Since 2020, North Korea has used the corona pandemic to almost completely cut off the country from the outside world. Satellite images analyzed by human rights organization Human Rights Watch show how far the country has gone: hundreds of kilometers of double, sometimes even triple, fences have been erected along the northern border with China in the past three years. The researchers counted almost seven thousand guardhouses in the images. Border guards have orders to shoot people who get too close to the border immediately and without warning.
The measures make it even more difficult than before to leave the country. Between 2017 and 2019, an average of more than 1,100 North Koreans managed to cross the border per year, in 2020 this was only 229, and in 2021 and 2022 less than seventy per year.
Informal trade
The barriers and controls have also almost completely ended informal trade with China, on which many North Korean citizens depend. A strict campaign against corruption also contributes to this, explains Lina Yoon, lead author of the report report presented on Thursday: “North Koreans could make a living through trade, and one of the keys to this was bribery, to circumvent the strict structures of the state. This is now being tackled head on.”
Photos Maxar and CNES/Airbus/Google Earth via Human Rights Watch
This informal trade has also fallen sharply due to the sanctions that the UN Security Council imposed on the regime of Kim Jong-un in 2016 and 2017 after a series of missile and nuclear tests, including North Korea’s first hydrogen bomb. The UN measures mainly restricted North Korean exports: 90 percent of regular exports were affected.
When implementing those sanctions, China increased border control to such an extent that the official and informal supply of food from China, which is not covered by the sanctions, was also made very difficult, HRW notes. This deprives North Korean citizens not only of an important source of food, but also of much-needed cash flows.
“We say: one smuggler feeds eleven people,” the researchers quote a former trader who managed to leave North Korea several years ago. Women are particularly hit hard, because they are often the breadwinners in North Korean families; many men are employed in state-owned companies, without or for very little pay.
According to United Nations figures almost half of North Korea’s 26 million people are malnourished. People have died of hunger, especially outside the capital Pyongyang, according to media with contacts in North Korea.
Photos Maxar and Planet Labs PBC/Google Earth via Human Rights Watch
HRW calls on the UN to take greater account of the humanitarian and human rights situation when taking action against North Korea over its weapons program. According to Yoon, these are “two sides of the same coin.” “North Koreans cannot leave the country and refuse to participate in the nuclear program if they are designated to do so. And the North Korean government is pouring billions into its nuclear weapons program instead of social programs. ”
Russia
The regime itself hardly seems to be fazed by the sanctions, the report also notes. After a brief pause during the failed rapprochement attempts of then US President Donald Trump, North Korea’s weapons program continued at full speed. In 2022 and 2023, Pyongyang conducted more than a hundred missile tests.
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South Korean hairstyle
The isolation is not limited to fences and watchtowers. North Korea has also used the pandemic to further restrict access to foreign sources of information. A law to combat “reactionary ideology and culture” prohibits the viewing, possession or distribution of material that could “paralyze the population’s revolutionary sense of ideology and social class.”
This not only concerns foreign, mainly South Korean news media, but also books, films, music or series – which are smuggled into the country on memory cards. Violators may receive the death penalty. A South Korean hairstyle or South Korean language can also be severely punished. In January, the British broadcaster BBC published images of it two sixteen year old boys who received twelve years of hard labor for allegedly watching a TV series from South Korea.
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