North Korea: Rare footage shows teens sentenced to hard labour over K-drama
www.bbc.com
Footage obtained by BBC Korean shows two 16-year-old boys handcuffed and sentenced to hard labour.

In 2020, however, Pyongyang enacted a law to make watching or distributing South Korean entertainment punishable by death.

A defector previously told the BBC that he was forced to watch a 22-year-old man shot to death. He said the man was accused of listening to South Korean music and had shared films from the South with his friend.

    • tardigrada@beehaw.org
      0·
      10 months ago

      I guess whoever made this footage and made it available to Western media may have risk their lives. Everything else than govrrnment propaganda is strictly prohibited in countries like North Korea.

      Just one recent information:

      North Korea Events of 2023 - Freedom of Expression and Information

      In March and April [2023], authorities reportedly conducted public trials in Ryanggang province under the law. One trial targeted 17 young people for watching unsanctioned videos and using South Korean language. One leader of the group was sentenced to 10 years of forced labor. In another trial, 20 youth athletes were sentenced to three to five years of forced labor for using South Korean vocabulary.

    • jarfil@beehaw.org
      0·
      10 months ago

      The clip has reportedly been distributed in North Korea for ideology education and to warn citizens not to watch “decadent recordings”.

      The video includes a narrator who is repeating state propaganda. “The rotten puppet regime’s culture has spread even to teenagers,” says the voice, in an apparent reference to South Korea. “They are just 16 years old, but they ruined their own future,” it adds.

      The boys were also named by officers and had their addresses revealed.

      Just a guess, but in Western rotten puppet regime clutures it might be illegal to doxx even some NK teenagers who have ruined their own future by watching decadent recordings…

    • 0x815@feddit.deOP
      0·
      10 months ago

      North Korea’s human rights: What’s not being talked about (2019)

      The state controls everything, and actively spies on its citizens using a vast surveillance and informer network.

      North Koreans get all their news, entertainment and information from state media, which unfailingly praises the leadership. According to RSF, citizens can be sent to prison for viewing, reading or listening to content provided by international media outlets.

      Internet access is available for the elite few in the capital, Pyongyang, who lead relatively comfortable lives. Others may have restricted access. The country has its own very basic intranet - a closed network which certain people are allowed to use.

      “North Korea has been said to be the world’s biggest open prison camp,” said Brad Adams [Asia director of Human Rights Watch]. “I don’t think that’s unfair.”

      Foreign nationals in North Korea have been arrested and detained for extended periods of time - often kept as prisoners for political reasons and used as diplomatic pawns at opportune moments.

      A significant majority of North Koreans undertake unpaid labour at some point in their lives, according to a HRW report. Former students who defected from North Korea told HRW that their schools forced them to work for free on farms twice a year - at ploughing and harvest time - for one month at a time.

      Discrimination against women very much exists, but “there isn’t a way to measure inequality in the North like how you measure the wage gap between males and females”, says Arnold Fang [a researcher from Amnesty International]

      Reports are also rampant of women facing torture, rape and other sexual abuses while held in detention facilities - and of widespread sexual abuse in the military.

    • Radicalized@lemmy.one
      0·
      10 months ago

      Yeah I don’t want to deny the horrific living situation of NK’s citizens, but after some of the outrageous propaganda we’re fed in the west, mostly by SK media groups, I am reluctant to believe anything about that country that is presented in this way.

        • Radicalized@lemmy.one
          0·
          10 months ago

          I don’t really know, tbh. But I do know a lot of the stuff the corporate media in the west reports on about NK are verifiably flat out lies. Stuff like “every male citizen is forced to get the same haircut as KJU”. That was a story invented whole cloth by a broadsheet rag in SK, then picked up by western media sources and reported to us as fact.

          There is a financial element to this: saying outrageous things about NK leads to tidy profits. Even NK defectors have been caught lying about the place. What’s her face was touring Americas right wing talk shows recently, saying things that either just aren’t true or wildly exaggerated. She’s made a good career of it.

          So don’t trust immediately. Verify. Every media source has a bias and recognize that whenever you view one.

          • tardigrada@beehaw.org
            0·
            10 months ago

            It just puzzles me that you don’t know which media you trust. How do you verify then? What do you read?

    • MiddledAgedGuy@beehaw.org
      0·
      10 months ago

      This seems to be an unedited version of that video with sound. I don’t speak Korean so I can’t validate it against the article, but the bbc has a reputation for being credible so I’m inclined to believe it. https://youtu.be/GcUe4O_53_0

      As for the organization, the only mentions I’ve found are almost all about this, with one mention of it being a think tank in South Korea, which is weirdly little information.