15 June 2010

Here’s more on that report of a ration cut in North Korea, which is sourced to Good Friends:

The chairman of the Good Friends organization, based in South Korea, Pomnyun Sunim, says this is taking place because the North Korean government can no longer keep its citizens from starving.

The Buddhist monk says the ruling communist party issued a directive May 26th that work units and individuals should fend for themselves. He says this can be understood as either a frank confession by the government of the severity of the situation there or that the government has abandoned efforts to solve the food crisis. [VOA]

At the same time, the Korea Development Institute is warning of extensive crop failures due to fertilizer shortages and an unusually cold spring.

Gordon Chang writes that Kim Jong Il’s efforts to pave the way for his son’s succession have actually fed discontent and created expectations the regime can’t meet:

In short, Kim Jong-il has created a hard-to-ignore marker for himself. That’s probably a mistake because there’s no conceivable way he can make good on that solemn promise. His major economic “˜reform’ initiative of last year, a misconceived demonetization launched on November 30, resulted in riots against the government and the firing squad execution of Pak Nam Gi, the official in charge of the botched plan. Kim was able to restore order, but the disruptions clearly demonstrated the lack of popular support for his regime–and the declining effectiveness of his governance. [The Diplomat]

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China’s support for isolated North Korea has created a “dead border” and driven much of its ethnic Korean population to emigrate:

Tumen’s streets were largely devoid of traffic, and a rock band from the provincial capital of Changchun played to only a scattering of onlookers steps from the Li Ning store.

Shopkeepers had a ready explanation: emigration to South Korea by the region’s ethnic Korean population. More than 92 percent, or 1.78 million, live in Jilin, Heilongjiang and Liaoning provinces, with the heaviest concentration in the prefecture encompassing Tumen.

South Korean statistics back up their claim. There were 363,087 ethnic Koreans from China living legally in South Korea last year, compared with 310,485 in 2007, according to the Ministry of Justice. [Businessweek]

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“Pyongyang Purge Echoes Stalin“

Pretty much as I’d expected, North Korea is exploiting the Cheonan Incident for domestic gain:

Amid the heightened tension between the two Koreas, the North’s reports are not focused on the prospect of conflict but instead seek to connect its government’s anger at Seoul with the need to improve the North’s impoverished economy.

That shows the North Korean regime has latched onto the sinking incident not just to preach about perceived external threats but as a new way to shift responsibility for the country’s troubled economy away from itself, said Brian Myers, an American professor in South Korea who has studied the North’s propaganda operations since the early 1990s.

“They’re using hatred of the outside world to inspire people to work harder,” he said. “The extent of it is quite striking.”

In a typical example of the reporting, Kim Myung Ho, manager of a collective farm, said on a state TV newscast last Friday that workers now “dash to work in the mindset of destroying the enemy’s schemes by doing the work of two or three men. As a result, the speed of rice planting is getting better everyday.” [Wall Street Journal, Evan Ramstad and Jaeyeon Woo]

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“No blood for blackberries!,” the fools will cry:

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys. [N.Y. Times]

One of the reasons why Iraq was able to make such strong gains toward stability in 2007-2009 was the rise in oil prices, which gave it the money to pay Sunni militias to provide security, to upgrade its infrastructure, and to dole out patronage to key constituencies. In Afghanistan, the potential benefit of drawing young men out to (and of) the tribal areas to work together in mines and mills could be of incalculable value in changing it from a tribal society to a partially industrial one. It could also help fund a better-paid, less corrupt bureaucracy and military. Yes, wealth also breeds corruption, but mineral wealth is still better than an economy based on narcotics. It will be difficult to manage this new wealth, but on balance, this is great news for Afghanistan.