A/HRC/25/CRP.1 my family was part of a very high or good class in North Korea.” Her father had been a miner.333 298. Among those who suffered the most extreme discrimination were South Korean prisoners of war (POWs) retained in the DPRK after the armistice.334 • Mr Yoo Young-bok, a former POW who fled the DPRK and returned to the ROK, explained at the Seoul Public Hearing: “Because we were POWs, we were discriminated against. They were looking down on us. Although we married North Korean women, our children were controlled, our children were kept under surveillance. They did not really give us good jobs; there were just no opportunities to make better lives for our children.”335 • Another former POW from South Korea worked in a coal mine in North Hamgyong Province for 40 years. He told the Commission that about a quarter of the miners were POWs and were under particularly strict surveillance by the Ministry of Public Security and the State Security Department. The witness was regularly interrogated and his interrogators seemed to know many details about his life. He married and had three sons and two daughters. His sons were neither allowed to join the army nor go to university, and one asked him “Why are we even born?” His daughters were not able to marry a man of good songbun, because they were from a POW family. Even his grandsons were denied the opportunity to join the army or to obtain a tertiary education. The witness recalled how a POW friend hung himself because his children complained so bitterly to him about their situation yet he could not do anything about it.336 299. Social mobility in the DPRK remains constrained despite the emergence of a private sector resulting from the de facto marketization of the DPRK economy that commenced during the famine and despite the advent of some limited new information technology. However, the role that songbun plays in determining a person’s opportunities is shifting. One well-known expert claims that the role of songbun – “once the single most important factor that determined the life of a North Korean” – is being displaced by wealth: “North Korean society has become defined by one's relationship to money, not by one's relationship to the bureaucracy or one's inherited caste status.”337 By most accounts, songbun still matters today, particularly at the very top and very bottom ends of the 333 334 335 336 337 84 Washington Public Hearing, 30 October 2103 (00:20:00). Also, witness Mr J was born in Yangbian, China. His father had been born in North Korea, and moved to China during the 1930s. As his father was an intellectual, the family became endangered during the Cultural Revolution, and they moved back to the DPRK in 1960. Mr J described being excluded from mainstream life in the DPRK because was he born abroad. He experienced discrimination in various ways including being sent to live far from any cities in North Hamgyong province where Korean POWs and other immigrants were settled. At school, he had been subjected to severe bullying for his accented speech and for wearing clothes from China. Despite being very good at gymnastics and getting selected by teachers for special training, only the children of party officials would be selected for competitions. Mr J was first assigned to work in a gold mine. He worked hard, and was promoted to leader of in a small work unit. His direct supervisor (a party member) also from the same village encouraged him to join the party, writing a recommendation for him. Mr J studied hard for the party tests, and applied twice, but was refused both times. He was later told by the supervisor that had recommended him that his application was excluded because under Kim Il-sung’s order, foreign-born nationals could not join the party (TSH049). Also TBG017. TBG008. Seoul Public Hearing, 23 August 2013, afternoon (00:18:35). TJH029. Andrei Lankov, “North Korea's new class system”, Asia Times, 3 December 2011. Also, ECC010.