NKorea cracks down on karaoke bars, Internet cafes

SEOUL (AFP) - North Korea has ordered the shutdown of karaoke bars and Internet cafes as part of a battle to stem a flood of South Korean pop culture, media reports said Wednesday.

A directive issued by the Ministry of People's Security on July 3 called for the closure of all unauthorised karaoke bars, video-screening rooms, Internet cafes and online gamerooms, the Dong-A Ilbo newspaper said.

The directive was plastered on the wall of a government building in a northwestern border town, it said, without saying how it acquired its copy.

The move is part of a campaign to curb South Korean pop culture, which has been spreading fast in the hardline communist country, the newspaper said.

Defectors say South Korean pop songs and movies are popular in the isolated country, despite a steady campaign to weed out what state media has termed "decadent foreign culture and ideals."

Videotapes and CDs of South Korean films, music or TV soap operas enter mainly via neighbouring northeast China.

The July 3 directive called for an all-out campaign against "manoeuvres by the enemy" and activities that threaten North Korea's social system, Yonhap news agency said.

South Korean aid agency Good Friends has said that North Korean security authorities conducted door-to-door searches last month, especially along the border with China, to seize South Korean VCDs.

The first and only inter-Korean summit in 2000 saw a major expansion in cross-border contacts. According to a previous report by the South's state-run Korea Institute for National Unification, it also led to a rise in executions of smugglers of VCDs.

But the crackdown on South Korean pop culture has largely failed, the institute said in June.

North Koreans for decades had access only to state-run domestic media which extolled the virtues of "Great Leader" Kim Il-Sung and his son and successor Kim Jong-Il, known as the "Dear Leader."

Very few private homes had telephones and calls were connected through operators, while radios were sold with tuning knobs fixed to official stations.

But new technology is breaking down barriers, observers say. Mobile phones with pre-paid cards have been smuggled in from China.

And as households in northeast China upgraded to DVD machines starting early this decade, smugglers bought discarded VCR players cheaply and smuggled them across the border into North Korea.