There is an update here and here’s another: the beatings executions will continue until morale improves.
Since December, approximately three million leaflets as well as instant rice, radios, toothpaste, toothbrushes, pens and erasers have been ballooned into the DPRK and they are drawing attention there. Chosun Ilbo reported the executions of two people in the DPRK.
Some 500 people in North Korea attended a public execution of a man and a woman caught reading South Korean propaganda, an activist claimed Sunday citing sources in the North. Choi Sung-yong, the head of Family Assembly Abducted to North Korea said security services rounded up some 500 people including 50 family members of South Korean prisoners of war and abduction victims and made them watch the execution.The victims were a 45-year-old woman accused of reading a South Korean propaganda leaflet and failing to notify authorities and a high-ranking regional military officer charged with pocketing the dollar bills that were sent along with the leaflets.
Choi said the families of the two were sent to a camp for political prisoners in South Pyongan Province.
“We have information from a source that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il was going to visit Sariwon in North Hwanghae Province soon, and it looks like authorities there held a public execution to warn the people there off any signs of dissent,” Choi said. “It seems North Korea is stepping up monitoring and crackdowns on people who read or listen to anti-communist propaganda to ensure the hereditary transfer of power” from Kim to his son Jong-un.
North Korean defectors said anyone who picks up an anti-communist leaflet must notify the authorities on pain of severe punishment. They said North Koreans are taught from a young age that eating South Korean-made cookies causes gut rot while picking up pens or lighters made in the South will make the hands decay.
It is interesting that a “high-ranking regional military officer” was one of the two executed, suggesting either that he miscalculated grossly or that strenuous efforts are perhaps being made to keep the military loyal to the Kim regime. Pocketing a few dollar bills probably would not, in whatever passes for normal circumstances in the DPRK, be considered a sufficiently serious offense to execute one of the military’s high-ranking own and to send his family packing off to a concentration camp. There have been at least a few other military executions, including “the platoon leader of the border garrison on charges of narcotics smuggling and human trafficking. . . . [and] a noncom officer of the border garrison was executed in January for having aided and abetted the defection of a family.” Their offenses would appear to have been more detrimental to the powers that be than the pocketing of a few dollar bills.
