| Nascent Dissident Movement Inside North Korea |
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A part of the film was made on this spot in
Hoeryong:
http://wikimapia.org/#y=42440484&x=129743195&
z=18&l=0&m=a&v=2
The market shown on this tape,is in Hoeryong:
http://wikimapia.org/#y=42441456&x=129741953&
z=18&l=0&m=a&v=2
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, he smoked L&M cigarettes nervously
as he recalled his daring feat against the
totalitarian government.
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. He 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 has created a sensation in
Japan and South Korea, where it has aired
repeatedly. South Korean human rights
advocates say it is the first evidence of a
nascent dissident movement inside North
Korea.
Besides the banner hung on the bridge, the
video shows an anti-government banner 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 denounces him
off-camera.
The video is one of a series of samizdat
videos that provide a rare glimpse 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 humanitarian aid from the
United Nations being sold at a market.
Among North Korea watchers, there is some
debate about whether the filmmakers were
motivated mainly by their opposition to the
government or by 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.
That people are able to make such videos
challenges many of the assumptions about
Kim's grip on power. The videos do not
necessarily mean the government is on the
verge of collapse — the majority opinion
among analysts is that it is not — but
their existence shows that social control is
fraying at 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 distributed
footage in March of an apparent public
execution in North Korea.
The footage of the anti-government banners
was smuggled out of North Korea across the
Chinese border by activists working with the
Seoul-based Citizens Coalition for Human
Rights of Abductees and North Korean
Refugees. It has been widely shown on
television and Internet sites, including
http://www.dailynk.com/file/2005/01/19/DNKR00
001267.wmv .
Do Hee Yun, secretary-general of the group,
says it is the first solid evidence of
nascent dissident activity 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 Los Angeles Times reporter
to Park, the defector, for his first
interview with the Western press. "They
believe their society should change, and they
want to bring the world's attention to the
human rights situation."
Do said Japanese television paid his
organization $15,000 for the video and that
it tried to pass on all of the money to
Park's group, but that after money brokers
took their cut, only $3,000 made it into
North Korea.
Park, who fled North Korea early this year,
said he worked 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. The trader asked him to use his
car to distribute pirated DVDs and videos
that were being smuggled in from China.
Foreign films are banned by the government,
which considers them cultural imperialism.
But then his Pyongyang contact asked Park to
start shooting videos to send abroad.
Park said he was eager to oblige. Even though
he was a member of the ruling Korean Workers'
Party, and relatively privileged, he said he
was disenchanted. "I saw that everybody was
starving, and the state wasn't doing anything
but building mausoleums to Kim Il Sung" —
the late founder of North Korea and father of
Kim Jong Il — "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, he knew that North Korea badly
lagged.
Park started filming in 2003 with a small
camera that was smuggled across the Chinese
border. He concealed it in a shoulder bag or
an empty cigarette carton, pointing the lens
through a small hole. He recruited several
other people he knew in Hoeryong to help.
With his hidden camera, he shot footage of
wanted posters, of women crouching in the
dirt at a dismal black market and of people
waiting to hitch rides. Last fall, he painted
three anti-government banners in his
apartment and with two other people put them
up. The posters were only up for a few hours.
But the filmmakers wanted the footage to
serve as a gesture of their resistance to the
government because it is impossible to hold a
demonstration or speak out openly.
"The camera is our weapon," Park said. "We
wanted to break the myth that North Korea is
an impenetrable fortress.... Our goal is to
bring down the regime by spreading knowledge
to the outside world."
Their posters were all signed in the name of
the Freedom Youth League, an appellation
chosen to embody hopes for the next
generation, and detailed their accusations
against Kim Jong Il. They blamed him for the
country's poverty and for stifling reforms.
They accused him of arresting reformers and
causing the death of his father, who they
claimed died of grief because of the
country's deterioration.
Park said his Pyongyang boss told him that
the Freedom Youth League had cells in other
cities — Pyongyang, Chongjin, Kaesong,
Musan and Nampo — but that for security
reasons he never met anyone other than the
few he was working with in Hoeryong.
Much of Park's account can be confirmed. A
Japanese broadcaster, Asahi Television, which
also interviewed Park, did a sound analysis
and concluded that he was the man whose voice
is heard in the footage, program director
Hiromichi Shizume said.
Numerous defectors who have seen the footage
say that several scenes, particularly the one
at the bridge, were clearly shot in Hoeryong.
But they, along with North Korea analysts,
expressed doubts about whether the Freedom
Youth League was a genuine dissident movement
or just a few guys trying to make a quick
buck.
"I don't believe there are conditions in
North Korea for any kind of real opposition
movement. These people are out for money,"
said journalist Chu Sung Ha, a defector in
Seoul who covers North Korea.
North Korea permits only state-owned
publications or broadcasting; even the
slightest criticism of Kim Jong Il can result
in execution or deportation to a prison camp.
Under its law, three generations of a family
can be punished for the crimes of one member.
Regardless of the motives, there is little
doubt that a growing number of North Koreans
have found new purpose as amateur filmmakers
trying to document their country for foreign
TV. In many cases, the video cameras have
been supplied by activists and defectors
living in South Korea.
In March, Japan's NTV aired the most dramatic
footage, purportedly of a firing squad
executing three men in Hoeryong for helping
North Koreans escape across the river to
China. It was apparently filmed by a North
Korean who was among the hundreds of
spectators.
The first underground footage from North
Korea appeared in 1998, when the Japan-based
Rescue the North Koreans group gave a camera
to a North Korean refugee in China and sent
him back across the border. He captured
harrowing images of people lying near death
in the streets and begging children that
helped to convince the world that refugee
accounts of a famine ravaging the country
were true.
"It was almost impossible to film inside
North Korea then, because nobody owned a
camera," said Lee Young Hwa, the founder of
the Rescue organization. "Now, it has gotten
much easier and you're seeing many videos.
There are some rich people in North Korea who
own video cameras. You don't immediately fall
under suspicion just because you have a
camera."
The videos are stored on slim memory cards
that are easy to smuggle into China. From
there, they usually end up in Japan.
"All the videos have been shot with the
cooperation of South Koreans, but they go to
Japan. The reason is that the South Korean
government is reluctant to criticize North
Korea," Takase, the TV executive, said. "In
Japan, the demand for North Korean videos is
very high, as are the prices."
The most coveted footage is that from inside
the political prison camps, but nobody has
succeeded in penetrating what is widely
considered a gulag holding up to 200,000
people. There have, however, been shots of
ordinary prisoners.
When Park Dae Heung was told that the video
of the posters had been aired in Japan and
South Korea, his career as an underground
filmmaker came to an end. Fearful that his
voice could be identified reading out the
denunciation of Kim Jong Il, Park fled across
the Tumen River into China. He has been in
hiding ever since and is seeking political
asylum in the U.S. or South Korea.
Tags : DPRK North Korea Kim Jong Il Starvation Hoeryong Secret Movie |
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Affichage : 23116
Durée : 302 s |
| Judas Priest / Slayer - Dissident Agressor |
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Song: Dissident agressor
From the "Sin after sin" album (1977).
Also on Slayer's South of Heaven (1988).
Lyrics:
Grand canyons of space and time universal
My mind is subjected to all
Stab! Bawl! Punch! Crawl!
Hooks to my brain are well in
Stab! Bawl! Punch! Crawl!
I know what I am, I'm Berlin
Through cracked, blackened memories of unit
dispersal
I face the impregnable wall
Stab! Bawl! Punch! Crawl!
Hooks to my brain are well in
Stab! Bawl! Punch! Crawl!
I know what I am, I'm Berlin
Exploding, reloading, this quest never ending
Until I give out my last breath
I'm stabbing and bawling, I'm punching and
crawling
Hooks to my brain are well in
I'm stabbing and bawling, I'm punching and
crawling
I know what I am, I'm Berlin
Tags : Rob Halford K.K. Downing Glenn Tipton Ian Hill Tom Araya Dave Lombardo Kerry King Jeff Hanneman dissident agressor |
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Affichage : 10516
Durée : 344 s |
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