What it means to live in North Korea

By Laura Bohnert

It seems almost everyone is on edge about North Korea right now as Trump continues to push tensions further and further—despite warnings about what this provocation might lead to—but what about the North Koreans in all of this? What’s it like living in the middle of what is probably the next US target?

As many have described, isolated.

North Korea defines itself as a self-reliant socialist state, although many consider it to be a totalitarian dictatorship, that is now being led by Kim Jong-un, a man whose ambitions are largely tied to his nuclear arsenal.

While North Korea does hold elections, its citizens, isolated in a propagandistic and militant state, are far from free. German-born photographer, Christian Petersen-Clausen, gained rare access to a number of North Korean cities as he travelled across the country with a tourist company; his photo-documentation revealed what he described as a mixture of national pride—and ever-present militarism. He described that it seemed like everyone was part of the military, a feeling amplified by the fact that even metro staff wear militaristic uniforms.

It all creates a sense of continuous monitoring that governs not only the actions of the citizens, but their thoughts and ideas as well. North Korea is isolated from the rest of the world and filled with images of propaganda. It has one channel on TV. It has its own internet (Intranet), a form that renders the smart phones many individuals display as expensive status symbols (even though many can only afford the shells) useless, connecting them only to North Korean propaganda. If citizens want access to foreign media (like Chinese soap operas and Hollywood movies), they need to be smuggled in on USB sticks.

North Koreans are unable to make phone calls to countries outside of North Korea either, and while Chinese sim cards can be acquired, making an international phone call is punishable by execution. It is also cut off from South Korea by a heavily fortified Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), and that means family members on either side are unable to see or communicate with each other.

While many women are sporting western styles of fashion, emulated from illegally obtained Chinese programs, there are also a lot of military style outfits, and, as with the smart phone shells, much of North Korean fashion involves the appearance of wealth; outside the capital (Pyongyang) are areas of deep poverty, where food is planted instead of flowers anywhere it might grow.

The tourist-eye view, however, is quite a different thing from the perspective of the North Koreans who are living it, as North Korean defector Yeomni Park revealed in a speech during the 2014 One Young World conference.

“North Korea is indescribable,” Park comments as she begins to describe the horrors she experienced under what is described as “the iron grip” of the country’s leader.

She describes horrific scenes of rape and violent oppression—including watching her friend’s mother publicly executed. “Her crime?” Park explains: “Watching a Hollywood movie.”

“There were no love stories—no Romeo and Juliet,” she describes. “Everything was propaganda about the Kim dictators.”

Park, now a human rights activist, fled the isolationist state when she was 13 years old. Her speech documents a state of fear among citizens that she explains aren’t free even to have their own thoughts. “When I was four years old,” she recounts, “I was warned by my mother not to even whisper. The birds and mice could hear me. I thought,” she admits, “the North Korean dictator could read my mind.”

Park goes on to describe the escape of a group of people who, armed with knives, were prepared to kill themselves rather than go back to North Korea. “We wanted to live as humans,” she explains, adding that “North Koreans are desperately seeking and dying for freedom at this moment.”

“We have to shed light on the darkest place in the world, she concludes. “North Korea is indescribable. No humans deserve to be oppressed just because of their birthplace. We need to focus less on the regime and more on the people who are being forgotten.”