Must read: Jieun Baek on how North Koreans beat the border blockade

Admittedly, Baek’s explanation of the North Korea’s guerrilla banking system isn’t the first I’ve read, it’s only the best:

The next time Kevin talks to his mother, she asks him for $1,000. She gives Kevin a phone number. When he hangs up after about a minute, Kevin then calls that number and tells the stranger on the line that he got a call from someone (he uses a pseudonym to protect his mother’s identity). Every time, the phone number is different.

The stranger on the other line is usually a girl, a Joseonjok girl. The woman gives Kevin a South Korean bank account number, to which Joseph wires $1,000. He then sends the woman a text message using Kakao Talk (a Korean smartphone application that’s similar to Whatsapp), texting that he sent the $1,000. After receiving the message, the Joseonjok lady sends a message to another Joseonjok living in North Korea. This person will then notify Kevin’s family via their legal domestic cell phones that the money has arrived so that Kevin’s mother can go to that individual’s location, or the underground financial house, to pick up her $700 in Chinese RMB. The two middlemen take 30 percent of the requested money and split the commission. The whole transaction, part of the small underground financing system inside the country, can take place in as little as 20 minutes. [Jieun Baek, Politico]

It sounds very much like the hawala systems that initially caused the Treasury Department so much trouble after 9/11, until Congress tightened requirements that they be licensed and regulated. With a few upgrades, this could be the guerrilla financial system I’d advocated for here.

Baek also writes that refugees in the South can send medicine to their sick relatives in the North via smugglers. That has helped to ease the suffering caused by the collapse of North Korea’s state-run health care system, but there are risks that come with this, too. As Rimjin-gang recently informed us, some North Koreans who take smuggled medicines — often, medicines stolen from U.N. aid supplies — without a doctor’s advice are getting sick. If some way could be found to open the lines of communication wider, doctors in South Korea could volunteer to treat North Korean patients remotely, practicing what’s now called telemedicine.

Jieun Baek is writing some of the most thought-provoking work on how to “engage” with the North Korean people I’ve yet read. I’ve added her to my blogroll, and must keep a closer eye on what she writes.