25 April 2010: N. Korea Desperate to Plug News Leaks

The North Korean authorities are hunting for those clandestine correspondents who give us those independent reports about events in North Korea as if the regime’s very existence depends on it:

A radio broadcaster run by North Korean defectors here reported this week that security guards in Hoeryeong, North Hamgyeong Province, directed its residents to turn in photos of their family members who have been missing from 2005. If the families say that these photos have been lost, security guards pay an unannounced visit to their homes to find out whether they are lying to them or not. [….] The move indicates that the North is making efforts to root out potential defectors-turned-democracy fighters with fear tactics. [Korea Times]

The desperation means those correspondents are having an effect. Unfortunately, some of the correspondents and their families have already paid the ultimate price for smuggling the truth across the borders of their homeland, and it’s certain that more will pay it. But by pushing even more phones into North Korea, and by giving the networks that move goods and information even more money, it would be possible to overload the system’s capacity to find all of the networks and correspondents operating from within North Korea. My guess is, the regime knows that. Hence the desperation, and the brutality.

I fail to see the down side of this: North Korea conducts an “inspection” of Kaesong, as it did shortly before confiscating Kumgang, and then hints that it may “entirely reevaluate” the complex’s existence. The North Koreans really don’t have to make good on a threat like that to completely destroy Kaesong’s attractiveness to potential investors, but please don’t interpret this is as a complaint. If North Korea really is prepared to cut off one of its largest sources of external funding, I may have underestimated its subversive effect on the workers there. Or, the North Koreans may actually believe they’re doing the South Korean a big favor.

Meanwhile, the South Koreans aren’t taking North Korea’s confiscation of its assets at Kumgang with degree of deference we’d come to expect of them in the past:

“The KNTO will not accept the decision to seize its assets in the resort, which is a violation of investment rules and respect for property rights,” [the head of the Korea National Tourism Organization] said.

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Park Nam Ki: Dead or exiled? In any other country on earth, we’d be reasonably sure of the answer to this by now.