BBC Publishes Three Secret Interviews with People Living Inside of North Korea

Via a reader tip comes this interesting article from the BBC where they secretly interview three North Koreans about life under the Kim Jong-un regime:

Under the tyrannical rule of Kim Jong Un, North Koreans are forbidden from making contact with the outside world. With the help of the organisation Daily NK, which operates a network of sources inside the country, the BBC has been able to communicate with three ordinary people. They are eager to tell the world about the catastrophic toll the border closure has taken on their lives. They understand if the government discovers they are talking to us, they would likely be killed. To protect them, we can only reveal some of what they have told us, yet their experiences offer an exclusive snapshot of the situation unfolding inside North Korea.

BBC

According to one of the North Koreans interviewed the food situation has gotten very bad due to the sealing of the border with China because of COVID:

“Our food situation has never been this bad,” Myong Suk tells us. (….)

Now when her husband and children wake, she prepares them a breakfast of corn. Gone are the days they could eat plain rice. Her hungry neighbours have started knocking at the door asking for food, but she has to turn them away.  

“We are living on the front line of life,” she says.

Here is what another North Korean had to say about the food situation:

At first Chan Ho was afraid he might die from Covid, but as time went on, he began to worry about starving to death, especially as he watched those around him die. 

The first family in his village to succumb to starvation was a mother and her children. She had become too sick to work. Her children kept her alive for as long as they could by begging for food, but in the end all three died. Next came a mother who was sentenced to hard labour for violating quarantine rules. She and her son starved to death. 

More recently, one of his acquaintance’s sons was released from the military because he was malnourished. Chan Ho remembers his face suddenly bloating. Within a week he had died. 

You can read much more at the link, but the interviewees say that COVID is being used as an excuse to crackdown on the people and stop cross border trade with China and defections to South Korea. It is apparently working because people are starving and many of those that attempt to escape now are publicly executed. Here is the final comments from the article:

Chan Ho blames the international community. “The US and UN seem half-witted,” he says, questioning why they still offer to negotiate with Kim Jong Un, when it is so clear he will not give up his weapons. Instead, the construction worker wishes the US would attack his country.  

“Only with a war, and by getting rid of the entire leadership, can we survive,” he says. “Let’s end this one way or another.” 

Myong Suk agrees. “If there was a war, people would turn their backs on our government,” she says. “That’s the reality.” 

The problem is no one wants a war with North Korea to save starving people at the cost of destroying Seoul and possibly causing a greater regional war. Thus these poor North Koreans are stuck starving while their leader Kim Jong-un and his family get fatter and fatter.