North Korea Liquidates Family for Trying to Escape

Via the Daily NK comes a terrible report about the fate of the Jeong family from the town of Hyesan, near the Chinese border. At some point, the Jeongs decided that they’d had enough stultifying propaganda and grass porridge for a lifetime, so they decided to make a break for it.

Early in July last year Jeong escaped from North Korea to Changbai in China along with his mother, wife and three- and seven-year old daughters. However, in August the family was caught by the Chinese police on their way to Neimenggu, where they planned to cross into Mongolia and from there travel to South Korea. Their plan foiled, the family was immediately repatriated to North Korea by the Chinese security forces.

China is a member in good standing of the U.N. Human Rights Council. Discuss among yourselves.

The North Korean authorities subsequently threw Jeong and his wife into a jail run by the NSA in Yangkang Province, and sent his mother (63) and daughters home.

Elsewhere, the report states that regime authorities “dispatched three other family members to a political prison camp and exiled an entire other family to rural Yangkang Province.” The report doesn’t specifically clarify what happened to the now orphaned little girls — whether they were sent to a camp, or whether they were sent to the countryside. North Korean orphanages usually fall low on the country’s food chain, and the girls will now be deemed “tainted” by the actions of their parents.

Jeong Dae Sung, the father, was 35. The mother, Lee Ok Geum, was 32.

At some point during Mr. Jeong’s interrogation, the authorities also arrested family friend Seong Gwang Cheol. Subsequently, the families received execution notices. No word, however, on whether the families were billed for the cost of the bullets. The executions were carried out in an unknown location, which represents something of a break from the beloved North Korean tradition of executing people in front of their neighbors:

It may just be possible that public executions have been less beneficial for morale than the Bowibu had hoped:

“Since 1998, the Central Prosecutor Office has issued execution notices to the families of condemned persons,” The Daily NK’s source explained. “They are killed behind closed doors, and bodies are never returned to the deceased’s families.

For a few years, the regime had relaxed punishments for border crossing, as long as those caught were not suspected of defecting, or having contact with foreigners or missionaries. Recently, the regime has increasingly executed any of its subjects caught trying to flee — most repatriated by China — or sent them to die in places like Chongo-ri. So this sort of brutality isn’t exceptional for North Korea these days.

The Daily NK reports that the regime is carrying out a “50-day Battle … aimed at restoring order in society.”

[Apologies for inadvertently publishing a draft of this before.]