Asia Times: PYONGYANG WATCH: The riot act?



	November 3, 1999	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH: The riot act?
By Bradley Martin

Is the tragedy of North Korea entering a phase of serious mass uprisings?

A dispatch from Beijing by a correspondent for Seoul's Chosun Ilbo quotes visitors returning from North Korea as reporting a riot near the Chinese border in mid-October. Posted on the November 1 issue of the paper's website, the report contains few details about the incident in Onsong County of North Hamgyong province. But it does say that a North Korean military "special unit" was mobilized. That unit it describes as having been tasked with controlling domestic riots and with conducting espionage across the border in northeastern China.

"One source said that the Onsong riot occurred around October 11 and North Korean authorities brought in helicopters to control the riot, and conducted a massive search for the leaders and 'rebellious elements'," Chosun Ilbo correspondent Jee Hae-boom reports. "The source said that North Korean officials told him to quickly return to China since it was difficult to do business in North Korea at the moment." But Jee reports that as of Monday no specific reasons for the riot had been uncovered and the current situation was unknown.

The report notes that Onsong "is a mine area where criminals or people of bad 'character' are banished" from elsewhere in the country; thus people there are known to take a negative attitude to the regime and its system. Moreover, thanks to relationships with people in China, the people of the Onsong district are known to be fairly well informed of the outside world."

The North Korean police state for decades maintained such tight control that it was all but impossible for discontented people to move around and communicate with one another enough to organize and mount effective protests. But the extended famine of recent years has brought with it a crumbling of controls to a considerable extent. Local authorities have looked the other way as starving people left their assigned places and set out to provide for themselves and their families in previously unacceptable ways, such as private trading and smuggling. In this environment occasional incidents of serious protest have been reported.

Note that Onsong is a mining district. One North Korean military officer who had defected to the South told me a few years ago that if there were ever to be a major anti-government movement it would most likely arise in mining country. He explained that many miners are demobilized soldiers, still on reserve status, having been sent straight to the mines when their 10-year enlistments ended. They know how to fight, and presumably at least some of them have access to weapons or know where to get them. Mining of course requires explosives.

In the case of last month's reported incident in Onsong, however, the more significant factors may be the district's proximity to China and the outcast status of much of its population. To Onsong's old role as a holding area for political and ordinary criminal offenders sent from other parts of the country has been added a newer role. It is now also a processing center for would-be defectors who have been caught in China and forcibly returned to North Korean soil. And if reports of the treatment of people who in that fashion fall into the clutches of the authorities in Onsong can be credited, the surprising fact might be that there are not more riots.

According to recent South Korean press reports, it is to Onsong and Hoeryong - which likewise is situated close to the border - that the authorities take North Koreans who, following their escapes to China, have been rounded up by authorities there and deported via the nearby Tumen customs office.

The Seoul daily Dong-A Ilbo on September 2 ran an article quoting Venerable Pomnyun Sunim, a Buddhist priest who heads the relief organization Good Friends, on the results of hundreds of interviews his group had coducted with escapees to China - evidently including some who had been repatriated and then had lived to escape yet again and tell their stories.

The priest told the paper that those repatriated escapees who were returned to Onsong or Hoeryong were interrogated for three to seven days each. Questioning was accompanied by beatings, torture and verbal abuse. Authorites performed strip-searches, probing body cavities supposedly to find hidden valuables. Severe wounds inflicted during torture went untreated afterward when many of the prisoners were sent to reformatories and detention camps, according to the survey by Good Friends.

"Punishment was administered in accordance with the seriousness of each case and by age," according to the report. "Children or elderly who fled the North to get food were told to go home. In the case of those 16 years old and over, even if the case was not serious they were sent to a reformatory or a re-education camp to do hard labor for several months. In case of those who chronically or collectively fled from the North, who committed the crime of smuggling and selling relics or expensive jewelry or who got married in China or were engaged in the flesh trade, they were sentenced to 15 years in prison at the maximum."

A country that cannot feed its civilian population certainly can't feed its prisoners - and that's another fact about a prison-colony center, such as Onsong, that might tend to keep people there more or less permanently riled and in the mood to strike back at the regime if the opportunity presents itself. Good Friends quoted a woman in her 20s, who was imprisoned after her repatriation, as saying she and 15 others interned at the same time were fed nothing but powdered chaff for 22 days. She suffered constipation but four of her group died in custody, she said.

So can we expect a major flareup of protests such as the one reported to have occurred last month? Not if the Pyongyang regime can help it. With some improvement reported in the food supply situation (in large part thanks to international aid) the regime is reported to be cracking down again, systematically moving to reinstate its iron control over the movements of the populace.

A Yonhap report October 5 quoted a military source in Seoul as saying North Korean security officials had formed a new "10th Corps" to guard the Chinese border, having determined that the security agents assigned in pairs to each village tended to neglect their duties - or even to collaborate with defectors. The same source said the North Korean military had recently taken control of the railways away from the cabinet "in order to watch the moves of residents".

(Special to Asia Times Online)

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