Stricter border controls introduced to curb COVID-19 continue to strangle North Korea's economic activity and informal trade networks more than 18 months after leader Kim Jong Un declared victory over the pandemic, Human Rights Watch said ( HRW).
North Korea was one of the first countries to act on COVID-19 reports circulating in early 2020, isolating itself from the outside world and its economic lifeline in China.
As Pyongyang suspended cargo shipments from China for two years, authorities also reinforced border barriers to prevent any movement between the countries, going so far as to issue a shoot-to-kill order on people and animals to prevent them from spreading COVID-19. .
Satellite photographs of six locations on the China-North Korea border show that fences have been expanded to cover 321 kilometers in 2023, up from 230 kilometers before the pandemic, HRW said in a report released Thursday.
Existing fences were also upgraded to include more guard towers, guard posts and secondary and tertiary layers of fencing, the human rights group said.
Since then, increased border security has made it almost impossible for North Koreans to leave, and the number of defectors fell sharply from 1,047 in 2019 to a low of 63 in 2021, and then to 196 last year, according to the report.
“The government’s persistent push to control its population, overly broad and protracted responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and expanded nuclear weapons capabilities have combined with intensifying external pressures from UN Security Council sanctions.” UN Security to convert North Korea, which is already effectively a country in the entire country. prison, to an even more repressive and isolated state,” the report says.
As authorities stepped up border patrols during the pandemic, officials also cracked down on bribery that since the late 1990s had allowed North Koreans to evade government restrictions on daily life to the extent they could enjoy some freedom of movement and purchasing goods in formal and informal markets. , according to HRW.
“Almost all” cross-border movement of people and formal and informal trade have stopped since the pandemic began, the report said, citing interviews with 16 North Korean defectors who were in contact with family members or informal intermediaries and smugglers still in the country.
“Informal traders can only obtain small packages that they can easily carry in their hands or hide on their body,” Lee Kwang Baek, director of Unification Media Group, a Seoul-based NGO that transmits news to North Korea, said in the report. . .
New security measures have made civilians afraid to even approach border regions for fear of being shot at, according to testimony from a former North Korean trader cited in the report.
“My [relative] He said there were no words to describe how hard life was. there was not [informal] trade with China, not even to get some rice or a bag of wheat. Yeah [authorities] “If I heard of a soldier allowing that, that person would simply disappear,” the trade said in the report. “The soldiers are very afraid… My [relative] said the people in [her area] “He said there isn’t a single ant crossing the border.”
North Korean authorities have also begun cracking down on jangmadang, or informal markets, which had been tolerated to supplement people's daily needs after a catastrophic famine in the 1990s, the collapse of the government rationing system and continued international sanctions, according to the report.
Officials have imposed harsher punishments, from forced labor to capital punishment, for “distributing imported products that do not have official trade certificates and conducting economic activities on streets or places without permits,” HRW said.
The rights watchdog said it had received reports that authorities were clamping down on “foreign culture, copying South Korean slang, hairstyles and clothing.”
Young people who watched or distributed the Netflix series The Squid Game and South Korean films have been sentenced to hard labor or even executed, according to defectors cited in the report.
Before the pandemic, a study by the US-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) recorded 436 officially sanctioned markets spread across rural and urban areas of North Korea that provided access to food, medical supplies and movies. and bootleg music.
Often run by married women seeking to supplement the low wages earned by other family members, the markets earned the government approximately $56.8 million per year in taxes and fees, according to CSIS estimates.
Peter Ward, a researcher at the South Korea-based Sejong Institute who was not involved in the report, said North Korea has yet to overcome COVID like other countries have.
“When we talk about post-COVID in the West, South Korea, Japan, we are talking about 2022, when things start to normalize. North Korea's normalization has been long overdue and you could say they haven't finished normalization yet,” Ward told Al Jazeera.
“The black market… is partially supplied by cross-border smugglers and smuggling networks, and these networks are substantially damaged by COVID-era closures and border controls,” Ward added.
