BANGKOK: With shaking hands, the North Korean climbed onto the shoulders of a buddy to reach the underside of the bridge. As another accomplice stood guard, he hung up a banner denouncing North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in bright red paint. Then he took out a video camera, disguised to look like a carton of cigarettes, and filmed his handiwork for posterity. Today, the North Korean who says he shot the video on behalf of a group called the Freedom Youth League lives in hiding in Thailand under an assumed name. A small, wiry man in his 30s, the defector smoked L&M cigarettes nervously as he recalled his daring feat against one of the world’s most totalitarian regimes.
Everything had to be done with the utmost secrecy, he said, to the point that he and his associates communicated by means of notes passed in sacks of potatoes. The man didn’t dare tell even his wife. “If we were caught, everybody would be dead,” said the man, who goes by the name Park Dae Heung. The 33-minute tape he allegedly produced has created a sensation in Japan and South Korea, where it has been aired repeatedly on television. South Korean human rights advocates say it is the first evidence of a nascent dissident movement operating inside North Korea.
Besides the banner hung on the bridge, the video shows an anti-regime banner hung in a factory restroom and has one particularly eye-catching scene in which the camera pans over an official photograph of Kim Jong Il defaced with graffiti as a man’s voice off-camera denounces him.
The video is one of a series of videos that provide a rare glimpse of the underside of life in what may be the most secretive country in the world. Since the beginning of this year, videos have emerged from inside North Korea of a public execution, children begging at a train station and UN humanitarian aid being sold at a market. Among North Korea watchers, there is some debate about whether the filmmakers were motivated primarily by genuine opposition sentiments or greed. Many of the videos have been sold to Japanese television stations, which have paid as much as $200,000 for choice footage, according to some accounts.
But the mere fact that people make such videos challenges many of the assumptions about Kim’s grip on power. The underground videos do not necessarily mean the regime is on the verge of collapse — the majority opinion among analysts is that it is not — but their existence shows that social controls are fraying the edges. “Nobody would have dared to do such a thing three or four years ago,” said Hitoshi Takase, president of Japan Independent News Net, a Tokyo-based company that is responsible for distributing footage in March of a public execution in North Korea.
The footage of the anti-regime banners was smuggled out of North Korea through the Chinese border by activists working with the Seoul-based Citizen’s Coalition for Human Rights of Abductees and North Korean Refugees and has been widely shown on television and Internet sites (www.dailynk.com/file/2005/01/19/DNKR00001267.wmv). Do Hee Yun, secretary-general of the group, says it is the first solid evidence confirming evidence of dissident activity building within North Korea. “Of course, the filmmakers have made some money with these videos, but I don’t think that is their primary motivation,” said Do, who introduced a Times reporter to Park, the defector, for his first interview with the Western news media. “They believe their society should change and they want to bring the world’s attention to the human rights situation.”
He says that Japanese television paid his organization $15,000 for the video and that it tried to pass on all of the money to Park’s organization but that by the time money brokers took their cut, only $3,000 made it into North Korea. Until he fled North Korea early this year, Park said, he held a job as a driver for a state-owned company in Hoeryong, a city near the Chinese border. About five years ago, he was approached by a well-connected trader from the capital, Pyongyang, with a business proposition. He asked him to use his car to distribute pirated DVDs and videos that were being smuggled in from China.
The job was illegal on the face of it, because foreign films are considered cultural imperialism by the regime, but then his Pyongyang contact upped his demands. He asked Park to start shooting videos inside North Korea to send abroad. Park said he was eager to oblige. Even though he was a member of the ruling Workers’ Party, and relatively privileged, he said he was disenchanted with the regime. “I saw that everybody was starving and the state wasn’t doing anything but building mausoleums to (the late founder of North Korea) Kim Il Sung and villas for Kim Jong Il.”
Moreover, Park had watched many of the DVDs he was distributing and from his glimpses of life abroad, at least as depicted by Hollywood, knew that North Korea badly lagged.
