PYONGYANG: A crowd gathers in a dusty field in North Korea. They have come to see a trial but as the judge passes sentence they grow uneasy.
“Mum, I want to go,” a child is heard to whisper on the audio.
“Hold on,” says the mother. “It looks scary.”
The next moment, the camera judders and an official — presumably the judge — is heard to declare: “Kim Jong-il is great in comparison to these worthless criminals ... they trafficked women across the border to China. We have to build up a strong guard to keep these influences out.”
The image jumps to the prisoner, already blindfolded and tied to a post.
“Forward, right,” the judge tells the armed men. “Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!”
The man falls to the ground and another prisoner is brought forward. Moments later, the anonymous cameraman walks into a nearby building and speaks directly into the microphone: “I watched soldiers executing people by firing squad ... children and adults watch the whole thing and then they go home.”
Filmed secretly last March, the footage is a damning indictment of the atrocities committed in the name of North Korea’s communist dictator Kim Jong-il, the ruler of one of the world’s most repressive regimes. Public executions are a regular occurrence in Kim’s Stalinist state but until now they have never been captured on film. Just as importantly, the footage is the first hard evidence of the existence of an underground resistance network in North Korea.
“The cameraman who filmed the execution was taking a huge risk,” explains Jung-Eun Kim, an American-Korean journalist who has spent seven years monitoring the growth of the resistance movement. “If he’d been caught, the punishment would almost certainly have been death.”
One man who can testify to the risks being run by the dissidents is ‘Mr Park’. The former head of a North Korean resistance cell, Park is currently hiding in a safe house in Bangkok and does not wish his real name to be used for fear of reprisals against his wife and child who are still in North Korea.
However, in an extraordinary interview with Channel 4’s Dispatches, Park claims that it was he who ordered the filming of the executions in Hoeryong city, in the northeast of the country. The footage records the summary trial and execution on March 1 of two factory workers, Choi Jae-gon and Park Myeong-gil (another, shot on March 2, shows the execution of another man).
Videos shot by others show corpses lying abandoned on the streets of the capital Pyongyang, the illegal sale of rice donated by the World Food Programme, scenes of casual brutality on trains and children scrabbling beneath a railway car for fertilizer with which to grow crops. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service
