Word: myung
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...most recent anti-South probe began in September, after authorities caught a group of students in a university computer lab watching a new South Korean disaster film, Haeundae, according to the North Korean Intellectuals Solidarity (NKIS), the Seoul-based defectors' organization that Myung now manages. The group says it learned of the arrests from an antigovernment cell at a North Korean university, which they regularly contact to gather information from inside the hermit state. Inspection teams have also been purging border cities where the movies are smuggled in, and even executing some smugglers in public as a warning, according...
...Myung, whose organization actively opposes the regime, exposing North Koreans to foreign ways of life is not just a matter of wasting a few hours on a Friday night. "The government can target the distributors, and they can be shot," Myung says, "but the government can never stop people from wanting to see the movies...
...Myung Chul Jin, 43, a recently defected North Korean living in Seoul, it hasn't been an easy year. The government executed his uncle last year for subversion against the state, the former police commander says, and his constant worry for his family still living in the North sends his gaze to the floor of his office in Seoul. But there were good times in Pyongyang too: evenings with friends when they watched smuggled South Korean soap operas and American films like Superman Returns and Titanic. "North Koreans love foreign dramas," says Myung, using an alias to protect his family...
...Korea that the regime launched a crackdown this fall on North Korean university students, the movies' biggest audience, and smugglers at the Chinese border, charging some with promoting the ideology of the enemy state. "The government is terrified of the ideas North Koreans are getting about the outside world," Myung says. "The people are starting to ask, 'Why are we poor?' And they point to South Korea...
...latter. Ten years ago, that particular crime carried a sentence of five years in a prison camp; today, enemy-propaganda watchers are usually handed a sentence of three months or less of unpaid labor, according to two refugees in Seoul. The shift may not have been an ideological one: Myung, who served in the North Korean police just last year, says that the regime made the decision because it couldn't afford to send so many people to prison camps. (See rare pictures from inside North Korea...