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Borderline Issues

Sunday, June 24th, 2007

Korea Times
Andrei Lankov
6/24/2007

The recent refugee crisis in China attracted much attention to the situation around the border between the two countries. Indeed, in recent decades the porous border with China has provided the major exit opportunities for both would-be defectors to the South and refugees escaping the food shortages and poverty of the North.

Most Communist countries guarded their borders against both intruders who tried to get in, and against defectors who wanted to run away from the not-so-perfect Communist paradises. From this point of view, the border with China constitutes a serious challenge. It follows two rivers _ the Amnok and the Tuman (Chinese read the same characters as Yalu and Tumen). Both are shallow in the upper streams, and completely freeze every winter. Thus, a determined defector or smuggler can always find his or her way across the border. At least until the late 1950s _ despite of the persistent efforts of both Korean and Chinese security agencies _ smugglers systematically crossed into China and back.

In the 1950s it was not only smugglers who moved across the border. Some of that human traffic included a number of North Korean dignitaries who chose to run away to China instead of being purged. One of the most famous incidents of this kind took place in early September 1956. On August 31 of that year a group of prominent North Korean leaders openly challenged Kim Il-sung’s policy at the plenary meeting of the KWP Central Committee. They wanted to replace him with a more moderate leader, but their proposal was voted down and they were immediately put under house arrest. They appeared to be doomed, but their ingenuity helped them to find a way out (they were former underground activists, after all!). In the middle of the night the rebels managed to secretly leave the house and then drove away in a car provided by a sympathetic friend. They easily reached the border and then proceeded to China where they were eventually granted asylum. Their example was later followed by other dissenting officials.

There was a movement from China as well. At the end of the 1960s, when the “cultural revolution” was at its height, some ethnic Koreans from China fled to the DPRK which in those years was a more stable and prosperous society. Since the relations with China were quite bad in the late 1960s, these refugees were not extradited and stayed in the North.

The ethnic composition of the region is favourable for those who, for whatever reason, want to make a clandestine border crossing. There are two million ethnic Koreans in China, and most of them live close to the border. Many ethnic Koreans have relatives in North Korea, and a small number of them are even technically DPRK citizens _ the so-called chogyo (in 1997 the number of chogyo was estimated at 6,000 or some 0.3 percent of the Korean population in the region).

On the other hand, in the DPRK there are a small number of ethnic Chinese or huaqiao. The ethnic Chinese from the DPRK and ethnic Koreans from the People’s Republic were allowed to visit their relatives throughout the 1970s and 1980s, when the governments of both countries tried to minimize the foreign contacts of their citizens. Their status was unique _ and widely used for commercial purposes. This trade, however, seldom if ever required illegal border crossings. In most cases, the traders arrived with proper visitor’s visas and large sacks of merchandise.

Generally speaking, the border with China was never protected well, especially when compared with the DMZ, arguably the world’s most heavily protected border. This was deemed unnecessary. The North Korean authorities believed that the runaways would be, in all probability, apprehended by the Chinese police and then extradited back to the North. Of course, occasionally the Chinese might have made a political decision about granting asylum to a disgruntled cadre, but it was too unusual a circumstance to warrant an expensive upgrade of the border protection system. In essence, the Chinese police served as a better deterrent to those with defection in mind than North Korean guards.

And there was not much incentive to run away _ at least for commoners. North-East China was one of the poorest parts of the PRC, and until the late 1980s North Koreans enjoyed much higher standards of living than their brethren across the border.

Things changed dramatically in the early 1990s. From that time, the movement across the border _ both legal and illegal _ began to increase until it developed into a full-scale refugee crisis soon after 1995.

Posted in China, Emigration, Political economy | Comments Closed

North Korea’s Dear Film Buff

Tuesday, June 19th, 2007

Asia Times
John Feffer
6/15/2007

The North Korean film projectionist is thinking back on her earlier life. When she was younger, she tells the camera, she dreamed of acting. She wanted to play a heroic role on the screen. Her eyes take on a wistful look. And there is a hint of pain in her voice. In any other country, this would be an ordinary show of emotion. In North Korea, however, the ordinary is extraordinary, for outsiders catch a glimpse of it so very rarely.

The North Korean woman, Han Yong-sil, is one of four film projectionists featured in a new documentary, Comrades in Dreams. Directed by Ulli Gaulke, a young German filmmaker, the documentary ties together the lives of cinema lovers from four countries: the United States, Burkino Faso, India and North Korea.

While all the footage is fascinating, the material from North Korea is unique. Films from and about North Korea rarely pierce the carefully constructed surface that the country and its citizens present to the outside world. Yet here, captured by Gaulke, Comrade Han reveals an individual personality behind the ritualized propaganda that she initially offers the camera.

Film has played an unusually prominent role in North Korean culture and history. Although it opens an important window on to a closed society, North Korean film has been a singularly overlooked subject. North Korean films are almost never shown in the United States. They rarely appear in international film festivals. Few articles have been written on the subject.

That all may change soon, however. A French company has just bought the rights to show the North Korean film A Schoolgirl’s Diary, reportedly seen by 8 million North Koreans, more than one-third of the population. Scholars are beginning to comb through North Korean films for clues about how the system ticks. And documentaries like Comrades in Dreams and the latest effort from Dan Gordon and Nicholas Bonner, Crossing the Line, are attracting attention at film festivals around the world.

The US and North Korea are inching closer together as a result of ongoing nuclear negotiations. With normalized relations on the agenda, information about North Korean society becomes ever more valuable. But do North Korean films ultimately reveal or conceal the reality of the country?

Bring up the subject of North Korean film and most people would be hard pressed to name a single title. But nearly every article about North Korean leader Kim Jong-il mentions that he’s a film buff with one of the largest film collections in the world. In fact, Kim started out in the cinema world. The rise of the “Dear Leader” to political leadership is linked inextricably to his film career.

“Kim Jong-il used film to prove that he was the legitimate guardian of his father Kim Il-sung’s legacy,” explained Kim Suk-young (Speaking at the Library of Congress Next Week), a specialist on North Korean theater and film at the University of California-Santa Barbara. “Kim Il-sung was very keen on protecting his legacy as a national father. So Kim Jong-il in the 1970s used film to prove that he was the legitimate heir.”

These films helped solidify his father’s personality cult and demonstrated that Kim Il-sung’s successor, unlike Deng Xiaoping in China or Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, would avoid any iconoclastic reforms.

Kim Jong-il was not the first person in North Korea to recognize the political uses of film. The regime early on realized the revolutionary potential of the medium. When it took control over the northern half of the Korean Peninsula at the end of World War II, the North Korean Workers’ Party under Kim Il-sung relied heavily on Soviet assistance. The Soviets, having pioneered film technique in the early days of the Russian Revolution, offered cinematic help as well.

From the very start, however, North Korea showed its independent streak by not following the Soviet model. “Even at its very beginning,” writes historian Charles Armstrong, North Korean cinema “was diverging from its Soviet sponsors’ aims by creating a distinctive cinema rooted in melodramatic emotionalism, a sentimental attachment to the Korean countryside, and the alleged values of peasant life, and a nationalist politics centered around the person of Kim Il-sung”.

To merge Soviet communism with North Korean nationalism – all rolled into the package of Kim Il-sung’s personality cult – film was the ideal medium. As Kim Suk-young explains, it is much easier to send films throughout the country as a propaganda tool than, for instance, relying on traveling theater groups. More important, Pyongyang could control the form and content from beginning to end. Political speakers sent to deliver propaganda to the masses might succumb to improvisation. Theater actors might give an unintended interpretative spin to their lines of dialogue. But movies allow for total control – or as close as the regime could get to total control in the cultural sphere.

Re-imaging history
Unlike Josef Stalin, Kim Il-sung often clothed his political instruction in narrative form. His multi-volume autobiography, for instance, is full of stories and parables. But nothing could compare to the power of film to create resonant images and stirring nationalist messages.

For instance, in the 1960s film On the Railway, set during the Korean War, the train-engineer hero infiltrates the territory held by US and South Korean forces and pretends to be a defector driving his train over to the other side. He is, like Kim Il-sung, a trickster who achieves victory despite overwhelming odds. He doesn’t do so on behalf of the workers of the world, however. He is fighting for the Korean fatherland and against the foreign aggressor.

Other movies, such as An Jung Gun Shoots Ito Hirobumi and Star of Chosun, dramatize moments of Korean history such as the 1909 assassination of a Japanese colonial official and the life of Kim Il-sung. Like the 1915 US film The Birth of a Nation, these films present a rewritten history that can replace authentic memory and balanced scholarship. A government can censor books. But film has the appearance of reality and can more seductively change how a citizenry understands its past.

Kim Jong-il put his stamp on North Korean filmmaking with his involvement in productions such as Sea of Blood and Flower Girl. These films, adapted from revolutionary operas credited to his father Kim Il-sung, established a cultural vocabulary similar to the opera productions that Madame Mao (Jiang Qing) unleashed on the Chinese population during the Cultural Revolution (so memorably described in Anchee Min’s memoir Red Azalea).

The language of these operas-turned-films, which both describe the atrocities of the Japanese colonial period, defined the parameters of acceptable cultural discourse. The images became iconic, like the Biblical tableaux that appeared in classical painting and formed the visual vocabulary of pre-modern European culture.

By the late 1970s, having established his bona fides with his father, Kim Jong-il perceived that North Korean film had hit a dead end. At that time, he already possessed an extraordinary collection of world cinema. He understood the widening gap between the international and the national. To bridge the gap, Kim Jong-il sought help from outside.

Revolution lite
One of the most popular films in Bulgaria in the late 1980s was North Korea’s Hong Kil Dong (1986). A classic tale of a Korean Robin Hood, the film introduced Hong Kong-style action to the Soviet bloc. The ninja moves and soaring kicks dazzled East European audiences. “Hong Kil Dong attracted hundreds of thousands of people to the cinemas across Bulgaria,” writes Todor Nenov. “It was almost impossible to get tickets for it, unless you booked them two or three days earlier!”

Borrowing from Hong Kong action movies was only one of the ways that the North Korean film industry revived itself in the 1980s. Kim Jong-il borrowed more directly from outside when he arranged for the abduction of South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee in 1978. Six months later, Kim abducted her estranged husband, famous South Korean director Shin Sang-ok.

Before the pair managed to escape in 1986 during a stopover in Vienna, Shin Sang-ok introduced many new innovations into North Korean film. His most famous films during this period – a North Korean version of Godzilla called Pulgasari and a retelling of the famous Korean folk tale of Chunhyang called Love, Love, My Love – added science fiction and musical romance to the North Korean repertoire.

It is difficult to know whether the entertaining aspects of Hong Kil-Dong and Shin Sang-ok’s movies distracted North Korean moviegoers from the political messages or made those messages easier to absorb. The historical and fantastical settings allowed for greater leeway in presenting stories. Although the screenplays nod in the direction of the People, the writers needn’t lard the narrative with adoring references to the country’s leader or address the tasks facing contemporary North Korean society.

The contemporary love story in Traces of Life (1989) is by contrast entirely subordinate to the political message of building a utopian society. The movie tells the story of a grieving widow. Her husband has died in a suicide mission that blows up an invading South Korean ship. Guilty about arguing with him on the night he left to make the sacrifice, she exiles herself to the countryside, where she becomes a farmer and eventually raises rice production to unprecedented levels.

She thus transforms her love of husband into love of country. When Kim Il-sung himself comes to her farm and praises the collective’s success, her love achieves its apotheosis. The love of the hero leader has absolved her of the guilt she felt about not living up to the ideal of her hero husband.

Romance in North Korean films tends to be of the revolutionary not the bourgeois variety. As Ri Hyang, the character in Urban Girl Comes to Get Married (1993), explains to her friend, she wants “a man with perfume”. Her friend, surprised, replies that “a man is not a flower”. Ri Hyang continues: she is looking for “a man who creates his life with great ambition, a man who is respected by people”.

Although Urban Girl has a much lighter touch than Traces of Life, the message is the same: love should be reserved for those who want and can build “paradise on earth”. If that means partnering with the fellow on the farm who spends night and day working on a better breed of duck, as urban girl Ri Hyang ultimately does in the film, so be it.

Utopian dreams
Films in North Korea do not simply carry messages. They model behavior. Han Yong-sil, the projectionist in Comrades in Dreams, explains that the audiences for her films learn about new agricultural advances. And indeed, Urban Girl features information about livestock breeding and rice transplanting, and Traces of Life provides information on microbial fertilizer.

But the films don’t just supply technical content. They model revolutionary virtues. Kim Suk-young points to the popularity of amateur contests in which average North Koreans learn the lines of famous movie parts and then compete for the honor to present their monologues at the finals in Pyongyang. “It sounds very oppressive to us,” she says, “but there’s comfort in identifying with those heroes.” In this way we see that North Korean films don’t simply reveal or conceal reality. They actively construct North Korean society.

As a projectionist on a model farm, Han Yong-sil also struggles to live up to the examples set in the films she shows. Her husband is far away on an assignment to beautify Mount Paektu, the reputed birthplace of the Dear Leader. This is an important mission and, like the heroine of Traces of Life, she knows that she should subordinate her personal loneliness to the good of the nation. Still, it is clear that she finds this task very difficult.

Her display of emotions reveals the normalcy of North Koreans. Ironically, it is this very normalcy, because it falls short of the revolutionary ideal, that the North Korean government is loath to reveal to the world. And so the outside world tends to perceive North Koreans as slightly unreal, as mere mouthpieces for government propaganda.

In the 1960s and even into the 1970s, the utopian themes in North Korean cinema went hand in hand with the rising expectations of the population. After the devastation of World War II and then the Korean War, North Korea rapidly rebuilt itself. The government prided itself on the various industrial and agricultural advances that put it on par with and even ahead of South Korea. By the 1980s, however, North Korea was stagnant. It had fallen behind not only South Korea but even its own previous standards.

It is interesting that Kim Jong-il perceived that North Korean film, too, was stagnant at this time. A kind of cognitive dissonance must have begun to emerge among the North Korean population. The government and the films were portraying an ever-improving society and yet the population must have been noticing that reality was stubbornly not keeping pace. In the Soviet Union, during the years under Leonid Brezhnev, people could get their entertainment elsewhere – foreign films, books, samizdat publications. But North Koreans, until very recently, did not have any alternatives. And so the North Korean film industry turned to escapism, like romance stories.

But even escapism has its limits, for there is a utopian quality to Urban Girl and Pulgasari as well. Perhaps in response to the growing cognitive dissonance, the North Korean entertainment industry has begun to address new themes: divorce, love triangles, the double and triple shifts of women. “These dramas dealing with failure suggest that people are craving something different,” observes Kim Suk-young.

Reaching out?
The North Korean government boasts of its world-class film industry. But since a devastating loss in an international film festival in Czechoslovakia in the early 1970s, North Korea hasn’t tried very hard to promote its films abroad.

Pyongyang has, however, hosted its own international film festival since 1987 and allows visitors to its film studio. “North Korea has never been shy about propagandizing its grand achievements, and the film industry is not something secretive,” said journalist Ron Gluckman. “You can visit the studios as part of a tourist itinerary.

“I did so on my first visit to North Korea back in 1992. I visited again in 2004, and the equipment shown off was definitely ancient. I suspect they have been unable to keep up to date due to the economic situation, and film has suffered as a consequence.”

More recently, the government has allowed outside directors to make films inside the country. Pyongyang Crescendo (2005) follows the story of a German conductor who spent 10 days in the North Korean capital teaching music students. Dan Gordon and Nicholas Bonner have produced three documentary films: on the North Korean soccer team that made it to the World Cup quarterfinals in 1966, on two girls training for the mass games in Pyongyang, and most recently on the US soldier James Dresnok, who defected to North Korea in 1962.

The Game of Their Lives, the 2002 soccer documentary, showed that films could be made in North Korea, said Nick Bonner. However, the country isn’t exactly issuing a general invitation to the film world. “It is still very difficult to film in [North Korea] and is certainly a case-by-case situation,” Bonner added.

With A Schoolgirl’s Diary, the North Korean film industry will try once again to break into the international market. In this 2006 release, a teenager complains that her scientist father is too busy to pay attention to her. It is, according to reviews, a “humorous drama about a rebellious teenage girl”. It offers a picture of the North Korean elite that, in the film, uses computers, carries Mickey Mouse schoolbags, and eats good food.

It shows a few flaws in the system, such as deteriorating housing stock. But these are, according to Bonner, the “day-to-day flaws that fit the story line of struggle during this time when great sacrifice is needed to build a strong country”.

Regardless of whether A Schoolgirl’s Diary attracts an international audience on the merits of its story and its filmmaking, it will be an important document of North Korea’s evolving society. It will also show what kind of model behavior the government now wants to inculcate in its citizens.

“We might have to imagine the world with North Korea for another 25 or 50 years,” Kim Suk-young concludes. “We should look at film in order to understand and co-exist and to have a glimpse of North Korea instead of reducing it to a one-dimensional propaganda tool.”

Posted in Art, Civil society, Film, Political economy | Comments Closed

North Korean Film Turns to Romance on the Failure of Propaganda Campaign

Tuesday, June 19th, 2007

Daily NK
Yang Jung A
6/19/2007

“North Korean government has employed movies to propagate superiority of the regime and Su-Ryeong (supreme leader) absolutism. However, North Korean movies have seen a new wave recently.” John Feffer, co- director at Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF), an Institute for politics & diplomacy in the U.S, declared through his article on the web on 12th.

Feffer remarked “North Korea was quickly recovered from World War∥ and Korean War. From the 60s to 70s, North Korean had had a great expectation on Utopia” “However, it has been stagnated since then.”

He was interested in the fact that even Kim Jong Il himself perceived that North Korean film was stagnant the same time of North Korean stagnation. Additionally, “The government and the films were portraying an ever-improving society and yet the population must have been noticing that reality was stubbornly not keeping pace” he explained.

◆ People noticed North Korean reality

He appraised “During the reign of Brezhnev (1965 ~1983), people in the former Soviet Union could get their entertainment from foreign movies, books and samizdat publications. On the other hand, the North Korean had no other alternatives” Thereafter, North Korean film industry has gone for a romance for escapism, he explained.

The most representative film is “the family” series. This series of short film, 9 episodes in all, pictured a struggle of the family caused by the couple’s divorce and their troubled children.

Feffer also said that North Korean movies, which haven’t opened to the public, have released to the world audience one after another.

Currently a film titled “A Schoolgirl’s Diary” portraying a story of a North Korean girl, has been expected to be released in Europe by a French distributor. Also, Daniel Gordon British director, have produced documentary films “A State of Mind (2005)” and “The Game of Their Lives (2002)” gaining permission from North Korean government.

Feffer pointed out “Since Film has played an prominent role in North Korean culture and history, scholars are beginning to comb through North Korean films for clues about how the system ticks.” However, he doubted whether North Korean films ultimately reveal the reality of the country or not.

He continued “We should look at film in order to understand and coexist and to have a glimpse of North Korea instead of reducing it to a one-dimensional propaganda tool.” “Besides, Kim Jong Il made most of movies to manage his political agenda.” He added.

He said that media have often said Kim Jong Il is a huge film buff.” “Therefore, the rise of the “Dear Leader” to political leadership is linked inextricably to his film career.” He explained.

Bulgarian audience fascinated by “Hong Kil Dong”

He continued to observe “North Korean movies would play a role to idolize Kim Il Sung. And Kim Jong Il, unlike Deng Xiaoping in China and Gorbachev in the former Soviet Union, was able to escape from criticism against the hereditary succession of power.”

Feffer noted. “In the 70s, Kim Jong Il, having established idolatry cult on his father, Kim Il Sung with movies, realized North Korean film hit the dead end.“ At that time, Kim, who is a remarkable film collector, had clearly understood the widening gap between national and overseas films.”

” ‘Hong Kil Dong’ was the most popular movie in the late 80s in Bulgaria and this classic tale, Korean version of Robin Hood, introduced Hong Kong style action to the East European for the first time.” “The brilliant action footage of the film dazzled the East European audience. It was part of the plan to revive North Korean film adopting Hong Kong style action.” he specified.

Kim’s passion on film reached the peak as abducting Choi Eun Hee , South Korean actress, in 1978.

Feffer mentioned “He also abducted Shin Sang Ok, the estranged husband of Choi Eun Hee, and made him to produce movies. This couple had brought a new wave on North Korean film industry until their escape in 1986.”

”The most renowned movie among Shin’s production is “ Pulgasari,” North Korean version of “Godzilla” and “Love, Love, Oh my Love,” revived Chunhyang, classic romance in Korea. Shin Sang Ok adapted Romance and SF to Korean style story line,” he assessed.
However, he pointed out “It’s difficult to know whether entertaining aspect on “Hong Kil Dong” and the new wave on Shin Sang Ok distracted the North Korean audience from political messages or made those messages easily absorbed.”

Indeed, Feffer appraised Kim Jong Il is not the first individual who recognize the political uses of film.

He explained that North Korean regime have recognised the evolutional potential of the media. Korea Workers’ Party, under the Kim Il Sung’s lead, was able to occupy Northern Korean Peninsula after the World War ∥ relying on the support from the former Soviet Union. The Soviets had already pioneered film technique in the early days of the Russian revolution.

However, North Korea already showed its independent streak not following the Soviet model .

Feffer said “Film was ideal means to adapt Russian Communism to North Korean Nationalism, which is solely manipulated for idolatry on Kim Il Sung.” “Leaders in Pyongyang was able to control over all the context. Government can manipulate publications. Still, film can be more powerful maneuvers of the past for it reflects reality.”

Posted in Art, Film, Political economy | Comments Closed

N.Korea’s Kang Sok-ju Appointed to NDC

Monday, June 18th, 2007

Choson Ilbo (Hat Tip DPRK Studies)
6/18/2007

North Korea’s First Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok-ju, who is in responsible for Pyongyang’s diplomatic affairs including the nuclear issue, was in May made a member of the ruling National Defense Commission (NDC) led by dictator Kim Jong-il, Russian sources said Sunday.

The sources said Kim appointed Kang to the leadership body to strengthen his power base, with the move seen as ensuring the NDC holds sway over the military as well as domestic and foreign affairs.

Kang has served as the First Vice Foreign Minister since 1986 and is known as the only foreign ministry official who can directly advise Kim. He was a signer of the 1994 Geneva Accords between the U.S. and North Korea and the leader of Pyongyang’s representatives in the six-nation talks. Kang recently visited Moscow for treatment of a cataract.

The sources also said that General Lee Myung-soo, who was the North Korean military’s director of operations, has been made an organizer in the NDC.

The NDC currently consists of the country’s nine most powerful leaders, including Kim who serves as the body’s head, Vice Marshal Cho Myong Rok, who is Kim’s special envoy, Vice Marshal Kim Young-choon, General Rhee Yong-mu, General Kim Il-cheol and Secretary Chun Byung-ho.

Posted in Ministry of foreign Affairs, National Defense Commission, Political economy | Comments Closed

Pyongyang Makes an Appearance

Sunday, June 17th, 2007

Korea Times
Andrei Lankov
6/17/2007

Keeping up appearances: this is how the official North Korean policy in regard to the city of Pyongyang, the cradle of revolution, can be best summed up. Being a Pyongyang dweller is a great privilege in itself. Until things began to fall apart in the mid-1990s, this meant that your food rations would consist largely of rice (not barley and corn, as in the countryside) and that your children would be entitled to a small glass of milk in school. But you also had to follow the rules, and participate in the grandiose symbolic performance that Pyongyang actually was _ and to an extent still is.

Many laws which dealt with the daily life of Pyongyang’s residents essentially served the purposes of presentation. Take, for example, the case of Pyongyang bikes. East Asia has a well-deserved reputation as a cyclists’ paradise. Nonetheless, North Korea used to be different. Until the early 1990s bicycles were outlawed in Pyongyang. Obviously, the North Korean authorities saw bicycles as decisively low-tech _ and hence inappropriate for the “capital of revolution.’’

Foreigners were not exempt from this charade. When in the mid-1970s a visiting Norwegian diplomat brought his bike to Pyongyang, he stirred up a diplomatic controversy. After painful negotiations he was granted permission to ride his bike… on weekends only.

Another example is a strict dress code imposed on the female dwellers of Pyongyang and some other cities. Women are not supposed to wear trousers outside their work. Actually, police turn a blind eye to such inappropriately dressed women in winter. Older halmoni also can walk in trousers with impunity _ at least if they do not stray outside their neighborhood. But for other women in summer time, skirts are obligatory, and until the late 1990s an attempt to walk the street in trousers would result in a fine and a probable report to police.

There are other restrictions as well: a certain tradition or institution may not be outlawed but should not be mentioned in the press. A phenomenon could exist in the real world, but it is not permitted to enter the world carefully constructed by Pyongyang propaganda.

My favorite example is the pram. North Korean women carry their children like women in East Asia have done for centuries: on their backs. This is probably a very good way: at least, Russian Koreans, arguably the most de-Koreanized of all overseas Korean communities, still sometimes follow this custom after some 150 years of their life in Russia. Perhaps, it makes sense: a baby feels so comfortable on a mother’s back!

But the North Korean authorities decided that this age-old habit of carrying children on the back should not be too widely advertised. Hence, you cannot find pictures of women carrying kids on their back. Instead, on the glossy pages of the North Korean propaganda monthlies, readers frequently encounter pictures of impossibly happy mothers who are moving their children about in prams. In real life one has to spend several weeks in Pyongyang before chancing on a pram-pushing lady. The politically incorrect tradition of carrying children on the back should not be mentioned in official publications or depicted in visual arts (unless they employed as a reference to the bad old days before the coming of the Kim dynasty).

Nowadays, the rules have been somewhat relaxed, but back in the 1970s or 1980s a foreigner took some risk by taking a picture of a mother with a baby on her back. There were chances that, if spotted, the film would be removed from the camera and exposed to the light.

The same fate could easily befall somebody who dared take pictures of Korean women moving heavy loads on their heads. Such scenes are increasingly rare in Seoul these days, but in Pyongyang this is still a commonplace sight. Nonetheless, in the ideal world of the official propaganda, Korean women do not carry large weight in such an archaic way, and no media is allowed to break the censorship of such subversive information.

Actually, I think that there are good reasons why the North Korean officials are afraid of such scenes. They likely know little about Edward Said’s writings on “Orientalism’’: after all, Leninist regimes were always very suspicious about non-Leninist brands of leftist ideology, so people like Gramsci, Althusser, or Said were never much loved in Moscow, Beijing, or Pyongyang. But they obviously grasped some of Said’s “Orientalist’’ ideas instinctively. For most Western readers, pictures of women with children on their backs or of old ladies moving heavy loads on the top of their heads do hint at “exoticism’’ and also, by implication, “underdevelopment’’. And the North Korean state does not want to present itself as underdeveloped.

But all these efforts to impress the world appear quite strange when we remember how small the target audience actually was. North Koreans knew the truth anyway, and foreigners in Pyongyang were very few in number. In most cases their positions and experiences made them very skeptical of all these propaganda exercises. But the North Korean officials tried hard nonetheless.

Posted in Bicycles, Civil society, Clothing, Political economy, Transportation | Comments Closed

Kim Jong Il Received PTCA, Not Surgery

Thursday, June 14th, 2007

Daily NK
Yang Jung A
6/21/2007

Kim Jong Il underwent a Percuteneous Transarterial Coronary Angioplasty (PTCA) performed by German doctors in mid-May.

An inside Japanese source well acquainted with North Korea reported by telephone on the 20th that Kim Jong Il received medical treatment from doctors of the Berlin Heart Center in mid-May and was back at work a day later.

This source said that North Korean authority asked the German doctors to closely examine Kim Jong Il’s health and perform surgery if necessary. The examination revealed a myocardial infarction, but no other serious heart condition.

According to the doctors, Kim’s health was not bad except for kidney hypertrophy and some symptoms of diabetes. After examination he received the relatively simple PTCA treatment instead of surgery.

PTCA expands a narrow artery by inflating a tiny balloon. The balloon is introduced into the artery through catheter. It is an effective treatment for coronary artery diseases without the use of thoracotomy, and results in high success rates and few complications. Patients need just a couple of days’ rest. Dr. Jung Yong Suk, a heart specialist at the Sunrin Hospital in Handong University, explained to the Daily NK that “PTCA is a medical treatment for coronary arteries supplying blood into the heart. If Kim Jong Il required the procedure, he may have some problem in his coronary arteries, but it is uncertain if it is a stricture of the heart or myocardial infarction.”

The Japanese source said that the “German doctors promised to keep Kim Jong Il’s procedure a secret and to coordinate a faked story with North Korea authority.” Therefore, the spokesperson of Berlin Heat Center revealed that 6 members of the center stayed in Pyongyang from May 11th to the 19th, treating only three laborers, a nurse, and a scientist.

A North Korea expert speculated that Kim Jong Il might be addressing health concerns prior to the year end South Korean Presidential Election and further nuclear negotiations. Many groundless reports have circulated regarding possible Kim Jong Il heart surgery. A Japanese magazine, Shukan Gendai, claimed that Kim Jong Il received coronary artery bypass surgery for myocardial infarction.

Original claim:
Kim Jong-il had artery surgery in May
Korea Herald
6/14/2007

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il was operated on by a team of German doctors last month to open a blocked artery, a person connected to the Kim regime said.

While doctors from German Heart Institute Berlin arrived in Pyongyang prepared to perform major surgery on Kim, they found only one clogged artery, the person said. The 65-year-old Kim, who suffers from diabetes and high blood pressure, recovered well from the surgery, said the person, who asked that his name not be used because North Korea wanted the operation kept secret.

The person said while other members of North Korea’s elite go abroad for medical treatment, only Kim is important enough to have a team brought into the country. Barbara Nickolaus, a spokeswoman for the institute in Berlin, confirmed that the doctors had been in Pyongyang, and said they were there to treat three workers, a nurse and a scientist.

Kim’s health has been the subject of repeated recent speculation. Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s biggest daily newspaper, said late last month that South Korean and U.S. intelligence agencies were checking reports Kim was suffering from heart, kidney or liver disease.

The Japanese weekly magazine Shukan Gendai said on June 8 a team of six doctors from Berlin was in Pyongyang from May 11 to 19 and conducted heart-bypass surgery on Kim.

The North’s official Korea Central News Agency said Kim visited factories in North Pyeongan Province near the border with China and spoke with workers on June 7, or less than three weeks after the German doctors left North Korea.

NK Daily, a Seoul online news organization staffed by defectors from North Korea, reported on June 11 it had confirmed the report with an “inside source” in North Korea who said the apparently vigorous Kim’s June 7 schedule lasted until 1 a.m.

Since the 1970s, when he was unofficially designated as successor to his father, Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong-il’s health has been the subject of speculation.

“Kim does have diabetes and high blood pressure,” said C. Kenneth Quinones, a retired U.S. State Department Korea specialist who teaches at Japan’s Akita International University. “But there is no firm evidence that either has worsened recently.”

Kim, who has three sons in their 20s and 30s, hasn’t publicly said whether one of them or someone else will be his successor in the world’s only communist dynasty.

U.S. Concern

“The State Department is concerned about his health, at least until he publicly designates an heir,” Quinones said.

Kim’s failure to keep to his usual quota of appearances, such as visits to work units to deliver what the official Korea Central News Agency calls “on-the-spot guidance,” often triggers speculation.

Given North Korea’s nuclear program, all reports about Kim’s health have to be taken seriously, said Michael Breen, author of “Kim Jong-il: North Korea’s Dear Leader,” a biography.

“One day the reports will be true,” Breen said. “So we can never ignore them.”

Chosun Ilbo reported in May that Kim had been on official activities 23 times between Jan. 1 and May 27, half the number reported during the same period in 2006.

At an April 25 military parade, Kim’s eyeglass lenses were different from his usual sunglasses, leading to speculation his diabetes had worsened, making his eyes more sensitive to sunlight, the newspaper said. That was a “false alarm,” Quinones said. He said Kim was actually wearing “transition” lenses that turn darker according to the sun’s brightness.

South Korea’s National Intelligence Service concluded Kim’s health probably wasn’t in serious decline, according to a person who spoke with service agents.

At the April parade in Pyongyang, South Korean agents watched Kim review troops for two hours with no signs of fatigue, a sign his health isn’t fragile, said the person, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the information.

Chain-Smoker

Kim is a former chain-smoker whose lifestyle — including a reported fondness for cognac and delicacies — may contribute to his diabetes and high blood pressure. His father died, reportedly of cardiovascular disease, at 82 in 1994.

Questions about the younger Kim’s health were heightened during a long disappearance in the late 1970s, prompting speculation he was dead or seriously incapacitated from injuries in a car accident caused by people opposed to a hereditary succession.

After his formal elevation to succeed his father in 1980, the official media portrayed him as a tireless worker for the people’s welfare even at the risk of his own health.

Kim looked pale and thin at the ceremony designating him as successor, causing North Koreans to write critical letters to officials for failing to take care of his health, official media reported at the time.

Kenji Fujimoto, a Japanese chef who served Kim at his Pyongyang palace, said in a pseudonymous book he wrote about the experience that the North Korean leader would complain about the medicine he had to take.

In the book, “The Private Life of Kim Jong-il,” Fujimoto quoted Kim as saying, “Do I have to keep taking these pills every day until I die?” (Bloomberg)

Posted in Germany, Health care, Political economy | Comments Closed

Mt. Baekdu’s 3 Generals Worth a Mere $2.50?

Monday, June 11th, 2007

Daily NK
Han Young Jin
6/11/2007

Recently, portraits of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Sook (Kim Jong Il’s mother) wearing military clothing are being sold at North Korea’s black market, Jangmadang.

“Good Friends” a North Korea support organization, published a newsletter which informed that a portrait of the “3 Generals portrait” was being sold for 7,500 North Korean won (approx. US$2.50) at Jangmadang.

The sale of the “3 Generals portrait” is actually prohibited. Then, how did portraits of the “3 Generals” end up on the black market? Is this a sign that the value of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Sook has plummeted to rock bottom? No way.

In the past, this portrait of “Baekdu Mountains 3 Great Heroes” or otherwise known as the “3 Generals,” was distributed to North Korea’s elite class. However, as the power of money slowly took a stance in North Korea, the “3 Generals” somehow managed to appear in the markets.

People purchasing the portraits are not the elite class. If a person visits the home and sees this portrait hung, they may get the impression that the household was closely related to the elite class. In other words, the home looks as if it has value or is important, hence the demand at the markets.

The sale of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Sook portraits in North Korea is a political offense. If a person is caught selling any portraits, they may end up in a political concentration camp.

However, as people thrive off trade and the value of money spreads throughout the nation, life continues abundantly as long as you don’t get caught. The fact that this item has appeared at Jangmadang just goes to show how much trade as prospered in North Korea.

Further, the source and owners of the portraits are the elite and with a little investigation one can unveil the corruption that is occurring amongst the upper class. As a result, as long as you do not spread rumors about the National Safety Agency and affiliated persons, authorities let you go unnoticed.

The painting is a family portrait with Kim Il Sung dressed as a Chief general on the left, Kim Jong Il dressed in a general’s outfit in the middle and then on the right, Kim Jong Sook dressed in a guerilla uniform.

The “3 Generals’ portrait” first appeared in 1997 about the time of Kim Jong Il’s 55th birthday. At first, the painting was distributed to officers of power including elite officials, generals, courts and the national security and safety agency. The portrait was not presented to average households and hence the “3 Generals” gained its elite status. “We have the 3 Generals in our home” children would say bragging to others.

Nonetheless, this portrait began to be sold on the markets illegally from 1997. This was a time where people died of starvation and Kim Jong Il went around proclaiming “Military First Politics.” Distributing the “3 Generals’ portrait” was all a part of Kim Jong Il’s propaganda for “Military First Politics.”

In the beginning, administrative officers bribed authorities with alcohol and cigarettes in exchange for the portraits. Factory managers would even exchange the goods in the factories and hang the portraits in their own homes. It was not too difficult to obtain the painting if you were closely affiliated to persons with any sort of power including the authorities, military or the government.

Since then, it was common to see the portraits in the homes of the rich. This portrait worth 3,000won in `97 has now escalade to 7,500won following the July 1st economic measure in 2002.

Sale of the portraits began at the place of manufacture Mansudae Art Institution (the national art academy, which is mainly creating works related to Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il). The moment rations were suspended, workers at Mansudae Art Institution began to produce extra portraits and badges of Kim Il Sung, and as a means of survival traded these portraits in exchange for food. With ties to relatives in the country, manufacturers sold portraits of the 3 Generals through the back door.

In additional to this, it is common practice that badges of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il are sold on the black market. There are many badges which vary according to class from badges in the shape of a flag (used by overseas North Koreans) to badges made for authorities and a special badge that was manufactured after Kim Il Sung’s death.

One badge, sold for 1,000won

At first the badges were distributed to elite officials and upper class and then slowly, more and more average citizens tried to obtain one. For example, in the mid-90’s it was rare to see the ‘couple badge’ in the country that it sold for 1,000~1,500won (approx. US$0.3~0.5) each. Accordingly, the cost of the badges has also been affected by market prices.

Dealers who sell the badges appear at the black markets wearing a black jacket. The portraits are hidden beneath the jacket and buyers haggle with the dealer for a good price.

However, not everyone likes the “3 Generals portraits.” A defector who recently entered South Korea said, “Only people who can afford the pictures are interested in buying the “3 Generals portraits.” Otherwise, the average commoner doesn’t care.”

Nevertheless, what would happen if Kim Jong Il found out that the portrait of the “3 Generals portraits” were being sold on the black market? Furthermore, what would happen if he found out that the portraits were being sold for a mere $2.50? He would most probably make an order to close Jangmadang.

If not for the living and trade of average commoners, it would be best for Kim Jong Il not to know this fact. It would be better for Kim Jong Il to be ignorant of this rather humiliating truth.

Posted in Art, Black markets, General markets (FMR: Farmers Market), Good Friends, Political economy | Comments Closed

To be or not to be the N.K. foreign minister

Sunday, June 10th, 2007

Korea Herald
Lee Joo-Hee
6/11/2007

Following the death of former foreign minister of North Korea Paek Nam-sun this January, eyes and ears are open to who would succeed him.

While in most countries, being named the next foreign minister would be a coveted honor, it was the opposite in North Korea.

Kang Sok-ju, the first vice foreign minister, indeed, has tried with all his means not to be named the new foreign minister, according to sources familiar with the North Korean system.

“North Korea designated Kang as the successor of late Paek, but he somehow dodged the actual appointment citing his illness, possibly arthritis,” a source was quoted as saying by Yonhap News.

Instead, former ambassador to Russia Pak Ui-chun was named to the seat on May 18 after it was vacant for four months.

Whether it was possible for Kang to “dodge” the appointment remains unconfirmed, the situation is quite understandable considering how North Korea bestows actual authority on the No. 2 man while the more public figure takes on the official top seat. Kang, seeking to remain in a position of real power, may have wanted to stay where he is.

The clearest example of this power ranking system is Kim Yong-nam, who, as head of the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly, is the formal president of North Korea. North Korea is, however, ruled by Kim Jong-il, whose official title is the chairman of the National Defense Commission.

“We deem that Kang believed becoming a foreign minister could mean going on all the official and open duties but being distanced from being one of the close confidantes of Kim Jong-il,” the source was quoted as saying.

Kim Jong-il, with intense interest in relations with the United States, reportedly has talked directly with Kang instead of the foreign minister to discuss pending issues since the 1990s.

A possible threat to Kang’s status could now be North Korea’s chief nuclear negotiator Kim Kye-gwan, according to sources quoted by Yonhap. Kim Kye-gwan was reportedly a candidate to succeed Kang if Kang was to be named the foreign minister.

Kim Kye-gwan earned the trust of the communist leader by successfully negotiating the lift of the freeze of North Korean funds at Banco Delta Asia in Macau, the sources said.

He was recently allowed to move into “the club,” a luxurious villa compound located in Pyongyang for some 30 households in which Kim Jong-il’s close confidantes reside.

Posted in Ministry of foreign Affairs, Political economy, Supreme Peoples Assembly | Comments Closed

North Korea needs a dose of soft power

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

Asia Times
Andrei Lankov
6/5/2007

It is clear that the current Western approach to dealing with North Korea is not working. Some people in Washington obviously still believe that financial or other sanctions will push the North Korean regime to the corner and press Pyongyang into relinquishing its nuclear program. But this is very unlikely.

First, neither China nor Russia is willing to participate in the sanctions regime wholeheartedly. Neither country is happy about a nuclear North Korea, but they see its collapse as an even greater evil. However, without their participation, no sanctions regime can succeed. More important, South Korea, still technically an ally of the United States, is even less willing to drive Pyongyang to the corner. And finally, even if sanctions have some effect, the only palpable results will be more dead farmers. The regime survived far greater challenges a decade ago when it had no backers whatsoever.

So what can be done? In the short run, not much. Like it or not, Pyongyang will remain nuclear. There might be some compromises, such as freezing existing nuclear facilities, but in general there is no way to press North Korean leaders into abandoning their nuclear weapons.

This is not good news, since it means that the threat will remain. Earlier experience has clearly demonstrated that every time North Korean leaders run into trouble, they use blackmail tactics, and they usually work. In all probability, there will be more provocations in the future. Since Pyongyang’s leaders believe (perhaps with good reason) that Chinese-style economic reforms might bring about the collapse of their regime, they have not the slightest inclination to start reforming themselves.

This leaves them with few options other a policy aimed at extracting aid from the outside world, and regular blackmail is one of the usual tools of this approach. Thus the threat persists unless the regime or, at least, its nature is changed, but how can this goal be achieved if pressure from outside is so patently inefficient? The answer is pressure from within, by nurturing pro-democracy and pro-reform forces within North Korean society (and also pro-reform thoughts within the brains of individuals).

Of all assorted “rogue regimes”, North Korea is probably most vulnerable to this soft approach. On one hand, unlike the bosses of the assorted fundamentalist regimes, North Korea’s leaders have never claimed that their followers will be rewarded in the afterlife; they do not talk, for example, about the pleasures of otherworldly sex with 72 virgins.

Their claim to legitimacy is based on their alleged ability to deliver better lives to Koreans here and now, and Pyongyang’s rulers have failed in this regard in the most spectacular way. The existence of another Korea makes the use of nationalistic slogans somewhat problematic as well.

North Korea’s leaders cannot really say, “We have to be poor to protect our independence from those encroaching foreigners,” since the existence of the dirty-rich South vividly demonstrates that under a reasonably rational government, Koreans can be both rich and independent (and also free).

This leaves Pyongyang with no choice but to seal the borders as tight as no other communist regime has ever done before, on assumption that the common folk should not know that they live a complete lie. This self-imposed information isolation is the major condition for the regime’s survival, and breaking such a wall of ignorance should be seen as the major target for any long-term efforts directed at bringing change to North Korea.

The power of soft measures is often underestimated, not least because such policies are cheap, slow and not as spectacular as commando raids or even economic embargoes. However, their efficiency is remarkable.

In this regard, it makes sense to remember a story from the relatively recent past. In 1958, an academic-exchange agreement was signed between the Soviet Union and the United States. Back then the diehard enemies of the Soviet system were not exactly happy about this step, which, they insisted, was yet another sign of shameful appeasement.

They said this agreement would merely provide the Soviets with another opportunity to send spies to steal US secrets. Alternatively, the skeptics insisted, the Soviets would send diehard ideologues who would use their US experience as a tool in the propaganda war. And, the critics continued, this would be done on American taxpayers’ money.

The first group of exchange students was small and included, as skeptics feared, exactly the people they did not want to welcome on to US soil. There were merely four Soviet students who were selected by Moscow to enter Columbia University for one year of studies in 1958. One of them, as we know now, was a promising KGB operative whose job was indeed to spy on the Americans. He was good at his job and later made a brilliant career in Soviet foreign intelligence.

His fellow student was a young but promising veteran of the then-still-recent World War II. After studies in the US, he moved to the Communist Party central bureaucracy, where in a decade he became the first deputy head of the propaganda department – in essence, a second in command among Soviet professional ideologues.

Well, skeptics seemed to have been proved right – until the 1980s, that is. The KGB operative’s name was Oleg Kalugin, and he was to become the first KGB officer openly to challenge the organization from within. His fellow student, Alexandr Yakovlev, a Communist Party Central Committee secretary, became the closest associate of Mikhail Gorbachev and made a remarkable contribution to the collapse of the communist regime in Moscow (some people even insist that it was Yakovlev rather than Gorbachev himself who could be described as the real architect of perestroika.)

Eventually, both men said it was their experiences in the United States that changed the way they saw the world, even if they were prudent enough to keep their mouths shut and say what they were expected to say. So two of the four carefully selected Soviet students of 1958 eventually became the top leaders of perestroika.

There is no reason to believe that measures that worked in the Soviet case would be less effective in North Korea. Academic exchanges are especially important, since the policy toward North Korea should pursue two different but interconnected purposes. The first is to promote transformation of the regime or perhaps even to bring down one of the world’s most murderous dictatorships. However, it is also time to start thinking about what will happen next, after Kim Jong-il and his cohorts vanish from the scene.

The post-Kim reconstruction of North Korean will be painful, expensive and probably lengthy. Right now North Korea is some 20 times a poor as the South, and the gap in education between two countries is yawning. With the exception of a handful of military engineers, a typical North Korean technician has never used a computer.

North Korean economists learn a grossly simplified version of 1950s Soviet official economics, and North Korean doctors have never heard about even the most common drugs used elsewhere. This means that in the case of a regime collapse, the North Koreans would be merely cheap labor for the South Korean conglomerates – a situation bound to produce tensions and hostility between the two societies. A North Korean who in 20 years’ time will look for a decent job should be made employable, and the best way to ensure this is to start thinking about his or her education right now.

Academic exchanges with North Korea would have dual or even triple purposes. First, they would bring explosive information into the country, hastening domestic changes (probably, but not necessary, changes of a revolutionary nature). Second, they would assist North Korean economic development, thus beginning to bridge the gap between the two Koreas even while the North was still under Kim Jong-il’s regime. Third, they would contribute to more efficient and less painful reconstruction of post-Kim North Korea.

Of course, all these scholarship programs should be paid for by the recipient countries. North Koreans have no money for such exchanges (and to paraphrase a remark by North Korea expert Aidan Foster-Carter, North Korean leaders are people who never do anything as vulgar as paying). But all three targets are clearly in the interest of the world community, and anyway the monies involved would be quite small.

North Korea’s leaders are no fools. They understand that such exchanges are dangerous, and they do not want future Korean Yakovlevs and Kalugins to emerge. Back in 1959-60 they even decided to recall their students from the Soviet Union and other countries of the Communist Bloc and did not send their young people to study anywhere but in Mao Zedong’s China until the late 1970s. In other words, for two decades Pyongyang’s leaders believed that those countries were way too liberal as an environment for their students.

However, they also understand that without exchanges they cannot survive in the longer run. Even now, Pyongyang is doing its best to increase exchanges with China, sending numerous students there.

Another important factor is endemic corruption. There is no doubt that nearly all students who will go overseas will be scions of the Pyongyang aristocrats, the hereditary elite that has been ruling the country for decades. A high-level official might understand that sending a young North Korean overseas is potentially dangerous. But if the person in question is likely to be his nephew, he will probably choose to forget about the ideological threats.

Of course, no sane North Korean leader would ever agree to send students to the US or to South Korea. However, there are many countries that are far more acceptable for them. The Australian National University a few years ago had a course for North Korean postgraduate students who studied modern economics and financial management. Australia or Canada or New Zealand might be good places for such programs.

While English-language education is preferable, since English is the language of international communication in East Asia, there is a place for European countries as well, especially smaller ones, whose names do not sound too offensive to the Pyongyang bureaucrats – such as Switzerland or Hungary or Austria.

Such programs should be sponsored by those countries whose stakes are the highest, such as the US, Japan and South Korea, but smaller and more distant countries also should consider sponsoring such an undertaking. This is not a waste of money, nor even a good-looking humanitarian gesture for its own sake. As history has shown many times, former students tend to be sympathetic to the country where they once studied, and they normally keep some connections there.

North Korea has great potential, and when things start moving, those graduates are likely to be catapulted to high places, since people with modern education are so few in North Korea. This means countries that consider small investments in scholarships for North Koreans will eventually get large benefits through important connections and sympathies that their business people, engineers and scholars will find in some important offices of post-Kim North Korea.

Scholarships for North Korean students are not the only form of academic exchanges. North Korean scientists and scholars should be invited to Western universities, and books and digital materials should be donated to major North Korean libraries in large numbers. Of course, only selected people with special clearances are allowed to read non-technical Western publications in North Korea, but they are exactly the people who will matter when things start moving.

It is well known that students and academics who come back from longtime overseas trips are routinely submitted to rigorous ideological retraining upon their return to North Korea. But does it help? Unlikely. If anything, heavy doses of obviously nonsensical propaganda make a great contrast with what they have learned and seen, thus putting North Korean society in an even less favorable light.

Of course, they will not say anything improper when they come back home, but they will see that there are other ways of life, they will see how impoverished, bleak and hyper-controlled their lives are, and they will think how to change this. Sooner or later, these people will become a catalyst for transformation – and their skills will help to ease the pains of the post-Kim revival of North Korea.

Posted in China, Civil society, Economic reform, Education, Energy, International trade, Nuclear, Political economy, Russia | Comments Closed

Lessons on North Korean “Kremlinology”

Monday, June 4th, 2007

Secretive Kingdom
MSNBC
Christian Caryl
6/4/2007

If you’re confused by the reports coming out of North Korea, you’re probably not alone. Take the recent slew of conflicting reports about the health of the nation’s Dear Leader. U.S. Calls Kim Jong Il’s Health a ‘Concern,’ ran one headline. The body of the story, quoting a senior U.S. official who was himself referring to reports from other unnamed officials in Seoul, alluded to a “monthlong disappearance” by Kim and noted that the North Korean dictator suffers “from advanced diabetes and heart disease as well as high blood pressure.” Around the same time, another analysis claimed that Kim had recovered from these “chronic diseases.” The report, which based its account on the usual anonymous senior officials in Seoul and obscure North Korea wonks, also asserted confidently, that “intelligence” in the hands of the South Korean government indicates that Kim will choose his youngest son, Kim Jong Un, as his successor.

So what are we to think? Does that mean that everything we read about North Korea is garbage pretending to be authoritative truth? This sort of conundrum is par for the course for anyone who has spent time studying the goings-on at the top of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as the North prefers to call itself. The ironic fact of the matter is that we know far more about North Korea than ever before. China and South Korea have both deepened their ties with the Hermit Kingdom in recent years, and that means that much more information is flowing out as well as in. A steady stream of defectors has provided us with often-elaborate detail about the country in general. And there’s even a small—exceedingly small—population of foreigners who deal with the North on a regular basis. All of this helps us to build up our picture of what’s going on in the country.

Yet when it comes to the most important part of the story—the motives and intentions of North Korea’s government—it’s always best to be skeptical. Andrei Lankov, a Seoul-based Russian academic who has studied the North for decades, says that he refuses to comment when asked by journalists about government reshuffles or coup rumors in Pyongyang. Such reports occasionally do end up getting confirmed by events, he concedes, but estimates that they are successful less than 20 percent of the time. (In other words, you’d usually be much better off judging the account’s veracity by flipping a coin.) Lankov notes that the Kim regime won’t even publish the precise number of members in the ruling communist party, much less basic stats on the economy. He describes it as by far the world’s most secretive state—far more so than even the old U.S.S.R., where it was common for intellectuals to discuss political topics when they knew they were in like-minded company. In North Korea, by contrast, “People are terrified to death to discuss anything political.” And that, he says, is because everything political ultimately comes down to the Kim family, which holds the power of instant life or death over every North Korean—and isn’t afraid to use it, as countless tales of the regime’s brutality attest. For that reason, Lankov argues, “The most explosive topic, the one that is never discussed, is the topic of succession.”

The result is a level of mystery that seems almost calculated to drive journalists into a frenzy. Confronted with such opacity, it’s hard to resist the temptation to show off even the slightest scrap of seemingly revelatory information garnered from some super-secret privileged source. In November 2004, the Russian news agency Tass reported that official portraits of Kim Jong Il were being taken down in North Korean diplomatic representations and official buildings. Could it be that Kim was on the way out? Respected news outlets jumped on the story, in some cases adding details culled from Chinese or Korean newspapers suggesting that the Dear Leader’s days were numbered. It hardly needs adding that he— and his portraits—remain firmly in place today.

Applying a bit more common sense might not be a bad thing. But the fact is that that’s far easier said than done. In April 2004, for example, a tremendous explosion took place in the train station in the North Korean city of Ryongchon, killing hundreds of people and rendering thousands more homeless. It happened just hours after Kim’s personal train had passed through the same station, spawning fervid speculation about a possible assassination attempt. According to one version the blast was triggered by a mobile phone—a detail that gained credibility a few months later, when the North Korean authorities pulled the plug on the country’s 18-month-old cell phone program. Service has never been restored.

Sounds convincing. Yet consider for a moment the important questions left unanswered by this version of events. If the explosion was being triggered remotely, why did the presumed conspirators wait for hours after Kim’s passage to send the signal? And why did they decide to kill hundreds of innocents in the process? In retrospect, virtually everything about this incident is still up for grabs. The fact that the North Korean government released casualty figures was actually hailed by some commentators as evidence of North Korea-style glasnost. Suffice it to say that we are still waiting for CNN to open its first Pyongyang bureau. (Skeptics note that the city’s proximity to the Chinese border meant that news of the explosion was bound to get out anyway.) In the wake of the disaster one British journalist confidently asserted that North Korea was becoming “more open to international help”—not that that stopped Pyongyang from announcing that it was about to start expelling international aid organizations a year later. And so it goes.

Western intelligence agencies also have a strikingly poor record when it comes to the country. No one in Washington or London predicted the North’s invasion of the South in 1950. The Clinton administration signed an agreement that would have supposedly rid the North of its plutonium-based nuclear-weapons program back in 1994—and then delayed fulfilling its own part of the deal because the CIA was assuring it of the North’s imminent collapse. (The experts are still sparring over whether the resulting failure of the Agreed Framework led inexorably to the North’s first nuclear test last autumn.) In 2002 the Bush administration announced that North Korea had suddenly admitted, in negotiations, its pursuit of a hitherto secret parallel nuclear weapons program based on highly enriched uranium—leading Washington to break off talks in indignation. In recent months, though, administration officials—their reputation already severely tarnished by the Iraq WMD intelligence scandal—have been forced to acknowledge that they can’t tell for sure whether the North Koreans still have such a program under way.

Grounds for despair? No, just for a measure of humility. Journalists—and governments—need to do a better job of admitting to the public that any information about North Korea’s leadership is to be regarded with profound skepticism. To be sure, a few privileged insiders—former Kim employees, a kidnapped film director—have come forth to tell their stories. That’s how we know, for example, details of the Dear Leader’s luxury-loving ways. Yet there have been almost no defectors from the upper ranks of the leadership who have been willing to reveal significant details about what makes the regime tick—presumably for fear of retribution against them or their families. Perhaps it’s just hard for many of us, wallowing in an age of instant messaging and tell-all blogs, to believe that there are limits to what we can know about other human beings. Consider, for example, this revealing incident involving a North Korean worker (who thus almost certainly doubles as an employee of the North Korean security service) at a European embassy in Pyongyang. The worker was shocked when her brother showed up one day to apply for a visa, because she had no idea that her brother had the right to travel abroad. He, by contrast, had no idea that his sister worked in a foreign embassy. In that respect, perhaps, North Korea can serve as a useful cautionary tale. Is it hard to know what’s going on at the top? “It’s not just hard,” says Andrei Lankov. “It’s impossible.”

Posted in Civil society, Political economy | Comments Closed

North Korean Economy Watch