North Korea is finishing up a widespread crackdown on all the things from wedding ceremony attire to slang because it seeks to counter the South’s affect, a brand new report has revealed.
The report – launched by South Korea’s Unification Ministry – is predicated on the testimony of tons of of defectors.
It contains the case of a 22-year-old who was executed after admitting listening to South Korean music and distributing movies, first reported by the BBC last year.
North Korea described final 12 months’s report as “slander and fabrication”, however has but to answer the brand new doc.
In accordance with the collected accounts, searches of houses have elevated since 2021, with officers searching for indicators of outdoor tradition, information company Yonhap studies.
Indicators are mentioned to incorporate sporting a white wedding ceremony gown or the groom lifting the bride on his again.
Individuals’s telephones are additionally being searched and checked for slang from South Korea in messages and contacts, it provides.
Sun shades have additionally been deemed counter-revolutionary, the report says, regardless of North Korean chief Kim Jong Un being know to don a pair. His father, nonetheless, additionally labelled sure on a regular basis garments gadgets as counter-revolutionary – together with denims.
What precisely the punishment is for these infractions is unclear.
Nonetheless, the crackdown on South Korean-made tradition seems extra extreme.
A 2020 regulation made watching or distributing South Korean leisure punishable by loss of life.
This 12 months’s report contains an account of a public execution which had earlier been revealed by the BBC, the place a 22-year-old farmer was killed for listening to 70 songs, watching three movies and distributing them.
It’s regarded as the one account of an execution being carried out underneath the “reactionary ideology and tradition rejection regulation” to emerge up to now.
A video from earlier this 12 months confirmed two teenagers being sentenced to hard labour for the same crime.
The South Korean report has been launched at a time of accelerating tensions between the neighbouring nations.
The North has despatched greater than 2,000 balloons stuffed with garbage throughout the border since final month – a few of which had been discovered to have parasites inside.
A gathering between Kim Jong Un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin final week has additional strained relations.
It’s notable, then, that that is solely the second time the report has been launched, regardless of having been compiled yearly since 2018.
They had been beforehand not launched so as to keep away from frightening North Korea.
