Mick Hartley

Reports of a general clamp-down in North Korea  – and the Alone in Berlin parallels – are reinforced by this grim news item:

Some 500 people in North Korea attended a public execution of a man and a woman caught reading South Korean propaganda, an activist claimed Sunday citing sources in the North. Choi Sung-yong, the head of Family Assembly Abducted to North Korea said security services rounded up some 500 people including 50 family members of South Korean prisoners of war and abduction victims and made them watch the execution.

The victims were a 45-year-old woman accused of reading a South Korean propaganda leaflet and failing to notify authorities and a high-ranking regional military officer charged with pocketing the dollar bills that were sent along with the leaflets.

Choi said the families of the two were sent to a camp for political prisoners in South Pyongan Province.

The punishment of whole families – to purge the hereditary taint of disloyalty – is of course a North Korean speciality. 

On the subject of prison camps, here's news of a booklet coming out on North Korea's gulag:

It covers the current state of the political prison camp system; directions to No. 14 and 18 Camps; the ways prisoners continue to live, descriptions of forced labor and torture; and cases of public execution that these former prisoners have testified to witnessing.

All the events explained in the book are accompanied by copies of drawings made by the former prisoners themselves, many of which cannot be easily found elsewhere and which include drawings of the camps themselves; drawings as accurate as any satellite photo.

Among the most harrowing pencil-drawn images are those of torture inflicted on the prisoners. Shin Dong Hyuk, for example, describes how he was handed “fire torture” in punishment for the fact that his brother and mother had been caught attempting to escape, not to mention the story of how the two were publicly executed while his father and he were forced to watch.