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10 months ago
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KIM Jong-un’s hellish regime has been exposed as two teenage students were sent to the gulag for watching banned TV.
They now face 12 years of hard labour behind bars after being handcuffed and publicly embarrassed in a stadium full of students for watching K-drama.
BBC
BBC
APAny form of South Korean entertainment is strictly prohibited in the North on orders by the Supreme Leader.
Rare footage shared by BBC Korean shows uniformed officers restraining a pair of 16-year-old boys and scolding them for not “deeply reflecting on their mistakes”.
Despite the severe punishments being well known it doesn’t stop some people from taking a risk and listening to K-pop music or watching hugely popular K-dramas.
The boys were named by the officers who also revealed their addresses.
Previously, young people who were caught indulging in South Korean entertainment would be sent to youth labour camps instead of being directed straight to the feared gulag.
The punishment used to get those responsible less than five years but that all changed in 2020 when the city of Pyongyang made a chilling law.
They announced the ultimate punishment for watching or distributing South Korean entertainment was the death sentence.
In the past, Korean defectors have told horror stories of being forced to watch two young men being killed after they were accused of listening to South Korean music and sharing illegal films with friends.
Others have been brutally executed by firing squad as recent as 2022, according to witnesses speaking on Radio Free Asia.
This video of the boys being arrested was sent to the BBC by the South and North Development (Sand) – a research institute that works with defectors from the North.
Reports suggest the clip has been used across North Korea to educate younger citizens and scare them into not watching “decadent recordings”.
The video that’s been shared across the nation is known to feature a narrator repeating chilling state propaganda.
A voice says: “The rotten puppet regime’s culture has spread even to teenagers.
“They are just 16 years old, but they ruined their own future.”
Sand CEO Choi Kyong-hui said North Korea’s capital sees the spread of K-dramas and K-pop as dangerous to the state’s ideology.
She said: “Admiration for South Korean society can soon lead to a weakening of the system… This goes against the monolithic ideology that makes North Koreans revere the Kim family.”
South Korean entertainment was first introduced to the North in the early 2000s during the years of the South’s “sunshine policy” where they offered economic and humanitarian aid to their neighbours.
But in 2010 the agreement was axed after Pyongyang’s behaviour showed no “positive changes” to the aid given and the shared content was banned.
A North Korean defector told BBC Korean: “If you get caught watching an American drama, you can get away with a bribe, but if you watch a Korean drama, you get shot.
“For North Korean people, Korean dramas are a ‘drug’ that helps them forget their difficult reality.”
The leaked footage is widely regarded as being taken from back in 2022 which makes it even more unique that it managed to get leaked.
North Korea is notorious for having very strict rules over any form of pictures or videos leaving the country without extremely in depth checks from the government.
They have spent decades hiding evidence of what life is really like in the country and shielding its people from anything in the rest of the world seeping through to the residents.
A North Korean defector previously said: “In North Korea, we learn that South Korea lives much worse than us, but when you watch South Korean dramas, it’s a completely different world.
“It seems like the North Korean authorities are wary of that.”
BBC
North Korean gulags are notoriously tough to live in
English (US)