N. Koreans are bootlegging liquor in Muslim countries

Last week, NK News published a detailed report on a black market in alcohol run by North Korean diplomats in Pakistan. Almost simultaneously, The Daily NK also reported that two North Korean “chauffeurs,” dispatched by the regime to Qatar, and nominally working for private companies there, had been arrested for bootlegging.

Two North Korean men are being detained in Qatar under suspicions of the distribution of illegal liquor; Voice of America [VOA] reported on September 4th, citing the Gulf Times, Qatar’s English language newspaper.

The men were alleged to have been selling the liquor to North Korean laborers there, as well as to citizens in surrounding nations, and if found guilty of the crime, will be deported back to North Korea. The Gulf Times was unable to confirm when or where the men were first arrested. [Daily NK]

Selling moonshine to thirsty construction workers is a novel, and typically exploitative, way to supplement those “loyalty” taxes expatriate workers must pay to the regime.

The report also references previous North Korean bootlegging arrests in Qatar, and arrests or investigations in India, Bangladesh, and Kuwait. According to a separate Gulf Times report from July of this year, another North Korean, who was working as an interpreter and has access to a car, was also arrested by Qatari police for selling alcohol and illegal drugs. (See also.)

North Korea’s bootlegging operations are not new, and probably as old as North Korea using diplomatic pouches to smuggle contraband and cash. Curtis Melvin points to a 1976 article in Time magazine about North Korean liquor and cigarette smuggling in Sweden and Denmark.

The earliest such report I found from the Middle East is from 2008, when “three North Koreans who converted their apartment into an alcohol factory” were arrested by Kuwaiti police, who also “seized 186 bottles of alcohol, 34 brewing barrels and gallons of alcohol.” There’s even a photograph.

Two other articles from The Arab Times, both undated, may describe separate seizures of 80 bottles and 200 bottles of liquor in Kuwait. Alcohol-related arrests of North Koreans are frequent enough there that annoyed South Korean diplomats monitor the local newspapers and ask them to clarify any reports that “Koreans” have been arrested for bootlegging.

With the exception of the NK News report from Pakistan, the reports do not directly implicate North Korean diplomats, but it’s difficult to imagine that overseas North Korean workers, whose movements and remittances are always carefully monitored — indeed, who have no means to send money home to their families directly — would engage in such activities without tacit official approval, and without being expected to hand the proceeds over to their regime handlers. The Chosun Ilbo described the arrangement this way, in a 2009 interview with a source in Abu Dhabi, in the UAE:

One source in Abu Dhabi said, “North Korean workers make between $300 and $500 a month, but the North Korean government confiscates $150 and even $250 as loyalty payments, leading to a lot of conflict.” North Korean labor export companies skim off an excessive amount of money from salaries. The level of discontent recently prompted the North Korean government to dispatch security agents who trawl construction sites on weekends to provide ideological “cleansing” sessions to workers. [….]

“The North Korean companies that sent the workers abroad are aware of the bootlegging but are turning a blind eye as long as the laborers pay portions of the profits,” one local source said. [Chosun Ilbo]

The construction companies, in turn, are almost certainly under the direct control of the local North Korean embassies. This arrangement has the advantage of putting two layers between the embassies and the retailers. That gives the embassies plausible deniability, and avoids disruption to the other business operations the embassies are involved in.

The real test of the regime’s culpability, of course, is how the profits move. At the end of the day, I’d wager that nearly all of the profits end up deposited in regime-controlled accounts, co-mingled with the proceeds of legal businesses to disguise their illicit origins, and wired through multiple shell companies to other regime-controlled offshore accounts.

I confess to some ambivalence about this line of business. I can certainly think of worse things North Korean diplomats have smuggled, but you can’t pick and choose what you allow a criminal organization to sell. You have to uproot all of it or none of it. And on balance, I don’t suppose North Korea’s bootlegging is any more likely to liberalize the Middle East than a few ChocoPies are to liberalize North Korea.

Yet again, as with the recent and not-so-recent arrests of North Koreans for illegal gambling (second section), we see that North Korea has no moral objection to capitalism, as long as it’s state capitalism. It just objects to granting economic liberty to its subjects, and to freeing them from hunger and dependency.