Chosun Ilbo: Protests in NK Over Food, Electricity

North Korea is to political disgruntlement what tar sands are to energy — enough to supply the whole world for decades, if only someone could figure out a way to harness it:

Small pockets of unrest are appearing in North Korea as the repressive regime staggers under international sanctions and the fallout from a botched currency reform, sources say. On Feb. 14, two days before leader Kim Jong-il’s birthday, scores of people in Jongju, Yongchon and Sonchon in North Pyongan Province caused a commotion, shouting, “Give us fire [electricity] and rice!”

A North Korean source said people fashioned makeshift megaphones out of newspapers and shouted, “We can’t live! Give us fire! Give us rice!” “At first, there were only one or two people, but as time went by more and more came out of their houses and joined in the shouting,” the source added. [Chosun Ilbo]

Do you suppose this could have been contained to “small pockets of unrest” if the North Korean people had Twitter, or cell phones? Not even the grand old North Korean tradition of ratting out your neighbors is sacred anymore:

The State Security Department investigated this incident but failed to identify the people who started the commotion when they met with a wall of silence. “When such an incident took place in the past, people used to report their neighbors to the security forces, but now they’re covering for each other,” the source said.

The commotion started because the North Korean regime had diverted sparse electricity from the Jongju and Yongchon area to Pyongyang to light up the night there to mark Kim’s birthday on Feb. 16.

See my masthead for further information on that.

Now, take every report like this with a few grains of salt. We don’t know who that “North Korean source” is, or how many of those “pockets of unrest” he’s seen for himself. Still, this report is consistent with other things we’ve heard from North Korea recently, as you’ll confirm by clicking the “resistance” category link above. And while North Korea seems to produce a record harvest of misery and deprivation every year around this time, the situation is more unstable this year, when the regime is also having difficulty feeding the people is actually wants to feed: soldiers, residents of Pyongyang, and the elite.

Interestingly, “a North Korean defector” quoted by the Chosun also notes that Yongchon, a/k/a Ryongchon, “has long been a headache to the regime due to the spirit of defiance of the people there.” Impossible! Ryongchon is the place where, according to the impeccable Korean Central News Agency, residents “struggled heroically in the last moments of their lives to save portraits” of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 explosion.