10 January 2010: Value of North Korean Won Continues to Plummet

MORE REPORTS OF DRASTIC FOOD PRICE INFLATION in the North: Prices probably also vary dramatically between regions. The series of diktats I’ve called The Great Confiscation has the potential to become the grimmest and most unnecessary humanitarian tragedy since the Arduous March, but unlike the 1990’s, North Koreans know more about life on Earth, and there are no more obedient subjects left outside Pyongyang who’d just die passively. The question isn’t whether North Koreans will resist; it’s is whether the resistance will be organized and armed, and therefore successful (which I doubt). Frankly, North Korea and the world would be better off for this crisis to end in a violent insurgency than another famine. At least the disorder that an insurgency would bring would break down North Korea’s border controls and allow some food to get smuggled in. The regime might even have to compete for “hearts and minds.”

YOU DON’T SAY: China wants to keep Korea divided, says Peter Beck. It’s more amazing to me that people would deny this.

U.S. HUMAN RIGHTS POLICY toward North Korea, as the Hanky imagines it: I’ve noted quite a few Hanky stories that run right from the starting gun on nothing more than unsourced speculation (“observers suggest,” “observers point out …”). Because this report is a classic example of why the Hanky is so unreliable, it doesn’t concern me unduly, but I am very concerned that the Hanky might happen to be right by sheer coincidence. One worrying sign of this: Robert King isn’t invited to the six-party talks.

SHIN HAE CHUL IS AN ASS and a singer, but the people who want to prosecute him aren’t singers:

“I, as one of the Korean people, congratulate the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea on its legal launch of a rocket,” the singer wrote on his webpage last April. Conservative civic groups charged Shin with openly praising the North Korean regime and thus breaching the National Security Law. “Shin, being an influential public figure, should be held responsible for confusing people by posting his arbitrary political opinions on cyber space,” said a civic group official.

DESPERATELY SEEKING RELEVANCE: That would be the Unification Ministry, and I see nothing good coming from this.

SOME INTERVIEWS WITH PRISON CAMP WITNESSES, from Radio Netherlands.

ROBERT NEFF AT THE MARMOT’S HOLE has been doing some great North Korea posts lately — on the banning of Air Koryo from Europe, death sentences handed out in Burma after the journalist Bertil Lintner published pics of those North Korean-built tunnels, and North Korea airbrushing Kim Jong Eun’s age (no doubt, just the first aspect of his biography to be retouched).