North Korea perestroika watch

The Daily NK reports that North Korean security forces in the bleak border province of North Hamgyeong are “shaking down” smugglers to make them rat out the identities of those who’ve escaped to South Korea. They’re identifying the smugglers by intercepting the cell phone signals of money-smugglers, who in turn are forced to rat out goods and people smugglers, who rat out the refugees, whose families are then vulnerable to shake-downs and collective punishment.

For many of the stay-behinds, what their relatives in Seoul send is a large share of what keeps them alive. You don’t have to wonder how this crackdown is affecting the food crisis for those families, although I doubt the World Food Program will never tell us much about that.

It’s all in a day’s work in North Korea’s steady progress toward reforming and opening itself to the world–progress that some of the brightest minds in America and South Korea have been predicting for several decades now. And that many bright people couldn’t possibly be wrong.

In other perestroika news, to most North Korea-watchers, it has been old news for a long time that South Korean DVDs have become ubiquitous in the North, despite the occasional public execution for watching them. This, too, is being undone by the His Porcine Majesty:

“Recently, aside from the 109 Group that is in charge of cracking down on CDs containing dramas from the South, officials from the SSD, People’s Safety Ministry, and People’s Committee are also taking part in surveillance,” a Pyongyang-based source reported on Friday. “With this, people are now trying to stay away from South Korean dramas.”

“Especially now, even bribes that could have helped bypass punishment from the SSD are no longer an effective option,” the source explained. “And with word that those involved will face penalization with no mercy, people are now too scared to watch them.” [Daily NK]

The report relays the accounts of local residents that “a woman in her 50s from the Hyongjaesan District in Pyongyang,” and “[t]he merchant who lent her the CD” have both been sent to prison camps—you know, one of those camps that North Korea says don’t exist. The risk is said to be so great that traders are getting out of the DVD business entirely.

The crackdown on so-called Hallyu [Korean Wave] content in North Korea is a more marked trend since the leadership of Kim Jong Eun. On January 14th, 2012, he ordered a crackdown on “impure” recorded content and publications, which led to the creation of an organization dubbed, “Unit 114.” This became the first regular group instituted during the current leadership with the aim of preventing capitalist culture from spreading.

Say, did you hear he went to school in Switzerland and likes to ski? Also, I understand his wife has a lovely handbag collection.