Breaking Kim Jong Il’s Blockade

A fascinating new New York Times story tells us how clandestine journalism inside North Korea is doing more than bravely telling us stories that went untold before. Services like the Daily NK and Open Radio are coming into their own and improving the quality of their reporting in the face of challenges that traditional journalists wouldn’t (and shouldn’t!) even attempt to overcome:

The reports are sketchy at best, covering small pockets of North Korea society. Many prove wrong, contradict each other or remain unconfirmed. But they have also produced important scoops, like the currency devaluation and a recent outbreak of swine flu in North Korea. The mainstream media in South Korea now regularly quote these cottage-industry news services.

“Technology made this possible,” said Sohn Kwang-joo, the chief editor of Daily NK. “We infiltrate the wall of North Korea with cellphones. [….]

Mr. Sohn, a former reporter with the mainstream daily newspaper Dong-A in Seoul, has South Korean “correspondents” near the China-North Korea border.

These volunteers, many of them pro-democracy advocates during their student years, secretly meet North Koreans traveling across the border and recruit underground stringers. The volunteers use business visas, or sometimes pretend to be students or tourists.

“It’s dangerous work, and it takes one or two years to recruit one,” Mr. Sohn said. [N.Y. Times, Choe Sang-Hun]

The clandestine services also claim to be recruiting more North Korean officials and intellectuals as sources, people who are hedging their bets against political risks:

“These officials provide news because they feel uncertain about the future of their regime and want to have a link with the outside world, or because of their friendship with the defectors working for us, or because of money,” said Mr. Ha, who also goes by his English name, Young Howard.

All these news outlets pay their informants. Mr. Ha pays a bonus for significant scoops. Daily NK and Open Radio each have 15 staff members, some of them defectors, and receive U.S. congressional funding through the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as support from other public and private sources.

Recently, they have been receiving tips from North Koreans about corrupt officials.

As it happens, I have the least faith in reports from the Daily NK and Open News when it comes to reports from inside the North Korean government itself. Those reports have particular potential to be disinformation. Still, I find it quite believable — and yet still remarkable — that some North Korean officials are willing to accept money from South Koreans to provide insider information. It suggests that some officials within the regime could be coopted in other ways, too.

A few years ago, it would have been unthinkable that North Koreans would play such a role in telling their story under such oppressive and dangerous circumstances. The implications go well beyond reporting the news. If it is now possible to establish durable links between clandestine journalists inside North Korea and newspapers on the outside, the potential exists for underground political movements to take root, too.

Of course, you say, moving a radio signal across the border is one thing; moving goods in quantity is another:

It has been reported that from early December to January 15 of this year, food has been increasingly smuggled in on large scales throughout North Korea, from the northernmost part of Ohnsung along the Tumen and the Yalu River all the way to the city of Shinuiju in the Northern Pyong province. In fact it is being reported that in a province near the banks of the Yalu River 100~120 tons of food were smuggled in in one night.

According to news from a source inside North Korea on January 15, food began to be smuggled in last December because they needed to exceed the amount of food for their importing licenses. Also when the New Year started many food importation licenses expired and there were no legal ways to import food; many turned to illegally smuggling food in instead. In North Korea the food importation license is issued after the lunar New Year, so it is difficult to import food before then.

It is reported that in these provinces that trucks are furiously loaded with food across the frozen river in the late hours of night. On some nights over 100 tons of rice have been smuggled in. In order to operate, these companies and wholesale agents are mobilizing transportation and the means to whisk them away quickly for their profit. In fact the current rate of smuggling is on a large enough scale to create the term “public smuggling.

Even the National Security Agency and the Military National Headquarters, along with other North Korean regulators are said to be overlooking this situation. In response the Chinese merchants have taken this as a golden opportunity and aggressively selling rice into North Korea. [Open News]

What gives an opposition movement the capacity to supplant the power of the state is its capacity to become a vehicle for the aspirations of the people — to credibly promise hope. Hope is at the pinnacle of so many human needs that this regime hasn’t been able to provide for nearly two decades, along with food, medicine, information, and justice.

So, given what you’ve just read here, which of those things wouldn’t a clandestine opposition movement be able to provide a few years from now? Cross-border smuggling doesn’t even begin to tap into the immense logistical potential of North Korea’s two long, indented coastlines.

Each of those coastlines is lined with dozens of small fishing villages.

Each village has a beach or harbor with a few small boats, or a few dozen.

Each of those boats is a potential vehicle for smuggling needed goods into a clandestine distribution network.

Consider the number of villages and boats in one short section of one of North Korea’s coast lines, and you get an idea of the impossibility of closing off those coastlines. The North Koreans can no more do it than the U.S. Border Patrol can stop the flow of marijuana from Mexico, no more than the Coast Guard can stop the flow of cocaine from Colombia.

I posit that given the state of discontent and corruption within North Korea today, a North Korean underground could smuggle, bribe, and subvert its way into a place of influence in towns and villages all over North Korea without firing a shot. Its infrastructure would consist of caches of food and medicine, kids willing to put up posters and deliver pamphlets, hidden cell phone repeaters, doctors willing to moonlight to treat resistance supporters, and mechanics willing to repair and drive resistance vehicles. With that infrastructure, the resistance would acquire the ability to coordinate action across large areas of North Korea. It could save many lives by delivering food and and medical care to people the regime is neglecting and starving. Regrettably, I do not believe that this regime can be toppled non-violently, but I do believe that coordinated action by a nationwide opposition movement is the least violent way to end the killing that is going on in North Korea now, and it would probably be less violent than the status quo.