North Korea has recently tightened state control over its hunger-hit population amid U.S.-led pressure over its nuclear weapons program and human right conditions, sources here say. South Korean officials and analysts interpret the move as part of efforts to prevent mounting outside threats over the nuclear standoff from triggering internal threats or opposition to the Stalinist leadership. Boosted by external threats, domestic opposition can jeopardize the totalitarian regime, evidenced, they say, by Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu, who was shot to death in December 1989 as communist rule ended in Eastern Europe.In the latest development, two North Koreans were shot to death in public in late February on charge of smuggling North Korean women into China, according to a Seoul-based online radio service run by defectors from the communist nation. The execution took place at a marketplace in the North Korean city of Heoryong, bordering China and Russia on Feb. 28, Free NK (North Korea) said, citing a North Korean staying in a Chinese border city. According to North Korean defectors and intelligence sources in Seoul, human trafficking is rampant in North Korea for sex trade and labor. "Attitudes towards sex have changed dramatically in North Korea," said a defector who resettled in Seoul last year. "North Korean women who illegally crossed the border into China for food were sold into the sex trade," he said. "Female fugitives are working in restaurants and karaoke in China to earn money," the defector said.
The open execution comes at a time when outside influence is seeping in the watertight society. North Koreans traveling to China are exposed to the rapidly spreading capitalist culture there, and some of them smuggle radios and CDs containing South Korean songs and TV dramas, which are popular in most of Asia. With no signs of a revival of the country's tattered economy, cracks were starting to show in North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's dynastic control. Leaflets and posters against Kim's rule appeared in the nation. In the face of growing cracks in the system, North Korea amended its criminal code last year increasing penalties for expressing criticism of the government and other "anti-state" crimes. The revision, the fifth since 1950, also calls for tougher regulation on new crimes caused by infiltration of outside information.