Rape, revenge, sanctions & North Korea’s hated Ministry of Love

FIVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, Machiavelli mulled the question of whether a tyrant should seek to be feared or loved. The Ministry of State Security or MSS is North Korea’s analog to Orwell’s Ministry of Love,¹ but in reality, it is Kim Jong-un’s most feared and hated enforcer. It targets “spies, subversive elements, and political criminals” — the people the state fears most. It runs North Korea’s most horrific prison camps, of which one North Korean woman interviewed secretly by the BBC said, “It is the ‘terror’ of such camps that ‘keeps society going.'” A second, numerically larger agency called the Ministry of People’s Security, or MPS, combines ordinary police functions with the enforcement of misdemeanor economic and political rules, if that’s the right word for a “crime” that can still get you sent to a labor camp with an annual mortality rate as high as 20 percent.² In both agencies, torture and brutality are not crimes but occupational skills.

Pyongyang obviously assigns a high value to the MSS’s ruthlessness. That’s why it surprised me when, in March of 2017, Pyongyang lectured MSS cadres about corruption and human rights abuses. There were concurrent reports that MSS head Kim Wong-hong was purged, just over a month after the Obama administration designated him for human rights abuses under the NKSPEA, which may have been a coincidence.

But if the MSS cadres spent a few days in sensitivity training, its effect was limited. Yes, there is some evidence that in at least one town, Hoeryong, the MSS were (by MSS standards) briefly chastened and relatively nice. In December of 2017, they caught a woman illegally calling South Korea, let her off with a mere $1,500 bribe, and drove her home. Indeed, as we will see, a woman in MSS custody can often expect far worse. Aside from this, reports from North Korea continued to speak of widespread corruption and brutality in the MSS.

In March, Pyongyang ordered an increase in the MSS’s brutality, in the form of a crackdown on “anti-socialist activities,” including “spreading religion, illegal border-crossing, smuggling, illegal foreign communication, using foreign currency, selling or using illegal drugs, practicing superstition, speculative investing, high-interest lending, possessing or circulating illicit media (such as DVDs or USBs), running an unpermitted business, and gambling.” In late June, the authorities held public “crowd trials” for those caught “watching South Korean movies, using drugs, and non-socialist acts including being unemployed, polygamy, and unauthorized residence.”

In July, however, amid reports of a public backlash, Kim Jong-un reversed course again, and “reportedly ordered that the country’s legal authorities refrain from ‘making enemies of the people.’” Quietly, the crackdown paused. Decrees announcing it disappeared from local post offices. The security forces now find themselves caught between conflicting directives and social forces. On one hand, the state is driving the security forces to squeeze the people. Yet its tactical retreats show tantalizing signs that it feels the limits of its power.

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As is inevitable for men with more power than pay, corruption is a more-or-less accepted way to supplement one’s state salary in both the MSS and MPS, and the lectures of 2017 did not change this. In January, MPS traffic police in Rason raised fines, demanded higher bribes, and confiscated cargo. MSS officers in Rason ordered Chinese drivers to fuel up their cars and motorcycles. They arrested remittance brokers who deliver money from defectors in South Korea to their relatives in the North, “expropriated” their cash, or demanded that they pay exorbitant bribes. Brokers who continue to operate must pass the higher costs on to their customers, often among North Korea’s poorest people. The MSS traced the brokers back to the remittance recipients and extorted them, too. Recently, they stormed into a man’s house as he was talking to his mother in South Korea and shook him down for $3,000. His mother borrowed from friends and scraped together her savings from working in a restaurant to raise that sum, plus broker fees. 

The security forces did not cease to be repressive in 2017, either. In May, the MSS spent $2 million to purchase and import surveillance equipment for the border. (A small consolation: “Several MSS officials were purged after it was found that they bought cheap equipment and embezzled the rest of the money.”) The MSS subsequently used the new gear to run an extortion racket. Its officers eavesdrop on, catch, and extort cross-border traders, and accuse state trading company officials of spying or skimming (and many of them are skimming, just like the MSS itself).³ They tail disgruntled citizens, eavesdrop on their complaints, charge them with political crimes, and send them to labor camps, allegedly to pad their arrest quotas. They arrested one man for making an illegal cell phone call to his daughter in China. After spending almost two weeks in a freezing holding cell, the man lost two toes to frostbite.

They aren’t very good at law enforcement, either. The incidence of actual crimes, including burglary and theft, is rising.

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But the crime that the MSS and MPS have most culpably failed to prevent or punish is rape. In fact, by most accounts, MSS and MPS officers are North Korea’s most notorious rapists. According to the U.N. High Commission for Human Rights, “Sexual violence by prison officials is reported to be common in holding centres.” Women who escape North Korea confirm this (see also pages 52-53). A South Korean NGO that collects testimonies of human rights abuses from refugees alleges that the rape of detainees is particularly prevalent in MSS detention centers in North Pyongyang Province. Some of the most heart-rending cases involve women who are still inside North Korea, whose stories were reported by covert journalists recently enough that we can suppose they are still being raped today.

Colonel Ri Chang-ju heads the Political Department of the local MSS office in Pochon County, Ryanggang Province. In November of 2017, he spotted a young wife, 20 years his junior and known for her beauty. He put her and her husband under surveillance and had them arrested for watching a South Korean drama. Ri interrogated them personally. Even after he extracted a substantial bribe from the husband, Ri repeatedly threatened and sexually assaulted the wife in detention over those next several days. Even after he released her, he continued going to her home to rape her. Of course, the husband was powerless to protect her. Of course, the wife was powerless to resist. They both knew how much worse it could have been.

In September of 2018, the Chinese police caught and repatriated a North Korean woman to the MSS in North Hamgyeong. The guards, who had been drinking through their shift, began to touch her and remove her clothes. She tried to run, but the guards caught her, brutally beat her, handcuffed her to a bed, and raped her. After the morning shift change, the new guards found her, still cuffed the bed and unconscious. They took her to the hospital, where her family saw her condition and complained to MSS commanders. The MSS declined to punish the guards and told the family that if they pursued their complaint, it would only make things more difficult for them.

One MPS captain in Chongjin used his power to commit “a range of abuses, including violent assault, rape, and extortion.” He became “skilled in extracting bribes from people and forcing females to perform sexual favors in exchange for covering up incidents.” He “almost exclusively took on cases involving women [who] caught his eye.” He picked out a young woman in her 20s who worked with her father in the market, cited her for some pretextual offense, took her in for interrogation, and then “threatened her and forced her to perform sexual acts on him.” He came back to rape her every week — sometimes in her own home. Her father knew but was powerless to intervene.  

[T]his is the norm in North Korean society, where the authorities brandish their authority to oppress and persecute the people. Fearing retaliation from local officials, everyone privy to the situation chooses to stay quiet, and the young girl continues to have no options in stopping the captain from his frequent abuse. This is North Korea today. [link]

And so it is. Not even the wives of MSS officers are immune. In at least one case, a senior MSS officer in Ryanggang Province demanded sexual favors from a subordinate’s wife in exchange for dropping an investigation of her. Even after she submitted, the officer raped her several more times in her own home.

This month, the head of a labor-training camp at Onsong, in North Korea’s extreme northeast, was removed from his position and put under investigation for having sex with a 30-year-old woman who had been arrested for smuggling drugs to China. The camp administrator traded sex for excusal from hard labor and furloughs outside the prison grounds. If North Korea permits the security forces to rape, it forbids them from having relations with prisoners that are transactional, lenient, or affectionate. The administrator probably would not have been punished if he had “merely” raped her.

Both Human Rights Watch and the report of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry provide exhaustive evidence confirming that the privilege of raping women — both married or single, by force or coercion — is an accepted job perk in the MSS and MPS. The Commission found, and survivors confirm, that the rape of an adult woman by an official is seldom prosecuted in North Korea. A former MPS officer confirmed that to the state, coerced submission is considered consent. Officials often make a woman’s sexual submission a condition of some life-sustaining benefit to a woman or her family. Among the all-powerful men who rule North Korea, the MSS and MPS are the apex predators. All MSS officers are men. The only women it employs are telephone operators.

Why, then, did Pyongyang bust an MSS lieutenant down to private last month for torturing a woman who had been repatriated from China? Could this report suggest a tacit acknowledgment by Pyongyang that the security forces’ brutality — and its brutality toward women in particular — is becoming a risk to internal stability? Is it a coincidence that this report follows widespread media attention following the release of this report by Human Rights Watch? Could the announcement of the arrest and execution of an accused serial rapist, something we’ve rarely seen historically, signify a desire by the state to be seen as a protector rather than a predator? Presumably, Pyongyang would not have acknowledged corruption or declared “war” on it unless the authorities saw corruption as a political problem. Similarly, rising public anger is the most likely explanation for Pyongyang’s 2017 decision to make scapegoats of MSS officers whose abuses raised enough public anger to require sacrifices. The state may be more sensitive to such criticism than many of us realize.

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You might think that rape is the behavior that’s more likely than any other to result in the violent taking of justice by husbands, fathers, brothers, or by women who refuse to be victims. In fact, most evidence suggests that it’s economic grievances that have driven most anti-state resistance since the end of the famine and the rise of North Korea’s people’s economy.

[Pictured: class warfare. Not even Karl Marx could deny it.]

In North Korea’s outer provinces, where the state rarely allows foreign journalists to go, acts of violent (but mostly unarmed) resistance against MSS and MPS cadres are reported much more often than you’ve probably heard, and this list is almost certainly incomplete. 

• You may want to start with the very long list of incidents of anti-state resistance I compiled here. Be mindful that covert journalism in North Korea was still in its infancy then. It has since improved its standards for corroborating its reports.
• 11/2006, Hoeryong, N. Hamgyeong: “From this morning, more than a hundred shopkeepers, their families and the residents of Nammun district rushed to the market management office to request compensation of market refurbishment fees and repeal of Nammun market closure.” Authorities later arrested 20 people.
• 3/2008, Haeju, S. Hwanghae: Young female traders fight with MPS guards over state restrictions on women under 49 doing business there.
• 3/2008, Sinuiju, N. Pyongan: “An inside source reported on the 2nd of March that traffic agents from the Shinuiju Safety Agency beat and killed a drunken man during the Lunar New Year holiday. His relatives and family were outraged, vowing to ‘tear off their [the agents] epaulettes and kill them.’”
• 12/2009: Mass protests and sporadic acts of resistance break out over an unannounced currency redenomination that wipes out the savings of millions of poor and middle-class North Koreans. In Hamhung, South Hamgyong, the authorities execute 12 people.
• 2/2010: “A Daily NK source reported on Monday, ‘A group of agents who had just finished doing the rounds of the [markets] in Naengcheon-dong, Haksu-dong, and Cheongok-ri in Pyongsung were attacked by a number of people, who assaulted them and immediately ran away. As a result, PSA officials are feeling very tense these days.'” The report also mentions incidents in Hyesan and Chongjin.
• 1/2012, N. Hamgyeong: “’During the mourning period, one official from the provincial NSA, one from the prosecutor’s office and two from the People’s Safety Agency were murdered in Cheongjin.’ The source added, ‘There was a note found lying next to the body of the executed NSA official which said ‘Punished in the name of the people.’”
• 8/2014, N. Hamgyeong: MPS officers are reportedly quitting their jobs due to the risks of revenge attacks from angry citizens. “Over the past few years, the country has seen a spike in attacks that were carried out by people seeking revenge against safety agents, the source said. ‘Just in the city of Chongjin, a few years ago, the head of a district safety office was clobbered in the back of the head, leading to immediate death,’ she explained.” 
• 7/2015, Hyesan, Ryanggang: A woman jumps off a ledge and seriously injures herself in an attempted suicide to protest an attempt by an MPS officer to extort her. The officer fled the scene as a sympathetic crowd gathered around the woman.
• 7/2015, Musan, N. Hamgyeong: “A massive brawl between Ministry of People’s Security [MPS] agents and vendors at a marketplace in Musan County last Friday has led to an urgent dispatch of county security and safety agents along with the complete shuttering of the market. The clash occurred after angry vendors tried to resist the confiscation of their goods by market surveillance authorities….“
• 7/2015: “Daily NK’s local sources across a number of regions, including North and South Pyongan Provinces and North and South Hamkyung Provinces, have reported … residents increasingly view forays into the business sector as their ‘legitimate right’ and ‘refuse to sit idly by and watch MPS agents try to take these rights away.’”
• “There was a recent case in Hamhung wherein MPS and merchants got into a major skirmish after the agents tried to regulate their actions. By now, tussles and confrontation between MPS agents and vendors have become common news.”
• “[O]n the same day, an additional source in the same province reported a recent riot targeting MPS agents at Chongjin’s Sunam Market. The skirmish ignited when an agent arbitrarily targeted a male merchant in his 60s for the old middle-school textbooks mixed in with the secondhand books he was hawking at his stall…. ‘The MPS agent took off in a flash before the altercation could escalate further.'”
• 2/2017, Pyongson, S. Pyongan: A man in his 40s angered by MSS mistreatment during an investigation of “economic crimes” attacked and seriously injured an MPS officer, then escaped.
• 6/2017, Hoeryong, N. Hamgyeong: An unknown assailant stabbed and seriously injured an MSS officer at a guard post.
• 10/2018, S. Pyongan: A soldier came home from a ten-year enlistment. After seeing how bad conditions had become, he got into an argument with a policeman and beat him so badly that when it was over, one went to the hospital and the other went to a prison camp.

[Pictured: obedient, docile, goose-stepping, card-flipping automatons; more here]

Thus, if the security forces guard fear the hatred of those they rule, there is a factual basis for that fear. Even men as brutal as these are demoralized by the knowledge that they’re despised for their corruption and brutality, and for their hypocrisy. MSS officers charged with enforcing the ban on South Korean dramas watch them “openly.” One North Korean escapee told researchers that while she was detained by the MPS, a fellow detainee, a 19-year-old sex worker, told her that MPS officers patronized her “every night” (page 48). Near Onsong in North Hamgyeong, an MSS officer and three accomplices were arrested recently for selling photographs and video of “information about everyday life and various other material” to a foreign buyer. Some MSS officials along the border are “having such a difficult time that they go around from house to house asking smugglers of Chinese cell phones whether they need some help.”

It also erodes the security forces’ morale and discipline that they aren’t being paid as regularly as they once were. In June, the Daily NK noticed “a gradual rise in discontent” among MSS cadres who were “faced with issues surrounding their own day to day survival” and worried about how to educate their kids and provide for their families. Some cadres are “losing confidence in the state” or want better jobs, except that surveillance and torture aren’t in demand as civilian job skills. Some cadres supplement their pay through corruption or extortion. Some officials in South Pyongan, including police officers, “recently stopped receiving rations entirely” and consequently “aren’t showing up for work.” Instead, they “work in the markets to make ends meet.” Their absenteeism “is creating a state of paralysis in the government.”

The number of police officers showing up for work has also been gradually falling. The North Korean authorities previously provided police officers with a limited amount of food rations. Even during the widespread famine that ravaged the country in the 1990s, the authorities continued to provide police officers with rations because they prevented social chaos from breaking out and were an integral arm of support for the Party’s policies.

Some police officers, who were long viewed as having a solid supply of food rations, have fallen into such dire financial straits financially that they can’t perform their duties. This has led to a breakdown in the services provided by local governments and is becoming a social problem.

“An officer at the police station in Pyongsong, South Pyongan Province, had been drunk all day, but recently his situation has gotten so bad that he can’t eat properly anymore. His right hand is trembling and he looks like he’s malnourished,” an additional source in South Pyongyan Province reported.

“The officer left military service and then graduated from the Ministry of People’s Security’s Political Science University before working as a factory manager in a rural area. He had a bright future because he had worked his way up to become a member of the Inspectors Department in the municipal police station in a short amount of time. However, the end of government rations has made it impossible for him to survive.” [Daily NK]

Could this be the result of sanctions? There isn’t enough information to say with any degree of certainty, but it’s plausible that they are. Sanctions on the trading companies that sustain the security agencies, or sanctions on the products they export, could explain why they aren’t getting steady pay. UN and U.S. sectoral bans on mineral and seafood exports may be affecting the MSS’s finances. We know that the MSS takes kickbacks from seafood smuggling, and seafood exports are subject to a UN sectoral ban. The MSS also funds itself through arms dealing in cooperation with an entity called KOMID, North Korea’s principal arms dealing agency. Treasury designated KOMID in 2005 and has been reasonably aggressive about designating its agents and partners. MSS officers have been selling weapons for KOMID in both Egypt and Syria. The U.S. Treasury and Justice departments began to freeze and forfeit the assets of the trading companies that sell or buy North Korean coal and minerals in 2017. This may be (and should be) having a chilling effect on other purchasers of North Korean minerals, but that effect won’t persist unless the enforcement does.

There is much more that we could do but haven’t. An MSS-controlled front company called Shinheung Trading Company sells seafood, iron ore, and various other wares, and has also been linked to cyber attacks. Although OFAC has designated the MSS and some of its top officials, it has not designated Shinheung or its iron ore distributor, Tumen Xinhuan Goods Trading Company. Treasury still hasn’t blocked the trading companies that are buying the cell phone trackers and surveillance equipment, or the companies that are selling them, despite mandatory sanctions under NKSPEA 104(a)(4). Seafood trading companies are also subject to discretionary U.S. national sanctions that were added to the NKSPEA by the CAATSA, but the Treasury Department has not yet invoked these authorities. Thus, whatever effect sanctions may be having on the security forces that keep North Koreans isolated and brutalized, they are falling far short of their potential.

Sanctions certainly aren’t the sole cause of the MSS’s morale and discipline problems. Starting in 2015, before a new wave of stronger U.S. and UN sanctions came into force, the unthinkable began to happen: a senior MSS counterintelligence officer and a Colonel in the Reconnaissance General Bureau, the North’s espionage and terrorism agency, both defected. In October 2016, a young MSS translator also defected.

More recently, the MSS director for Ryanggang Province has been under investigation for unauthorized contact with South Korea. In February, one Colonel Kang, who headed operations for the MSS’s Overseas Anti-Espionage Department, reportedly absconded from his post at the Chilbosan Hotel in northeast China to Europe, possibly Britain or France, with the engraving plates for printing counterfeit U.S. dollar bills and a big wad of cash. It almost sounds too sensational to be true, although isn’t all that much more sensational than the defection of Thae Yong-ho. Kang came from a highly privileged family that descended from one of Kim Il-sung’s anti-Japanese revolutionary comrades. In June, Kim Jong-un is said to have personally dispatched a five-man hit team to Europe to track him down and kill him (the more a report purports to reflect inner-party information, the less I tend to believe it). That followed the failure of a previous ten-man team to do so. The report claims that the authorities ordered all MSS officials to receive loyalty lectures denouncing Kang’s “traitorous actions.”

Why do some of North Korea’s most trusted officials defect? For some, there may be ideological, cultural, or material motives, but I suspect that another important one (that we have the power to influence) is Pyongyang’s strict earnings quotas for officials posted overseas. Cash-strapped agencies don’t dare relax those quotas, particularly knowing how much graft occurs. The state may assume that what isn’t kicked up lines the official’s pockets, or worse, to create personal slush funds that can be used for escape. Then, when the officials suddenly can’t meet their quotas, they face the difficult decision to go back to Pyongyang to face unspecified punishments, or not.

Pyongyang now finds itself balancing three countervailing threats to internal stability: (1) a relaxation of its political and economic control over the people; (2) a crackdown that leads to a popular backlash, mass protest, or acts of anti-state violence; and (3) falling morale within the despised, corrupt, and underpaid security forces. This suggests that neither maximum pressure nor maximum engagement is the best way to build internal pressure for reform and opening. Rather, sanctions should relentlessly target the trading companies that sustain the security forces, to retard their capacity to pay their cadres, fuel their vehicles, buy equipment, and maintain discipline. At the same time, we should maximize engagement with the non-state traders that Pyongyang is trying hardest to oppress, by giving them a secure means to receive remittances electronically, to facilitate non-sanctioned trade, to force trading companies to shift from sanctioned trade to non-sanctioned trade, and through broadcasting that puts individual acts of MSS and MPS brutality and corruption into their broader political context.

Great political change often comes in two ways: gradually, then suddenly. Gradual and sudden change both forecast a bleak future for the MSS and MPS. The fear that they’d be lynched on the first day of a popular uprising must make the MSS and MPS doubly vigilant about postponing that day for as long as possible. That should give us pause about cheering on revenge killings, no matter how justified they may be. Sometimes, a society’s choice comes down to punishing crimes against humanity or ending them. But this history also tells a less dramatic, but equally important story. While many of us have been waiting for a Pyongyang Spring — a popular uprising that will not come until North Koreans have the means to share news and organize from city to city and province to province. Meanwhile, a quiet, gradual revolution has been happening at the margins of the state’s power — in the markets, in the villages, and along the borders, where the state now quietly hesitates to push people who will be pushed no more. In the outer provinces, the balance of power between the state and the people is more delicate than we might think. And in important ways, we could do more to shift it faster.

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1. It is sometimes also referred to as the State Security Department, and was formerly known as the National Security Agency. Different sources have added to the confusion by applying different translations and acronyms to the agencies’ names.

2. Previously known as the People’s Safety Agency.

3. Six letters: DIY EMP.