North Korea has recently introduced a new law that seeks to stamp out any kind of foreign influence, including wearing jeans
North Korea has recently introduced a new law that seeks to stamp out any kind of foreign influence, including wearing jeans. Yoon Mi-so has said that she was 11 when she first saw a man being executed after being caught with a South Korean drama.
The man’s entire neighbourhood was ordered to watch his execution.
“If you didn’t, it would be classed as treason,” she told the BBC from her home in Seoul.
The North Korean military guards were making sure that everyone knew the penalty for smuggling any illicit videos from outside of the isolated nation was death.
“I have a strong memory of the man who was blindfolded, I can still see his tears flow down. That was traumatic for me. The blindfold was completely drenched in his tears.
“They put him on a stake and bound him, then shot him.”
This comes after Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said that he will not hesitate to move countries off of the green travel list, but he could see “nothing in the data” to mean that the 21st of June easing of coronavirus measures can’t go ahead.
And now its the country’s leader Kim Jong-Un has clamped down further, introducing a sweeping new law against what the regime has described as “reactionary thought”.
Anyone caught with any large amount of media from South Korea, the United States or Japan now potentially faces the death penalty. Those who are caught watching the banned material face a prison camp sentence of 15 years.
And the new law is not just about what people in the country watch.
Recently, Kim Jong-Un wrote a letter in state media calling for the country’s Youth League to crack down on “unsavoury, individualistic, anti-socialist behaviour” among the young generation. He wants to stop foreign speech, as well as hairstyles and clothes that he describes as being “dangerous poisons”.
The Daily NK, which an online publication in Seoul that has sources within North Korea, has reported that three North-Korean teenagers had been sent to a re-education camp for cutting their hair to resemble K-pop idols and hemming their trousers above their ankles. The BBC, However, have not been able to verify this account.
This comes after paramedics and ambulance crews in the UK are to be given body-worn cameras after thousands of attacks against staff were reported last year. Trials showed the devices reduced violence against paramedics, who also felt safer if they had something to record with.
Analysts have said that Kim Jong-Un is trying to stop outside information from reaching the North Korean people, as life in the country becomes increasingly difficult for its citizens.
Millions of people in the country are thought to be going hungry. Mr Kim wants to ensure that they are still being fed the state’s carefully crafted propaganda, rather than them gaining glimpses of life according to the glitzy K-dramas that are set south of the border in Seoul, in what is one of Asia’s richest cities.
The country has been more isolated from the outside world than ever before after it sealed its border last year in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Vital supplies and trade from the neighbouring country of China had almost ground to a complete halt.