The End of Chongryon?

I’d previously mentioned that  Chongryon, North Korea’s fifth column organization in Japan,  was forced to “sell” its de facto embassy in Tokyo.  As it turns out, the sale was  a  fraudulent scheme assisted by Japanese sympathizers, without consideration, to evade seizure by the authorities.  Japanese authorities have since voided the transaction, and, according to Yonhap, approved the seizure of the building.

We also know more about why Chongryon is dying.  I was aware that some adverse tax judgments by the Japanese authorities contributed to this, but I did not know that money laundering and looting by the North Korean regime had also played a role:

Sixteen Chongryon-affiliated credit unions went broke since the 1990s. The Japanese government put in a total of over 1 trillion yen in public funds to protect the depositors. The biggest cause of bankruptcies was illegal loans under fictitious names, a considerable portion of which is believed to have gone to the North Korean regime. Non-performing loans from the credit unions totaled 62.8 billion yen. The RCC won all 18 lawsuits involving the non-performing loans, and the court did not cut a penny from the sum RCC requested. [Chosun Ilbo]

In the end, what killed Chongyon was the revelation of North Korea’s kidnapping of Japanese citizens, and of Chongryon’s likely role in them.  Those revelations cost Chongryon most of its membership and the income they contributed to it. 

Even Mindan, the rival  pro-South Korean in Japan, has lost interest in any rapproachement with Chongryon and is treating it like the pariah it deserves to be.  The latest developments have all the signs of North Korea concluding that Chongryon had lost its profit-making potential and deciding to recover the scrap value of its assets.  That represents the loss of a significant income stream for Kim Jong Il.

Anju Links:  

*   The Jubilee Campaign and the Korean Church Coalition will hold demonstrations in Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo  to  protest China’s  inhumane treatment of  North Korean refugees.  The Washington event will take place on July 17th at noon, on the West Lawn of the Capitol.

*   South Korea has agreed to renegotiate  a proposed free trade agreement.

*   There has been a deadly pipeline explosion in North Korea:

“On June 9, a fire broke out at a field in Sonchon County in North Pyongan Province and some 110 North Koreans were killed,” Good Friends, a Seoul-based Buddhist civic organization, said in an e-mail newsletter.

The alleged disaster came when a lot of people came out to collect gasoline from the fuel pipe, which burst and spilled fuel. “People collected gasoline in their vessels, pandemonium erupted, and a fire broke out,” the newsletter said.  [Yonhap]

Although Good Friends has good sources in the North, the UniFiction Ministry questions the report.  I question the UniFiction Ministry’s outlook on the North in general, but one sign of whether the reports are true would be the presentation of a suspicious re-insurance claim by the North Korean government.

*   Objectivity may be too much to ask for when it comes to how South Korean schools portray North Korea.  Throughout decades of unleavened rightist propaganda under Park Chung Hee’s rule, North Korea’s standard of living may have been equal to or greater than that in the South.  That had changed drastically by the 1990’s, when the portrayal of the North switched to unleavened leftist propaganda, mostly directed by the anti-American, pro-North Korean Teachers’ and Educational Workers’ Union (see also 1, 2, 3, 4).  Now, the human rights group  NKNet, with a large number of defectors in its membership, is presenting  its own  counter-propaganda:  “Knowing North Korea Properly,” featuring scenes of the hardscrabble lives and deaths of ordinary citizens outside Pyongyang.  This is probably the best we can hope for.  Let the kids see all of the information, keep their minds open, and make them up for themselves.

*   If you visit one of those North Korean restaurants in China or Southeast Asia, know what you’re supporting.