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First signs of protest in world's top secret state
(Filed: 18/01/2005)
The first known visual evidence of dissent within the world's most secretive state emerged yesterday when video footage taken in a North Korean factory showed a portrait of the dictator, Kim Jong-il, defaced with graffiti demanding freedom and democracy.
The 35-minute video clip, said to have been taken in November, was posted on the website of an opposition group based in South Korea. It shows a poster of Kim scrawled over with the words: "Down with Kim Jong-il. Let's all rise to drive out the dictatorial regime.''
Poster of Kim Jung-il
A defaced poster of Kim Jong-il in a factory in Hoeryong
Still frames captured from the clip and a partial transcript were made available by the Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights, a group of defectors and refugees who have settled in the South.
According to another opposition group in South Korea, the footage was taken in the north-eastern border city of Hoeryong and was passed to activists in China.
The Citizens' Coalition for Human Rights of Abductees and North Korean Refugees, based in Seoul, said the act of dissent against the paranoid leadership of the totalitarian state and its broadcast abroad suggested the first signs of an attempt to forge a domestic movement against Kim.
Such an act would be considered a grave crime in the North and would mean a death sentence without trial for the perpetrator, said Do Hee-youn, who heads the group. "It's no ordinary group of people who took this video," he told Reuters news agency.
The video, which also shows street scenes outside the factory, is accompanied by the voice of a narrator.
"The gentle and ordinary people of North Korea need a new leader," a male voice says. "There is a great potential for democracy in this country."
Kim inherited the leadership of the world's most reclusive communist state in 1994 on the death of his father, Kim Il-sung.
