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North Korea is one of the few nations where executions, usually of political prisoners, are carried out in public.
The execution of former (North) Korean Workers Party agricultural secretary So Kwan-hi was a typical example. Forced to take responsibility for the failure of agricultural policy, he was shot before thousands of spectators at a bus stop on Pyongyang's Unification Street in August 1997. Several defectors said they witnessed the execution.
In 1979, top North Korean actress Wu In-hui and the son of a wealthy returnee to North Korea were discovered naked in a car, the man dead from suffocation. Because of this, Wu began to name officials with whom she had affairs, and Kim Jong-il ordered her execution. Defectors like Kim Kil-son said the execution was witnessed even by Wu¡¯s daughter and husband.
Defector Yun Song-su, a former member of North Korea's internal security forces, testified that public executions reached their peak in the latter half of the 1990s, when food shortages were at their worst. He said people who stole cows for food or electrical wires for sale in China as well as human traffickers and those helping people defect to China were publicly executed around the country to make examples of them.
Public executions are carried out in similar fashions for both political and economic criminals. Before the execution, a judge reads the sentence, orders the execution, and the convict is then hung or shot. Hangings are reserved for more serious crimes. During executions by firing squad, three soldiers fire at each condemned man.
(Kang Chol-hwan, nkch@chosun.com )
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