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Fake North dollars used to cash UN check in ‘95

Monday, March 26th, 2007

Joong Ang Daily
Lee Sang-il
3/26/2007

North Korean bank allegedly gave counterfeit U.S. $100 notes to a foreigner working for the United Nations Development Program when he cashed a check at a bank in Pyongyang in 1995, a diplomatic source in Washington told the JoongAng Ilbo.

A spokesman for the UN agency confirmed the suspicion, adding that the bills will be handed over to the U.S. Treasury Department for verification.

In 1995, the UNDP’s Pyongyang office issued a check to an Egyptian consultant for his services on a North Korea project.

The consultant claimed that he cashed the check at the Foreign Trade Bank in Pyongyang and that the bank gave him 35 $100 bills.

After returning home, the consultant attempted to exchange the bills for Egyptian currency, but the bills were rejected as fakes, the source said.

The Egyptian sent the bills back to the UNDP office in Pyongyang, and the UN officials confronted the Foreign Trade Bank and asked for real money, the source said. The request was turned down, and the UN agency has been holding the bogus bills for 12 years.

The revelation of the incident highlights charges by the American government that North Korea has been passing so-called “supernotes” ― fake $100 bills ― for many years. Washington’s claim that Banco Delta Asia in Macao was a conduit for the release of the notes was one reason for the freezing of $25 million in North Korean funds in September 2005.

That money is now due to be released as a precondition for progress in the six-party talks. The U.S. has cut the suspect bank’s access to the American financial system.

In an e-mail interview with the JoongAng Ilbo, David Morrison, spokesman for the United Nations Development Program, said the agency is in the process of giving the notes to the Treasury Department. Mr. Morrison said he was not aware of any other incidents.

Mr. Morrison added that the Egyptian consultant has not provided further evidence that the bills were passed by the Pyongyang bank. He also said that UNDP had used Banco Delta Asia to send money to the North to finance projects from January 2000 to December 2002. He said they chose the bank for its convenient financial services.

Asked if North Korea asked the agency to use Banco Delta Asia, Mr. Morrison said it was an independent decision. He said the UN body stopped transactions with the Macao bank when the settlement currency was changed from dollars to euros.

UNDP opened its office in Pyongyang in 1980 and has carried out public hygiene, agricultural, energy and environmental projects.

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Posted in Banking, Counterfeiting, Foreign Trade Bank, Illicit activities, UNDP | Comments Closed

North Korean Restaurant in China Shuts Down as Receptionist Escapes

Wednesday, March 21st, 2007

Daily NK
Kwon Jeong Hyun
3/21/2007

A North Korean restaurant “Pyongyang-kwan” in China is facing a similar predicament as another restaurant in the same area “Pyongyang Moran-kwan,” where a female employee “Lee” was repatriated back to North Korea last October having been arrested for fleeing the restaurant. As a result, North Korean authorities made the restaurant accountable and repatriated all the employees back to North Korea, which inevitably led to the restaurant closing its doors.

In 2000 also, some female employees fled a restaurant “Pyongyang” in Yanji. As a result, the business was terminated and has yet to restart operations again.

The majority of North Korean restaurants located in China are run by entrepreneurs who have signed a contract with North Korean authorities. While the Chinese are responsible for business and property lease for the restaurant, North Koreans bestow the female workers and extract 40% of the net income.

As more and more waitresses break away from restaurants, North Korean authorities are continuing to withdraw the remaining restaurant employees, as is their custom. Consequently, if all North Korean employees are removed, the restaurant has little choice but to shut down.

North Korean workers sent overseas must undergo a meticulous selection period. North Korean authorities select graduates as their ideal candidates and even if a minor detail is undesirable, the candidate is discarded. Furthermore, North Korean authorities dispatch independent National Security Agents to regulate the overseas workers. Normally, 2~3 security agents are residing at the restaurant also.

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Posted in China, Emigration, Restaurants | 1 Comment »

S. Korea to fork out US$250,000 for N. Korea’s football squad

Tuesday, March 20th, 2007

Yonhap
3/20/2007

South Korea will spend about $250,000 to foot the bill for the training of North Korea’s visiting under-17 football squad, the Unification Ministry said Tuesday.

In a show of thawing ties between the two Koreas after a recent North Korean denuclearization deal, the squad arrived earlier Tuesday on the southern island of Jeju for a month of training. The North Koreans are preparing for the FIFA U-17 World Cup, which South Korea will host this summer.

“We decided to tap into the inter-Korean cooperation fund to pay for their accommodations and others,” a ministry official said on customary condition of anonymity.

It is the first visit by a North Korean sports team to the South since a squad took part in an East Asian regional football competition in August 2005.

The 23 players and nine coaches arrived from a training session in the Chinese city of Kunming, and the squad is scheduled to play friendly matches against university and high school teams before meeting the South Korean under-17 team on March 30. 

South and North Korea agreed to resume joint projects, including South Korea’s rice and fertilizer aid, at their first ministerial meeting in seven months.

They are to hold family reunions via video link at the North’s Mount Geumgang resort on March 27-29. Face-to-face reunions for families separated by the sealed border since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War will be held on May 9-14.

Inter-Korean relations have warmed considerably since the 2000 summit of their leaders, but tension persists since the rival states are still technically in a state of war, as no peace treaty was signed at the end of the Korean War.

South Korea suspended its food and fertilizer aid to North Korea after it conducted missile tests in July. A possible resumption of the aid was blocked due to the North’s nuclear bomb test in October.

The latest six-party talks — involving the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia — opened in Beijing on Monday as the U.S. agreed to release $25 million in North Korean frozen funds at a Macau-based bank, a stumbling block to North Korea’s first steps toward nuclear dismantlement.

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Posted in Civil society, Football (soccer), South Korea, Sports | Comments Closed

N. Korea Has 3 Stimulant Drug Factories

Monday, March 19th, 2007

Korea Times
3/19/2007

Japan’s National Police Agency (NPA) has reported that it suspects there are at least three secret factories producing illicit stimulant drugs in North Korea, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported Saturday.

The Japanese daily said that Hiroto Yoshimura, deputy commissioner general of the NPA, mentioned the suspicion of the facilities during his speech as a Japanese representative at the U.N. Commission on Narcotic Drugs’ closed-door meeting in Vienna on Wednesday.

The commission is under the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

Two of the three factories are located in areas where pharmaceutical factories were situated when the Korean Peninsula was under Japanese colonial control, Yomiuri reported quoting sources.

It is highly possible that North Korea has been using the factories to produce the drugs, according to the report.

It is the first time that the NPA has mentioned at an international conference the locations of stimulant drug factories in North Korea.

Over smuggling of North Korea’s stimulant drugs, the NPA reexamined seven cases uncovered from 1997 to May last year, in which about 1,500 kilograms of stimulant drugs were seized.

As a result, the NPA determined in July that Pyongyang was involved in an organized way on the grounds:

_ Spy boats of North Korea’s secret agency have been used as a means of transportation.

_ North Koreans arrested for smuggling made confessions hinting they had been acting under the instructions of the North Korean government.

According to the authorities, the drugs seized are divided into three types, based on analyses made of the contents. Due to differences in impurities and crystalline elements, the police are increasingly under the belief the drugs were produced at different locations.

Further, the authorities analyzed confessions of suspects arrested for smuggling stimulant drugs, data from intelligence satellites and the moves of covert operations boats and cargo vessels that transported the drugs.

The police strongly believe buildings in Wonsan in North Korea’s east and Chongjin in the northeast are drug factories.

Both places are where the Japanese pharmaceutical factories were located before World War II.

Also, it has been confirmed that stimulant drugs were sent from a port at Nampo near Pyongyang and there is a building suspected to be a drug factory near the port.

In addition, the NPA has obtained information there is another factory along the Yalu River near the border with China.

In November, the NPA reported at an international conference in Bangkok on controlling drugs in the Asia-Pacific area of North Korea’s state involvement in stimulant drug smuggling.

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Posted in Drug smuggling, Illicit activities, Japan, U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime | Comments Closed

Taking Pulse of Herbal Medicine

Monday, March 19th, 2007

Korea Times
Andrei Lankov
3/19/2007

Herbal medicine occupies a very prominent place in the North Korean health care system.
In fact, it would be but a minor exaggeration to say that nowadays the North Korean health care system is largely built around traditional herbal medicine.

But this was not always the case. In the early years, until the mid-1950s, herbal medicine was looked upon with disapproval.

It did not appear ‘scientific’ enough, and the Soviet educated doctors saw it as a potentially dangerous superstition.

The first signs of the coming change in attitude were in 1954 when the licensing system for herbal doctors was first introduced.

But the revival of herbal medicine began in earnest in April 1956, when the North Korean cabinet of ministers accepted Decree No. 37, which envisioned the incorporation of herbal medicine into the official medical system. At the same time, Kim Il-sung made a very positive reference to herbal medicine in his lengthy speech delivered to the KWP Third Congress. By the end of 1956, there were 10 herbal medicine centers operating across the country, and by 1960 the number had reached 332.

I think it was not without good reason that this sudden revival of the medical tradition took place in 1956. This was when the North began to steer itself away from its Soviet patron, whose new policy of de-Stalinization met with growing disapproval in Pyongyang. It was also the time when nationalist trends began to grow in the North _ partially because nationalism served the interests of Kim Il-sung and his group, but also because it resonated with the feelings and world view of common Koreans. This created a fertile soil for the rejuvenation of hitherto neglected traditions. It is not incidental that in later eras the initial rejection of herbal medicine came to be blamed on the ‘factionalists’ _ that is, people who did not share Kim Il-sung’s nationalism and his drive for heavy industry and a powerful army at all costs.

And there was another dimension as well. We have been accustomed to thinking of herbal medicine as more expensive than its Western counterpart, but back in the 1950s the opposite was the case. Generally, East Asian medicine, which relied on local herbs, tended to be cheaper and this mattered in a poor country with limited resources.

Around the same time, herbal medicine was encouraged by the South Korean authorities as well. They also saw it as a cheap palliative, a substitute for the “real” Western medicine which only a few South Koreans could afford.

And, last but not least, the basic ideas of herbal medicine resonated quite well with Kim Il-sung’s new policy of selfreliance.

In a sense, herbal medicine was an embodiment of self-reliance in health care.

Thus, the 1960s was a period of triumphal advance for Eastern medicine in the North. For a while herbalists were trained in junior colleges, but from 1960, Pyongyang medical college opened a traditional medicine department. A number of research centers were created with the task of fusing the achievements of Western and traditional medicine. From 1960, a state evaluation committee began to operate, and in that year 239 North Korean herbalists became “Eastern medicine doctors, first class,” while 1,495 had to satisfy themselves with their inferior standing of “Eastern medicine doctors, second class.”

Of course, the growth of herbal medicine was accompanied by claims about wonder drugs and miraculous discoveries, to which the Stalinist regimes were so vulnerable (suffice to remind ourselves of the Lysenko affair in the USSR, or the improbable claims of wonder harvests in Mao’s China).

But the domination of Dr. Kim Pong-han, North Korea’s Lysenko, lasted for merely six years. In 1960 he claimed that he had discovered a new principal type of centralized system in the human body, somewhat similar to a nerve system of blood circulation. There was much talk of this alleged discovery and related medical miracles, but from 1966 all references to Professor Kim suddenly disappeared from the Pyongyang press.

The subsequent decades witnessed a continuous growth in the herbal medicine endeavor, which frequently received direct encouragement and approval from the Great Leader himself (after all, Kim Il-sung’s father once was a part-time herbalist himself). The reasons for the policy remained the same, and even some statements by Kim Il-sung were remarkably frank.

In 1988 he said, “If we produce a lot of Koryo medicine drugs, it is good not only for curing diseases, but also for solving the drug problem, since it will reduce the importation of drugs from other countries.” More than a dozen colleges now train herbalists in the North, and from 1985 would-be Western doctors have also been required to take introductory classes in Eastern medicine.

Perhaps, in some post-unification world the North will become a major source of quality herbal doctors, and their presence will help to drive down prices for this service which many Koreans take so seriously. Who knows, but there are already North Korean herbalists working in the South.

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Posted in Health care, Indigenous medicine, Juche, Russia | Comments Closed

We [ROK] Could Be Left Out of a U.S.-N.Korea Deal

Monday, March 19th, 2007

Choson Ilbo
Yun Duk-min
3/19/2007

It was set off by a nuclear test. The Bush administration, which insisted it could not reward a wrong and wouldn’t conduct bilateral negotiations with North Korea, made a U-turn and promised the North political and economic compensation in bilateral talks. North Korea’s response has been equally astonishing. North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-kwan recently had a long meeting with former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger. What he said sounds unbelievable. Expressing a deep interest in improving U.S.-China relations, he asked if the U.S. has “strategic interests” in North Korea and added, “The Korean Peninsula has been invaded by foreign powers like China and Japan. Strategic relations with the U.S. will be of help to North Korea and regional stability.”

The U.S.-China rapprochement early in the 1970s involved two factors. The U.S. wanted to use China’s strategic value to check the Soviet Union’s expansion, so it broke close relations with Taiwan in exchange for diplomatic relations with China. By the same token, it seems that North Korea is now willing to cooperate with the strategic U.S. interest of restraining China.

North Korea will inwardly have been concerned about its deepening economic reliance on China and increasing Chinese influence on its domestic affairs. In view of the rumors that China could be attempting a change in the North Korean leadership in the wake of the North’s nuclear test, the North may be trying to check the attempt by drawing in the U.S. As the U.S. abandoned Taiwan for the sake of diplomatic ties with China, North Korea may attempt to isolate and restrain South Korea through strategic relations with the U.S.

Kim Kye-gwan’s remarks suggest that the North intends to check South Korea and China by drawing in the U.S. Why does North Korea, after saying it only developed nuclear weapons because of the U.S., now embrace Washington to restrain the South and China? Having introduced a capitalist system in the 1970s, China is emerging as a serious threat to the North Korean regime. What’s more, Beijing in the wake of the collapse of the Berlin Wall forsook Pyongyang and established diplomatic ties with Seoul. South Korea’s rapid economic growth and democratization posed a threat of unification by absorption. In order to avoid either absorption by the South or becoming a Chinese satellite, Pyongyang needed two approaches; nuclear armament and establishment of strategic relations with Washington.

A close review of the 17-year process of negotiations on the North’s nuclear weapons development program clearly reveals North Korea’s intent. The only counterpart in negotiations was the U.S. But unlike the Clinton administration, which negotiated with North Korea directly, the Bush administration, with its top priority on the creation of a new order in the Middle East, had practically left the issue to China. Two aircraft carrier fleets are deployed in seas near Iran, but none came anywhere near the Korean Peninsula when North Korea test-fired missiles and tested a nuclear device. Thanks to its nuclear test, North Korea has now managed to bypass China and secure direct negotiations with the U.S.

Secondly, the North pledges to pose no threat to the U.S. if the latter tacitly approves its limited nuclear armament. It can relinquish long-range missiles capable of attacking America and will never transfer nuclear weapons or materials to third parties or terrorists, the North says. Thirdly, Pyongyang says it can recognize the U.S. forces on Korea. Already in 1991, the senior North Korean leader Kim Yong-sun, deceased in 2003, told high-ranking U.S. officials that North Korea could be a U.S. ally and recognize the USFK. Pyongyang has now only added its willingness to cooperate with Washington’s China strategy.

North Korea’s attempts failed so far because the North wanted both — strategic relations with the U.S. and nuclear armament. Without the premise of resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis, the U.S. could hardly accommodate that. But North Korea’s willingness to cooperate in restraining China must be a very interesting development for the U.S. Rumors are afoot that the U.S. may give tacit consent to the North’s nuclear armament. If the nuclear problem is shelved, it is possible for the U.S. to accommodate North Korea’s demands.

We are at a crucial juncture with denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. While the North endeavors to build a survival framework through nuclear armament and the help of foreign powers, we are bogged down in domestic bickering as to who will benefit more from a possible inter-Korean summit and a peace agreement. We must recognize that our principle of not tolerating any nuclear weapons on the peninsula could prevent a U.S.-North Korea compromise that would be unfavorable to us. North Korea, too, should realize quickly that the survival of its regime and the happiness of its people depend on its relations not with the U.S. but with South Korea, which accounts for two-thirds of the peninsula’s population and 99 percent of its economic strength. 

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Posted in China, Political economy, South Korea, USA | Comments Closed

Seoul to resume North Korea aid

Friday, March 16th, 2007

BBC
3/16/2007

South Korea is to resume shipments of fertiliser aid to the North later this month in a further sign of progress after a recently-agreed nuclear deal.

The South Korean Red Cross said the first of some 50 shipments would be sent on 27 March.

Seoul had suspended humanitarian aid to its secretive Communist neighbour after Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile tests.

Separately, the ending of a US probe into a bank linked to North Korea has been welcomed by a pro-Pyongyang paper.

The Japan-based Choson Sinbo described as a “very positive sign” the US Treasury’s announcement that it had ended its 18-month investigation into the Macau bank Banco Delta Asia (BDA).

The US found the BDA complicit in alleged North Korean money-laundering and counterfeiting activities and has barred the bank from accessing the US banking system.

But the Treasury decision does mean the Macau authorities could now remove the bank from receivership and return some of North Korea’s money.

North Korea had insisted the freeze on its assets – estimated to be up to $25m (£13m) – be lifted as part of any agreement on ending its nuclear programme.

“We can call this a truly epochal event because the most arrogant and violent regime ever in the United States did so as if it knelt before a small country in the east,” the Choson Sinbo said.

While North Korea itself has yet to comment on the US Treasury decision, China on Thursday said it “deeply regretted” the move.

The BDA denies it ever intentionally handled illicit funds.

‘Fully committed’

Nuclear negotiators are in Beijing for preparatory discussions ahead of more high-level talks next week.

They will discuss progress on the agreement of 13 February, which was reached during talks involving the two Koreas, China, the US, Japan and Russia.

Under the deal, the North has pledged to “shut down and seal” its Yongbyon nuclear reactor within 60 days in exchange for energy aid.

The UN nuclear chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, travelled to North Korea earlier this week to discuss the resumption of international inspections.

He said Pyongyang was still “fully committed” to giving up its nuclear programme.

Since 13 February various bilateral meetings have been taking place.

The two Koreas held their first talks in several months soon after the nuclear deal was reached, and discussed a number of issues including the resumption of reunions for families split since the division of the Korean peninsula.

But Seoul had linked the resumption of deliveries of rice and fertiliser to North Korean progress on dismantling its nuclear programme in accordance with the February deal.

South Korea’s Red Cross chief Han Wang-sang said the organisation would send its first shipment of 300,000 tonnes of fertiliser on 27 March.

“It will take about three months to complete the whole process, which will consist of about 50 separate shipments,” he said.

The fertiliser shipments will arrive in time for the impoverished North’s spring planting season.

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Posted in Foreign aid statistics, International Aid, South Korea, Statistics | Comments Closed

Dining with the Dear Leader

Thursday, March 15th, 2007

Asia Times
Bertil Lintner
3/15/2007

Video of the Restaurant on Youtube: 1, 2, 3

Its undoubtedly the liveliest and most popular Korean restaurant in town. Packed for lunch and dinner, the Pyongyang Restaurant is famous not only for its cold noodles and barbecue served with kim chi, but also for its talented wait staff, which when not serving are dancing to traditional Korean tunes played on violins and electric piano.

But the Pyongyang Restaurant in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh is no ordinary Korean eatery. For one, it’s owned and run by the North Korean government, a capitalist enterprise that sends its profits directly to state coffers in Pyongyang. As with most other upper-crust restaurants in Phnom Penh, the meals have to be paid for in US dollars, not in riel, as the local currency is not convertible outside Cambodia.

When the international community imposed economic sanctions against North Korea after its nuclear tests last October, the Pyongyang authorities were able to continue to run a string of small-scale companies and businesses across the region that kept foreign-currency earnings flowing back home. Restaurants such as the Pyongyang Restaurant in Cambodia have in no small way helped keep the North Korean government afloat during tough diplomatic times.

And the establishments’ often booming business are proving North Koreans are no slouches as capitalists. Government-backed North Korean eateries are mushrooming across the region. For years there have been various North Korean-themed restaurants in Beijing, Shanghai and other Chinese cities. But the first was opened in Southeast Asia only in 2002 in the Cambodian town of Siem Reap, a popular tourist destination because of its proximity to the Angkor Wat temple complex.

It became an instant success – especially with the thousands of South Korean tourists who flock to see the ancient Angkor ruins every year – so successful, indeed, that Pyongyang decided to open a second venue in Phnom Penh in December 2003. Most of the clientele there are South Korean businessmen who work in Cambodia as well as a smattering of homesick South Korean tourists who drool over the authentic Korean eats. And while severe food shortages still plague North Korea itself, the fare in Phnom Penh is good and plentiful.

The choice of Cambodia for this North Korean capitalist experiment was, of course, no coincidence. Norodom Sihanouk, the country’s erstwhile strongman – first as king, then as prince, later as leader in exile and finally king again from September 1993 until his abdication in October 2004 – is a longtime close friend of North Korea.

He met the late North Korean leader Kim Il-sung in 1961 at a Non-Aligned Movement meeting in Belgrade. Four years later, Sihanouk was invited to visit Pyongyang, and a personal bond developed between the two leaders. When Sihanouk was ousted by his own military in a coup in March 1970, he was immediately offered sanctuary in North Korea.

Sihanouk’s government-in-exile, which included senior Khmer Rouge cadres, was in Beijing. But by 1974, Kim Il-sung had built a special private getaway expressly for Sihanouk about an hour’s drive north of Pyongyang. A battalion of North Korean troops worked full-time for nearly a year on the palatial residence and, when it was finally finished, only specially selected guards were allowed anywhere near Sihanouk’s 60-room home away from home. Overlooking scenic Chhang Sou On Lake and surrounded by mountains, the Korean-style building even included its own indoor movie theater. Like the “Great Leader”, Kim Il-sung, and his son, “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il, Sihanouk loved to watch movies.

Sihanouk returned to Cambodia after the government of Lon Nol was overthrown in April 1975 and Sihanouk’s communist allies, the Khmer Rouge, came to power. But when the Khmer Rouge put him under virtual house arrest in the royal palace in Phnom Penh, from where he narrowly managed to escape when the Vietnamese invaded in January 1979, Sihanouk was flown out on a Chinese plane and returned to his grand North Korean residence.

When Sihanouk triumphantly returned to Phnom Penh in 1991, he came with North Korean escorts, both as personal bodyguards and as diplomats, who took up residence in a huge new embassy built for them near the Independence Monument in downtown Phnom Penh. And in 1993, when Sihanouk was officially reinstalled as the king of Cambodia, he surrounded himself in the civil-war-torn country with people he knew he could trust – North Korean bodyguards.

So it is not surprising that hanging prominently on the wall at Phnom Penh’s Pyongyang Restaurant is a picture of Sihanouk, his wife Monique and their son King Norodom Sihamoni. According to locals familiar with the restaurant’s opening, the Cambodian royal family was among the first guests to dine there.

Business opportunities are still fairly limited in Cambodia, so last year the North Koreans opened an even bigger restaurant in neighboring Thailand. Its first day of operation was auspiciously chosen as August 15, coinciding with the anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. The Bangkok branch of the Pyongyang Restaurant is tucked away down a side alley in the city’s gritty Pattanakarn suburb, far from areas Westerners usually frequent but very near the North Korean Embassy.

Inside, the walls are decorated with paintings of Kim Il-sung’s alleged birthplace, a peasant hut in Mangyongdae near Pyongyang. An all-women’s band, dressed in traditional Korean dresses known as hambok and in the North, chima jogoiri in the South and, of course, with little Kim Il-sung badges on their blouses, plays upbeat music on electric guitars, drums and electric piano.

It’s not exactly a tourist attraction, but it’s a colorful backdrop for businessmen and diplomats to cut deals or exchange the information that has in recent years helped to make Thailand into North Korea’s third-largest global trading partner after nearby China and South Korea. There are no signs of economic sanctions or deprivation here, but rather, perhaps, a tantalizing glimpse of a one day more prosperous and joyful North Korea.

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Posted in Cambodia, International trade, Restaurants | Comments Closed

Yongchun Explosion…Chinese Merchants First to Inform

Wednesday, March 14th, 2007

Daily NK
Kim Min Se
3/14/2007

It is a well known fact that goods made in China are sweeping across North Korea with Chinese merchants taking the role of distributor.

However, Chinese merchants are not only exporting goods into North Korea but are also importing goods made in North Korea such as seafood, medicinal herbs, coal and minerals back to China.

Particularly, dried shellfish sells very well in China. As more and more Chinese merchants buy dried shellfish from North Korean markets, they play a critical role in the lives of North Korean citizens as sellers who are then able to raise the price due to demand. Every year, from April~Sept, people from the North-South Pyongan, Haean collect shellfish along the shore. 10kg of rice can be bought with 1kg of shellfish meat. Consequently, citizens of other regions also come to the beaches to collect shellfish.

If Chinese merchants did not import any goods and North Korea’s finest goods were not exported to China, the cost of goods at Jangmadang would increase exponentially. This is how close the relationship between the lives of North Korean citizens and Chinese merchants have become interconnected.

Significance of information runners

Though Chinese merchants are currently contributing to market stability, it does not necessarily mean that their existence will continue to be positive to North Korean authorities.

The people first to inform news of the Yongchun explosion in April 2004 to the outside world were Chinese merchants.

At the time, after confirming the lives their family members in North Korea, Chinese merchants who heard the explosion in Dandong gathered information about the explosion details from relatives in Shinuiju and Yongchun over mobile phones. Undoubtedly, news spread instinctively. The economic development zone, Dandong, which is at the mouth of the Yalu River is merely 10km from Yongchun.

Due to this incident, Kim Jong Il banned the use of mobile phones in North Korea. Chinese merchants have played a great role in the outflow of inside North Korean issues, a problem feared by North Korean authorities that contributes to the inflow of foreign information.

Recently, Chinese merchants have been charging a 20% fee involved in remitting dollars to defectors wanting to send money to family in North Korea. For example, if a defector wishes to send $1,000 to family in North Korea, a merchant will extract $200 and transfer the remaining $800 to the family.

As long as Chinese merchants have a specific identification card, they are free to travel between the North Korean-Chinese border and hence many defectors prefer to use Chinese merchants as the intermediary. Thanks to these merchants, many people can convey money and letters to family within North Korea.

In these respects, Chinese merchants are not only selling goods but are acting as information runners transporting news of the outside world into North Korean society.

As more and more North Koreans rely on markets as a means of living and trade between China and North Korea, the North Korean market will only continue to expand. We will have to wait and see whether or not Chinese merchants will have a healing or poisonous affect on the Kim Jong Il regime from here on in.

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Posted in Agriculture, Banking, Black markets, Cell phones, China, Coal, Communications, Finance, General markets (FMR: Farmers Market), Indigenous medicine, International trade | Comments Closed

UNDP’s Wrong Action Accused

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007

KCNA
3/13/2007

The United Nations Development Program recently announced that it would suspend its country program for the DPRK and, accordingly, withdraw the staff members of its office from Pyongyang.

A spokesman for the DPRK Ministry of Foreign Affairs Tuesday answered the question raised by KCNA in this regard.

The responsibility for this abnormal thing that happened in the cooperative relations between the DPRK and the UNDP, which have favorably developed for the past several decades, rests with the U.S. and Japan and some circles inside the organization, who took this discriminative action against the DPRK only, yielding to the pressure of the above-said two countries, the spokesman said, and continued:

The U.S. has spread sheer lies about the DPRK’s “diversion of UNDP’s program fund” since the outset of the year in a bid to tarnish the international image of the DPRK. Taking advantage of this, Japan has pressurized the UNDP to suspend its country program for the DPRK. It wooed some member states of its executive board to reopen the discussion on the already passed country program for the DPRK.

Some officials of the UNDP tried to cancel the country program of developmental nature for the DPRK contrary to its mission under the pressure from outside and adjust it into a country program of humanitarian nature and has unilaterally closed or cancelled the ongoing project.

As regards this discriminative step taken against the country program for the DPRK only, it demanded the UNDP explicitly explain and clarify the step. The UNDP, however, has kept mum about the demand, deliberately avoiding its answer.

The DPRK does not care about whether it receives small assistance from the UNDP or not but it will not tolerate even a bit any foolish attempt to hurt its dignity.

It is the firm stand of the DPRK not to receive any politically motivated assistance seeking a sinister aim in the future, too.

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Posted in International Aid, Ministry of foreign Affairs, UNDP | Comments Closed

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