Tag Archive: north korea

Thousands of North Korean cameras on Chinese border

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With more and more defectors heading south, Kim Jong-un’s North Korean regime spent $1.66 million on over 16,000 border-security cameras in the first 11 months of 2012, the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo reports, as he continues to build a spy network on his own citizens. And that’s not good news for anyone under the watching eyes of the Supreme Leader who’s trying to seek refuge amidst, you know, democracy. The data, according to Chosun Ilbo, is based on Chinese customs data:

“[North Korea] imported a total of 16,420 CCTV cameras worth about US$1.66 million from China from January to November last year.

“In 2009, the first year China published statistics on bilateral trade, the North imported a whopping 40,465 surveillance cameras from China. In 2010 the figure was 22,987 and in 2011 22,118. Altogether the North has imported over 100,000 cameras worth about $10 million.”

That’s a lot of surveillance equipment for such a small country: North Korea’s addition of 100,000 closed-circuit TV cameras over three years is a gain of about one for every 244 citizens, compared to the approximately 1.85 million in all of Britain — or one for every 33 of its population. London, which has upwards of a third of those British spycams, is of course more densely packed than Pyonyang.

But Kim Jong-un isn’t focusing on the cities — he’s looking for runaways. As analysts tell Chosun Ilbo from South Korea, “cameras are being positioned at key points along the long border the two nations share in order to detect and capture would-be defectors from the North.” As The Telegraph‘s Julian Ryall explains, it’s part of a larger push to keep North Korean citizens from crossing the border:

“Kim Jong-un has carried out a crackdown on people hoping to escape their repressive homeland, as well as anyone using a mobile phone to communicate across the border and smugglers bringing in banned newspapers, books and recordings of television programmes that show the lives of people in prosperous South Korea.”

And the North Korean regime’s efforts seem to be working, with the number of defectors coming out of the country dropping sharply over the past three years, just as the camera trade has ramped up. “Just over 1,500 North Koreans arrived in the South in 2012 compared to more than 2,700 the previous year, according to the South’s Unification Ministry,” reported the BBC, which notes that the figure is a seven-year low. “Most North Korean refugees escape across the border with China and then make their way to South Korea via third countries.”

[Repost from The Atlantic]

 

 

Technology a dictator’s dilemma

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In his New Year’s greeting earlier this month, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un extolled the benefits of technology, saying: “The industrial revolution in the new century is, in essence, a scientific and technological revolution, and breaking through the cutting edge is a shortcut to the building of an economic giant.”

Even Kim must realize that it’s pretty hard to be “cutting edge” if you have no access to the Internet. And yet, that is the case for nearly all of the 24 million people in his country. While it is hard to get accurate figures on most everything related to North Korea, Martyn Williams, who runs Northkoreatech.org, estimates that the number of North Koreas with Internet access is probably in the “low thousands.” Such access tends to be limited to people in elite or scientific circles.

North Korean leaders have long viewed technological prowess as a source of government legitimacy. The recent satellite launch, for example, can be pointed to as a symbol of regime “accomplishment.”

North Korea is facing an extreme version of the dictator’s dilemma. On the one hand, its leaders are attracted to the knowledge, economic growth, and global connectivity that are facilitated by the Internet. At the same time, they know that the Internet would threaten their grip on power.

Most regimes facing this quandary have chosen to embrace technology, even with the corresponding loss of control. North Korea is likely to do the same. The difference is that it might not survive the consequences.

Stinging UN call for international inquiry into North Korean human rights

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The U.N.’s top human rights official said Monday that as many as 200,000 people are being held in North Korean political prison camps rife with torture, rape and slave labor, and that some of the abuses may amount to crimes against humanity.

For that reason, said Navi Pillay, the world body’s high commissioner for human rights, nations must mount an independent probe into North Korea’s human rights record.

She said the political prison camp system involves “rampant violations, including torture and other forms of cruel and inhumane treatment, summary executions, rape, slave labor, and forms of collective punishment that may amount to crimes against humanity.” Living conditions are reported to include scarce food, little to no medical care and inadequate clothing.

The U.N. Human Rights Council and the U.N. General Assembly, which includes all 193 member nations, have condemned North Korea’s human rights record, but Pillay said stronger action is needed, including such a probe – one authorized by the United Nations but performed by experts independent of the U.N. system.

The stinging criticism and call from the world body’s top human rights official for “a full-fledged international inquiry into serious crimes” in North Korea comes a year after Kim Jong Un became the new leader of the nuclear-armed Asian country upon the death of his father.

“There were some initial hopes that the advent of a new leader might bring about some positive change in the human rights situation,” Pillay said. “But a year after Kim Jong Un became the country’s new supreme leader we see almost no sign of improvement.”

Pillay’s statement was based on extensive research submitted by a special investigator for the 47-nation Human Rights Council based in Geneva and meetings that she held there in December with two survivors of the prison camps, said Pillay’s spokesman, Rupert Colville.

[AP]

The changing role of women in North Korean society

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According to Marcus Noland, the deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, North Korean women were traditionally pushed out of employment in core state organizations. “And that is why they ended up in the market,” he adds. “Certainly, there was no intention on the part of North Korea decision-makers to raise the role of women relative to men. Just the opposite.”

“Women, because of their prominence in the market, are at the forefront of acts of civil disobedience,” Noland says, emphasizing that civil disobedience is still extremely unusual in North Korea. “The protests are generally reactive and defensive in nature, but women are very prominent in them.”

The extra burden women carry is beginning to have social consequences, with young women hoping to delay marriage to avoid taking on a husband. For men, their emasculation within their own households is now a fact of life.

“Whatever your wife tells you to do, you do,” says Mr. Kim, despairing. “If women say it’s a cow, it’s a cow. If they say it’s a giraffe, it’s a giraffe. We are slaves, slaves of the women. Women’s voices have become louder. …  Men without wives become beggars. They become so hungry that they can’t go to work. Then they have to go to market to beg. This has happened to between five and seven men I know.”

And North Korean women now have a new figurehead: the fashionable wife of the young leader Kim Jong Un, first lady Ri Sol-ju. North Korean women hope her high-profile role might translate into gains for them.

Vulnerable North Korean women

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One major — and largely unspoken — problem for North Korean women is skyrocketing domestic violence.

Ewha University’s Kim Seok-hyang makes a point of asking North Korean defectors about domestic violence. “I interviewed more than 60 people. All of them agreed violence is there against women. Violence against women is not news for them. It’s so natural, it’s happening almost every day.”

She blames men’s alienation and frustration with their diminution of power within the family for the problem.

Outside the home as well, in the marketplace, women are vulnerable too, says Marcus Noland, the deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. In his research of women working in local markets, 95 percent reported paying bribes to police and officials, who would try to shake them down.

That — and being exposed to new ideas in the marketplace — could affect women’s political views. “Women, because of their prominence in the market, are at the forefront of acts of civil disobedience,” Noland says, emphasizing that civil disobedience is still extremely unusual in North Korea. “The protests are generally reactive and defensive in nature, but women are very prominent in them.”

Desperate North Korean women become breadwinners

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Anecdotal evidence collected in interviews by Kim Seok-hyang, a professor of North Korea studies at Ewha Women’s University in Seoul, indicates that women are the main breadwinners in 80 to 90 percent of North Korean households — and that is having social consequences within the family.

One North Korean woman says those social changes are playing out in her own family. “I don’t know if you can call it power, but … we can speak louder now,” she says. “In the past, we obeyed our husbands. But now they can’t make money. Women have to make money and feed them. Women have become the heads of the family. They make the money and buy the food. Men cannot say what they want.”

She admits her friends mockingly call their husbands “puppies” or “pets” because they have to be fed, yet they do nothing.

A typical woman may earns about 3,000 won a day at the markets that have sprung up — the equivalent of less than 50 cents — at black market rates. But that’s double what her husband would earn in an entire month, were he to get paid.

A male interviewee who has an office job in a state-run company complains, “I get paid 1,200 won (5 cents!) a month. It’s a joke. There’s nothing you can do with that salary. A kilo of rice is something between 5,000 to 7,000 won.”

North Korean men paying not to work

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Imagine going to work every day and rarely getting paid. Then, one day, you’re told there’s no work to do — and you must pay the company for the privilege of not working!

Welcome to the Orwellian world of work in North Korea, where men remain tied to the country’s moribund state-run institutions.

Mr. Kim’s job in a state-run steel factory requires him to build roads. He can’t remember the last time he received a monthly salary. When there are no roads to build, he has to pay his company around 20 times his paltry monthly salary.

“He had to pay not to work for about six months of last year,” Mrs. Kim told NPR, sighing. “You have to pay, even if you can’t afford to eat. It’s mandatory.”

“And if you don’t go to work, you go to prison,” another male interviewee tells NPR.

North Korea trip by Richardson and Schmidt set for next week

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Former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt will lead a private humanitarian mission to North Korea next week, Richardson’s office confirmed in a statement Saturday.

The trip comes despite public criticism from the U.S. State Department, which has said the visit was ill-timed in light of tensions stemming from North Korea’s recent rocket launch.

The delegation will also include Jared Cohen, the director of a Google initiative known as Google Ideas and Schmidt’s co-author on an upcoming book about how the Internet is changing the world.

Last July, Cohen organized a conference outside Los Angeles that featured nearly a dozen North Korean defectors, who gave harrowing accounts of privation and coerced criminal activity including drug sales.

Schmidt spoke at the conference and met with the group, according to panel moderator and North Korea expert Sheena Chestnut Greitens, now a graduate student at Harvard University.

Richardson, a former ambassador to the United Nations, has made numerous trips to North Korea. Many observers expect Richardson to seek the release of Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American tour guide who was detained last year.

Google executive and Governor Bill Richardson to visit North Korea

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Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, will be traveling to North Korea on a private, humanitarian mission led by former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson that could take place as early as this month, sources told The Associated Press.

The trip would be the first by a top executive from U.S.-based Google, the world’s largest Internet search provider, to a country considered to have the most restrictive Internet policies on the planet. To add to the mystery, last year a group of North Koreans paid a visit to Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.

North Korea is in the midst of what leader Kim Jong Un called a modern-day “industrial revolution” in a New Year’s Day speech to the nation. Kim Jong Un is pushing science and technology as a path to economic development for the impoverished country, aiming for computers in every school and digitized machinery in every factory.

However, giving citizens open access to the Internet has not been part of the regime’s strategy. While some North Koreans can access a domestic Intranet service, very few have clearance to freely surf the World Wide Web.

It was not immediately clear who Schmidt and Richardson expect to meet in North Korea.

The visit also follows North Korea’s announcement that an American citizen of Korean descent has been jailed in Pyongyang on suspicion of committing “hostile” acts against the state. Kenneth Bae, identified in North Korean state media by his Korean name, Pae Jun Ho, is the fifth American detained in North Korea in the past four years. The exact circumstances of his arrest were not clear.

Richardson, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who often serves as an envoy to countries that do not have diplomatic relations with the United States, will try to meet with North Korean officials, and possibly Bae, to discuss the case, the sources said.

Rare New Years address by Kim Jong-un

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North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called for an end to confrontation between the two Koreas, in a surprise New Year’s broadcast on state media.

“An important issue in putting an end to the division of the country and achieving its reunification is to remove confrontation between the north and the south,” Kim said in an address that appeared to be pre-recorded. “Past records of inter-Korean relations show that confrontation between fellow countrymen leads to nothing but war,” he said, speaking from an undisclosed location.

The New Year’s address was the first in 19 years by a North Korean leader, and appeared to take the place of the policy-setting New Year’s editorial published annually in the past in leading state newspapers. Additionally, his father, Kim Jong-il, rarely spoke in public.

Conspicuously absent from Kim’s speech though was any mention of North Korea’s nuclear arms program.

Kim’s statement “apparently contains a message that he has an intention to dispel the current face-off (between the two Koreas), which could eventually be linked with the North’s call for aid” from the South, said Kim Tae-woo, a North Korea expert at the state-funded Korea Institute for National Unification. “But such a move does not necessarily mean any substantive change in the North Korean regime’s policy towards the South.”

North Korea has offered olive branches before and Kim’s speech does not necessarily signify a change in tack from a country which vilifies the United States and U.S. ally South Korea at every chance.