North Korea: The New Generation Losing Faith In The Regime

[Purveyor]

After decades of absolute control, Pyongyang's iron grip on the lives of ordinary citizens is finally slipping. Tania Branigan meets the people who no longer believe the propaganda

Tania Branigan in Yanji
The Guardian, Monday 21 April 2014

If she is lucky - if her husband or children can slip away unnoticed to the riverside, nearer the Chinese phone masts - Chae Un-ee can talk to her family each day. “Talk” is perhaps an exaggeration; her loved ones end the call, made on a smuggled handset and SIM card, almost as soon as it begins.

“They have to be very quick because otherwise the phone can be tracked down,” she said. “It’s mainly just to hear their voice and know that they’re okay. If they don’t call me I worry, because the situation is very tense there.”

“There” is North Korea. Chae is not a dissident, not even a defector; only a mother working abroad in China to feed her family. Yet the North’s control of its citizens is such that even this work, in the country’s only significant ally, could result in harsh punishment.

Six decades after its creation, North Korea remains a totalitarian state, controlling not just the expression and movements of its citizens, but their livelihoods, viewing habits and even haircuts.

A United Nations report released last month warned that the “gravity, scale and nature of [human rights] violations reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world”.

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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/22/north-koreans-turning-against-the-regime

[agbdf]

1. I hope the people will rise up against this oppressive regime

I saw the UN report on the concentration camps in North Korea. The are as bad or worse than the gulags in former USSR during the era of Stalin. I only hope the elites in North Korea, who live like kings while the masses starve are brought to justice someday before the UN.

[MicaelS]

2. Forget the UN.

I hope the people take care of their own elites. People's Justice. Just exactly like what happened to Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife in Romania.

[Marrah_G]

3. Sadly I am not confident that can happen

The people are unarmed, half starved and live in a constant state of distrust, fear and reverence. It's the worlds largest cult, in my opinion, and it's gone on so long that those who remember anything from before the regimes are quickly dying off.