Inside the dangerous world of Kim Jong-un's crooners

Kim Jong-un's ex-girlfriend was among a dozen well-known North Korean performers who were executed by firing squad nine days go, according to South Korean reports.

Hyon Song-wol, a singer and rumoured to be a former lover of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un

Once a leading singer and lover of Kim Jong-un, the downfall of Hyon Song-wol has shed light on the perils of life in the Supreme Leader's entertainment corps.

As the in-house bands to the world’s most brutal Communist regime, the Unhasu Orchestra, Wanghaesan Light Music Band, and Moranbong Ladies are well-versed in getting it right on the night.

After all, when the front row of the audience includes North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un, stage fright is not an option, and the only acceptable performance is a perfect one.

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Yet according to last week’s accounts of the death of Hyon Song-wol, the lead singer with the Moranbong Ladies, even the world of light entertainment is not immune from Pyongyang’s terrifying palace intrigues.

The singer of such patriotic ditties as I Love Pyongyang and We are Troops of the Party, Ms Hyon had long been a national favourite, and enjoyed a brief period as the young Kim’s girlfriend around a decade ago. Earlier this month, though, the petite 30-year-old was forced into a line-up of a very different kind.

In an act of viciousness extraordinary even by North Korean standards, Ms Hyon and 11 other performers were executed by machine gun, while surviving band members and victims’ immediate families were forced to watch.

The “audience” were then despatched to a prison camp from where they have not been heard from since - but accounts of the massacre, as yet unconfirmed, surfaced last week in newspapers in neighbouring South Korea.

The reports have shone a fresh light on one of the oddest aspects of the secretive and nuclear-armed regime - the so-called Happy Corps, a cabal of female entertainers who double as concubines to the North Korean elite. They are part of a wider group called the Fifth Division - a harem of up to 2,000 women trained to entertain senior figures at parties and sleep with them afterwards.

Happy Corps members are warned on pain of death to be keep discreet, but an insight into what was expected of them was given by Shu Chung Shin, a 25-year-old dancer who defected to South Korea.

In an interview with Bradley Martin, the author of the book Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader, she told how she was thrilled when party apparatchiks turned up at her college, looking to recruit big-eyed, nubile young women to join the Wanghaesan Light Music Band.

“I wanted to go... I would have nice clothes, French make-up, imported lingerie, good food - fruit, butter, milk - that was hard to find in our local area,” said Miss Shu, who was eventually turned down after a vetting check discovered that her family was not pure-blooded North Koreans. “At the time I was young.... so l didn’t realise sex might be part of the deal.”

Such state-sponsored prostitution has been in place ever since the days of Kim Jong-un’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung, who, as Mr Martin writes, took his role as “father of the nation” quite literally.

Convinced that impregnating young women would keep him feeling young himself, he sired scores of illegitimate children at secret love nests code named “Number One” and “Number Two.”

One part of the Fifth Division, known as the Satisfaction Corps, is dedicated entirely to prostitution, although its members’ parents are told that their children have been sent to work as undercover spies in South Korea.

Last week’s report about Ms Hyon’s death are now the subject of much speculation among Western diplomats in the region, for whom executions offer a rare, if perplexing, glimpse into the inner workings of the nuclear-armed dictatorship.

Was it, as the Chinese source quoted by the newspapers claimed, because Mrs Hyon and other band members had appeared in pornographic films that were sold in China? Had Mrs Hyon, as an old flame of the Supreme Leader, become the victim of a jealous plot by his current wife, Ri Sol-ju?

Or could it be part of a wider purge that also claimed the scalp of a senior general, Kim Kyok-sik, who was last week reported to have mysteriously vanished from public life?

^{Kim Kyok-sik (right) with Kim Jong il. (GETTY IMAGES)}

None of these speculations have any particular ring of truth, according to North Korea experts - save, that is, for the abrupt savagery of the execution itself.

“The whole thing seems very bizarre, but it also fair to say that there is no limit to North Korea’s weird and appalling behaviour,” said Aidan Foster-Carter, an expert on North Korea at the University of Leeds. “Kim Jong-un’s world is like the court of a medieval king, and if someone falls from favour for whatever reason, they may simply be got rid of.”

Since the reports of the executions first surfaced on Thursday, North Korea watchers across the Far East have had the unusual task of monitoring the internet for footage of the porn video in which Mrs Hyon allegedly starred.

Given the huge coverage that the execution story received in the region, it seems almost certain that a copy would surface somewhere, said John Everard, Britain’s ambassador to Pyongyang between 2006 and 2008, and author of a recent book about life in North Korea.

As of this weekend, though, no such footage has appeared - but nor has there been any denial of the execution reports from the regime.

Either way, it suggests that Kim Jong-un is not particularly anxious about improving his standing in the outside world, despite having backed off his threats to start war with South Korea earlier this year.

As Mr Everard points out, the accounts emerged just ahead of a visit to Pyongyang last week by Robert King, who is President Barack Obama’s special envoy for human rights issues in North Korea.

“Perhaps Kim just saw red for some reason, without worrying about what impact it might have on that visit,” Mr Everard said. “He has a reputation, as it were, for being “impulsive”.”

The incident has also underlined the privileged but precarious world of the regime’s favoured entertainers. To Western audiences, such middle-of-the-road ensembles may sound like a losing entry in the Eurovision Song Contest, typically resembling a cross between Pan’s People and the James Last Orchestra.

But performers who win the Supreme Leader’s approval can expect a life far better than the average North Korean citizen, with trips abroad, decent salaries, and privileged access to good schools and housing.

There is, though, a darker side being a contestant in Kim Jong-un’s very own version of “North Korea’s got Talent”. Those who incur his displeasure for any reason can expected imprisonment or worse, and many of the female entertainers are groomed from the start to act as concubines for him and his friends.

Such is believed to have been the case with Mrs Hyon, who is thought to have first caught Kim Jong-un’s eye around 10 years ago. They then started a relationship, only for it to be broken off around 2006 on the orders of Kim’s late father, Kim Jong-il, who did not see her as marriage material for his heir apparent.

^{Hyon Song-wol, ex-girlfriend of Kim Jong-un. (YOUTUBE)}

Why his father had such reservations is not known, but it may have been informed by his own personal knowledge of the extra “duties” that are routinely expected of female members of such bands, who are recruited from performing arts colleges around the country.

Kim Jong-il, who carried on the role of state pimp-in-chief from his own father before him, also made it clear that no entertainer should spurn his affections.

One who tried do so was Yung Hye-yong, the lead of another popular band, the Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble, who threw herself off the roof of a banquet hall rather than accept his advances, badly injuring herself. Enraged, Kim Jong-il instructed his agents to resuscitate her and then executed her in 2003, while she was in a coma.

Even so, however, a forced acquaintance with the sleazier side of the North Korean entertainment industry has its limits. In public, the regime maintains strictly prudish, and porn films are banned, making it unlikely that Mrs Hyon was involved in such activity.

“It is quite a straight-laced society,” said Mr Everard. “Besides, cameras for making films are not something that everyone in Pyongyang can afford.”

Likewise, he points out, there would seem no current reason for Mrs Hyon to have fallen foul of Kim Jong-un’s wife, who herself hailed from another band, the Unhasu Orchestra. “After Kim’s father said he didn’t approve of his son’s relationship with Hyon, she was allowed to marry an army officer, and it all seemed to be water under the bridge.”

Then again, it takes very little for entertainers in the public eye to come unstuck in North Korea. Take, for example, Kim Cheol Woong, a star pianist in the country’s state symphony orchestra, who had a private passion for the music of French pianist Richard Clayderman, which the regime deemed a morally corrupt form of Western “jazz”.

Having been denounced to the authorities, Woong was accused of treachery and forced to write a ten page long self-criticism, after which he fled the country. Interviewed while playing a human rights benefit concert in South Korea last month, he remarked: “Even if you are the greatest pianist in the world, you cannot play piano if you do not show sufficient loyalty.”