|
|
|
|
Ready! Aim! Fire at enemies of the
state
By Andrei Lankov
SEOUL - A man is tied to a pole,
blindfolded and gagged. A firing squad takes its
position. "Aim! Fire!" It's over in a minute, and
then officers are struggling to fit the corpse
into a sack. Crowds of onlookers stand nearby, and
a large shiny loudspeaker van broadcasts martial
music followed by commentary about an appropriate
punishment that inevitably awaits all enemies of
the people. It is captured on video, like more and
more North Korean executions, scenes from prison
camps and even "courts".
This is video
footage smuggled from North Korea. The information
blockade is crumbling, and more and more North
Koreans are willing to risk their lives by
documenting the less savory parts of their daily
existence on videotapes and then smuggling the
tapes overseas. There are few doubts that
clandestine cameramen (or camerawomen) are native
North Koreans, otherwise they would attract way
too much attention. Some of them might do this out
of their political and religious convictions while
others are perhaps attracted by money payments,
largely coming from Japan these days. In the
current political climate of embracing the North,
South Korean TV networks are not particularly
interested in information that presents the "North
Korean brothers" in unfavorable light.
A
number of such videos have made their way to Japan
in recent months: we have seen the beggar-infested
streets of the country outside North Korea cities,
scenes in prison camps and footage of a public
court where a teenage girl stood trial for
prostitution. And finally we have video footage
depicting two public executions, which took place
in early March. The video was publicized by the
Daily North Korean, a South Korean online
newspaper specializing in things North Korean, and
by a Japanese TV station, Nippon Television
Network.
The unknown operator shot not
only executions, but also public trials that
preceded the death rituals. This is a highly
public form of justice, more Maoist than
Stalinist. The outcome is clear from the
beginning: during the second trial, policemen had
begun to fix an execution pole even before the
official sentence was read. There were two trials,
both taking place in early March near Chinese
border, in the most impoverished part of North
Korea.
Eleven people stood the first
trial, which took place on March 1 in the city of
Hoeryong near the border with China. All were
accused of people-smuggling or, in other words, of
helping North Koreans to defect. The last decade
has seen the growth of large clandestine networks
whose participants for a hefty fee help the
impoverished North Koreans reach China where food
and (badly paid) jobs are plentiful. Obviously,
authorities decided to teach a lesson to the
people involved in such activities. Of 11 accused,
two were condemned to death, two others were sent
to prison for life, while seven others received
prison terms of 10-15 years. The execution was
carried out immediately: after all, in a Stalinist
culture they know that police are never wrong, so
there is not need to waste society's money on
appeals.
The next trial took place the
next day, in the city of Yuson, which is some 10
kilometers from Hoeryong. This time, there were
only two defendants, both accused of the same
crime. One of them was shot, with execution
carried out immediately, and another went to
prison.
According to the sentences, the
criminals sent North Korean women to China, where
they were forced to engage in prostitution. The
remark about prostitution might be true (such
things happen), but for propaganda considerations
authorities had to say it anyway, even if these
women went to China merely in search of jobs or to
participate in matchmaking schemes. Such schemes
are very common these days. North Korean women are
eager to enter an arranged marriage with a
Chinese-Korean bachelor who is for some reason
discriminated against in the the highly
competitive Chinese marriage market. At the same
time the Chinese-Korean girls are equally eager to
enter a similar marriage with a South Korean (in
the past year alone, marriages between South
Korean men and Chinese - usually Chinese-Korean -
women constituted an astonishing 6% of
allmarriages in South Korea). Voluntarily
or not, smuggling of women across the border is a
part of life in that part of the country, but it
seems that authorities decided to put the practice
to an end, using the most powerful visual
deterrent - public trials and executions.
Public execution is an established
tradition in North Korea, and it seems that the
technique of this gruesome ritual has not changed
much for almost 50 years: a kneeling criminal is
tied to a pole and then shot from a short
distance. In larger cities, stadiums are used as
venues for executions since these can accommodate
a large number of spectators. In less prominent
places, any large open space will do: the two
executions cited took place near the local market
and near a railway station respectively. In some
cases and for some groups, attendance is
obligatory. In prison camps an attempted escape or
critical speech about the government is also
punished by a public execution, but for inmates
death might be by hanging, not necessarily by a
firing squad.
It is not known when exactly
public executions became a part of the North
Korean legal practice, but it seems that in the
early years of North Korean history they were not
that common. Back in the early 1980s, when I was
an undergraduate in Russia, our teachers told us
that they saw such executions around 1958, and
then it was a novelty, discussed by the
expatriates from European communist countries with
surprise and some patronizing disgust ("Asians,
you know"). Being foreigners, they would not be
allowed to witness an execution themselves, but
one of them happened to chance on a place where
execution was in preparation. It was not a
stadium, a choice site of a later era, but simply
a large open field on the outskirts of Pyongyang.
The reintroduction of public execution was
a major break with Soviet tradition. Even under
Josef Stalin the Soviet legal practice always
followed and imitated, however superficially,
external forms of Western law. Since by the early
1900s Western public opinion had come to see
public executions as barbaric, there should be no
public execution in the enlightened country of
triumphant socialism. Stalin's secret police
killed people in droves, but there was usually a
trial, however farcical or biased, by officially
appointed judges, and the execution could be held
in public only under the most exceptional
circumstances. In the Stalin-era Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics (USSR) public execution took
place in the battlefield or, sometimes, in a
prison camp (war criminals were also sometimes
dealt with in public). This probably reflected the
residual respect that Soviet Stalinism had for
Enlightenment traditions and legal formalities.
The national Stalinism of Kim Il-sung's North
Korea was both more populist and less rooted in
European traditions, so it had few qualms about
discarding those vestiges of early revolutionary
Marxism.
Obviously, public executions have
remained a part of the North Korean legal
enforcement culture for nearly 50 years, even if
in recent decades such visual lessons in terror
and retribution are seldom if ever staged in
Pyongyang. Contrary to what is often assumed, only
a fraction of executions in North Korea are
public: such spectacles are staged either when the
government wants to teach a lesson to all the
politically unreliable, or wants to show the
population how most notorious criminals meet their
fate. Political criminals form a minority among
public-execution victims, at least outside camps.
This correspondent can think of only a handful of
relatively well-proven cases when "unmasked
counter-revolutionaries" were executed. Executions
in prison camps are an obvious exception, but in
such cases the entire audience consists of the
inmates and prison guards. Outside the camps, a
majority of the victims are what we would call
"common criminals" who are accused of some grave
crimes of a non-political nature, such as murder,
rape or large-scale embezzlement of state
funds.
There were some reports that in
recent years public executions have become less
frequent, so two executions carried out in two
subsequent days in one area seem to indicate that
authorities have begun a major crackdown on
cross-border movement. It is possible that
nowadays, when North Koreans are malnourished
rather than starving, the authorities believe that
it will be practical to close the border with
China, which functioned as a safety valve in the
worst days of famine in the late 1990s. Will his
work? Well, the rulers should know their history:
even breaking on the wheel and burning alive did
not always help to stop people from doing what
they wanted.
Dr Andrei Lankov is
a lecturer in the faculty of Asian Studies, China
and Korea Center, Australian National University.
He graduated from Leningrad State University with
a PhD in Far Eastern history and China, with
emphasis on Korea, and his thesis focused on
factionalism in the Yi Dynasty. He has published
books and articles on Korea and North Asia. He is
currently on leave, teaching at Kookmin
University, Seoul.
(Copyright 2005
Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
All material on this
website is copyright and may not be republished in any form without written
permission.
© Copyright 1999 - 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd.
|
|
Head
Office: Rm 202, Hau Fook Mansion, No. 8 Hau Fook St., Kowloon, Hong
Kong
Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
|
|
|
|
