“Undercover in the Secret State”: Must-Viewing

This must be the first time American television has dealt with the subject of human rights in North Korea seriously, and if the people of this country ever awaken to how ghastly things have really become in the North today, this documentary will be a landmark in that process. Indeed, it even surpasses the BBC’s “Access to Evil” in its focus on the everyday hazards and humiliation of life for ordinary people. Unlike claims about gas chambers that may wait years for verification, the tapes shown on “Undercover in the Secret State” are beyond much question.

Don’t kick yourself if you missed it. It will re-air on Saturday, Nov. 19 at, 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. [Update for Readers in Korea, via Brendan Brown: It will also air on CNN International this Thursday at 8 p.m. Seoul Time. Thanks, Brendan!]

CNN does a perfectly fine job describing some parts of the documentary in its promotional text, so I’ll graf it, and add some comments of my own:

This rare video of a public execution-likely the first ever smuggled out of North Korea-is an example of how dissidents are using technology as a new weapon in their battle against North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il. In North Korea, protest is both difficult and dangerous. But now, dissidents are using hidden digital cameras and cell phones to record, as never before, images of life inside the country. These images show the world what conditions are really like there-in chilling detail.

One thing you won’t doubt after watching this: it’s not a transforming North Korea, eager to open itself to the outside world. This is a regime that considers isolation as essential to its survival as other states consider trade. And physically–this is the part that amazed me–it’s like a desert. The land looks bleak and exhausted from decades of deforestation, and from the overuse of fertilizers and pesticides. You can see the same in many areas with Google Earth.

It may be gratuitous of me to kick the CIA when it’s down, but couldn’t they divert their attention from backbiting over Iraq intel just long enough to supply these poor people with pinhole cameras? They’re using ordinary Chinese camcorders, and if someone caught them, they’d no doubt die horrible deaths. I believe what we’re talking about is our lamented “human intelligence.”

“Undercover in the Secret State” features some of the most dramatic footage to ever come out of North Korea, including the cursory trials and public executions in two different border towns. Also captured on hidden camera: emaciated, dirty, homeless children steal and scrounge for scraps in the markets. In the bleak, frigid North Korean countryside, political prisoners labor in a concentration camp the government says doesn’t exist.

None of these scenes, as much as they affected me, affected me as much as three others:

In the first, the camera pans around to images of the dead and dying lying all over the streets. One woman lies supine, looking otherwise quite normal and peaceful, in the middle of the street. She has permed hair and bright red polyester pants, making her almost indistinguishable from any ordinary Korean ajumma who might jostle you in the market stall that sells mackerel, or pinch your cheeks at a family gathering. Passersby walk pass, pause furtively with horror in their faces, and then decide to go on. But it is too late; you have read their thoughts on their faces. Elsewhere, other sick and dying people lie incapacitated by the roadsides and railroad tracks waiting to die. T houghout the winters of The Great Famine bodies lay frozen and unburied in heaps near these stations.

In another scene, a train stops and a crowd of men, women, and childen rush to the tracks to scoop spilled grain from the dirt. It seems they’re getting more dirt than grain; the sight of it belies any claim that North Korea is ready to go it alone without food aid. In yet another scene, two hungry women come face-to-face with the cruelty of the authorities as they try to travel on a train without travel passes. Security personnel, led by a shrill female policeman, eject them, shouting “na-ga!,” for “get out!”

CNN describes a “growing resistance network” that risks everything to capture these images. Those images raise no questions of authenticity, in part because they show enough background scenery (if you can call it that) to be subject to authentication:

And, under a bridge in a factory town, a dissident defaces a poster of “The Dear Leader,” films his anti-government protest and runs for his life. His act of protest has cost him everything: his home, his country, a life with his wife and daughter. Kim Jong Il’s North Korea is one of the world’s last Stalinist societies, a tightly closed state that strictly controls its people. There is no freedom to travel, to speak openly, to question or oppose the regime. The government of North Korea describes the nation as a paradise, but refugees speak of famine, prison, torture, lack of food, safety and even the most basic freedoms. The images now being captured by dissidents are some of the first to show what life is really like there.

“Undercover in the Secret State” also shows how information threatens North Korea’s rigid isolation and seeps into North Korean culture as never before. Smuggled DVDs of South Korean soap operas and movies from the West are showing citizens that North Korea may not be the paradise the government indicates. An Internet radio station in Seoul, South Korea, run by North Korean defectors broadcasts news to those on the border. A smuggled cell phone allows Jung-Eun to speak personally with a young man she met years ago at the border, and who now struggles to survive in North Korea.

It’s impossible to say, of course, whether “resistance network” overstates it (you can see their untranslated video here; my coments and partial translation here). One can’t know how many people were involved in making and moving these tapes. Clearly, hunger has taken its toll on the regime’s popularity. People are prepared to risk everything to tell the story of how they live. For people who have been isolated from the world, they show an extraordinary degree of media savvy, knowing that more tapes like this have the power to change national policies worldwide.

There is a fairly extended interview of Kim Seung-Min, Director of Radio Free North Korea, whose confrontation with a North Korean “diplomat” on Capitol Hill has now led to terrific blogging fodder here and here. Kim has received so many threats from North Korea and its agents that he carries a gun and needs a 24-hour security detail. As mentioned many times on this blog, those threats nearly led to a shut-down of RFNK. I’m very proud to have been present with Mr. Kim two weeks ago, when Suzanne Scholte’s North Korean Freedom Coalition handed Mr. Kim a fat check to continue his operation. A Korean friend, now associated with RFNK, tells me that the station will soon expand its broadcasts from webcasting to AM . . . just in time for Kim Jong Il’s birthday.

One final piece of irony I couldn’t help noticing–Hyundai bought ad space for “Undercover in the Secret State.” I realize that a family rift has long since separted Hyundai Motors from Hyundai Asan, which has funneled so much money into Kim Jong-Il’s coffers. But for the assumed ignorance of so many American viewers to those facts, this would have been a notable example of tone-deaf corporate relations.

Whatever you do, don’t miss this again. How often do you watch a program so important that people would have given their lives, and perhaps those of their families, so that you could see it?