N.Korean Cheerleaders Banished to Camps

The Chosun Ilbo
Feb. 17, 2006

Women who caught South Korea's attention with their charm and cheerleading antics when they accompanied the North Korean athletes to the Busan Asian Games have ended up in North Korean detention camps.

Lee Myeong-ho, a former inmate of the Daeheung concentration camp in South Hamgyeong Province who recently escaped to China, said “21 beautiful women” were detained at the camp since the end of last year. “Later I found out that they were the cheerleading team that had gone to South Korea,” he said.

Lee said since inmates are forbidden to talk to one another, he could not find out for sure what mistake they had made, but the rumor was that they had broken their promise to North Korean security services not to disclose what they had seen in South Korea.

Another defector explained the cheerleaders are picked among university students, propaganda squad members and music school students from good families. Before they were sent to South Korea, they had to sign a pledge bearing their 10 fingerprints that says if they are going to an enemy country -- Pyongyang’s epithet for the South -- they must fight as soldiers of leader Kim Jong-il and never talk about what they have seen or heard in South Korea once they return. They agree to accept punishment if they break the promise.

The defector said the Daeheung camp usually houses those convicted of economic crimes with a political dimension but has recently also become a camp for political dissidents. The camp, known as one of the worst in North Korea, is located in a mining area high in ragged mountains where there is hardly any vegetation.

North Korea first sent 270 cheerleaders to the Busan Asian Games in September 2002. For the 2003 Summer Universiad in Daegu it was 306, and at the 2005 Asian Athletics Championship in Incheon there were 124.