About 10 military officials of North Korea were reportedly punished after they were caught with “impure” video files, including Hollywood films and Japanese porn.
This comes as a crackdown on illegal foreign media turned its eyes on high-ranking men in uniform, sources told RFA. In December 2020, North Korea passed the draconian Elimination of Reactionary Thought and Culture Law. It carries a maximum penalty of death for watching, keeping, or distributing media from countries, particularly from America and South Korea.
A strike force, Surveillance Bureau Group 109, was tasked with seeking out and arresting violators. Over the past year, many civilians were caught by the strike force. They were sentenced to hard labor, life in prison, or death.
But now the strike force is focusing on high-ranking military officials. Senior officers who use official computers or have devices or mobile phones of their own are reportedly being targeted by the strike force. A source said that since the beginning of January, the General Political Bureau of the People’s Army started an "intensive inspection on the use and possession of ‘impure’ video media." The source claimed that a member of the 109 Joint Inspection Team said that about "10 officers who stored impure recordings and watched them have been punished, so the military command is getting nervous."
The source said that one official had been caught in possession of 10 Japanese pornographic movies, 3 South Korean movies and several South Korean TV shows. Another high-ranking military officer was reportedly found to have “three South Korean adult magazines and 20 South Korean 'superstitious materials' on his laptop." After the inspection, both were reportedly punished.
The source added that all units are nervous as "they announce that the 109 Joint Command will begin random inspections… of all the units where someone was caught in the crackdown this time.”
North Korean authorities consider K-Pop music and other South Korean media dangerous as they are thought to encourage people to defect. Daily Star reported that out of 200 North Koreans who had moved to South Korea, 90% of them said that they had accessed Western music and TV while living in the North. About 75% of them said that they knew of someone who had been punished for it.
In 2017, Independent reported that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un apparently punished leading military officials in his regime for “impure behavior." According to analysts, the dictator was attempting a “brutal and efficient” bid to tighten his grip on power by getting rid of senior military officers.
