Kim Jong-un’s North Korea continues to be
a cruel oddity, as countries go.
Although some progress has been made towards
turning the People’s Republic into something
its people can actually live in, by all accounts
it’s still a pretty ruthless place for the
average citizen.
Here’s a look at some brutal realities of
life in the most secretive country in the
world.
10.
Labor camps
Every self-respecting ruthless dictator has
a labor camp or a hundred in his back pocket,
but North Korea’s version of the theme is
particularly brutal.
Kang Cheol-hwan is a former labor camp prisoner
who spent 10 grueling years at the Yodok concentration
camp, which was a hidden in a mountainous
region and hosted “enemies of the state.”
Kang himself had done nothing wrong: He ended
up in the camp as a child, with his high-ranking
parents who had criticized the Kims for going
against communist ideals and turning the North
Korean leadership into a dynasty.
There, the young Kang was confined to a life
of back-breaking labor, which included tasks
like hauling heavy wood for several miles.
Still, no matter how brutal the work was,
disobeying was not an option.
Those who refused to obey orders were taken
to a special prison within the camp, where
they were confined to tiny cells with cold,
muddy water covering the floor.
Most didn’t survive this, and the ones who
did were damaged beyond repair: The water
had literally rotted their flesh.
Somehow, this wasn’t even the most humiliating
way to die at the camp: Sometimes, the guards
hanged prisoners, and the other prisoners
were forced to watch and throw stones at the
hanged man.
The guards would keep the corpse up for a
week, and the elements, carrion birds and
the effect of the stoning would render it
unrecognizable.
Ultimately, Kang was one of the lucky ones:
He and his parents were eventually released
from the camp.
Unsurprisingly, Kang escaped the country the
first chance he got, and became a director
of the NGO North Korea Strategy Centre, a
defector-led human rights organization.
9.
Famines
It probably comes as no surprise that a country
led as … erratically as North Korea has
the occasional problem with food production.
What you might not know is just how bad their
situation is.
The country is the territorial equivalent
of a guy who’s just one bounced paycheck
away from not making rent: Almost every single
mishap runs the risk of sending them plunging
into a food shortage.
The problem is that they tend to attract plenty
of mishaps: As recently as in 2017, they were
teetering on the edge of a massive famine
caused by a combination of international sanctions,
massive drought, and the government’s stubborn
tendency to pour way too much of the country’s
extremely limited resources into various military
programs.
Perhaps the most legendary famine in North
Korea’s history was the Arduous March of
the mid-1990s.
The seeds of the Arduous March were sowed
way back in 1948, when the country was created
and it became apparent that its soil was less
than ideal for food production.
Kim Il Sung was able to sidestep the issue
by allying himself closely with the Soviet
Union, who were happy to throw some food and
fuel his way to support the cause.
However, when the Soviet Union began to falter,
the aid stopped coming and North Korea was
left to its own devices.
Kim had already started pushing an isolationist
policy, so he decreed that North Koreans should
be able to feed themselves.
This worked roughly as well as expected, which
is to say not at all.
Without a steady Soviet supply of fuel and
food, the country lost its backup food supplies
and the ability to produce chemical fertilizers
for their own farms.
When El Niño flooded a good chunk of North
Korea’s already scant farmland in 1995 and
1996, all ingredient for a recipe for disaster
were in place.
The entire country hit panic mode: Farmers
hid parts of their crops for themselves, international
food relief was stolen and hoarded by elite
officials as soon as the shipments arrived.
Soon, the government stopped distributing
food altogether, and hundreds of thousands
of desperate North Koreans were flooding out
of the country, regardless of the travel ban
and its repercussions.
No one knows the true death toll of the famine,
because the North Korean leaders appear to
pretend that it never happened.
However, estimates indicate that it may have
killed millions of people.
8.
The “three generations rule”
The “three generations rule” is possibly
the most ruthless policy in the already pretty
awful North Korean prison system.
Its basic gist is this: If a citizen commits
a crime, they’re sent to a labor camp, and
the sentence also applies to a full three
generations of their family.
This means that children can be born in the
prison camp and they’re already sentenced
because of something their parents or grandparents
may or may not have done.
This punishment is mostly directed at people
who are disloyal to the government, and it
can be seriously hazardous to the mentality
of the people who are forced to suffer for
a crime that was committed decades before
they were even born.
One defector describes that he could not conceive
what the world was like, and could not even
have thought of escaping because the prison
camp was all he knew … and he thought that
the whole world outside the camp’s borders
was just more of the same.
7.
Forced mass choreographies
North Korea has a strange tradition.
Well, it has a lot of strange traditions,
but one of the most famous ones is the Mass
Games — a strange event that consists of
parades, gymnastic performances and impressive
mass choreographies performed by scores of
people.
According to North Korea researcher Andray
Abrahamian, the games are “the official
national narrative bundled into a 90-minute
spectacle,” and as such, they’re highly
valued by the leadership.
But how does a broke, isolationist country
like North Korea have so many experts on choreography
at its disposal?
By force, of course.
In the past, up to 100,000 people have been
mobilized to take part in the event.
For the 2018 Mass Games, thousands and thousands
of schoolchildren practiced from early morning
to late at night, causing human rights groups
to criticize the event as straight up child
labor.
There are reports of children training for
months in all weathers, and being fed urinary
infection medication to cope with the long
hours of sitting in the cold.
Still, it’s said that the households that
participate in the Games often receive certain
benefits such as color televisions (yes, they’re
still a rarity in North Korea), so people
actually compete to participate in the event.
6.
Media restrictions
A large part of North Korea’s mysterious
reputation is due to the fact that they don’t
really treat freedom of press as a thing that
exists.
For a North Korean citizen, it’s borderline
impossible to get any real information on
what’s going on in the country.
Every single domestic media outlet is controlled
by the state, and government supervision and
censorship run rampant.
Foreign medias that have established offices
in the hermit nation are only marginally better
off.
Their access is tightly restricted, and news
teams have been known to be thrown out of
the country whenever their work doesn’t
please the powers that be.
In fact, leaving the country might be the
best case scenario for a journalist who has
fallen out of favor with Pyongyang: In August
2017, two South Korean journalists and their
publishers were sentenced to death, just because
they had dared to review a book that happened
to discuss socio-economic changes the country
has gone through in recent years.
Fortunately, the journalists were nowhere
near North Korea at the time.
5.
Executions
Since North Korea doesn’t think twice of
throwing its citizens in a concentration camp
until they (sometimes literally) rot away,
it probably comes as no surprise that they
occasionally execute people.
We already mentioned the brutal hanging/stoning
deaths and deadly water-cells in the labor
camps, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg
when it comes to the country’s capacity
of deadly inventiveness.
During Kim Jong-un’s reign, the favorite
style of public execution seems to be the
anti-aircraft gun.
This gruesome method has been applied to people
who Kim perceives as a threat to his rule,
officials who have fallen out of favor, and
even humble musicians.
One high-ranking defense chief was anti-aircrafted
merely because he happened to doze off in
Kim’s presence.
The gruesomeness and gore of applying a gun
that’s meant to bring down planes to a human
body is obviously quite brutal.
Of course, North Korea manages to make the
process even grislier than you’d expect.
They aren’t always content with firing their
monster guns at people in the traditional
“firing squad” way.
Instead, they tie the person to the end of
the barrel, yell: “Fire,” and watch as
the bits fly around … while the loved ones
of the victim are forced to watch.
4.
Restricted religious practices
Technically, you can practice any religion
that you like in North Korea.
However, the word “technically” is imperative
here — after all, you can also technically
be critical of the government, for which you
will technically be arrested and thrown into
a labor camp to technically toil away for
three generations.
North Korea’s official ideology is called
Juche, which is a combination of self-reliance
and Marxist ideals that oppose religion by
principle.
This means that although the country’s official
stance is “Sure, whatever,” its practical
approach actively discourages all worship
that isn’t directed towards whichever Kim
happens to be in charge that particular decade.
This is not to say that the country is completely
without its beliefs.
Some citizens practice their own religious
rituals behind closed doors, risking serious
repercussions if the officials find out.
There’s also a widespread, informal shamanism-style
belief system with a heavy emphasis on ghosts
and spirits.
Because of this, fortune-tellers wield a considerable
unofficial power in North Korea: Even the
top officials of the country have been known
to treat the most famous soothsayers extremely
warmly, and invite them to their homes for
consultation.
3.
Developmental challenges
There are many ways life can hand you a raw
deal in North Korea, even if you’re just
a child.
Apart from the three generations rule, which
may define your home base as a concentration
camp just because your granddad disrespected
a bureaucrat once, and the Mass Games, which
will force you to train for months in grueling
conditions so that your family can watch the
Great Leader’s face in full color, there’s
always a chance that the horrible living conditions
of the country will cause you to become developmentally
challenged … just because of the horrendous
living conditions you’re born into.
Here’s the situation that a child born in
North Korea faces.
There’s a way-too-high chance that they
have to drink contaminated water.
If they get sick, it’s a spin of the wheel
whether the hospital they check into has the
drugs and medical equipment required to treat
them — tuberculosis and other diseases run
rampant, and some hospitals only have the
means to treat roughly 40 of every 140 patients.
And then there’s malnutrition — the country’s
great scourge.
Back in 2011, a ridiculous 28% of North Korean
children were considered developmentally stunted
simply because they didn’t have enough to
eat.
Fortunately, the recent years have seen some
improvement, and the current figure is about
… uh, 20%?
Yes, as you read this, one in five North Korean
children are still developmentally challenged
simply because the country’s leaders can’t
seem to figure out how food distribution works.
2.
Life in the military
At this point, it’s pretty obvious that
the civilians have it bad in North Korea.
But surely, the military is a lot better off?
After all, the country likes to boast its
military might — it stands to reason that
the soldiers would be well fed and equipped.
Yeah, no.
First of all, the military service in North
Korea is mandatory for both sexes, and longer
than a stretched dachshund.
Women are expected to serve seven years.
For men, it’s a full decade, and if you’re
fortunate/unfortunate enough to make it to
Kim’s personal bodyguard unit, you’re
looking at a lucky 13 years of military service.
If you’re pursuing higher education, you
might get off with three to five years, which
is … still a pretty hefty chunk of your
life, especially as you’re going hungry
for most of it.
Although the special forces are obviously
given special rations, the vast majority of
the military deals with constant hunger.
Sometimes they get two or three potatoes per
meal.
Other times, it’s raw kernels of corn, or
corn with some rice mixed in.
This is not an ideal diet for the physically
oriented life of a soldier, which isn’t
helped by the fact that many soldiers are
expected to both train and help out on the
fields.
They grow wiry and desperate, and many attempt
to steal food or desert.
Although the military does give the troops
the occasional leave when they need to recuperate,
many of the soldiers are so weak with malnutrition
that they can’t even walk at that point.
The lucky families get to pick their children
up every once in awhile and feed them back
to health.
The unlucky ones will find out that their
child starved to death while serving the country.
1.
Women in North Korea
If you think that men have it bad in North
Korea, women are in a much, much more unfortunate
position.
Many women are treated as little more than
property, and domestic violence and sexual
abuse run rampant.
Interviews with defectors indicate that a
lot of this is because of North Korea’s
paradoxical culture.
Its history as a Marxist communist state and
deep-lying roots in Confucian patriarchy has
created a strange hodgepodge of values that
on one hand promote that everyone, regardless
of their gender, is equal, and on the other
freely practices the kind of gender segregation
that leaves women in a very vulnerable position.
When the UN pointedly called out some of North
Korea’s human rights violations towards
women, the regime responded by brazenly claiming
that the country is “heaven” for women.
According to Harper’s Bazaar, their definition
of heaven leaves something to be desired,
as in reality, the life of a North Korean
woman is a lot closer to a living hell.
Those fit, powerful-looking women who march
in parades and cheerlead in sports events
might show all the signs of emancipation,
but in reality, they’re little more than
sex slaves.
When the fancy shows aren’t going on, the
same ladies reportedly have to attend politburo
parties, and sleep with whoever’s fancy
they may catch.
According to defectors, this “use and abuse”
attitude applies to pretty much every woman,
and it can come up at the weirdest of situations.
One lady says that she was just talking about
an official about housing options, when said
official raped her.
She describes the country’s general approach
to women as follows: “In North Korea, a
woman’s dream cannot be achieved without
being raped or without selling her body.”
