Archive for Resistance
Posted by Joshua Stanton on July 15, 2010 at 6:46 am · Filed under Resistance
Radio Free Asia has published more details about those dissident leaflets that showed up in Hoeryong recently.
According to sources, the leafleting occurred just 150 meters away from the Hoeryong Historic Pavilion, a site in Osanduk-Dong guarded by security agents, where the statue and birth house of Kim Jong Suk, Kim Il Sung’s first wife, are located. Near Osan Elementary School, School Village has the lowest crime rate in Hoeryong city due to round-the-clock patrols and surveillance by law enforcement, security authorities, and workers’ brigades. But despite the heavy security, someone managed to distribute the leaflets undetected by authorities.
In a June 30 telephone interview, a 29-year-old university student at the Hoeryung College of Education who called himself Han Kyung Chul, described the leaflets. “The leaflets were handwritten with thick, probably Chinese-made, color marker pens—not on [letter-sized] paper, but on paper torn out of diaries available at open door markets,” Han said. Han said the leaflets contained slogans such as “Down with Traitor Kim Jong Il!” and “Overthrow Kim Jong Il, Enemy of the People!” About 30 leaflets were scattered around four different places, he said, adding that they were likely hard to collect afterward due to their small size.
As with the similar operation in Chongjin, it apparently took place in a closely guarded central area, near a sensitive political monument. The similar M.O. and timing suggests some possibility of a coordinated operation. Who knows? Might even be the same people.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on July 9, 2010 at 6:12 pm · Filed under Resistance
It’s the second such report I’ve seen this week, which is pretty extraordinary for North Korea:
North Korea’s National Security Agency (NSA) has launched a hunt for the individual or organization responsible for scattering 5,000 won bills scrawled with words criticizing the Kim Jong Il regime in Chongjin, North Hamkyung Province.
A source reported on Thursday that around the Kim Il Sung statue in Pohang and parts of Shinan district in the city, large numbers of 5,000 won bills inscribed with criticisms of the regime were scattered on the 26th of June. Chongjin NSA is conducting an investigation.
The new 5,000 won bill, which was issued on November 30 last year, features Kim Il Sung’s portrait. On the reverse side of the bills distributed in Chongjin were the criticisms and the words, “Defection National Salvation Action Group.” [Daily NK]
The security forces barricaded off that area of the city and restricted movements out of the city. If this is the Kim Il Sung monument they’re referring to — and let’s face it, there’s more than one of those — we are speaking of an area in the middle of the city, where an intrepid dissident could easily have slipped out of town on a passing train.
Rumors about the defaced bills spread quickly in spite of the regime’s controls.
After the last such story, I’d wondered if the leaflets were spread by balloon, but Chongjin is a tough target to hit up in the far northeastern corner of North Korea, and the Daily NK’s sources suspect that the leaflets are of local origin, but possibly made with some support from defectors. Hmmm ….
There have been reports like this for years, of course, but the acts they describe have all been too fragmentary and too easy to contain to amount to much.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on July 7, 2010 at 6:08 pm · Filed under Resistance, Religion, Deprogramming, Subversion
It is a terrible thing to say, but I will say it: it is better that Son Jong Nam is dead than that he still endures torture in North Korean captivity. Truthfully, I had long assumed that Son had died, even by the time I wrote this post in late 2007. Now, Son’s brother has told an AP reporter that his brother is dead.
Like most North Koreans, Son Jong Nam knew next to nothing about Christianity when he fled to neighboring China in 1998.
Eleven years later, he died back in North Korea in prison, reportedly tortured to death for trying to spread the Gospel in his native land, armed with 20 bibles and 10 cassette tapes of hymns. He was 50.
His story, pieced together by his younger brother, a defector who lives in South Korea, sheds light on a little-discussed practice: the sending back of North Korean converts to evangelize in their home country — a risky move, but one of the few ways to penetrate a country that bars most citizens from outside TV or radio and the Internet.
Little is known about the practice, believed to have started in the late 1990s. Missionaries won’t say how many defectors they have sent back, citing their safety and that of the defectors.
“It’s their country, where people speak the same language. They know where to go and where to escape,” says the Rev. Isaac Lee, a Korean-American missionary in Seoul who has dedicated his life to spreading Christianity in the North. “But I agonize a lot whenever I have to send defectors to the North as I know what kind of punishment they would get if arrested.” [AP, Hyung-Jin Kim]
No word in our times is as profaned as “martyr,” but that is what Son Jong Nam embodies to me. His case evokes none of the ambivalence I feel about starry-eyed foreigners prostrating themselves before border guards with petitions in their hands. Son knew that he was confronting a fate worse than death for a small chance at a small role in changing the fate of his homeland. He also knew enough about North Korea and its regime to have a plausible chance at evading capture and accomplishing an important mission, and he knew that Bill Richardson wasn’t coming to fetch him if he got caught. He took that chance, one that others must follow him in taking if North Korea will ever change.
Son was arrested again in January 2006 after police found bibles at his home in the northeastern city of Hoeryong. He was also charged with spying for the United States and South Korea and sentenced to public execution by firing squad.
His brother launched an international campaign to save him. That apparently led his captors to switch to a less public method: torture. “There are many ways to kill people in North Korea,” says his brother.
He died in a prison in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, in December 2008.
“He told me his dream is to build a church at a good Pyongyang location and work as a pastor there,” his brother says. “I thought the religious faith completely changed his fate.”
I do not profess to know whether God exists, but if anyone can transform North Korea, it will be men and women who are at once warm enough to believe He does and cool enough to propagate that belief with discretion and guile. Men like Son Jong Nam make me hope ardently that there is a better afterlife for those who suffered so much on this earth. Lacking that, we can only hope that his suffering will be for the eventual betterment of others.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on May 19, 2010 at 5:42 am · Filed under Resistance, Kim Jong Eun
Interesting report from the Chosun Ilbo:
Nonetheless, starving families are said to have swarmed local party headquarters and protested, and even local party officials are openly complaining. Provincial party officials in Chongjn, North Hamgyong Province, and Hamhung, South Hamgyong Province, effectively stopped working, telling party headquarters there is nothing they can do if there is nothing to eat.
With rumors spreading that Kim Jong-un led an unpopular “100-day struggle” and “150-day struggle” that pressed people into service on the farms and even the currency reform, public disaffection is reaching critical mass.
A recent North Korean defector said people are openly calling Kim Jong-un “an immature little bastard” who is “more savage than his father.” Anti-government sentiment prevails among college students in Pyongyang and other major cities, who say the dynastic succession is a feudal practice and a betrayal of socialism.
Kim junior has become a sort of lightning rod for discontent, and earlier hopes for change seem to have been abandoned, the defector said. [Chosun Ilbo]
If these reports describe the sentiment of even half of the North Korean people accurately, you have the perfect environment for an insurgency to rise. First, there is widespread dissatisfaction with the regime. Second, there is an absence of effective government.
If an organization rises to snyc up the discontent among the people and oppose terror of the anjeonbu and the bowibu, enough people will be inclined to join that opposition to pose a real threat to the regime’s authority in those areas.
Insurgencies prosper amid anarchy. Wherever the state fails to govern and provide, a well-funded organized opposition movement could move in and quietly assume the role of governance. The opposition could harness existing trade and smuggling networks to resume food distribution, and the supply of clothing and medicine. It could pay the doctors and nurses and stock their clinics. It could pay mechanics and obtain tools and parts for their use. Where the government can’t govern, the opposition would be able to subvert the regime’s infrastructure with little violence, and without most of those collaborating with it even realizing it until they were already implicated. Insurgencies that rise by trying to shoot their way to power usually fail. Insurgencies that rise as shadow governments are very difficult to uproot.
If you want to know how we get Kim Jong Il and Hu Jintao to negotiate in good faith, we do it by acquiring influence inside North Korea and threatening the stability of the regime.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on April 5, 2010 at 9:13 pm · Filed under NK Economics, Resistance
If you’ve read a spate of recent reports and op-eds in places like the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal recently, you might have acquired the impression that The Great Confiscation was a fiasco that caused panic, chaos, and an unprecedented swelling of discontent. The North Korean government wants you to know that all of this is all a brigandish, flunkeyist fabrication:
‘’In the early days immediately after the currency change, market prices were not fixed, so markets were closed for some days,'’ Ri Ki Song, a professor at the Institute of Economy at North Korea’s Academy of Social Sciences, told APTN. ‘’But now all markets are open, and people are buying daily necessities in the markets.'’ [….]
‘’Outside Korea, many people have been talking loudly about problems that occurred during the change of currency in our country, but there wasn’t any of the social disorder that they have been talking about,'’ Ri said. ‘’Now the situation is being stabilized overall, and the economy is functioning well, thanks to some of the measures that have been taken.'’ [AP, via NYT]
If you say so. And you can’t say they seem to have learned much from recent events:
Ri insisted the government’s objective is to phase out markets completely and rely on a state-controlled network of outlets to supply its citizens.
‘’Markets will be removed in the future, by reducing their numbers step-by-step, while continuously expanding the planned supply through state-run commercial networks,'’ Ri said. ‘’This is our official position on markets. Now, markets are used as a subsidiary means to offer convenience in peoples’ daily lives.'’
Either way, I have to wonder exactly how Selig Harrison will manage to interpret this as a subtle signal of North Korea’s desire for economic reform and openness … if only Barack Obama would break the spell of his neocon puppetmasters and engage.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on March 24, 2010 at 9:33 pm · Filed under NK Economics, Resistance
Two new reports today describe the accelerating outing of dissent in North Korea. The first, from the Washington Post’s Blaine Harden, cites this new study by Marcus Noland based on surveys of refugees from 2008, this study by the International Crisis Group, which I’d previously blogged, and more recent reports since The Great Confiscation:
There is mounting evidence that Kim Jong Il is losing the propaganda war inside North Korea, with more than half the population now listening to foreign news, grass-roots cynicism undercutting state myths and discontent rising even among elites.
A survey of refugees has found that “everyday forms of resistance” in the North are taking root as large swaths of the population believe that pervasive corruption, rising inequity and chronic food shortages are the fault of the government in Pyongyang — and not of the United States, South Korea or other foreign forces. The report will be released this week by the East-West Center, a research group established by Congress.
Read the rest on your own.
The second report comes from the L.A. Times’s Barbara Demick, from the Chinese-North Korean border, and much like yesterday’s Times Online report, finds evidence that North Korea’s food situation is deteriorating rapidly, food and other goods have vanished from stores and markets, and that popular discontent is rising rapidly. Beyond the widespread tendency for people to blame and lose faith in the regime, Demick found that not all of those she interviewed expressed or directed their discontent in the same ways:
“People are outspoken. They complain,” said a 56-year-old woman from the border city of Musan who gave her name as Li Mi Hee. Lowering her voice to a whisper, she added: “My son thinks that something might happen. I don’t know what, but I can tell you this — people have opinions. . . . It is not like the 1990s when people just died without saying what they thought.” [….]
“We were told that somebody decided he would burn the money instead of giving it to the government. The money had the picture of Kim Il Sung, and because he burned it he was shot to death for treason,” Song Hee said. [….]
Although Su Jong held North Korea’s own economic policies at fault, she said she had not lost her l”People are outspoken. They complain,” said a 56-year-old woman from the border city of Musan who gave her name as Li Mi Hee.
Lowering her voice to a whisper, she added: “My son thinks that something might happen. I don’t know what, but I can tell you this — people have opinions. . . . It is not like the 1990s when people just died without saying what they thought.”ove for Kim Jong Il. “If [Kim] was a good leader, we wouldn’t see children starving, people wandering the streets in rags, the markets with no food,” she said. “But I don’t doubt his good intentions. It is the people under him who are corrupt.”
It’s now quite possible that more people in Berkeley than in North Korea who blame America for North Korea’s misery. This is progress.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on March 23, 2010 at 9:45 pm · Filed under NK Economics, Refugees, Resistance
The Times of London sent correspondent Jane Macartney to China’s border with North Korea and found that the refugees there are reporting a rapidly deteriorating food situation, deepening discontent with the regime, and more willingness than ever to express that discontent openly. The editors of the Times are shocked enough by the report to write these cogent words in an editorial:
Of all the atrocities of modern history, famine is the least commemorated. It is an agonising mass death sentence imposed, invariably, by a non-democratic regime. With the possible exception of Mao’s China during the Great Leap Forward, no tyranny has acted with greater ruthlessness in perpetuating its people’s sufferings than North Korea. The Times reported this weekend that famine is an imminent prospect in the isolated prison-state. Hunger killed millions of North Koreans in the 1990s, and threatens to do so again. [Times Online]
In the coming days, expect to see more good reporting of this kind finding the same trends. Macartney’s reporting is must-reading, and I’ll give you some extended excerpts so that they’ll be here in the archives for the long haul:
The Times met four women in a safe house in China this week who fled recently across the frontier. They described despair in North Korea at the growing prospect of starvation in the Stalinist state. The youngest, only 16, crossed the frozen river last month. The other three, in their 50s, left last year and were tight-lipped about how they got out because they must go back to help the families they left behind.
While snow falls outside, Choi Kum Ok squats on the floor of an anonymous apartment not far from the border. Her eyes fill with tears as she talks of the son she had to leave behind. “I came over to earn money for his medical care. I need to get him food or he will starve.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Joshua Stanton on March 6, 2010 at 11:00 pm · Filed under Resistance
North Koreans, it seems, didn’t really feel much like celebrating on February 16th:
One person was killed by armed guards on Feb. 16 when a group of people attempted to rob a food train at Komusan Railway Station in Puryong-gun, North Hamgyong Province, defector group North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity said. The attack came on North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s birthday after a disastrous currency reform sent food prices skyrocketing. The train was loaded with rice imported from China, the group said. Workers, outraged over the death, attacked armed guards with ploughs and police and military were called in.
“North Koreans are angry that guards shot a worker dead for a few kilograms of rice but protesters are unlikely to get off lightly because the incident happened on Kim’s birthday,” the group said. [Chosun Ilbo]
The North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity (NKIS) reported that a North Korean was shot dead in a fight after he, along with several other hungry residents, attempted to loot food items by jumping on a train in North Hamgyeong Province. The train shipping imported foods from China was passing through the region. The province shares a border with the northeastern part of China.
“A man, who was identified only as Jung, died during a physical fight with security forces,” the report said. [Korea Times]
Are North Koreans really resisting their government more, or does the proliferation of cell phones mean that we’re just more likely to hear about it when they do? My guess is that it’s a bit of both, since resistance against this regime certainly isn’t an entirely new development.
In any event, I was interested in knowing where this riot had occurred to put it into the context of the the region, prior reports of disturbances, and the size of the population there. Komusan turns out to be a small, isolated town along the railroad line from Hoeryong on the Chinese border down to the large North Korean city of Chongjin, the city described in Barbara Demick’s recent book. It also turns out to be just 7.5 miles as the crow flies from the village of Chongo-ri, which has given its name to the infamous prison camp I located just east of there, with much help from David Hawk and Chuck Downs, and some key tips from Curtis and my wife.
The north side of the town is taken up by what appears to be a large mill serving the numerous mines in the surrounding hills. As we’ve learned, there are copper mines in this area.
Here are some closer views of the town and the station.
This area has long been a hotbed of discontent. It’s geographically isolated, so disturbances would be easy to contain. That may be why various Korean regimes have long sent malcontents to this part of the country. But today, this area has become strategically significant. The main supply routes from China to North Korea run through Sinuiju in the West and Hoeryong in the East. This railroad line is the eastern route from China that supplies the provinces of North and South Hamgyeong and Kangwon. It runs south to Chongjin, then southwest along the coast to Hamhung, Hungnam, and Wonsan. North Korea’s interior is mountainous. It has a few roads and rail lines, but most appear to be poorly maintained. If disturbances interfere with this rail line, the next best ways to supply the east coast would be by ship, using those cities’ dilapidated ports, or by bringing the supplies through Sinuiju in the west through Pyongyang, then to Wonsan and up the coast again.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on February 25, 2010 at 7:56 am · Filed under NK Economics, Resistance
Shortly after North Korea announced The Great Confiscation came The Ajumma Rebellion, an event that may prove to be one of the most significant in North Korean history. The historical perspective comes into focus as I read this analysis at the Daily NK, not so much of why The Great Confiscation failed, but why the regime even tried something so clearly predisposed to fail. It concludes with this:
Decades after the leader promised “boiled rice and beef soup” to everyone and with no sign of it on the horizon, strengthening state control will only incite more and greater resistance. Most citizens already know that the government is neither willing nor able to give boiled rice and beef soup to them. Therefore, the only choice is to introduce a system where anyone can have boiled rice and beef soup as long as they are prepared to work for it. [Daily NK]
It certainly looks as if revolutionary capitalism is North Korea’s destiny, no matter how much Pyongyang and Berkeley may wish otherwise. The author, perhaps hoping to appeal to Pyongyang’s softer side, suggests that this will actually strengthen the North Korean system. I disagree and embrace the coming chaos. The victory of those brave ajummas who protested in the markets means — who stood up to the world’s scariest tyranny and won — means that for the first time in North Korean history, the regime’s power isn’t absolute. It has not lost, but has begun to lose, its power to starve and terrorize its subjects into submission. It has not lost, but has begun to lose, its control over its borders and over the flow of information across them. The regime’s unprecedented retreat in the face of unprecedented open opposition will accelerate all of these trends during the years to come.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on February 17, 2010 at 7:48 am · Filed under Resistance
Via Open News, we learn that mandatory adulation on Kim Jong Il’s birthday isn’t quite unanimous:
Based on the interviews from four regions of North Korea- North Hamkyung Province, Yanggang Province, South PyongAn Province, and Nampo city- between February 2 and 4, North Koreans are expressing their discontentment about Kim Jong-Il and his son Kim Jong-Eun.
The expression of discontentment differs from region to region, however. Citizens near the border do not hesitate to express their discontentment, while citizens in the interior are not so open about their feelings. Forms of discipline vary from region to region. In the border region, the agents only give warning, while in the interior, the agents are more prone to punish them.
One of the frequent complaints voiced by one citizen: “The government officials are trying to take away money from the citizens because they did not have enough for themselves. They were saying that the value of money will increase and the price will decrease. They also said the salary will be the same, and more things to make the reform sound good. Right now, as of early February, they also said the markets would be recovered as before. They did not give out food rations, and we are like beggars. Through all this, the government probably obtained a lot of foreign currency from the citizens, and none from the government officials. They are all bastards, and Kim Jong-Il should die soon.”
Open News is also reporting a continuation of a rash of suicides due to The Great Confiscation.
According to the source, the will said “Kim Jong-Il turned my 100,000 Won into 1,000 Won and the rest became trash. I burned all the bills with his face on them (old bills). The new 1,000 Won bill is useless because the price of rice rose. Kim Jong-Il took away everything I had.”
At the risk of paraphrasing Sister Soulja, I submit that it would be better for people to kill secret police agents than themselves.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on February 11, 2010 at 2:51 am · Filed under NK Economics, Kremlinology, Resistance
If absolute power is never having to say you’re sorry, what could this possibly mean?
On Friday, Premier Kim Yong Il apologized for the aftermath in a meeting with government officials and local village leaders, the mass-circulation Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported, citing an unidentified source in North Korea.
“Regarding the currency reform, I sincerely apologize as we pushed ahead with it without a sufficient preparation so that it caused a big pain to the people,” Kim read a statement during the meeting at Pyongyang, according to the paper.
Kim said the government “will do its best to stabilize people’s lives,” saying it will ease its curb on markets and re-allow the use of foreign currency, the paper said. [AP, Hyung-Jin Kim]
The AP helpfully notes that the Premier is the third-most powerful man in North Korea, after Kim Jong Il and Kim Yong Nam.
This is simply astonishing … an open admission of failure and defeat? From these people? In such a system, apologies tend to portend dark things. It may well be that the removal of Pak Nam Gi, the Finance Director of the Workers’ Party, and Kim Dong-Un, the head of Bureau 39, will now expand into a broader purge of party officials. Purges are dangerous things for regimes. Even when they don’t fracture the leadership, they weaken it, as The Great Purge of 1937-1939 weakened the Soviet Army. To this day, there is still speculation that Stalin was poisoned by aides who thought they’d be purged next.
Just as significant, the regime is now reversing some of the Great Confiscation diktats, or so says an anonymous source for the Chosun Ilbo:
He indicated that the regime will allow people to use foreign currency, which has been banned since the reform, and permit open-air markets to return to normal after a crackdown that seemed aimed at strangling a nascent market economy. But Kim at the same time stressed the need to stick to state-set prices, adding that the government will strictly crack down on the hoarding of goods.
Some experts say the situation in the North has returned to almost the state before the currency reform. A South Korean official said North Korean authorities loosened their control of the markets since there has been unprecedented resistance from ordinary people. This seems to have forced Kim’s hand.
After Kim’s apology, most money changers and illegal traders who had been arrested were reportedly freed. The number of people leaving for China has grown noticeably as offices of state agencies or state-run corporations involved in earning dollars, which suspended business due to the ban on use of foreign currency, have resumed business. [Chosun Ilbo]
The source claims that the apology has “quenched a lot of the simmering public anger,” though this is a report I find difficult to credit too much:
“Premier Kim Yong-il’s direct apology to village chiefs, who are representatives of the people of each region, is tantamount to an apology to the people themselves. It’s a big event in the history of North Korea,” a former senior North Korean official who defected to the South said. “Authorities have never apologized to the people for wrong policies before.” He believes the apology came “because discontent with the currency reform had spread widely even among core supporters of the regime,” he added.
Residents in Hwanghae Province are in some cases said to have beaten security officers who were cracking down on the use of dollars.
But of course, much of the damage can’t be undone. You can’t unburn a pile of worthless currency; revive people who’ve been starved, executed, or killed themselves; or restore confidence in a currency that’s under the control of unstable and arbitrary people.
Furthermore, in a system where power is a zero-sum commodity, for the first time, people fought the system and lived to fight again. To a lot of people used to being under the heel of absolute power, an apology is going to look like weakness. It will invite more challenges. Indeed, the Chosun Ilbo’s source agrees that this apology may invite North Koreans to become more assertive in the future.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on February 7, 2010 at 1:51 am · Filed under NK Economics, Resistance
It’s still premature to say that the North Korean regime has retreated in its attack on the system of markets, known as jangmadang, on which the majority of the people had come to depend since the collapse of the state distribution system in the 1990’s. The best available information — and the qualifiers to the aforementioned phrase should be obvious — suggests that the regime has decided against pressing the attack in certain specific places for now. For the time being, food prices and exchange rates have begun to stabilize, at least in the border provinces of Ryanggang, North Hamgyeong, and North Pyongan. Time will tell if the regime allows markets to reopen in the “core” area of Pyongsong, a city near Pyongyang that had become a trading center. The reopening of markets near the capital would likely signal an abandonment of the anti-market campaign.
Adding to the confusion, the state has finally announced the long-delayed “official” prices for foodstuffs, threatening to confiscate goods sold for higher prices, despite the fact that the goods’ market value is substantially higher. The Daily NK thinks the new prices will be difficult to enforce.
The regime’s retreat appears, remarkably, to be the result of civil unrest like the reported riot in Hamhung, what I call the Ajumma Rebellion, and alarming reports of violent attacks against members of the security forces. Via Good Friends, there is a new report of civil unrest, this time in the South Hamgyeong town of Dancheon:
Danchun City, South Hamgyong Province is named to have the highest death due to starvation by the result of the field survey, and war veteran residents from the city held a mass protest in front of their city hall. Mainly war veterans over the ages of 70-80 gathered and they were followed by other elders and residents, so the momentum was great. War veterans sat across from city office and violently complained, “We worked hard for our survival during the Arduous March, but the current movement of opening doors to the Strong and Prosperous Nation would make everyone starved to death with currency exchange. Are you going to starve us to death?” The atmosphere turned ugly for a while when residents charged up with emotions screamed after hearing war veteran’s speech. An elder cried, “What is the use of the City Party or people’s government organization when they cannot feed their people? When we followed the Great Leader during the revolution, we wanted to make sure our descendents were well-off. It doesn’t matter if old people die, but our descendents are all about to die. We don’t need such government.” The City Party of Danchun City reported this incident directly to the Central Party. On January 26, the Central Party ordered, “Distribute 1,000 tons of rice that is being saved as Number 2 reserve in Danchun City farms.” The City Party rushed distribution at the end of January to residents with the most difficult living situation. An official at Danchun City commented, “Residents of other cities and counties are having difficulties, but our residents seem to suffer the most. More people are dying and many households with 4-5 members are living off of 500g of corn noodle boiled in water.” [Good Friends]
Even among those without the extraordinary courage needed to openly resist the state, there is more open discontent than in previous years:
Chang, Keum-Ok (alias), a resident in Danchun city, south Hamgyong province complained about the government’s inaction: “they know of people dying of hunger, but they do nothing to resolve people’s suffering.” People cannot find grain even if they want to buy, and the food prices skyrocket everyday. People can do nothing but despair at this moment. Ko, Byong-Gook (alias) complained that “if the government took away all of people’s money, they should provide services and goods to ensure people’s basic living conditions. They just say nicely, but nothing is actually coming out to support people’s basic living conditions.” There are some rumors from some part of the City Party that PDS (Public Distribution System) may be reactivated around February 16 holiday, but people are not terribly excited by that. People complain that “even if that is true, people will die of hunger while waiting for that to happen. Will the government let starving people die?” People complain that they are experiencing the worst ordeal right now: “our government does not show any mercy; instead they seem to test how long their people could survive without sufficient food.”
Good Friends also reports dire conditions in Chongjin, and reports that the damage to the market system is persistent. Traders who lost everything in the Great Confiscation were hit hardest. The markets were their survival strategy. Now, some of them are literally starving. Most ominously for the state, there are worries about the sufficiency of the army’s food supply. And according to multiple reports, people are speaking much more openly of their discontent than in the past:
The residents in Sunchun, South Pyongan province do not hide their opposition. They complain that “the government’s new economic measures make people die of hunger. Instead of making a Strong and Prosperous Nation for people, the new economic measures open the door of poverty and hunger for people.” Heyoung Kim (alias) said “women who feed a family have many opinions on the new economic measures. Compared to the days of old monetary system, our living condition is much worse. Many households cannot even eat corn porridges. Since people’s living condition is at the bottom, they talk badly to the government.” Police officials agree with such sentiments. “In these days, people are increasingly angry and harshly blame the government. Their firm belief and commitment about the Strong and Prosperous Nation are already gone. Political speeches and lectures these days are not effective to reorient and realign the people to the nation’s ideology. They seem to think only about the means and ways to make their living.” [Good Friends]
For obvious reasons, it’s hard to know how much of this is true, though it’s consistent with other things we’ve heard recently. North Korea never emerged from the Great Famine entirely. The most vulnerable and obedient are already dead, but in a place like North Korea, the arbitrariness of the state produces an unsteady but constant supply of vulnerable people whose deaths pass unnoticed.
I predicted before that eventually, “the diktats that demand tomorrow’s sacrifices will be mostly forgotten because no one will have the luxury of obedience.” Most likely, what we’re seeing is a return to the old pattern of the people ignoring, evading, and bribing their way about the state’s economic regulations, as the security apparatus ceases to enforce those regulations as anything more than good reasons to shake down targets of opportunity.
___________________
Ordinarily, the palace economy and the peoples’ economy live their separate lives, but there are exceptions. If the state is willing to risk civil unrest because the state wants the money, I’ll speculate that this means that the palace economy needs the money. The sharp drop in revenue from weapons sales certainly also suggests as much. The most telling evidence, however, is the indication that the regime is purging the people who finance the palace economy: first, Pak Nam Gi, the Finance Director of the Workers’ Party, and now, Kim Dong-Un, the head of the notorious Bureau 39:
South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said Kim Dong-un was dismissed because he had been blacklisted by so many foreign governments, including the EU in December, leaving him unable to travel on behalf of Room 39’s legal companies. He has been replaced by his deputy, Jon Il-chun, Yonhap said, citing an unidentified source.
Housed in an unremarkable government compound in Pyongyang, Room 39 oversees 120 companies and mines, accounting for a quarter of all North Korean trade and employing 50,000 people, according to Lim Soo-ho, a research fellow at the Samsung Economic Research Institute. He said Kim’s dismissal may be part of attempts to get around international sanctions. [….]
Some of the money generated by Room 39 is used to buy the loyalty of senior party officials, a role that may take on greater prominence as Kim Jong-il, who suffered a stroke in 2008, prepares to hand over power to his third son, Kim Jong-un. Analysts have estimated that illegal activities account for up to 40% of all North Korean trade and an even higher share of total cash earnings. [The Guardian; hat tip, Curtis]
It’s possible that Kim Dong-Un was replaced simply because he was a marked man outside North Korea, but his dismissal now seems unlikely to be completely unrelated to the regime’s current instability. There are other indications of infighting within the inner party:
“Right now, North Korean officials are busy blaming each other for the failed currency reform and Pak, who spearheaded the revaluation, is believed to have been sacked,” said a diplomatic source in Beijing. “Markets have come to a grinding halt following the currency revaluation and prices have soared,” the source said. It seems North Korea hoped to stabilize prices through the currency reform and then credit the achievement to Kim Jong-il’s third son and heir apparent Jong-un to consolidate his grip on power, but this flopped, the source added.
Some North Korea watchers in China predict that the regime may perform a U-turn back to timid market reforms now that Pak, who led the crusade against capitalism, has been fired. One North Korea expert in Beijing said, “There is a strong possibility that high-ranking North Korean officials who led the drive to crush market forces since 2004 will be removed from office, while policies will shift toward market reforms starting in the second half of this year.” [Chosun Ilbo]
Although it would be reasonable to infer from this that the sanctions are working, as is often the case in North Korea, not all signs point in the same direction. One would not expect a regime in financial distress to proceed with something as useless as cladding the useless Ryugyong Hotel in glass (see, e.g., this excellent photograph, and yes, Pyongyang looks even colder than D.C.)
Posted by Joshua Stanton on February 2, 2010 at 8:34 pm · Filed under Resistance
The Daily NK is reporting on “an explosion in the number of casualties resulting from popular resentment” of the series of draconian economic diktats I call The Great Confiscation. These include the cancellation and reissue of the currency, which wiped out the savings of millions of people overnight; the ban on foreign currency; and the closure of markets — first in Pyongyang, and if rumors are accurate, in Chongjin and Hamhung this spring. Via Curtis, we have North Korean confirmation that in addition to restoring total dependence on the state, the moves were also designed, to restate matters bluntly, to screw the people and steal their money, even if it starves them.
[Thanks to Curtis, by the way, for the sweet overlay.]
Not surprisingly, this made a lot of North Koreans very angry. More surprisingly, North Koreans are so angry that a lot of them aren’t hiding it. Instead, they’re on the verge of open rebellion. Among the disturbances that followed the Great Confiscation were angry protests by ajummas in the markets, people burning piles of currency in protest, and a riot in Hamhung that ended with 12 executions. And that is not all:
[I]n Pyongsung, North Pyongan Province, normally one of the key distribution centers in North Korea, there have been several incidents of agents from the People’s Safety Agency (PSA), the organization charged with cracking down on the smuggling of food and other officially “immoral” acts, being attacked by unidentified assailants.
A Daily NK source reported on Monday, “A group of agents who had just finished doing the rounds of the jangmadang and alley markets in Naengcheon-dong, Haksu-dong, and Cheongok-ri in Pyongsung were attacked by a number of people, who assaulted them and immediately ran away. As a result, PSA officials are feeling very tense these days.”
The usual cautions apply.
There have been more examples unearthed in recent days, too. For instance, North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity (NKIS), a Seoul-based defector group, recently received news that “a fight broke out between agents of the PSA, who monitor the Hyesan jangmadang, and some residents. As the fight turned serious, one resident snatched an agent’s gun and fired randomly into the crowd. One agent, Choe, is in a critical condition.”
According to NKIS, the fight began after the PSA agents beat up a trader who was trying to avoid the crackdown, and that made other residents angry, so they attacked the agents in return. As the fight grew more serious, agents threatened residents, but this only added fuel to the flames.
Finally, a Daily NK source from North Hamkyung Province released one other incident: Cho, who used to work for the Prosecutions Department of the National Security Agency in the region, was apparently killed by a Chongjin Steel Mill worker called Jeung Hyun Deuk.
The source explained, “Jeung’s father, the chief of a foreign currency-generating company, was interrogated last July on suspicion of embezzling enormous amounts of property and foreign currency, and in January was sentenced to life in prison. However, a few days after being imprisoned, he died. Thereafter, Jeung held a grudge against his father’s interrogator, Cho, and eventually killed him.”
The Daily NK reports that part of the reason why people are fighting back is that they’ve concluded that they have nothing to lose anyway. Some would rather go down fighting if the alternative is slow starvation, something plenty of them have seen happen. As a result of all this discontent, the Anjeonbu and the Bowibu are launching a “50-Day Battle” to root out dissenters.
A few thoughts I’ll add to this:
First, has there ever been a place so achingly in need of a revolution as North Korea? Sure, the Nazis were more evil in the grand scheme of things, but at least they could build autobahns and put food on the shelves.
Second, I read somewhere that some guy somewhere (I went to public school) said that “when a government becomes destructive of these ends” — referring life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — “it is the right of the people to alter, or to abolish it.” Yeah, but who still believes that?
Third, and for those Machiavellian realists who discard the previous thought out of hand, if North Korea can sell small arms and man-portable surface-to-air missiles to Iran and its terrorist clients — possibly to include the militias that are killing American soldiers — would it be so wrong or a completely ineffective deterrent for us to “lose” a few truckloads of Tokarevs in some place where discontented North Koreans could find them?
Posted by Joshua Stanton on January 9, 2010 at 1:58 pm · Filed under NK Economics, Resistance
Just minutes after reading Barbara Demick’s description of the sprawling Sunam Market in Chongjin, which she called North Korea’s largest market, my ADD got the best of me, I set aside the book, and clicked on Good Friends’s site, where I saw this:
Soonam Market in Chungjin to be Closed in March
North Korean authorities are to close down Soonam market in Chungjin, North Hamgyong Province in March following the shutdown of Pyongsung market in South Pyongan Province last June. The cabinet decided on a measure to cease the operation management of the Soonam market on December 30, which practically means a closure. Hereafter, North Hamgyong Provincial Party Committee will take charge of the closing process and take the party leadership initiative. The provincial party decided “to implement a propaganda campaign project in order to control opinions and utterances of the residents.” The intention is to eradicate possible strong resistance of the residents by means of a carefully designed ideology campaign. Having been in operation only for five years, Soonam market is located between Chumok-dong and Chungnam-dong in Soonam District. The Provincial Party plans to demolish the market beginning in March and build trendy parks and houses. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Joshua Stanton on January 1, 2010 at 11:04 am · Filed under Resistance
Yes, the recent past is littered with unrealized predictions of upheaval in North Korea, but if it’s possible to know anything about the North Korean Street, then things are clearly changing faster now than they have in the past. Reading updates from the Daily NK and Open News sounds more like the first chapters of “A Tale of Two Cities” every week. In 2009, the North Korean people pushed their country into the margins of Phase V. This year, 2010, could be the year North Korea enters Phase V in earnest. I’m not saying this is the year — the timing of even likely events is impossible to predict — but I am saying that this year is much more likely to be a year of unrest than any of the years leading up to this one.
If there is unrest, I predict that it will, initially, fail to overthrow the regime. It takes a disciplined, cohesive, armed opposition to overthrow a determined dictatorship, but hatred of the regime itself is enough to galvanize opposition. There is much that we can do to help North Koreans cohere around a set of principles, and that’s something I’ll be writing more about later.
Some updates:
WHOOP DE DOO. NORTH KOREA HAS RELEASED ITS MUCH-ANTICIPATED and analytically worthless New Year’s speech. Every year, they promise to improve the lives of the people; every year, foreigners read this as a harbinger of reform; and every year, things in North Korea only get worse. But nevertheless, let the over-analysis begin! It’s hard to say which is the single worst example among so much weedy, perennial regrowth, but this one probably wins the honor, at least until we see the Hankyoreh’s entry.
WHICH IS, I SUPPOSED, MUCH LIKE NORTH KOREA’S CALL FOR PEACE with the United States. People will naturally see what they choose to see in this, no matter how much past experience contradicts it. Reuters, on the other hand, has seen it all before, and even talks to someone insightful:
“North has absolutely no interest in normalizing relations with the United States. As soon as the North does that, it loses all reason to exist,” said B.R. Myers, an expert on the North’s ideology at Dongseo University. “As soon as people think it is possible to get along with America, they will ask themselves why they need a ‘military first’ policy,” Myers said in a recent interview.
This year, “peace” on North Korea’s terms means recognition as a nuclear state, the dropping of U.N. sanctions, a license to proliferate and counterfeit at will, and non-interference of any foreign power as it commits mass murder against its own people. This is the peace of the (mass) grave, although I’m sure those terms are acceptable to plenty of people in our State Department. Of course, it’s anyone’s guess what “peace” will mean next year.
LEE MYUNG BAK’S MESSAGE IS NO LESS CRYPTIC or manipulative, if we’re to be objective about this. The art of politics — and no one has mastered this more than Barack Obama — is to promise them just enough so that their hopes can fill in the rest of what you didn’t say. Yonhap’s picture of Lee delivering it is one for the ages:
While the hot young thing on his left — I presume she isn’t the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but who’s complaining? — hangs on his every word, the fellow on the right appears to have entered a trance-like state. No doubt, this is an intense form of concentration.
THE DAILY NK’S CHRIS GREEN, who has become a great asset to its English language edition and everyone who reads it, has the best commentary on the Robert Park situation I’ve read anywhere so far. I’m not even going to quote it. Just read the whole thing yourself. I will say that what Park says about the beef protests explains why I’m ready to write off South Korea as a total loss until unification, when I expect North Korean voters will restore some perspective for a while.
CAPTAIN JON STAFFORD, author of this much-discussed paper on finding America’s role in a post-Kim North Korea, offers another contribution — this time, in the Australian Defense Force Journal. Stafford’s ideas manage to be both subversive and achingly sensible. I wish they had more currency in our government. I also found the article on pashtunwali interesting.
MORE NORTH KOREAN REFUGEES THAN EVER are arriving in Thailand: “Thai immigration authorities say they took more than 1,000 North Koreans into custody this year, compared with less than 400 in 2008 when Beijing tightened security for the Olympics.”
SO FAR, I’M NOT READING REPORTS OF CHAOS IN IRAN, but I’m glad to see that the Iranian opposition doesn’t seem to be backing down from the death threats of the regime’s thug squads.
JULES CRITTENDEN has written a wonderful, bitter, must-read diary of his last decade.
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