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10-03-2024
PYONGYANG: Tightened border controls introduced to curb COVID-19 are still strangling North Korea’s economic activity and informal trade networks more than 18 months after leader Kim Jong Un declared victory over the pandemic, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said.
North Korea was one of the first countries to act on reports of COVID-19 circulating in early 2020, sealing itself off from the outside world and its economic lifeline in China.
As Py
ongyang suspended freight shipments from China for two years, authorities also beefed up border barriers to prevent any movement between the countries going as far as issuing a shoot to kill order for people and animals to prevent them from spreading COVID-19.
Satellite photos of six locations on the China-North Korea border show that fencing was expanded to cover 321 kilometres in 2023, up from 230 kilometres before the pandemic, HRW said in a report released on Thursday.
Existing fences were also updated to include more watchtowers, guard posts, and secondary and tertiary layers of fencing, the rights group said.
Since then, heightened border security has made it nearly impossible for North Koreans to leave, with the number of defectors dropping sharply from 1,047 in 2019 to a low of 63 in 2021, and then 196 last year, the report said.
“The government’s persistent drive to control its population, overbroad and prolonged responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and expanded nuclear weapons capabilities, have combined with the intensifying external pressures of UN Security Council sanctions to turn North Korea already effectively a country-wide prison into an even more repressive and isolated state,” the report said.
As authorities ramped up border patrols during the pandemic, officials also cracked down on bribery that since the late 1990s had allowed North Koreans to evade government restrictions on daily life to the extent they could enjoy some freedom of movement and buy goods at formal and informal markets, according to HRW.
“Almost all” cross-border movement of people and formal and informal commercial trade has stopped since the pandemic began, the report said, citing interviews with 16 North Korean defectors who were in contact with family or informal brokers and smugglers still in the country.
“Informal traders can only get small packages that they can carry easily in their hands or hide in their body,” Lee Kwang Baek, director of the Unification Media Group, a Seoul-based NGO that broadcasts news to North Korea, said in the report.
The new security measures have made civilians afraid to even approach border regions for fear they could be shot, according to testimony from a former North Korean trader quoted in the report. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
