North Korean Economy Watch

According to the Washington Post:

The Obama administration, concerned that Burma is expanding its military relationship with North Korea, has launched an aggressive campaign to persuade Burma’s junta to stop buying North Korean military technology, U.S. officials said.

Concerns about the relationship — which encompass the sale of small arms, missile components and technology possibly related to nuclear weapons — in part prompted the Obama administration in October to end the George W. Bush-era policy of isolating the military junta, said a senior State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Senior U.S. officials have since had four meetings with their Burmese counterparts, with a fifth expected soon. “Our most decisive interactions have been around North Korea,” the official said. “We’ve been very clear to Burma. We’ll see over time if it’s been heard.”

…

Underlining the administration’s concerns about Burma is a desire to avoid a repeat of events that unfolded in Syria in 2007. North Korea is thought to have helped Syria secretly build a nuclear reactor there capable of producing plutonium. The facility was reportedly only weeks or months away from being functional when Israeli warplanes bombed it in September of that year.

“The lesson here is the Syrian one,” said David Albright, president of the nongovernmental Institute for Science and International Security and an expert on nuclear proliferation. “That was such a massive intelligence failure. You can’t be sure that North Korea isn’t doing it someplace else. The U.S. government can’t afford to be blindsided again.”

Burma is thought to have started a military relationship with North Korea in 2007. But with the passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution last June banning all weapons exports from North Korea, Burma has emerged “as a much bigger player than it was,” the senior U.S. official said.

In a report Albright co-wrote in January, titled “Burma: A Nuclear Wannabe,” he outlined the case for concern about Burma’s relations with North Korea. First, Burma has signed a deal with Russia for the supply of a 10-megawatt thermal research reactor, although construction of the facility had not started as of September.

Second, although many claims from dissident groups about covert nuclear sites in Burma are still unverified, the report said that “there remain legitimate reasons to suspect the existence of undeclared nuclear activities in Burma, particularly in the context of North Korean cooperation.”

Previous posts about the Myanmar-DPRK relationship can be found here. 

Read the full story here:
U.S. increasingly wary as Burma deepens military relationship with North Korea
Washington Post
John Pomfret
3/4/2010

According to TVNZ:

North Korean experts were in Vietnam this week to advise the government on – no, not uranium enrichment – choreography for an extravaganza celebrating Hanoi’s 1,000th anniversary, state media said.

The delegation was led by Song Pyong Won, deputy director of the Arirang performance department in North Korea’s Ministry of Culture, and included experts in mass performance, stage design, sound and lighting, reported the website of the newspaper Saigon Tiep Thi (sgtt.com.vn).

“This is the advance team that will make preparations for the various art performances, including card flipping to make images and words, as well as stage design, sound and lighting for the opening ceremony,” the newspaper said.

Hanoi will mark its 1,000th anniversary on October 10 this year.

Song hoped “through this visit the delegation would gain a precise grasp of the basic material conditions in Vietnam, like human resources, so that the staged programme can be the most unique and best possible,” the article said.

The group met representatives of Vietnam’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and planned to visit various anniversary event venues, including the 40,000-seat My Dinh Stadium. It would also visit other sites, such as Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, it said.

Read the full story here:
N Korea teaches Vietnam how to party
TVNZ
3/5/2010

According to Bernama (Malyasia):

Farmers in Pahang will soon be able to use North Korean technology to commercially grow paddy, after an alliance was formed between North Korea and Syarikat Sungai Duri Plantations Sdn Bhd.

Sungai Duri Plantations managing director Datuk Normala A. Kahar said the technology acquired from North Korea was used countries like China, Uganda, Angola and the Philippines successfully.

Normala said five experts from North Korea who would be involved in a project that covers an area of 263 hectares in Sungai Pelak, Pekan, would conduct a study and research to help soil enrichment and identify pest that can be a problem to the growth of paddy.

She added that an area of 60 hectares in Mambang, Pekan had already been planted with the MR219 type of seeds produced by Mardi and would be ready for harvest in May.

“The results have been very encouraging and we are optimistic that the project will be a success,” she told reporters after sealing an agreement with the North Korean government here on Thursday.

Normala said through the technology, farmers can reap up to seven tonnes of paddy per hectare a season.

Malaysia has an interesting relationship with the DPRK.  I have been told that Malaysia does not require entry visas for North Koreans.  If this is not true, please let me know.  There are also a couple of North Korean restaurants in Kuala Lumpur.  Finally, the Mansudae Overseas Projets Group built the Rice Museum (“Muzium Padi” located here) in northern Malaysia.

Pahang is here.

According to the Associated Press (via the Washington Post):

North Koreans are getting better medical treatment as the result of a joint program between the two Koreas that has trained thousands of doctors, provided modern equipment and renovated hospitals, the World Health Organization said Thursday.

Maternal mortality has declined by over 20 percent since 2005, and diarrhea cases and deaths in operations have also dropped, said Dr. Eric Laroche.

The World Health Organization has helped in the wide-ranging program, which started in 2006 and is funded by South Korea. It has cost a total of $30.2 million so far.

The program has trained more than 6,000 doctors and nurses in emergency obstetric care, newborn care and child illnesses, said Laroche, who assessed its progress in a four-day visit to North Korea.

The specialization marks a change in health strategy in North Korea, which has about 90,000 family doctors who care for about 130 families each, according to Laroche.

“They know each family one by one,” he said. But, he added, “they’re extremely keen to be trained.”

…

Laroche said hospital staff have been trained in hygiene and clinics have received better material for operations, blood transplants and other medical interventions.

Numerous hospitals have been renovated, and material has also been distributed to 1,200 rural clinics.

Between 2007 and 2009, the number of patients dying in operations fell 73.4 percent, said Laroche, citing a study by the University of Melbourne.

He declined to give an overall view of the health system in the isolated communist nation. But he said services were well-spread among cities and communities.

Read the full article here:
WHO: Korean cooperation boosting health in north
Associated Press (via Washington Post)
Elaine Engler
3/4/2010

According to Yonhap:

North Korea threatened Thursday to revoke its contracts with [Hyundai Asan] for tours to its Mount Kumgang unless the Seoul government agrees to quickly resume the tourism program that was suspended two years ago, following the shooting death of a South Korean tourist.

Officials from South and North Korea held a fresh round of talks early last month, but failed to reach an agreement on measures that will ensure the safety of South Korean tourists traveling to the communist nation.

…

“If the South Korean government continues to block the travel route while making false accusations, we will be left with no choice but to take extreme measures,” an unidentified spokesman for the North’s Asia-Pacific Peace Committee said in a statement carried by the country’s official (North) Korean Central News Agency.

The spokesman added such measures will include the nullification of contracts with South Korea’s Hyundai Asan for the mountain tour program.

Yonhap notes that Seoul is demanding an official apology for the death of the female South Korean tourist in 2008.  In the past, however, Seoul has made multiple demands to the DPRK for resumption of Kumgang Tours. The South Korean government does not plan to allow tourists to return to Mt. Kumgang until the DPRK:

1. Cooperates in an investigation of the shooting of a South Korean tourist last year.

2. Implements measures to prevent a recurrence.

3. Guarantees tourist safety.

4. Provides more transparency about how it spends the money it receives from the Kumgang resort.

Accordong to Yonhap, the DPRK is willing to implement No. 3.

I have added the following CRS reports to my “DPRK CRS Reports” page:

1. North Korea: Terrorism List Removal

2. North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons Development and Diplomacy

3. North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons: Technical Issues

4. North Korea: Economic Leverage and Policy Analysis

Hat tip to a consistently helpful reader. 

This year Joseph Bermudez, a military analyst for Jane’s Intelligence Review and author of The Armed Forces of North Korea, launched a journal dedicated to the discussion of the DPRK military: KPA Journal. 

Volume 1, No. 2 contains articles on the 1st Engineer River Crossing Regiment and the KN-02 SRBM (Short Range Ballistic Missile).  You can download it here.

You can download the inaugural issue here.  Both have been added to my burgeoning “DPRK Military Resources” page.

Is is just me, or does anyone else see the “face in the ocean”?  It is in the West Sea north-west of Sunan.

Click image for larger version or see it in Wikimapia here.

1. Alejandro Cao de Benos, head of the Korean Friendship Association,  did an interview for an Italian publication (Page 1, Page 2).  Josh is posting a translation: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.

2. Flower of Reunification: North Korean propaganda film about Im Suk Yong.  Lots of great footage of the 1989 World Festival of Youth and Students in Pyongyang.  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7.

3. North Korea has launched a new propaganda campaign aiming to increase living standards.  See the new paintings in the Choson Ilbo here.

 4. Ice skating: Pyongyang might have the DPRK’s only indoor ice skating rink (as far as I know), but ice skating–particularly on frozen rivers and lakes–seems to be pretty popular in the DPRK.  Scenes like the one below (Hyangsan) can be easily found in North Korea on Google Earth:

5. Reunification fruit.

6. According to Google’s international dailing chart, North Korea and Cuba are the most expensive places to call!

7. North East Asia Matters posts interview with former member of KJI pleasure squad.

Since the Daily NK became the first to move on the DPRK’s currency revaluation the number of references they have received in the mainstream media have soared.  I have found the Daily NK a terrific resource from the earliest days of this blog so I am thrilled to see their reports become so widely read.

This week, the New York Times published an interesting article pulling back the curtain on the Daily NK‘s operations (about which I know little).  According to the article:

For a journalist who helped break one of the biggest stories out of North Korea in the past year, Mun Seong-hwi keeps an extremely low profile. The name he offers is an alias. He does not reveal what he did in North Korea before his defection in 2006, aside from mention of a “desk job,” in order to protect relatives left behind.

He also maintains a wall of secrecy around his three “underground stringers” in North Korea, who he says do not know he works for Daily NK, an Internet news service based in Seoul and reviled by Pyongyang.

“I take pride in my work,” Mr. Mun, a man in his early 40s with brooding eyes and a receding hairline, said in an interview. “I help the outside world see North Korea as it is.”

Daily NK is one of six news outlets that have emerged in recent years specializing in collecting information from North Korea. These Web sites or newsletters hire North Korean defectors and cultivate sources inside a country shrouded in a near-total news blackout.

While North Korea shutters itself from the outside — it blocks the Internet, jams foreign radio broadcasts and monitors international calls — it releases propaganda-filled dispatches through the government’s mouthpiece, the Korean Central News Agency.

But, thanks to Daily NK and the other services, it is also possible now for outsiders to read a dizzying array of “heard-in-North Korea” reports, many on topics off limits for public discussion in the North, like the health of the country’s leader, Kim Jong-il.

The reports are sketchy at best, covering small pockets of North Korea society. Many prove wrong, contradict each other or remain unconfirmed. But they have also produced important scoops, like the currency devaluation and a recent outbreak of swine flu in North Korea. The mainstream media in South Korea now regularly quote these cottage-industry news services.

“Technology made this possible,” said Sohn Kwang-joo, the chief editor of Daily NK. “We infiltrate the wall of North Korea with cellphones.”

Over the past decade, the North’s border with China has grown more porous as famine drove many North Koreans out in search of food and an increasing traffic in goods — and information — developed. A new tribe of North Korean merchants negotiates smuggling deals with Chinese partners, using Chinese cellphones that pick up signals inside the North Korean border.

These phones have become a main tool of communication for many of the 17,000 North Korean defectors living in the South trying to re-establish contact with their families and friends in the North.

Mr. Sohn, a former reporter with the mainstream daily newspaper Dong-A in Seoul, has South Korean “correspondents” near the China-North Korea border.

These volunteers, many of them pro-democracy advocates during their student years, secretly meet North Koreans traveling across the border and recruit underground stringers. The volunteers use business visas, or sometimes pretend to be students or tourists.“It’s dangerous work, and it takes one or two years to recruit one,” Mr. Sohn said.

In the past year, the quality of the information these news services provide has improved as they have hired more North Korean intellectuals and former officials who defected to the South and still have friends in elite circles in the North, said Ha Tae-keung, a former student activist who runs Open Radio for North Korea and a Web site.

“These officials provide news because they feel uncertain about the future of their regime and want to have a link with the outside world, or because of their friendship with the defectors working for us, or because of money,” said Mr. Ha, who also goes by his English name, Young Howard.

All these news outlets pay their informants. Mr. Ha pays a bonus for significant scoops. Daily NK and Open Radio each have 15 staff members, some of them defectors, and receive U.S. congressional funding through the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as support from other public and private sources.

Recently, they have been receiving tips from North Koreans about corrupt officials.

Read the full article below:Nimble Agencies Sneak News Out of North KoreaNew York TimesChoe Sang Hun1/24/2010