Notes from Underground

U.S

. President George W. Bush was likely including North Koreans when, in last Thursday's inaugural address, he vowed: "When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you." Some residents of the authoritarian state may not need much encouragement: earlier in the week, a Seoul-based human-rights group released an anti-regime video that it says was produced by dissidents in the North. Following some jerky shots of a market, a high school and a factory, the camera pans across a poster that declares: "Down with Kim Jong Il!" in Korean characters scrawled in red ink. "People, let's all rise up and drive out the dictatorship!" The video ends with a shot of anti-Kim graffiti scrawled over an official portrait of North Korea's Dear Leader. A voice off-camera urges the U.S. and other countries to "help our movement to overthrow Kim Jong Il's authoritarian regime."

Reports of discontent have filtered out of the North for years, but this is the first time such sentiments have been filmed, according to Do Hee Yun, whose group, the Citizen's Coalition for Human Rights of Abductees and North Korean Refugees, released the footage. Do says a contact in China had smuggled the video out of the North; defectors from the area have said that the factory and other buildings shown in the footage are in Hoiryong, a small town near the border with China. The filmmakers, who call themselves the Youth Freedom League, have cells in other North Korean cities, including Pyongyang, says Do, and they want the world to pay attention: "They have put their lives at stake to tell the outside world about the prison-like conditions inside North Korea."

Any underground movement faces enormous difficulties getting traction in a country where police surveillance is pervasive, and the video has yet to be definitively authenticated.

Still, the samizdat film fits the picture painted by recent defectors of an increasingly angry and desperate populace. "I really think it reflects the popular mood," says Jasper Becker, author of a forthcoming book titled Rogue State: The Continuing Threat of North Korea. "There is a persistent pattern of people trying to voice their hatred of Kim Jong Il and blame him for the disasters that have overtaken the country." Those voices may be getting louder, but it's not clear that Bush—already entangled in Iraq—will be inclined to listen.