Category: DPRK Government

Crackdown on cell phones along North Korean border

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North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un has launched an unprecedented multi-agency campaign to crack down on illegal cell phones along the country’s border with China by tracking signals and sending security forces to nab the callers, according to sources in the area.

The move is aimed at closing off one of the few connections to the outside world from isolated North Korea. In areas close to the country’s northern border with China, North Koreans using phones smuggled in from the neighboring country can connect to Chinese cell phone towers to make outside calls.

But since the beginning of October, authorities have tightened restrictions on the phones and begun using radio monitoring stations to spot illegal cell phone signals, according to a source in North Hamgyong province. Once a signal is detected, a search force is immediately dispatched to the area to nab the culprit, the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

In addition to radio monitoring stations, military bases and the national police department’s special task forces are involved in the crackdown effort, the source said. “They are mobilizing even the posts of the Worker-Peasant Red Guards,” the country’s civilian defense force, the source said.

Previous curbs on illegal cell phones had not involved so many agencies or such a sophisticated method of detecting signals and finding callers, but did significantly reduce the number of people illegally crossing the river border into China.

North Korea says its missiles can reach US mainland

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North Korea said Tuesday its missiles can reach the U.S. mainland — days after South Korea announced a deal with the United States to extend its missile range. The strike zone of North Korean rocket forces includes “not only the bases of the puppet forces and the U.S. imperialist aggression forces’ bases in the inviolable land of Korea, but also Japan, Guam and the U.S. mainland,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported.

But some analysts questioned the claim. “That’s been a desire or an objective, politically, for North Korean leadership for quite some time. But they have not demonstrated that capability,” said Daniel Pinkston of the International Crisis Group’s North East Asia Program.

On Sunday, South Korea said it reached a deal with the United States that allows Seoul to extend the range of its ballistic missiles to include the northern peninsula of North Korea.

“What else can they say? It was politically impossible for them not to react,” said professor Andrei Lankov of Kookmin University in Seoul.

Privileged Pyongyang a political strategy

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A mix of underground trading, investment funds, particularly from China, and the growth of government-authorized commercial enterprises has helped reshape North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, with its 3 million residents.

The capital is a complex mixture of facade and reality: blackouts remain commonplace in many neighborhoods; backstreets are dusty and potholed; the outsides of many apartment buildings are splattered with patches of mold.

But life is also far less grim than in the rest of the country. If nothing else, there is the appearance of opportunity.

Top officials in the ruling party, the government and the military live in gated neighborhoods closed to outsiders. They shop in stores filled with goods, and sing karaoke in wood-paneled restaurants. They live and work in constant proximity to power, opening up channels for professional promotion, business opportunities and black market profits.

“The government is privileging Pyongyang as a political strategy,” said Glyn Ford, a former European Union parliamentarian and international consultant who travels regularly and widely in North Korea. “The people who live in the capital are the people who count. They’re the people who underpin the regime.”

Their support is particularly important right now, with the ascension of third-generation leader Kim Jong Un, who clearly sees his political survival linked to improved standards of living. With Kim Jong Un’s abrupt rise to power, Pyongyang is getting even more.

In just the past few months, the regime has opened the Dolphinarium (which also required a new 30-mile pipeline to pump in fresh seawater), a $19 million amusement park and an elaborate pool-and-water-slide complex. All are filled with adults, and all are wildly popular.

Outside of Pyongyang though, there are no $19 million amusement parks. Asked what Kaesong residents do for enjoyment, a city official paused to think. There’s the pool, Kim Ryong Mun said eventually, though it’s really just for children. Finally, he had something: “Many people go outside and have picnics.”

Kim, with his faded, blue-striped tie and digital camera hanging from his wrist as a sign of his success, blames international sanctions, imposed because of Pyongyang’s nuclear program, for the lack of development.

The elite mystery of Pyongyang

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North Korea can appear outwardly stagnant, a country frozen by poverty and Soviet economic policies, but a small but resonant market economy has taken root over the past 15 years or so. While the country still has a per capita GDP of just $1,800 per year, according to U.S. figures, this new economy – a mix of underground trading, investment funds, particularly from China, and the growth of government-authorized commercial enterprises – has helped reshape its capital Pyongyang.

Pyongyang is a closed city, sealed off by security forces that monitor movement at dozens of checkpoints. North Koreans cannot move there, or even visit, without official permission. Its estimated 3 million residents have been vetted for their ideological purity, or at least their connections to the inner circle.

Today, the Pyongyang rich, spending their dollars, euros and Chinese yuan, can buy everything from high heels to imported watches. They have bought enough cars in the past couple years to cause the occasional traffic jam. But few of these changes have gone beyond the capital, and the elite who live there. That contrast, between Pyongyang and every other city in the country, reflects an ever-growing chasm between North Korea’s elite and the daily struggles of everyone else.

The urban divide can be seen in the industrial city of Hamhung, where the skies above the handful of working factories are filled with gray soot, and workers are ferried to the beach on their day off in crowded, cobbled-together trucks powered by wood-burning stoves. It’s visible on the “Youth Hero Highway” outside the port city of Nampho, where there are so few cars on the eight-lane road that it looks like an empty parking lot stretching toward the horizon.

It’s in the province around Chongjin, where U.N. data shows the rate of abnormally short children – a key indicator of chronic malnutrition – is 50 percent higher than around Pyongyang.

You can also find the urban divide in the hospitals of the other second-tier cities, according to people who have fled North Korea. They say desperate doctors struggle to treat patients with almost no medicine, using equipment that can be decades old.

A possibly tougher China defers North Korean leader’s trip

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China quietly deferred a request by North Korea for its young leader to visit last month because the Chinese leadership was preoccupied with its once-in-a-decade leadership change and a host of other distractions, two independent sources said.

The move also suggests that China, North Korea’s main food and oil supplier, may be seeking an assurance from the isolated state that it drops its nuclear ambitions, one source said, after it ignored warnings from Beijing not to go ahead with a rocket launch in April.

Kim Jong-un’s desire to visit China in September was relayed by his powerful uncle, Jang Song-thaek, when the latter met Chinese leaders on a visit to Beijing in August.

But China discreetly put off the request, which was never publicized.

“Kim Jong-un wanted to come but it was not a convenient time,” a source familiar with China’s foreign policy said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, who died in December, made six visits to China from 2004 to 2011.

How the North Korean parliament functions

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Virtually all legislators of North Korea’s parliament, the Supreme People’s Assembly, are members of the Kims’ party who ran unopposed in the last nationwide election, leading many outside observers to consider the body a rubber stamp for the regime’s policies.

North Korea’s Constitution allows political parties, but politics is overwhelmingly dominated by the Workers’ Party, founded by Kim Il Sung, grandfather of the current ruler.

Here’s a look at the Supreme People’s Assembly and how it works:

  • The current 12th parliament formed in 2009 has 687 legislators, or deputies, of which 107 are women. The number of deputies is determined by the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly in proportion to the country’s population.
  • The assembly meets at the austere Mansudae Assembly Hall in the capital, Pyongyang.
  • Deputies are elected after a committee of more than 100 people from each district recommends candidates to represent the constituency in the parliament. Even though the law provides no limits on the number of candidates who can run from each district, almost all candidates ran unopposed in the last election in March 2009.
  • According to Kim Song Chun, a parliamentary official, deputies meet to discuss and pass laws and establish the country’s domestic and foreign policies. They also can appoint or dismiss officials at top state organizations and confer titles. For example, at the last session in April, Kim Jong Un was made first chairman of the powerful National Defense Commission.

Parliament typically met only once a year under Kim Jong Il, the now-deceased father of the current leader Kim Jong Un. With a second parliamentary session having been convened in the first year of Kim Jong Un’s reign, this could mark a return to the more active role that parliament played under Kim Il Sung, who often held two sessions a year, said John Delury of Yonsei University in South Korea.

“… A general trend under Kim Jong Il [was] holding less frequent and less regular meetings of key party and government organs,” Delury said. “The striking thing is that Kim Jong Un seems to be reversing that trend by regularizing and re-institutionalizing governance.”

 

North Korean parliament holds second session this year

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North Korea’s parliament convened Tuesday for the second time in six months, passing a law that adds one year of compulsory education for children in the socialist nation, the first publicly-announced policy change under leader Kim Jong Un.

The Supreme People’s Assembly’s second meeting of the year was notable mainly as a departure from how Kim’s father did business. Before he died in December, Kim Jong Il convened his legislature just once in most years. And during one three-year period after his own father’s death it didn’t meet at all.

By adding a year to North Korea’s state-funded educational system, from 11 to 12 years, Kim may be trying to cultivate loyalty among younger generations as he consolidates his power base.

Kim Jong Un himself attended Tuesday’s session, which was adjourned after a single day, according to the official Korean Central News Agency. Foreign reporters were denied access.

North Korea’s Constitution allows political parties, but politics is overwhelmingly dominated by the Workers’ Party, founded by Kim Il Sung, grandfather of the current ruler. Virtually all legislators are members of the Kims’ party who ran unopposed in the last nationwide election, leading many outside observers to consider the body a rubber stamp for the regime’s policies.

North Korean missile launch pad pause

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North Korea has stopped construction on a launch pad where intercontinental-range rockets could be tested, an interruption possibly due to recent heavy rains and that could stall completion up to two years.

Despite the setback, however, Pyongyang is also refurbishing for possible future use another existing pad at the same complex that has been used for past rocket launches, according to the analysis of August 29 images provided to reporters by 38 North, the website of the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

While the renovations don’t mean a launch is imminent, they indicate North Korea is preparing the site for possible future rocket tests, according to the 38 North special report written by Nick Hansen.

North Korea conducted nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009, but experts don’t believe Pyongyang has yet mastered the technology needed to shrink a nuclear weapon so it can be mounted onto the tip of a long-range missile

There are worries, however, about North Korea’s rocket and missile programmes. The United States, South Korea and others have said North Korea uses rocket launches, including a failed effort in mid-April, as covers to test banned missile systems that could target parts of the United States. North Korea says recent rocket launches were meant to put peaceful satellites into orbit.

North Korea has repeatedly vowed to push ahead with its nuclear program in the face of what it calls US hostility that makes a “nuclear deterrence” necessary.

Agriculture is changing in North Korea but will it last?

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Deep in the North Korean countryside, in remote villages that outsiders seldom reach, farmers are now said to be given nearly one-third of their harvests to sell at market prices. Collective farms are reportedly being reorganized into something closer to family farms. And State propagandists are expounding the glories of change under the country’s new young leader.

In the rigidly planned economy of this Stalinist state, could this be the first flicker of reform? A string of long-doubtful observers have become increasingly convinced that economic change is afoot, akin to China’s first flirtations with market reforms 30 years ago. But, they also warn, exactly what is happening remains a mystery.

“My gut sense is that something is changing,” said Marcus Noland of the Washington, DC-based Peterson Institute for International Economics and a leading scholar on the North Korean economy.

Kim Jong Un “is trying to do something new. … Whether that succeeds or not is a completely different issue,” he added. Like many other analysts, Noland remains pessimistic. The economic reforms appear to be very limited, he noted, and could quickly be abandoned if Kim changes his mind or faces opposition from his core supporters.

North Korea has flirted with radical economic shifts before. The 17-year rule of Kim Jong Il — whose December death paved the way for his son, Kim Jong Un, to take power — included market experiments in 2002, and a devastating currency devaluation in 2009 that stripped millions of people of their savings. Nearly all the changes were rolled back amid internal disputes, and fears among the ruling elite that they could lead to demands for change that could spiral beyond the state’s control.

Iraq blocks Syria-bound North Korean plane on weapons suspicions

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Iraq has denied permission to a North Korean plane bound for Syria to pass through Iraqi airspace because it suspects it could be carrying weapons, a senior official said.

Ali al-Mossawi, media advisor to the Iraq’s prime minister, told Reuters the scheduled plane’s itinerary, from North Korea to Syria, was what had aroused suspicions but that there had been no contact between the Iraqi government and North Korea on the issue.

Syria’s upheaval is politically tricky for Iraq’s Shi’ite Muslim-led government of Iraq. Close to Assad’s ally, Shi’ite Iran, Baghdad has resisted joining Western and fellow Arab calls for the Syrian leader to step down while also calling for a reform process in Syria. Iraqi leaders fear Assad’s fall would fracture Syria along sectarian lines and yield a hostile, hardline Sunni Muslim regime that could stir up Iraq’s volatile Sunni-Shi’ite mix.