N. Korea Perestroika Watch: Man executed for calling China

The Daily NK provides us some updates on Kim Jong Un’s ongoing crackdown on unauthorized contact with the outside world, via sources in North Hamgyeong Province, in the far northeast:

The North Korean authorities recently added five extra clauses to Article 60 of the country’s criminal code, which pertains to attempts to overthrow the state. The additional clauses codify harsh punishments for acts including illicit communication with the outside world, which could in principle now incur the death penalty. [….]

The newly re-codified offenses include: ? Illegal phone contact with foreigners, including South Koreans; ? Viewing South Korean dramas or DVDs and listening to [foreign] radio broadcasts; ? Using or dealing in drugs; ? Transnational human and sex trafficking; and ? Aiding and abetting defectors and leaking state secrets.

In criminal code revisions made in mid-May of last year, harsh punishments were decreed for a loose basket of acts deemed to be seditious, including political agitation, rioting, and public demonstration. Sedition was one of a litany of charges thrown at Kim Jong Eun’s uncle Jang Song Taek before his execution in December last year.

If North Korea is as stable as some “experts” suggest it is, then why is it necessary for its government to raise the penalties for such unthinkable acts as “political agitation, rioting, and public demonstration?” In fact, we’ve seen fragmentary reports of demonstrations in North Korea in the past, mostly by female traders protesting market restrictions.

The nature of the revised punishments provides a stark reflection of the regime’s anxiety at the nature and scale of cross-border activities, the source explained. A minimum of five years “reeducation” or the death penalty can be decreed for those caught communicating with the outside world, a minimum of ten years reeducation is the maximum punishment for simply watching South Korean media or listening to foreign radio, and a minimum of five years reeducation is possible for drug smuggling. [Daily NK]

Separately, the Daily NK reports that the regime is using its traditional methods for showing its subjects that it’s more serious about enforcing these rules that it had been in the past, when it was possible to bribe one’s way out of enforcement.

The victim, a 49-year old stage lighting engineer called Ri Kyung Ho, was executed in March. His execution, though not public, was used as an example to others, and his family has been incarcerated in a State Security Department (SSD) facility.

The latest report is that North Korea is making examples of those caught, but isn’t executing them in public, perhaps because it fears that video may leak out again. So were there posters, or other announcements of the execution? The report doesn’t say.

“Ri Kyung Ho was caught out of town by an SSD agent with a signal detector. He’d been calling his family in South Chosun” the source said, explaining the background to the man’s arrest. “He probably didn’t have time to take the phone apart and hide it before SSD agents got to his house.”

Ri was reportedly involved in North Korea’s emerging black-market banking system, a system that got a big push from North Korea’s 2009 currency “reform,” which wiped out the savings of millions of members of the country’s rising non-elite middle class. That system has not only stocked North Korea’s markets with food to fill the void left by a non-functional state distribution system, it has also helped many poor North Koreans pay for that food with money sent home by relatives in China and South Korea.

In the course of Ri’s subsequent interrogation, it reportedly emerged that not only had he been making regular phone calls, but had also been involved in remittance transfers from South Korea and aiding and abetting defections.

“He seems to have started by conveying money from defectors to their families, but then began to help people who asked him to send their families to China,” the source said. “Some people are asking why he was killed just because of the money thing, but there are a few who were close to him and his wife, and they say it was because he had been helping defections.”

“In times gone by you could bribe your way out of this, but right now they’re sure to punish you. Nobody knows when or why they might get caught up in it, so everyone is nervous,” she said. “Anyone who uses a cellphone to call ‘that way’ or ‘the other way’ [meaning South Korea or China] is scared.” [Daily NK]

The report only cites a single unnamed source. If it’s is true, expect to see more sources corroborate it, or tell us about more executions from more cities, particularly along the border.