N. Korea Perestroika Watch: Woman sent to firing squad for “gambling and drug use”

Did you hear the one about how Amerikkka’s prisons are filled with small-time drug offenders? Well, the workers’ paradise has solved that problem:

In mid-November 2014 in Sinuiju, North Pyongan Province, a woman in her 50s considered part of the donju [new affluent middle class] was publicly executed for “gambling and drug use,” Daily NK has recently learned.

According to Daily NK’s source in North Pyongan Province, the woman was “the wife of a North Korean trader in Dandong who was able to rapidly accumulate wealth by having Sinuiju’s wholesale market at her fingertips.”

He added, “Following an intense investigation after her initial arrest for gambling, this woman was found to have bribed officials with the Chosun Workers’ Party, the Ministry of People’s Safety, and most every law enforcement body in North Korea. Orders for her public execution were quickly handed down by the authorities as she was ‘practicing an unclean lifestyle by gambling and using drugs,’ running contrary to the accepted practices of a socialist society.” [Daily NK]

The report claims that the actual reason for her execution was that she was rich. (I guess that privilege is reserved for corrupt officials.)

So does that mean that a North Korean who makes it as far as the prison gate should consider herself lucky? If you’re asking yourself that, you must be new here. North Korea has another method for keeping its prison population down amid its own war on drugs: it maintains an “extremely high rate of deaths in custody . . . due to starvation, neglect, arduous forced labour, disease and execution.”