North Korean Economy Watch

Now available on Google Earth! 
(click above to download to your own Google Earth)

North Korea Uncovered v.3

Google Earth added a high-resolution overlay of the area between Pyongyang and Nampo.  In it, most of the Koguryo tombs listed with UNESCO are now distinguishable.  In addition, viewers can see the latest Kim Jong Il palace (including a yacht), the DPRK’s premier golf course, and the Chinese-built Taean Glass factory.  I have also made some progress in mapping out the DPRK electricity grid.

This is the most authoritative map of North Korea that exists publicly today.  Agriculture, aviation, cultural institutions, manufacturing, railroad, energy, politics, sports, military, religion, leisure, national parks…they are all here, and will captivate anyone interested in North Korea for hours.

Naturally, I cannot vouch for the authenticity of many locations since I have not seen or been to them, but great efforts have been made to check for authenticity. In many cases, I have posted sources, though not for all. This is a thorough compilation of lots of material, but I will leave it up to the reader to make up their own minds on the more “controversial” locations. In time, I hope to expand this further by adding canal and road networks.

I hope this post will launch a new interest in North Korea. There is still plenty more to learn, and I look forward to hearing about improvements that can be made.

Daily NK
Kim Young Jin
7/24/2007

The North Korean government, with the approaching Provincial People’s Assembly delegate elections on the 29th of this month, stepped-up one level the management of citizens and regulation of cell phones.

Kang Ki Ok (pseudonym), a civilian of Hyesan in Yangkang Provicne, said in a phone conversation with the reporter on the 20th, “Nowadays, I am afraid to turn on my cell phone. The People Safety agents and the National Security agents inspect us with fury in their eyes. People who use cell phones during the election season are punished, so there are people who bury their phones by putting them into jars.”

The North Korean government, when the People’s Assembly election season comes around every four or five years, concentrates on regulating the society by observing the movement of citizens and examining the registration cards.

The members of the elections preparations committee, composed of National Security agents, chairmen of People’s Units, and head officials of each provincial unit, are ordered to strictly investigate illegal acts occurring in their regions and to control them. Illegal acts are punished at the end of the elections.

According to Mr. Kang, the outflow of information has been secured at the border region with the upcoming delegate elections, so concentrated cell phone regulation were carried out. Further, the control of the border has been toughened recently, so the escape fee has skyrocked to the North Korean currency of 1 million won (approx. US$1,075).

Another source relayed, “Safeguarding Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il statues and research offices have been toughened by inspection units composed of each organ and enterprise farming laborers. Further, they are making sure that historic places and vestiges of battle are not destroyed.”

This source said, “Youth Leagues have also organized inspection units and are regulating unemployed persons and are strictly making sure that juveniles do not watch South Korean dramas and listen to illegal CDs and South Korean songs.”

On one hand, related to election preparation, each city, district, and county candidates were posted at the election site and citizens over 17 have gone into preparations such as conducting voter registrations through the election committee.

The source also relayed that the People’s Safety Agency have actively stepped up inspections by summoning civilians who have gone out to foreign sites to catch clam and mine gold for survival.

When the movement of the North Korean authorities to strengthen the solidarity of the regime was presented through this election, the citizens, in fear of being punished as trial cases, have produced a cautious atmosphere.”

At the time of the Supreme People’s Assembly elections in 2003, when thefts or acts of violence occurred, perpetrators were stringently punished regardless of whether or not they were members of the Workers’ Party. Further, in the case that teenagers got into fist fights, the parents were disciplined and jointly held responsible.

Mr. Kim, who defected in 2006, said, “At the time of the 1991 provincial elections, in the province where we were living, teenagers got into a fist fight. One of the gangs who started the fight accused the opponent of “stirring a political event destroying elections” and went to the parents and got compensation for damages by threatening them.”

Wall Street Journal
Melanie Kirkpatrick
7/20/2007

Of all the evidence turned up by the U.S. concerning irregularities in the United Nations Development Program’s operations in North Korea, some of the most disturbing concerns the transfer of dual-use technology.

As reported last month, the U.S. has uncovered documents showing the UNDP procured and delivered to North Korea in May 2006 technology that could be used for military purposes: global positioning system (GPS) equipment, a portable high-end spectrometer and a large quantity of high-specification computer hardware. According to packing lists and confirmation receipts, the items were intended for a “GIS” — geographic information system — project.

The equipment “is the type of technology subject to (U.S.) export controls,” says a spokesman for the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, which is responsible for issuing export licenses. So how did it end up in Pyongyang? It would seem more than passing strange that Commerce would have issued the requisite export licenses. The answer is: It didn’t.

U.S. officials, led by Ambassador Mark Wallace at the U.S. mission to the U.N., have spent a year looking into the UNDP’s operations in North Korea. Now, at the request of the State Department, Commerce searched its archives and found no record of any application for export licenses for the GPS, spectrometer or other equipment for the GIS project in North Korea.

Over the past 10 years, Commerce has received more than 200 license applications to export U.S. technology for U.N. projects in North Korea. Of those applications, the UNDP was named in a grand total of two, including one for software for the same GIS project that was equipped last year. That application was rejected.

Previously undisclosed documents show that the UNDP had been trying to equip the GIS project since at least 1999, when the application for an export license for mapping software was denied. Commerce cited concerns over the lack of safeguards in the project that could result in the software being diverted to the North Korean government and used for military purposes.

Yet seven years later, the UNDP procured and transferred sensitive technology to the same, unsafeguarded project — this time without bothering to apply for a license. And while there’s no evidence the UNDP went ahead and purchased the software for which it had been denied a license, that possibility must be considered, since GPS equipment is useless in such a project without mapping software.

The denial notice for “Case Number: Z177037” is dated Sept. 18, 1999. The “consignee in country of ultimate destination” is listed as the UNDP in Pyongyang. The one-page notice is written in prose that is clear and unambiguous: “The Department of Commerce has concluded that this export would be detrimental to U.S. foreign policy interests.”

The 14 items on the UNDP’s wish list were all classified “EAR99,” which means they are subject to Commerce jurisdiction but didn’t specifically appear on the Commerce Control List of items restricted for export. In discussions over the past several weeks with State Department officials, Commerce officials who examined the archives explained their agency’s decision to deny the export license. During the interagency review of the UNDP request, they say, questions were raised about whether the software would stay in North Korea after the UNDP international staff left and whether North Koreans would have access to the software.

Supporting documents show that the answer to both questions was yes. A letter dated April 5, 1999, from the software manufacturer that was seeking the export license on behalf of the UNDP, explains: “The project is supposed to be completed in three (3) years and the software will be left with the state agencies.”

Emails from the UNDP to Commerce offer further information about the UNDP’s security controls — or lack thereof. An Aug. 3, 1999 email from the UNDP’s Shankar Manandhar, in response to a Commerce query, says, “We would like to inform you that the North Korean nationals will have access to the computer in the project office in [the] presence of UNDP staff.” In another email, Mr. Manandhar notes that the software will be “utilized in the project office.”

The Defense Department recommended to Commerce that the application be denied. In a memo dated July 20, 1999, Defense explains that “These items could pose both national security and proliferation issues for the US and allies if diverted to the North Korean military.” Among the list of potential military applications cited are “planning a nuclear weapons infrastructure or missile launch sites.” And, “it could also be used for targeting.” In the end, as one Commerce official explained, since this type of mapping software can be used for military purposes, it was deemed to be “too great a risk of diversion.”

The Commerce official also says the case notes for the denial specify that several earlier licenses granted to the UNDP in North Korea had been conditioned in such a way that no North Korean nationals were to have access to the licensed items. Oh, really? Based on the UNDP’s replies to Commerce’s questions regarding the 1999 application, the official says that the licensing officer at the time believed it was “highly likely” that the UNDP was violating the terms of its previous licenses by allowing North Koreans access to licensed items. We now know — as confirmed by the U.N.’s preliminary audit of the UNDP’s North Korea operations — that the agency’s local staff were Ministry of Foreign Affairs employees assigned to the UNDP by the government.

It’s also worth noting the year these events took place: 1999. That is, the denial notice originated in Bill Clinton’s Commerce Department, part of an administration that was “conducting a one-sided love affair with North Korea,” in the felicitous phrase of Christopher Cox, then a Republican congressman closely monitoring Asian issues. On Sept. 17, 1999, the day before the issuance of the denial notice, the administration announced it would ease economic sanctions on North Korea. But approving the sale of sophisticated mapping software was a bridge too far even for the Clinton administration.

Since the U.S. went public in January with evidence of the UNDP’s lack of oversight of its programs in North Korea, the agency hasn’t exactly been forthcoming. At first, the UNDP denied that it had purchased dual-use equipment for North Korea, referring instead to “rice husk removers” and “plotters to help the [Korean] authorities more accurately produce maps for environmental monitoring.”

Next it look the line that the GPS equipment, portable spectrometer and computers delivered in May 2006 “do not represent state-of-the-art technology,” as Ad Melkert, the No. 2 UNDP official, put it in a June 28 letter to Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. An annex to Mr. Melkert’s letter describes the technology as “not high-end or sophisticated” — an assessment at odds with the representations of the manufacturers. Trimble, for example, maker of the GPS GeoXT Handheld sent to North Korea, describes its product as having “a powerful 416 MHz processor running the most-advanced operating system available.” Mr. Melkert says in the annex that the UNDP is investigating “whether the vendors [in the Netherlands and Singapore] were required to obtain export permits for these items” — which sure sounds like an effort to shift responsibility.

Since January, when the U.S. concerns were made public, the UNDP has pulled out of North Korea and the U.N. audit has confirmed extensive violations of U.N. rules regarding hiring practices, the use of foreign currency and site inspections. The latest U.S. revelations raise far more serious questions about the UNDP’s oversight. Under the most generous interpretation, the agency was negligent of its legal responsibilities to keep dual-use technology out of a country that is on the U.S. list of terror-sponsoring states. At worst, it deliberately transferred the technology, knowing it was breaking U.S. law and helping to strengthen Kim Jong Il’s military dictatorship.

These questions — and many more concerning the UNDP’s record in North Korea — highlight the need for an independent, external inquiry of the UNDP’s programs world-wide. The U.S. first went public with its concerns in January, after months of pressing the UNDP for more transparency. If anything, as the latest U.S. evidence shows, things are worse than anyone thought.

Ms. Kirkpatrick is a deputy editor of the Journal’s editorial page.

Korea Herald
7/12/2007

North Korea has ordered the closure of karaoke bars in an apparent attempt to stem outside influences on the isolated communist country, AP reported, quoting a South Korean civic group as saying Wednesday.

Separately, the North’s Ministry of People’s Security conducted house-to-house overnight inspections in areas near the border with China earlier this month to search for cell phones and illegal video CDs, the Good Friends aid agency said in a newsletter, according to the report.

It reported that the ministry said in a directive last week that the move against karaoke outlets was a ”mopping-up operation to prevent the ideological and cultural permeation of anti-socialism,” according to the aid group.

Violators were warned they would face punishment, including deportation to other regions within North Korea.

The group did not say how it obtained the information. Its previous reports on the North’s isolated regime have been reliable.

It was not clear how many karaoke bars the country has.

AP said officials at South Korea’s top spy agency, the National Intelligence Service, were not immediately available for comment.

Yonhap 
6/3/2007

NKeconWatch: Joshua at One Free Korea is skeptical about the article below, read here.  As a side note, see how much lower health care prices can be if consumers are permitted to pay for it themselves. 

High-tech portal devices such as music players and cameras are almost ubiquitous in South Korea, but many may believe they are nowhere to be found in poverty-stricken North Korea.

Unlike the conventional wisdom, however, a growing number of North Koreans, though still confined to some privileged classes, listen to music with MP3 players and take pictures with digital cameras in their daily life, a North Korean souvenir shop clerk told Yonhap News Agency.

A group of South Korean reporters visited North Korea last week to cover a delegation from South Korea’s Gyeonggi Province which has been promoting agricultural exchanges with the communist government. The reporters were allowed to visit a department store and other attractions in the North’s capital, Pyongyang.

When asked what he was listening to with an earphone, the North Korean clerk answered plainly, “MP3 music files,” adding that he downloaded songs from the Internet.

When asked if he has a digital camera, the clerk replied, “I am using the same model Canon that you are carrying now.”

In terms of IT development, the reclusive North has been regarded as lagging far behind South Korea where almost all younger people take it for granted to use digital devices.

The clerk’s response does not provide any insight into the North’s IT sector, including how many of them use such digital devices, but experts say that they offer a glimpse into changes taking place in North Korea, though slowly.

Meanwhile, a North Korean restaurant worker said that many beauty-conscious North Korean women receive plastic surgeries to look prettier. “You can easily see a woman on the street who had a double eyelid operation,” he said.

Such eyelid plastic surgery costs around 0.7 euro in the North, slightly less than the average monthly salary in the country, he said.

Freedom House
5/1/2007

North Korea comes in last place again: 197

Asia-Pacific Region: The Asia-Pacific region as a whole exhibited a relatively high level of freedom, with 16 countries (40 percent) rated Free, 10 (25 percent) rated Partly Free, and 14 (35 percent) rated Not Free. Nevertheless, Asia is home to two of the five worst-rated countries in the world, Burma and North Korea, which have extremely repressive media environments, as well as several other poor performers such as China, Laos and Vietnam, all of which use state or party control of the press as the primary tool to restrict media freedom.

Several bright spots worth noting include Nepal, where wide-ranging political change led to a dramatic opening in the media environment, and Cambodia and Indonesia, which also featured positive movement. Asia saw many negative developments in 2006, however, continuing the downward regional trajectory noted in last year’s survey. Coups and military intervention led to the suspension of legal protections for press freedom and new curbs imposed on media coverage in Fiji and Thailand. Intensified political and civil conflict during the year contributed to declines in Sri Lanka, East Timor and the Philippines. Heightened restrictions on coverage, as well as harassment of media outlets that overstepped official and unofficial boundaries, negatively impacted press freedom in Malaysia, China and Pakistan.

The Christian Post
Michelle Vu
4/29/2007

In a country described as a spiritual vacuum surrounded by the watchful eyes of a totalitarian regime and oppressed by a quasi religious cult centered on its leader’s family, North Koreans desperate to keep the Gospel alive have found innovative methods to smuggle in the Word of God.

Whether it is through human transport of Bibles or North Koreans risking their lives to testify to their families upon return or balloons filled with Christian tracts, the Word of God is penetrating the country where being openly Christian can result in execution.

From within the country, evangelism is taking place through disguised missionaries and North Korean Christians repatriated by China or returning on their own free will, according to North Korean defectors at the Open Doors USA panel discussion this past week on religious persecution in North Korea.

One North Korean defector, Ms. Eom Myong-Heui, said that she was evangelized through a Chinese-Korean missionary disguised as a businessman while still living in North Korea.

Eom – who is now an assistant pastor of a church in South Korea for North Korean defectors – said that she was desperate for food during the North Korea famine in the 1990s and had resorted to partnering with the disguised missionary businessman to earn money.

The Korean-Chinese missionary would teach her the Bible whenever they met and eventually Eom became a Christian.

Yet she and the other North Korean defector on the panel agreed that the best method to spread the Gospel in the closed society is through training North Korean refugees.

“The best and most effective way is using the North Korean refugees,” stated Eom, who said defectors can call their family and relatives in North Korea and share the Gospel.

Eom explained that she speaks to her two daughters still in North Korea through a cell phone from China that cannot be monitored by the North Korean government.

“We can train those North Koreans as strong believers and connect to relatives in North Korea … and conversations can spread [the] Gospel,” she said.

“Philip Lee,” a North Korean defector now living in South Korea. added that some North Koreans are even willing to return to the North and spread the Gospel. Lee, whose real name is withheld for security reasons, said that one of the main ministries in his church composed of North Korean defectors is to train strong Christian leaders who are willing to return to North Korea and witness.

But he noted that even refugees forcefully returned to North Korea can become powerful witnesses.

Lee recalled a repatriated North Korean Christian named Brother Luke who would daily urge his prison guards and officers, “You should believe in Jesus! You should accept Jesus!” Luke reportedly continued his exclamations even during torture and before a judge in court, according to Lee. Before his martyrdom one year later, one prison guard had accepted Christ.

Meanwhile, other North Korean defectors have found innovative ways to spread the Gospel in the North while still remaining in South Korea.

Lee Minbok, founder of North Korea Christian Association, began sending large balloons filled with thousands of Christian tracts across the North-South border about three years ago. Lee, previously a scientist in North Korea, is mostly joined by a small group of defectors or those who have worked with North Korean refugees. The balloons are said to land in North Korea within 20 minutes to 1 hour from its departure in the South.

“I’m proud that North Korea is angry,” said a grinning Choi Yong-Hun, a volunteer at NKCA and a South Korean who spent nearly four years in prison in China for helping North Korean refugees, to The Christian Post. “They ask, ‘Who sent it?’ We say that God sent it. It is a very effective way to send the Gospel.”

Other ways given to evangelize North Koreans include smuggling in Bibles, as Open Doors has done over the past ten years; Christian radio broadcast; and through organizations working with North Korean refugees along the border in China.

Last week’s panel discussion in Washington was part of North Korea Freedom Week, Apr. 22-29, which seeks to raise awareness of the brutal North Korean regime and to urge stronger actions by the U.S. government and international community to press North Korea on its human rights abuse.

The week mainly ended on Saturday with international protests against China’s violent treatment or North Korean refugees at Chinese embassies around the world.

Asia Times
Bertil Lintner
4/24/2007

The state of North Korea’s information-technology (IT) industry has been a matter of conjecture ever since “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il famously asked then-US secretary of state Madeleine Albright for her e-mail address during her visit to the country in October 2000.

The answer is that it is surprisingly sophisticated. North Korea may be one of the world’s least globalized countries, but it has long produced ballistic missiles and now even a nuclear arsenal, so it is actually hardly surprising that it also has developed advanced computer technology, and its own software.

Naturally, it lags far behind South Korea, the world’s most wired country, but a mini-IT revolution is taking place in North Korea. Some observers, such as Alexandre Mansourov, a specialist on North Korean security issues at the Honolulu-based Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies (APCSS), believes that in the long run it may “play a major role in reshaping macroeconomic policymaking and the microeconomic behavior of the North Korean officials and economic actors respectively”.

Sanctions imposed against North Korea after its nuclear test last October may have made it a bit more difficult for the country to obtain high-tech goods from abroad, but not impossible. Its string of front companies in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand and Taiwan are still able to acquire what the country needs. It’s not all for military use, but as with everything else in North Korea, products from its IT industry have both civilian and non-civilian applications.

The main agency commanding North Korea’s IT strategy is the Korea Computer Center (KCC), which was set up in 1990 by Kim Jong-il himself at an estimated cost of US$530 million. Its first chief was the Dear Leader’s eldest son, Kim Jong-nam, who at that time also headed the State Security Agency, North Korea’s supreme security apparatus, which is now called the State Safety and Security Agency.

Functioning as a secret-police force, the agency is responsible for counterintelligence at home and abroad and, according to the American Federation of Scientists, “carries out duties to ensure the safety and maintenance of the system, such as search for and management of anti-system criminals, immigration control, activities for searching out spies and impure and antisocial elements, the collection of overseas information, and supervision over ideological tendencies of residents. It is charged with searching out anti-state criminals – a general category that includes those accused of anti-government and dissident activities, economic crimes, and slander of the political leadership. Camps for political prisoners are under its jurisdiction.”

In the 1980s, Kim Jong-nam studied at an international private school in Switzerland, where he learned computer science as well as several foreign languages, including English and French. Shortly after the formation of the KCC, South Korean intelligence sources assert, he moved the agency’s clandestine overseas information-gathering outfit to the center’s new building in Pyongyang’s Mangyongdae district. It was gutted by fire in 1997, but rebuilt with a budget of $1 billion, a considerable sum in North Korea. It included the latest facilities and equipment that could be obtained from abroad. According to its website, the KCC has 11 provincial centers and “branch offices, joint ventures and marketing offices in Germany, China, Syria, [the United] Arab Emirates and elsewhere”.

The KCC’s branch in Germany was established in 2003 by a German businessman, Jan Holtermann, and is in Berlin. At the same time, Holtermann set up an intranet service in Pyongyang and, according to Reporters Without Borders, “reportedly spent 700,000 euros [more than US$950,000] on it. To get around laws banning the transfer of sensitive technology to the Pyongyang regime, all data will be kept on servers based in Germany and sent by satellite to North Korean Internet users.” Nevertheless, it ended the need to dial Internet service providers in China to get out on the Web.

Holtermann also arranged for some of the KCC’s products to be shown for the first time in the West at the international IT exhibition CeBIT (Center of Office and Information Technology) last year in Hanover, Germany. The KCC’s branches in China are also active and maintain offices in the capital Beijing and Dalian in the northeast.

Another North Korean computer company, Silibank in Shenyang, in 2001 actually became North Korea’s first Internet service provider, offering an experimental e-mail relay service through gateways in China. In March 2004, the North Koreans established a software company, also in Shenyang, called the Korea 615 Editing Corp, which according to press releases at the time would “provide excellent software that satisfies the demand from Chinese consumers with competitive prices”.

Inside North Korea, however, access to e-mail and the Internet remains extremely limited. The main “intranet” service is provided by the Kwangmyong computer network, which includes a browser, an internal e-mail program, newsgroups and a search engine. Most of its users are government agencies, research institutes, educational organizations – while only people like Kim Jong-il, a known computer buff, have full Internet access.

But the country beams out its own propaganda over Internet sites such as Uriminzokkiri.com, which in Korean, Chinese, Russian and Japanese carries the writings of Kim Jong-il and his father, “the Great Leader” Kim Il-sung, along with pictures of scenic Mount Paekdu near the Chinese border, the “cradle of the Korean revolution”, from where Kim Il-sung ostensibly led the resistance against the Japanese colonial power during World War II, and where Kim Jong-il was born, according to the official version of history. Most other sources would assert that the older Kim spent the war years in exile in a camp near the small village of Vyatskoye 70 kilometers north of Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East, where the younger Kim was actually born in 1942.

The official Korean Central New Agency also has its own website, KCNA.co.jp, which is maintained by pro-Pyongyang ethnic Koreans in Japan, and carries daily news bulletins in Korean, English, Russian and Spanish, but with rather uninspiring headlines such as “Kim Jong-il sends message of greetings to Syrian president”, “Kim Jong-il’s work published in Mexico” and “Floral basket to DPRK [North Korea] Embassy [in Phnom Penh] from Cambodian Great King and Great Queen”.

On the more innocent side, the KCC produces software for writing with Korean characters a Korean version of Linux, games for personal computers and PlayStation – and an advanced computer adaptation of go, a kind of Asian chess game, which, according to the Dutch IT firm GPI Consultancy, “has won the world championship for go games for several years. The games department has a display showing all the trophies which were won during international competitions.”

Somewhat surprisingly, the North Koreans also produce some of the software for mobile phones made by the South Korean company Samsung, which began collaboration with the KCC in March 2000. North Korean computer experts have received training in China, Russia and India, and are considered, even by the South Koreans, as some of the best in the world.

More ominously, in October 2004, South Korea’s Defense Ministry reported to the country’s National Assembly that the North had trained “more than 500 computer hackers capable of launching cyber-warfare” against its enemies. “North Korea’s intelligence-warfare capability is estimated to have reached the level of advanced countries,” the report said, adding that the military hackers had been put through a five-year university course training them to penetrate the computer systems of South Korea, the United States and Japan.

According to US North Korea specialist Joseph Bermudez, “The Ministry of the People’s Armed Forces understands electronic warfare to consist of operations using electromagnetic spectrum to attack the enemy by jamming or spoofing. During the 1990s, the ministry identified electronic intelligence warfare as a new type of warfare, the essence of which is the disruption or destruction of the opponent’s computer networks – thereby paralyzing their military command and control system.”

Skeptical observers have noted that US firewalls should be able to prevent that from happening, and that North Korea still has a long way to go before it can seriously threaten the sophisticated computer networks of South Korea, Japan and the US.

It is also uncertain whether Kim Jong-nam still heads the KCC and the State Safety and Security Agency. In May 2001, he was detained at Tokyo’s airport at Narita for using what appeared to be a false passport from the Dominican Republic. He had arrived in the Japanese capital from Singapore with some North Korean children to visit Tokyo Disneyland – but instead found himself being deported to China. Since then, he has spent most of his time in the former Portuguese enclave of Macau, where he has been seen in the city’s casinos and massage parlors. This February, the Japanese and Hong Kong media published pictures of him in Macau, and details of his lavish lifestyle there – which prompted him to leave for mainland China, where he is now believed to be living.

Whatever Kim Jong-nam’s present status may be in the North Korean hierarchy, the KCC is more active than ever, and so is another software developer, the Pyongyang Informatics Center, which, at least until recently, had a branch in Singapore. Other links in the region include Taiwan’s Jiage Limited Corporation, which has entered a joint-venture operation with the KCC under the rather curious name Chosun Daedong River Electronic Calculator Joint Operation Companies, which, according to South Korea’s trade agency, KOTRA, produces computers and circuit boards.

The US Trading with the Enemy Act and restrictions under the international Wassenaar Arrangement, which controls the trade in dual-use goods and technologies (military and civilian), may prohibit the transfer of advanced technology to North Korea, but with easy ways around these restrictions, sanctions seem to have had little or no effect.

North Korea’s IT development seems unstoppable, and the APCSS’s Mansourov argues that it can “both strengthen and undermine political propaganda and ideological education, as well as totalitarian surveillance and control systems imposed by the absolutist and monarchic security-paranoid state on its people, especially at the time of growing conflict between an emerging entrepreneurial politico-corporate elites and the old military-industrial elite”.

So will the IT revolution, as he puts it, “liquefy or solidify the ground underneath Kim Jong-il’s regime? Will the IT revolution be the beginning of the end of North Korea, at least as we know it today?” Most probably, it will eventually break North Korea’s isolation, even if the country’s powerful military also benefits from improved technologies. And there may be a day when the KCNA will have something more exciting to report about than “A furnace-firing ceremony held at the Taean Friendship Glass Factory”.

Bertil Lintner is a former correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic Review and is currently a writer with Asia-Pacific Media Services.

DOWNLOAD IT HERE (to your own Google Earth)

Using numerous maps, articles, and interviews I have mapped out North Korea by “industry” (or topic) on Google Earth.  This is the most authoritative map of North Korea that exists publicly today.

Agriculture, aviation, cultural, manufacturing, railroad, energy, politics, sports, military, religion, leisure, national parks…they are all here, and will captivate anyone interested in North Korea for hours.

Naturally, I cannot vouch for the authenticity of many locations since I have not seen or been to them, but great efforts have been made to check for authenticity. In many cases, I have posted sources, though not for all. This is a thorough compilation of lots of material, but I will leave it up to the reader to make up their own minds on the more “controversial” locations.  In time, I hope to expand this further by adding canal and road networks. 

I hope this post will launch a new interest in North Korea. There is still plenty more to learn, and I look forward to hearing about improvements that can be made.

Korea Herald
Annie Bang
4/10/2007

Twenty organizations of North Korean defectors established a politically unified group in Seoul yesterday and pledged to lead activities to democratize the North.

The group also revealed satellite photos of 17 private houses in the North owned by the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.

“The defectors, who experienced living under the dictatorship of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, must seek more systematic ways to democratize North Korea,” said Sohn Jung-hoon, secretary of the newly founded Committee of Democratizing North Korea.

The committee was formed by almost all the organizations of North Korean defectors in the South, including Democracy Network against North Korean Gulag, and Association of the North Korean Defectors.

“It is impossible for North Korea to recover its economy and resolve the shortage of food without freedom,” the committee said in a statement. “Democratizing North Korea is a must to bring peace on the Korean Peninsula, to improve inter-Korean relations and to recover the North Korean economy.”

Hwang Jang-yop, chairman of NKD, who was secretary of the Central Committee of the North Korean Workers’ Party, will lead the unified group.

There are over 100,000 North Koreans who defected from the North as of February, and the Seoul government believes the number will exceed 200,000 in five years.