67 people arrived in 2022.

Women accounted for more than 80 per cent of people who escaped last year, and most defectors travelled via a third country, the South Korean government said.

There was also an upward trend in the defections of North Korean elites such as diplomats and students studying abroad, according to the ministry.

“We have confirmed last year’s defections by the elite class were the highest in recent years,” it said.

Around 10 people from North Korea’s elite class fled to the South last year, the most since 2017, according to the Yonhap news agency.

Defecting by sea directly to the South is extremely rare and seen as far more dangerous than land routes, with only a handful of people making it across the de facto maritime border, the Northern Limit line.

In 2023, 13 defectors fled to the South by sea, the Unification Ministry said, noting it was indicative of “worsening situations in North Korea”.

All escapees who crossed the maritime border cited food shortages as driving their decision to flee, it said.

North Korea uses harsh words such as “human scum” when describing its citizens who have escaped.

– with AFP