Kims’ Clear-Cutting of Korean Forests Risks Triggering Famine

November 21st, 2007

Bloomberg
Bradley Martin
Hideko Takayama
11/21/2007

In some parts of the world, floods and famine are acts of God. In North Korea, they’re acts of government.

For decades, the late North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung mobilized vast work teams to fell trees and turn the mountainsides into farmland, allowing rainwater to wreck roads, power lines and agricultural fields.

Following Kim’s death in 1994 — just before a flood- linked famine gripped the nation — his son and successor Kim Jong Il continued the sacrifice of forest cover until 2000, when he began encouraging reforestation. But the shift hasn’t reversed the damage, and some analysts warn that another famine, close to the scale of the 1990s disaster that may have killed millions of people, might occur as soon as next year.

“Next year’s food situation is quite serious,” said Kwon Tae Jin, a researcher at the Korea Rural Economic Institute in Seoul. The famine risk is greatest starting next spring, after the current harvest is used up, he said; North Korea’s best hope may be for more food aid from abroad as a result of its agreement to begin dismantling its nuclear-weapons program.

Floods in August and September left 600 people dead or missing by official count, and 270,000 homeless. “Corpses were dug out of the silt” still clutching vinyl-wrapped photos of the Kims, the official Korean Central News Agency reported.

`Bad Governance’

South Korea has similar rainfall but has largely avoided such calamities. The North’s flooding “is a product of bad governance, economic mismanagement, poor agricultural policy and haphazard short-term survival strategies of the starving, desperate population,” Alexandre Y. Mansourov, a Korea specialist at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu, said in a study.

North Korea’s deforestation program dates back to a 1961 speech by Kim Il Sung. In a mostly mountainous country, he proclaimed, “it is necessary to obtain more land through the remaking of nature.” Not only tidelands but “hills throughout the country and plateaus” should be “brought under the plough,” he said.

“The hills and mountains still had trees, and I never heard of floods,” said Hiroko Saito, a Japanese woman who moved with her Korean husband to North Korea in 1961. Her husband joined one of Kim’s vast mountain work teams in the early 1970s, said Saito, now 66 and back in Japan.

Workers and Soldiers

The crews included “city workers, students, soldiers of the Korean People’s Army and anybody else who could move,” said Lee Wo Hong, a pro-communist Korean agricultural expert living in Japan who began spending time in North Korea as a teacher and adviser in 1981.

What he saw there turned him into a critic of Kim Il Sung’s agricultural policy, he said. The country “was filled with bald mountains” on which the North Koreans had planted fast-growing maize; even relatively light rain would wash the crop away.

Reclaiming marginal land appeared successful for a while as North Korea’s overall crop yields increased, agriculture specialist Edward Reed wrote in a 2001 University of Wisconsin study. “Yet from the mid-1980s on, there appears to have been a slow decline in production, probably due to soil depletion from overintensive production,” he said.

By the early 1990s, yields dropped so low that hungry North Koreans went to the mountains to bring even more land under cultivation. Meanwhile, increased demand for firewood — the result of an energy shortage caused when former communist trading partners halted cut-rate fuel exports — added a new incentive to strip the mountainsides.

Death Toll

The results came to the world’s attention in 1995, with the worst floods in a century. The lost farmland contributed to a famine — already under way — that killed somewhere between 600,000 and 1 million North Koreans, according to “Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform,” by Stephen Haggard and Marcus Noland. Other estimates put the death toll as high as 4 million.

As floodwaters poured into coal mines, the energy shortage worsened and the state-run economy all but collapsed. Economic recovery — which didn’t begin until 1998 — was halted by further catastrophic floods in 2006, when the economy again shrank, according to an estimate by South Korea’s central bank.

A report on North Korea’s environment as of 2003, jointly prepared by North Korean government agencies, the United Nations Environment Program and the United Nations Development Program, blamed severe “land degradation” on “conversion of forest land in hilly areas to agricultural land.”

Enthusiast

The report portrayed Kim Il Sung as a forest-planting enthusiast from as early as six decades ago. Nick Nuttall, a spokesperson at UNEP headquarters in Nairobi, said the agency was “not in a position to comment” on why the report didn’t mention Kim’s mountain-clearing policy.

While the report said reversing the environmental damage through reforestation has become “an all-out campaign,” hungry people have continued cultivating crops between the tree seedlings, according to Han Young Jin, a defector from the North who lives in South Korea.

As the branches spread, “people would tie the sprigs together so the trees could not grow,” Han wrote on a defector-staffed Web site, Daily NK. “When the trees inevitably died, new saplings would be planted.”

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Selling to survive

November 21st, 2007

Financial Times
Anna Fifield
9/19/2007

Pak Hyun-yong was, by North Korean standards, an entrepreneur. Too much of an entrepreneur. During the famine that ravaged the country in the late 1990s, Mr Pak watched his family die of starvation – first his younger brother, then his older sister’s children. Then, eventually, his sister too.

Somehow he pulled through this period, dubbed by the regime as “the arduous march”, and was spurred into taking some very non-communist, almost subversive action. He began selling noodles.

Every day he would take 10kg of “corn rice” – a poor North Korean imitation in which dried kernels are fashioned into grains – and turn it into noodles. Then he would get on his bicycle and pedal around his home town of Hamhung on the east coast, bartering the noodles for 12kg of corn rice: 10kg for tomorrow’s noodles and 2kg for his remaining family.

“The police would come by and try to persuade me not to sell the noodles, saying that I should not succumb to capitalism and that the Dear Leader would resolve our food shortages,” says Mr Pak, who escaped from North Korea a year ago and is upbeat and energetic considering the hardships he has endured.

Now 32, he is in hiding in a bleak, remote village in northern China not far from the North Korean border, together with his wife, with whom he escaped, and their new baby. They live in a one-room house with no bathroom – protected by locals who are helping them settle.

“The [North Korean] police even threatened to imprison me if I didn’t stop selling. Suddenly I realised that North Korea was a country where they would stop people’s efforts to survive,” he says, sitting on the warm floor of his house, still dressed in the apron he wears to work in a nearby butchery.

“I heard that China was a rich and modern country – that they had tractors and that people could eat rice every day, even in rural areas,” he says, shaking his head. “Chinese dogs wouldn’t eat our rice – they would ask for better.”

In almost 20 interviews along the border with China, ethnic Koreans born in China and North Korean escapees, some of whom had been in the isolated state as recently as two months ago, describe a country where change is taking place from the ground up rather than under the direction of its leader, Kim Jong-il.

North Korea remains the most tightly controlled state in the world. But recent escapees tell of the changes that are being driven by necessity in areas near China, especially in the cities of Rajin and Hoeryong in the north and Sinuiju at the southern end of the border.

While it would be an overstatement to say that this represents the type of nascent transition to free-market reforms that has occurred in countries such as Russia and China, the worsening state of the North Korean economy is leading to widespread trading and the emergence of a fledgling merchant class crossing into China, the escapees say.

Some agricultural markets – rather than just state markets – were permitted during the “economic improvements” of 2002, but ad-hoc markets have since sprung up around the country with the tacit approval, if not the encouragement, of the regime. These markets are now the backbone of North Korea’s creaking economy as the regime provides almost nothing by way of rations any more.

The parlous state of the economy is probably the driving factor behind Mr Kim’s decision to roll back his nuclear programme. The six-party denuclearisation talks are making surprisingly good progress, analysts say, as his regime seeks heavy fuel oil for its rusting industries and an end to economic sanctions.

Certainly, recent escapees from North Korea describe a desperate situation inside the country. Somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 North Koreans are thought to be living in hiding in the north-eastern provinces of China, especially in Jilin and Heilongjiang, areas considered backward by Chinese standards.

The Financial Times travelled throughout this region to meet North Koreans while seeking to avoid endangering their lives. (North Koreans who are repatriated from China face detention in labour camps or worse, and even those who are not caught put the lives of family members at risk by talking to journalists. For that reason, names have been changed.)

“In Rajin, all the factories have stopped,” says Oh Man-bok, a 22-year-old who escaped in September from the city near the borders with Russia and China, considered relatively prosperous because it is one of the North’s main trading channels. “The men still have to go to work and have their name checked off but there is nothing to do. Sometimes they sit around and sometimes they go home. They don’t get paid but sometimes, in a good month, they get 15 days’ worth of corn in rations,” he says.

That means women are increasingly becoming the breadwinners, going to the mountains to collect edible plants or to the market to sell home-made snacks. “People survive by selling. They do whatever they can to earn money – selling fried dough sticks or repairing shoes and clothes,” Mr Oh says. “But it’s very difficult to earn enough to survive and even in Rajin, many people have to eat porridge made from the whey left over from making tofu.”

Rajin and Sinuiju, as the main thoroughfares for trade with China, have been more open than the rest of North Korea for some time, but the experiment with capitalism that has been taking place in these two cities now appears to be expanding to Hoeryong.

The city of Hoeryong can be clearly seen from the Chinese side of the border, which is marked by a shallow river only 20 metres wide in places. On the bridge between the two countries, the Financial Times watched North Korean trucks trundle into China and dozens of Chinese – and a few North Koreans wearing badges stamped with the image of Kim Il-sung, Mr Kim’s late father and founder of the state – lug bags across.

A Chinese border official says that about 100 a day cross the bridge from the Chinese side, mainly going to visit family members, although in summer as many as 300 go on tour packages to the beach on North Korea’s east coast. About 10 North Koreans a day cross into China for trading or to see their relatives. “With Rmb1,000 [$135, £65, €92] they can come to China even if they don’t have family here. So they often borrow money to come here and buy things for trading in the market in Hoeryong,” the official says.

Bribery appears to be becoming more widespread as trade and travel increases – from a few cigarettes needed to pass through internal checkpoints to the few hundred renminbi expected at border crossings. “Everyone wants to be a border guard these days,” says one Chinese-Korean trader. “They don’t explicitly say, ‘Give me money’ – they just keep going through your paperwork and asking you questions until you offer them money.”

Again, Pyongyang seems to be aware that this is happening and allows it as a way to keep people happy – rotating border guards every six months to give officials from around the country a chance to earn extra money, according to escapees.

In Hoeryong, the market used to be beside the bridge on the outskirts but this year it was moved to a school building right in the centre of town. Its 180,000 residents enjoy a relatively privileged existence because Kim Jong-il’s late mother was born there.

The market has become central to the city and to people’s lives, driven by grassroots demand, says Song Mi-ok, an ethnic Korean living in China who has made several trips to the city recently. She has gained access by visiting fake relatives, a family to whom she pays Rmb1,000 every time she pretends to visit them.

“You can find everything there,” she says of the market, which opens at 7.30am and closes at dusk. “People usually start by selling food that they have grown or made, using the profits to move into goods trading.”

North Koreans say one can buy everything in the markets “except cat horns”, as their expression has it. Rice given as aid from South Korea is on sale and people even display the bag – even though they risk having it confiscated by the authorities – because people know that South Korean rice is of high quality, Ms Song says.

One kilogram of rice in Hoer­yong market costs 900 North Korean won – a huge amount in a country where the average wage for a government employee is about between 3,000 and 4,000 won a month, or slightly more than one US dollar.

“There are a lot of people buying and it’s all money trade; there’s no bartering now,” Ms Song says. “North Koreans are poor, so it’s quite surprising to see people with a lot of money. They don’t receive money from the state – it’s all money they have made themselves.”

One Korean-Chinese man who visited relatives in Hoeryong last year also describes an increasingly active drug trade. It is not uncommon, he says, to be approached by people in their twenties or thirties selling a white narcotic called “ice” – probably a form of crystal methamphetamine. The drug fetches 20 times the North Korean price in China, making smuggling a lucrative business, but the punishment for drug trafficking in China is so severe that Hoeryong dealers try to sell it to visiting Chinese.

The markets are thriving thanks to new border regulations. While the number crossing illegally has dropped because of tighter restrictions in both countries, the number of North Koreans who are allowed to cross into China legally has steadily increased, according to several Korean-Chinese who help those who make it across the border.

North Koreans with relatives in China but not in South Korea are allowed to apply for passports to cross the border. This is creating a new group of migrant workers – those who are legal but working for themselves and their families rather than for the state. “Young people come here to work for one or two months and earn some money – they’re coming from Pyongyang as well as the regions,” says Ri In-chol, an ethnic Korean missionary from China who supports border crossers, legal or otherwise.

“They pay Rmb300-Rmb400 to get a passport and then they can cross. There is now a much freer flow because Kim Jong-il realises that this is the only way to keep the people alive. They take back money, used sewing machines and used clothes from their relatives that they can sell in the markets,” Mr Ri says.

Although Chinese clothes are most prevalent, North Koreans prefer South Korean products for their higher quality. “The labels have to be cut out of South Korean clothes, so if they don’t have a label then people assume that they’re South Korean and they like them more,” says another Chinese-Korean who has recently visited Rajin.

Indeed, Mr Ri says that North Korean officials are picky about what they will let through. “When North Koreans come to China they are allowed to take used clothes back. But when Korean-Chinese people want to give clothes to their relatives in North Korea, they have to be new because otherwise the officials think they are being looked down on,” he says. (Jeans and short skirts, seen as representative of American immorality, are still not allowed.)

The economic changes – particularly the lessening dependence on the state – are potentially destabilising for Mr Kim’s regime because they weaken the tools of control. That means that there is a fine line between what is permissible and what is not. “Kim Jong-il is tolerating this much openness because people need to survive, but if he wakes up one morning and sees capitalism is spreading too far, he will order it all to be stopped,” says Gao Jing­zhu, professor of Korean studies at China’s Yanbian University, near the border.

“North Korea is small, so if there is too much change it will threaten the sustainability of the regime and it will collapse,” Prof Gao says. “North Korea is in a dilemma.”

Good Friends, a Seoul-based civic group that monitors life inside North Korea, this month said Pyongyang was cracking down on women working in street markets. “The authorities have judged that female merchants have reached a point that threatens the country’s government,” Good Friends quoted a North Korean official in China as saying.

“The men are tied to their workplaces but they don’t receive proper rations,” the official reportedly said. “This has shifted the men’s burden of supporting their families on to the women. With trade directly linked to the people’s survival, the crackdown isn’t going well.”

Indeed, it may already be too late. The increased economic interaction with China means that the flow of information to North Koreans is steadily increasing. “People’s awareness and illusions have changed,” says one Chinese-Korean who drives trucks into North Korea.

This is just the kind of contact that threatens Mr Kim’s regime, which has kept the 23m-strong population under control by cutting off access to the outside world and telling them they live in a socialist paradise. Mr Ri, the missionary, says: “People living in open areas like Rajin and Hoeryong are more exposed to the outside world but that is not the case when you go further into North Korea. So even if it is becoming more open, you never know when that is going to change. They will still come after you if you are involved in political activities.”

But recent escapees from North Korea say that people are increasingly discussing – in private – one topic that they say would have been unimaginable until very recently: the eventual death of the Dear Leader. “State control is still as strong as before but now, when people gather together as families, they say that the system is really wrong. That never used to happen before,” says Mr Pak, the man who left Hamhung last year.

“Kim Jong-il always says he will feed the people and make them happy, but that has not happened. There are many people who hope that Kim Jong-il will die soon,” he says, shrugging his shoulders. “I have to admit it: the state is already kind of breaking down.”

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Mount Paektu pilgrimage packages for 2008

November 19th, 2007

Joong Ang Daily
Ser Myo Ja
11/19/2007

Seo Myeong-hee has traveled the world to see the pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China and the Grand Canyon in the United States, but she said her visit to Chonji, the crater lake on the peak of Mount Paektu, was the best trip of her life.

“It was a beautiful sunny day in May last year. I was just taken away by the magnificent view,” Seo, 57, recalled of her visit to the mountain that straddles the border between China and North Korea. “After walking along the ridge for about three hours, we were there. The lake was a mysterious blue, and there were wildflowers everywhere.”

Standing 2,744 meters (9,002 feet) tall, Mount Paektu has been worshipped for centuries as the place of Korea’s ancestral origins. In addition to its beauty, it is this rich cultural tradition that prompted Seo, like many South Koreans, to travel through China to see the mountain, since there is currently no way to visit the area via North Korea. “It was a five-day trip, but mostly we spent time in Chinese towns seeing ancient ruins of the Goguryeo Kingdom and other tourist attractions,” she said. “The highlight was definitely Mount Paektu, but you have to sit on the bus for many painful hours to actually get there.”

All that, though, is about to change. Last month’s inter-Korean summit finally opened the door for South Koreans to fly directly to the mountain. It promises to be a popular destination once the infrastructure is complete.

In 2005, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il promised Hyundai Asan Chairwoman Hyun Jeong-eun during a visit to Pyongyang that he would allow a tour program for Mount Paektu. Nothing was done for more than two years, however, until the October summit between Kim and President Roh Moo-hyun resulted in a deal to allow passengers to fly from Seoul to an airport on the mountain.

With cooperation from the Korea National Tourism Organization, Hyundai Group’s North Korea business arm, Hyundai Asan, has begun preparations in cooperation with North Korea’s Asia-Pacific Peace Committee, which handles civilian inter-Korean projects.

Hyundai Asan, which has the sole franchise to operate tours to the North from South Korea, plans to begin offering tours to Mount Paektu in May 2008. The only other tour program from the South allows visitors to travel to Hyundai’s resort at Mount Kumgang, a project that began in 1998. A South Korean team including officials from the KNTO, the Roh administration and Hyundai will make an on-site survey of Mount Paektu before the end of this month.

Yoon Man-joon, president of Hyundai Asan, told the JoongAng Daily in an interview Thursday that he is extremely optimistic about the tour project. Yoon and Hyun visited the mountain personally early this month.

“The Mount Kumgang tour had more of a symbolic meaning, because it was the first opportunity for South Koreans to go to North Korea for tourism,” Yoon said. “Mount Paektu, however, has much more potential to succeed solely as a tour program.”

Yoon thinks demand will be high and response immediate once the tours begin. “Mount Kumgang is praised for its scenic beauty, but Mount Paektu is more than that,” Yoon said. “The place is the origin of all Koreans, and it is an extraordinary experience for us to visit there.”

Seo could not agree more. “When I saw Chonji, the crater lake, I became so emotional that I almost cried,” she said. “The lyrics of our national anthem even begin with the mountain ― ‘Until the East Sea’s waves are dry, and Mount Paektu is worn away, God watch o’er our land forever!’”

The mountain has long been considered sacred. In Korea’s creation myth, Hwanung, a son of the Lord of Heaven, was allowed to descend onto Mount Paektu with 3,000 followers and found the City of God.

There a tiger and a bear told Hwanung that they dreamed of becoming human, and Hwanung gave them 20 cloves of garlic and a bundle of mugwort, ordering them to eat only those foods and remain out of the sunlight for 100 days. The tiger failed, but the bear endured and eventually was transformed into a woman.

The bear-woman then prayed for a child, and Hwanung took her for his wife. A son, Dangun, was born, and he built the walled city of Pyongyang and called his kingdom Joseon. Not to be confused with the Joseon Dynasty, the kingdom is referred to in Korean history as Gojoseon or Ancient Joseon. Historians believe his kingdom began in 2,333 B.C.

This mythology is still marked on the modern Korean calendar, with Oct. 3 celebrated as Gaecheonjeol, or National Foundation Day, which marks the establishment of the first Korean kingdom.

The opening of Mount Paektu is not without controversy. Other travel agencies have expressed their displeasure with Hyundai Asan’s monopoly on tours to the famous mountain. On Nov. 13, Shim Joong-mok, the president of the Korea Tourism Association, held a press conference and said the group wants a share of the potentially lucrative market. He said the association, which represents more than 20,000 travel agencies in Korea, may take legal action if their request is not met.

Hyundai Asan President Yoon rebuffed the demand. “The agreement we have with North Korea for exclusive rights to Mount Paektu tourism is a legitimate commercial deal,” Yoon said. “They act as if we received this right for free, but we have made vast investments in North Korea over the past nine years and earned the North Korean authorities’ trust. The tour program was given in return.”

Yoon said the tourism industry should respect market principles. “It would be the same for any other beautiful mountain. Would it make sense for me to develop a resort under an exclusive contract and then have other travel agents demand that they also want to do business there?” Yoon asked. “The travel agents’ demand is unreasonable.”

According to a Hyundai Research Institute report, it will cost up to $1.26 billion to develop a resort on the mountain comparable to the facilities in Pyeongchang, the South Korean city that hopes one day to host the Winter Olympics.

Yoon said he is confident about the Paektu program’s potential, citing his recent visit to the mountain. “There are two lodging facilities built by North Korea on the mountain. One is Sobaeksu State Guest House and the other is Baegyebong Hotel. Both are modern, and they will be usable after some modifications,” Yoon said.

He said the survey team, which will leave before the end of this month, will also study what work is needed for Samjiyon Airport on Mount Paektu to begin receiving flights from South Korea. “We will have a better idea after surveying the runway and traffic tower,” he said, adding that Korean Air and Asiana have both expressed interest in flying to North Korea.

The modernization of the airport may also be expensive. The Ministry of Construction and Transportation said in a report last month that repairs will cost 280 billion won ($304 million).

The price of the tour program is also still to be decided. “It will be competitive with tour programs via China,” Yoon said. “We don’t want to make it too expensive or too cheap.”

Seo said she paid 1.2 million won for her five-day package to visit the mountain via China. “I didn’t think it was too expensive,” Seo said. “If I can fly to the mountain in just two hours at a similar cost, I will be more than willing to go one more time.”

Running a tour program for Mount Paektu is also tricky because there are only few weeks in the year when Chonji Lake can be seen in good weather. “I was happy because the May weather was fantastic,” Seo remembered. “The tour guide said we were lucky because many groups could not see the magnificent view due to the weather.”

According to Yoon, Hyundai Asan is reviewing other plans to use the mountain’s winter weather as a possible attraction for sports and hot springs.

The new tour may take away one small attraction of the Chinese route ― a chance to see the low-key North Korean border with China. “The border is not heavily guarded,” Seo said. “Our guide even allowed us to cross the border on foot. The North Korean guard smiled at us, and we took a souvenir photo together. I gave him a chocolate, and he was really thrilled.”

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N.K. officials visit Wall Street over access to global financial system: sources

November 19th, 2007

Yonhap
11/18/2007

A North Korean delegation is visiting Wall Street to meet financiers and attend a seminar that could help the isolated communist country gain access to the international financial system, sources here said on Sunday.

The six-member delegation led by Ki Kwang-ho, a director at the North Korean Finance Ministry, arrived here on Thursday for the two-day-long session, which starts Monday. The U.S. side is to be represented by Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary Daniel Glaser and other officials involved in ending Pyongyang’s suspected illicit activities.

The visit by the North’s delegation, the first of its kind, comes about one year after the release of some US$25 million in North Korean funds that were frozen at a Macau bank over their alleged connection to money laundering and other illegal activities.

Although the assets were released in a one-time transaction through the international financial system, the North has said it wants full access to the system without financial sanctions from the U.S., which has considerable influence over the global market.

The delegation’s visit also coincides with recent progress in the multilateral negotiations for North Korea’s nuclear disarmament, in which Washington is negotiating with Pyongyang on the removal of the North from its list of state sponsors of terrorism and the termination of the application of its Trading with the Enemy Act.

Washington, one of major shareholders in the International Monetary Fund and other lending institutions, is obliged by law to oppose any loans to countries on the list.

The North Korean financial officials met with financiers at the heart of global finance here Saturday to discuss international financing for the isolated communist state, informed sources said.

Donald Gregg, chairman of the New York-based Korea Society, quoted the North Koreans as saying Friday that they came to learn about ways to get access to the international financial system.

While attending a seminar sponsored by the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, the North Koreans asked about know how to join the IMF and other international financial institutions, the former U.S. ambassador to South Korea said.

Another North Korea expert, however, predicted a long and bumpy road ahead for the North, saying the isolated, impoverished communist state needs a lot of manpower, experience and technologies before joining the international financial system.

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Hyundai Asan plans to add Pyongyang to tours of N. Korea’s highest peak

November 19th, 2007

Yonhap
11/19/2007

A South Korean company operating businesses in North Korea said Monday it plans to add the North’s capital to the itinerary for future tours of the North’s highest peak, located on the border with China.

Hyundai Asan, the North Korean business arm of Hyundai Group, is preparing to launch tours of Mount Paekdu in May next year, after the leaders of the two Koreas agreed to establish direct flights from Seoul to the mountain at the second-ever inter-Korean summit early last month.

“We already asked South and North Korean authorities to include Pyongyang in the tour route to Mt. Paekdu,” said Yoon Man-joon, chief executive officer of Hyundai Asan.

Yoon said he was “optimistic” about adding the North Korean capital to the route because the North shared a “similar view as a business partner.”

Yoon made the remark during a press conference at North Korea’s Mt. Geumgang, where the company operates the only South Korean tourism business in the North, to mark the ninth anniversary of the start of the tourism project.

Although Yoon gave no exact timetable for the Pyongyang tours for ordinary South Koreans, company officials hinted they will probably be available in early 2009.

The Mt. Geumgang tourism program, which started in 1998, is the only one that gives foreign tourists an opportunity to easily see parts of North Korea.

Hyundai Asan is believed to pay hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars to North Korea in fees for the program, which has drawn more than 1.5 million tourists.

At the inter-Korean summit last month, President Roh Moo-hyun and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il agreed that their countries would work together on a wide range of economic projects, even though the two states are still technically at war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice.

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S. Korea to Supply Electricity to Shipyard in N. Korea

November 19th, 2007

Korea Times
Jung Sung-ki
11/19/2007

South Korea is considering directly supplying electricity to Anbyeon on North Korea’s east coast, where a South Korean-funded ship block plant is to be constructed next year, to help ease the power shortage there, a government source said Monday.

“The government has concluded after a recent on-site inspection that without resolving the electricity issue, the plan to build a shipbuilding complex (in Anbyeon) would not be successful,” the source said, asking not to be named.

“So the government is considering taking the initiative to resolve the problem, so that the private sector can stably invest in the inter-Korean business program,” he said.

The two Koreas are to break ground for a shipyard in Anbyeon, Gangwon Province, during the first half of next year as part of large-scale cross-border economic projects agreed upon at the second inter-Korean summit last month.

A group of South Korean officials and shipbuilding businessmen visited the town early this month.

South Koreas plans to propose North Korea the option of a direct supply of electricity next month when a second inspection team visits Anbyeon, the source added.

Experts say the project will cost a sizable amount.

It will require hundreds of billions of won to build steel pipes, transmitters and transmission roads from the northeastern town of Goseong in the South to Anbyeon, a 130-kilometer route, they say.

In case of the Kaeseong Industrial Complex, just a few kilometers north of the inter-Korean border, South Korea spent 35 billion won ($38 million) to build electricity supplying facilities.

The electricity supply will require consultation with countries involving in multinational talks aimed at ending Pyongyang’s nuclear ambition, as energy aid is one of the key incentives for the communist state in return for its denuclearization efforts.

The two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia have engaged in six-party talks to scrap North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

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As More Take a Chance On Fleeing North Korea, Routes for All Budgets

November 18th, 2007

Washington Post
Blaine Harden
Sunday, November 18, 2007; A01

SEOUL — Brokers here are busily selling what they call “planned escapes” from North Korea.

Given enough money, the brokers say, they can now get just about anyone out of the dictatorial Stalinist state that human rights activists call the world’s largest prison.

A low-budget escape through China via Thailand to Seoul, which requires treacherous river crossings, arduous travel on foot and several miserable weeks in a Thai immigration jail, can cost less than $2,000, according to four brokers here.

A first-class defection, complete with a forged Chinese passport and an airplane ticket from Beijing to Seoul, goes for more than $10,000. From start to finish, it can take as little as three weeks.

North Korea’s underground railroad to the South is busier than ever because the number of border guards and low-level security officials in the North who are eager to take bribes has increased exponentially.

With the disintegration of North Korea’s communist economy and the near-collapse of its state-run food distribution system, the country’s non-elite population is in dire need of cash for food and other essentials, experts agree.

“More than ever, money talks,” said Chun Ki-won, a Christian pastor and aid worker in Seoul who says that in the past eight years he has helped 650 people elude Chinese authorities and settle in Seoul.

Religious groups once dominated the defection trade in North Korea, but in recent years defectors themselves, many of them former military and security officers, have begun to take over, several brokers and religious leaders said.

This new breed of broker, based in Seoul, uses personal and institutional contacts to hire North Korean guides and to bribe officials. The guides make clandestine contact with defectors, then escort them to the Chinese border, which in most places is a river that they swim in summer and walk across in winter after it freezes. On the other side, Chinese-speaking guides take over.

“I didn’t know it could happen so fast,” said a 37-year-old North Korean defector who paid $12,000 to a broker in Seoul in 2002 to get her 11-year-old son out. The woman did not want her name published because this month she and her siblings are paying another broker to smuggle out their mother.

“It only took five days for my son to be plucked out and taken across the river into China,” she said, adding that two weeks later he was in South Korea. “I was dumbfounded when I got a call from officials at Seoul airport and my son was here.”

For years, North-to-South defections amounted to just a trickle. Most of those coming out were men in their 30s and 40s who held positions that made fleeing relatively easy, such as diplomatic work abroad or border duty with the military. Generally, they escaped without help.

Just 41 defectors sought asylum in South Korea in 1995, but nearly every year since then the number has risen, the flow enhanced by the networks of brokers and agents that sprang up. More than 2,000 North Koreans settled here last year, according to the government in Seoul.

As the number has increased, the typical sex and age of defectors have also changed. There are more women and more families, according to Chun Sung-ho, an official at South Korea’s Ministry of Unification.

Those figures do not include the many more North Koreans who are hiding in China without connections to brokers who can bring them on to South Korea. The New York-based human rights group Amnesty International estimates their number at about 100,000, a substantial proportion of whom are women who have been sold into prostitution.

For all the functionaries who are newly willing to take money to look the other way, for all the recent diplomatic optimism that North Korea may be opening up, working on the underground railroad remains extremely risky.

“It is possible to get people out, but you cannot say it is easy,” said Lee Jeong-yeon, a former North Korean military officer who defected in 1999. A lot of guides and brokers get caught, he said, adding: “The policy is for 100 percent execution of those caught helping people to defect. I personally saw several such executions.”

Lee, whose identity was confirmed by the South Korean government, said he worked for three years along the Chinese-North Korean border, where he supervised agents who pretended to be brokers and guides in order to infiltrate and disrupt the smuggling trade.

“The successful brokers are experienced people who have good contacts in the military, and they bribe the guards,” said Lee, who said he has used his contacts to smuggle 34 North Koreans across China and into Southeast Asia. “Guards are rotated often, and new people have to be bribed.”

An Abundance of Risks

The risk is not confined to brokers and agents. Human Rights Watch reported this year that the North Korean government, reacting to the increasing number of defections, has stiffened penalties for citizens it catches trying to flee. Under North Korean law, attempting to leave the country illegally is still classified as treason.

Until 2004, the government imposed relatively light punishment on non-elite citizens attempting to get out, releasing them after questioning or at most sentencing them to a few months in labor camps, Human Rights Watch said.

But since then, North Korea has imposed sentences of up to five years in prison. “Anyone imprisoned in North Korea is liable to face abusive conditions including beatings, forced labor and starvation far worse than among the population at large,” Human Rights Watch said.

In recent months, North Korea has beefed up electronic surveillance along the border, strung more barbed wire and erected barriers. Last year, China also increased border security.

Once in China, defectors still face danger, particularly on the low-budget route. Those trying to reach haven in South Korean diplomatic facilities in China are on their own for the last few yards, scrambling to run past Chinese policemen and climb walls. Not all of them make it.

Chun Ki-won, the Seoul-based pastor who helps defectors, said that the Chinese government has cracked down on North Koreans as it prepares to host the Olympic Games in Beijing next summer. “It is getting worse,” said Chun, who runs orphanages in China for children abandoned by defectors. “There are an increased number of arrests.”

China is not supposed to return people to a country where their lives are at risk. But it routinely repatriates North Koreans it has detained, human rights groups say.

When defectors do succeed in reaching South Korea, they are often debilitated by guilt over the kin they left behind. And such guilt is not unjustified, because the North Korean government often sends relatives of defectors to forced labor camps.

That occurs as a matter of policy when defectors are government or military officials with inside information about the workings of Kim Jong Il’s dictatorship.

Defectors from Pyongyang, the capital, can also expect their families to be ordered to labor camps, according to Lee, the former North Korean army officer, who said his relatives were all dead when he defected.

Punishment may also be inflicted on the families of ordinary people who manage to leave. “I just go crazy to think that because of me my parents and my sister may be in a labor camp now,” said a 40-year-old woman who two years ago fled her North Korean coastal town in a fishing boat, along with her husband and teenage son. She and her husband had run a small business trading fish for food and consumer goods.

She has since heard that her mother, father and sister were forced from their homes by the authorities and relocated to a farming area in the interior.

“We have hired brokers to try to find them, but the guide sent to find them has been arrested,” said the woman, who lives in a Seoul suburb and did not want her name published for fear that her family would be further punished.

“You cannot know how heartbreaking it is to leave your family in this way.”

Fees and Incentives

Seoul-based brokers say they often accept payment on an installment plan — with little or no money upfront. Once an installment-plan defector gets to Seoul and has access to some of the $43,700 that South Korea doles out to each new asylum seeker, brokers typically demand far more than their basic fee.

“My boss is willing to put up all the money to pay the bribes to get someone out,” said a Seoul-based broker who was formerly a North Korean military officer. “But when you get to Seoul, you have to pay double for this service.”

This broker, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he has a child and other relatives back in North Korea, said his company usually charges less than $2,000 for bringing a defector to Seoul via China and Thailand. That automatically jumps to $4,000 for those who cannot offer cash upfront.

To help defectors remain solvent as they adjust to life in the booming capitalist South, the Seoul government now pays out money over time rather than in a lump sum, according to Chun Sung-ho, the Unification Ministry official. It also offers incentives for finding and holding jobs.

About a quarter of the money goes directly for housing, eliminating any chance that it could be paid to a broker.

Guilt and Longing

Even after they pay off brokers for their own passage to Seoul, North Koreans who settle in the South often end up spending many thousands of dollars more to try to bring out loved ones left behind.

Lee Moon-jae, 81, fled North Korea more than five decades ago. He soon remarried in the South and raised two sons. But he continues to wrestle with the guilt and longing he feels for the wife and two sons he abandoned.

Two years ago, he said, he paid $4,800 to a broker to bring him face to face with one of his lost sons, who is now 58. They met for three days and two nights in a hotel on the Chinese side of the border.

At the end, Lee said, his son declined to defect — and returned home to his wife and children. Before his son left, Lee said, he gave him $1,700 in cash, a digital camera and some clothes — but Lee later learned that his son lost it all while swimming across the Tumen River that separates China from North Korea.

So Lee has raised $3,250 for brokers who promised him they will again contact his family. This month, he said, they hired agents who are already out searching. He has asked them to set up another border meeting or, if possible, smuggle out his entire family, including his aging North Korean wife.

They all live in the interior of the country, and Lee says that moving them to the border is complicated and perhaps foolhardy.

He says he is not sure he should be trying to do this, but he is desperate to see them again. Talking about it brings tears to his rheumy eyes.

“I do not have much time before I die,” he said. “What should I do?”

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Chinese Community in NK

November 18th, 2007

Korea Times
Andrei Lankov
11/18/2007

Until recently it would have been just a minor exaggeration to say that Korea is a country without national minorities. The only exception to this rule are the ethnic Chinese who began to move to Korea in the late 19th century. Nowadays, South Korea is home to some 20,000 ethnic Chinese who are considered citizens of Taiwan.

North Korea also has its ethnic Chinese community, whose members, needless to say, hold passports of the People’s Republic of China. The ethnic Chinese of the North are descendants of people who moved there in the 19th century. In the late 1940s, most of them went back, but a few chose to stay, creating a small but unusual community, one of the few minorities in a society which sees its own homogeneity as a source of pride.

From the very beginning of their history, the North Korean huaqiao (as foreign nationals of China are known) found themselves in an unusual and controversial situation. Their presence was not really welcomed: in the 1950s and early 1960s the North Korean authorities went to great length to “cleanse” the land of all non-Korean elements, including citizens of supposedly friendly countries. Hence, the Chinese were strongly encouraged to go back to China.

However, the Chinese themselves were not very enthusiastic about this move: most of them had spent their entire lives in Korea. It was also important that China in the 1960s and 1970s was in an even worse state than North Korea. It had lower living standards, and hardly fared much better in terms of political freedom: Kim Il-sung’s dictatorship might have been bizarre, but it was more predictable and perhaps less brutal than the moody rule of Chairman Mao. People still went to China, to be sure, but they were not in a hurry.

According to a 2001 Chinese publication which cited North Korean sources, in 1958 in the North there were 3,778 Chinese households comprising 14,351 members.[1] In the 1960s numbers dropped on account of the ban on private economic activity, the forced collectivization of agriculture, and the nationalist policies of Pyongyang. These factors conspired to drive the ethnic Chinese away. Thus, by 1980 numbers had fallen to a mere 6,000, of whom half reportedly resided in Pyongyang with most of the balance living near the North Korean border with China.

The situation of the North Korean huaqiao was difficult to describe in one word: they were both discriminated against and privileged. As foreigners, they could not become members of the Korean Workers Party, and this alone made them ineligible for many possible careers (well, no department in the administration or bureaucracy would take them on anyway). However, children of small vendors and vegetable farmers hardly felt too bad when they realized that they would never become district party secretaries or army colonels, their aspirations were milder.

At the same time, the huaqiao were exempt from the many obligations of the average North Korean. For example, they were allowed to have radio sets with free tuning, on the condition that they would not tune in to anything but the official broadcast if some locals were present nearby. They did not attend the boring and time-consuming indoctrination sessions. And one also might surmise that they also enjoyed a much less likelihood of being arrested for some minor improper ties.

Like the ethnic Chinese in South Korea, the North Korean huaqiao have their own schools. According to the same publication, cited by Kim Min-se, in the late 1990s in North Korea there were four Chinese middle schools where students, young citizens of the People’s Republic, studied according to the Chinese curriculum. There were primary schools as well.

However, of all the privileges the most important one was their right to trade. From around 1980, the Korean huaqiao were allowed to go to China or invite their relatives to North Korea. This meant that they were the only group (at least, outside the narrow inner circle of the top families) whose members could go overseas more or less at will. In the 1980s China was beginning its remarkable economic overhaul, and the possibility of using a price differential between two closed markets is the dream of any astute merchant. In few years, most huaqiao made trade their main or only source of income.

They moved back and forth, selling seafood, frog oil, mushrooms and other exotic products, which play an unusually important role in North Korean foreign trade, to China. From China, they brought in garments, cloth, cheap electronics and household items. In the mid-1990s, during the famine, food became a major import item as well. Everything was sold at huge profits, and from around 1990 every huaqiao was seen as a rich person, almost by definition.

However, the numbers of North Korean huaqiao are said to be dwindling nonetheless. The lure of successful China is too great, so they often prefer to leave. They stay in touch with their connections in the North and maintain their business networks, but now they reside in the more comfortable and secure environment of modern China. Their desire to give their children a better education also plays a major role in the repatriation process, another similarity with the shrinking Chinese community in the South.

However, there is another move afoot as well: some Chinese are moving to North Korea to start businesses there, and they might just lay the foundations for a new huaqiao community. But that will be another story, of course.

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Internet to Open inside Gaeseong Site

November 16th, 2007

Korea Times
Yoon Won-sup
11/16/2007

The prime ministers of the two Koreas have agreed to set up Internet, wire and mobile phone services including mobile phones in the Gaeseong Industrial Complex in North Korea.

They also agreed to allow free movement of people and vehicles of the South in the complex starting next month in order to expand inter-Korean economic cooperation.

The agreement was made between Prime Minister Han Duck-soo and his North Korean counterpart Kim Yong-il Friday.

The rare talks between the prime ministers, the first in 15 years, went smoothly.

The North Korean delegates were very favorable to suggestions made during the three-day talks in Seoul, according to sources.

Particularly, Han and Kim took a stroll together in the morning and toasted each other with soju at dinner, Thursday, boasting of their friendship.

President Roh Moo-hyun hosted a lunch for the delegations, Friday, and thanked them for reaching an agreement. The North Korean delegates returned to Pyonyang by plane afterwards.

The two prime ministers issued a joint statement after the talks, which were aimed to follow up agreements reached at the second inter-Korean summit held in Pyongyang from Oct. 2-4.

They agreed to create a committee for a special zone of peace and cooperation in the West Sea coastal area under which five subcommittees will be set up to deal with an economic zone in Haeju, North Korea; the common use of Haeju port and the southern part of the Han River estuary in South Korea; the safe passage of private ships near Haeju; and a common fishing area in the West Sea.

The first committee meeting, chaired by a minister-level official, will be held in Gaeseong next month.

They also agreed to have a premier-level meeting and vice premier-level economic cooperation committee’s meeting every six months, one in Pyongyang in the first half of 2008 and the other in Seoul.

A cross-border freight and cargo railway linking Munsan in the South and Bongdong in the North will start operation from Dec. 11.

Working-level talks will be held in Gaeseong for two days from Tuesday to finalize the agreement on the cross-border train service, according to the statement.

As part of reconciliation measures, South Korea will help North Korea repair the Gaeseong-Sinuiju railway and Gaeseong-Pyongyang highway in 2008.

Han and Kim agreed to start the construction of shipyards in Anbyeon and Nampo next year.

For family members displaced since the 1950-53 Korean War, the two Koreas will allow exchanges of video calls starting next year and complete the construction of a family reunion center at Mount Geumgang next month.

A series of talks will be held next month to discuss the launch of a tourism program to Mount Baekdu, as well as the use of the North’s Pyongyang-Shinuiju railway to transport a joint supporters group from the two Koreas to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

“The agreement is the first step toward enhancing inter-Korean relations through the virtuous circle of peace and economy,” Unification Minister Lee Jae-joung said.

Lee said the joint statement contained implementation measures for the summit accords, except the military measures that guarantee the cooperative plans.

Apparently mindful of the importance of these, he added: “The coming inter-Korean defense ministers’ talks will deal with the implementation.” The military talks are slated for Nov. 27-29 in Pyongyang.

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Mt. Geumgang Tours See Ambitious 10th Year

November 16th, 2007

Korea Times
Ryu Jin
11/16/2007

The Mt. Geumgang tour business marks its ninth anniversary this Sunday. Hyundai Asan, the South Korean operator of the tour project to the resort mountain across the border in North Korea, says that it sees a more prosperous business for its 10th year.

Hyundai Asan is set to hold a ceremony to celebrate the anniversary, which comes after encouraging news such as the agreement with the North to open the 1,638-meter Biro-bong, the highest peak of the auspicious mountain, early next year.

According to the firm, a total of 1.72 million people have so far visited the “caged” area of the tightly controlled Stalinist nation over the past nine years since Nov. 18, 1998, when the cruise ship “Geumgang” arrived at the site for the first time.

A land route was opened through the heavily militarized border in 2003, terminating the cost-heavy sea travel from 2004 onwards. And North Korea opened more and more sites including “Naegeumgang” (the inner, western part of the mountain).

A company spokesman expects that the number of Mt. Geumgang travelers this year, which has already exceeded 300,000 as of October, to reach above 350,000 by the end of the year, a new record.

Hyundai Asan’s successful business, despite some political uncertainties in recent years, is largely due to its endeavors to diversify tours in the limited area of the 530-square kilometer mountain.

The Naegaumgang Tour, launched last June, added more prospects for South Korean climbers who until then could only enjoy “Oegeumgang” (the outer part of the mountain) and “Haegeumgang” (the seashore).

Beside, cultural events such as concerts as well as visits to hot springs and restaurants with unique Northern cuisine, an 18-hole golf course and a duty-free shop that opened in the resort area recently, will provide visitors with additional pleasures.

However, some experts point out that there remains much to be done in order for the Mt. Geumgang tourism business, which still remains largely a symbol of inter-Korean reconciliation, to be reborn as a more lucrative business.

The complicated processes of immigration control in addition to the long journey of 4-5 hours to the eastern coastal area are among major problems that should be addressed, along with the insufficient infrastructure such as hotel accommodation.

“We plan to expand facilities in the tourism zone further, as more visitors will come to the mountain when Biro-bong is opened next year,” the company spokesman said. “In particular, we will also pay attention to more safety measures.”

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