Tuesday, March 30, 2010

The following opinion, written by Marcus Noland, is from Foreign Policy Magazine Online. 

“This month, North Korea reportedly executed the Korean Workers’ Party’s economic policy director, Pak Nam Gi, for being a “bourgeois infiltrator” who ruined the country’s economy. Upon his 2005 appointment to the position, a post akin to a finance minister, Pak had allegedly vowed to put an end to the “capitalist fantasy.” But the 77-year-old technocrat’s disastrous currency-reform program, launched Nov. 30, 2009, ended up damaging something very real: the informal market economy that today provides for most North Koreans’ sustenance. The “reform” chopped two zeros off the currency, gave citizens only a brief window to exchange their wealth, and capped the amount of old bills that North Koreans could trade in at roughly $40.

So complete was the resulting economic chaos that it precipitated an unprecedented outpouring of civil disobedience. And though the sporadic protests appear to have been relatively small and uncoordinated, the reported prominence of octogenarian war veterans among the protesters was enough to unnerve the government. The fiasco was obviously self-inflicted and visibly inconsistent with the regime’s tendency to attribute all ills that befall the country to foreign “hostile forces.” Pyongyang bumped up the limit for currency exchanges and in February made a historically unparalleled apology to the public delivered by Pak and Premier Kim Yong Il. And because leader Kim Jong Il’s favorite son and rumored successor, Kim Jong Un, was associated with the policy, someone had to pay. Pak was the scapegoat. (Continue reading this article…)

{ 0 comments }

Monday, March 29, 2010

According to the NYT, North Koreans are increasingly sharing information about their lives to South Koreans via cellphones that are smuggled across the border and distributed by South Korean human rights activists, some of whom are North Korean defectors living in South Korea.  Information received from North Koreans is subsequently posted on the web. As North Korea remains nearly inaccessible to the international community, such information provides a rare lens into North Korean experiences in North Korea. 

However, given Kim Jong Il’s domestic system of surveillance and forced internment for hints of defection, such communications are highly risky and may result in imprisonment or death.  In fact, having learned about the relay of information by North Koreans via smuggled cellphones, Kim Jong Il’s regime has begun to more vigilantly trace cellphone usage and service within the country.  The article reveals one known instance of public execution where the North Korean government tracked and found a cellphone.

Information received via cellphone includes recent descriptions of government crackdowns on emerging private enterprise (e.g., private markets) and government currency revaluations that have inflated the price of food.  Both actions by the North Korean government are likely due to economic stresses created by the economic crisis.  Information is said to come primarily from areas that are close to North Korea’s border with China, as the phones work on China’s cellular networks.

Click here for the full NYT article.

{ 0 comments }

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Stephen Haggard, Marcus Noland, and the East-West Center released a new report this week on changing political attitudes in North Korea. While repression and human rights atrocities continue in North Korea, the report explains that Kim Jong Il’s regime is receiving increasingly open and negative criticisms by its own people. In fact, according to the report, North Koreans are seeming to shift accountability for the country’s economic collapse from the United States and foreign imperialism to the North Korean government, demonstrating either a significant shift away from North Korea’s juche ideology/propaganda or an increasing ability and comfort in expressing negative reviews of Kim Jong Il’s leadership.

Haggard and Noland posit that increasing resistance against Kim Jong Il’s regime, however slight, may be attributed to: the recent deaths of more North Koreans due to food shortages; increased access to radio, television, and internet; continued failure of the North Korean government to provide food and economic opportunity for its people; continued repression; increasing participation in private economic activity and small markets where North Korean citizens can meet and converse with slightly less government surveillance; and recurring waves of food insecurity since North Korea’s devastating famine of 1998.  While the 2008 sample of 300 North Korean refugees living in South Korea has its weaknesses – namely, size, and self-selection -, there remains little statistical data or analysis on the attitudes of North Koreans living under Kim Jong Il’s repressive regime. 

Click here to access the East-West Center’s full report.
Click here to read the Washington Post’s coverage on the report.

{ 0 comments }