Mick Hartley

In the wake of those unprecedented riots by unpaid North Korean workers in China, Ko Young-hwan, a North Korean diplomat who defected to South Korea, is interviewed at the Chosun Ilbo – “North Korean workers in China are angry, and things are no better back home”.

Are you saying North Korea isn’t what it used to be?

“Violence has been on the rise in North Korea lately. The most frequently assaulted are security and safety agents. It has become commonplace for attackers to wait for the agents to return home or leave, then assault them in alleys and flee. It’s not like the old days when citizens couldn’t make a peep.”

Can control over the residents be maintained like that?

“Day and night are completely different. These days, security agents stop anyone on the street, snatch their cell phones, and if a South Korean song plays, they drag them away. They also ask for IDs if they hear young men and women calling each other ‘oppa,’ [a South Korean word for older brother], or ‘Honey.’ If their surnames differ, they say, ‘He’s not your oppa. You’ve been watching puppet regime dramas, haven’t you?’ and take them away. The control is so tight that people become anxious about using expressions they’ve used without a second thought, worrying if they might sound like they’re speaking in the South Korean style. They can’t even say ‘Nice to meet you’ because it’s considered a South Korean phrase. Life is hard enough, but with such oppression, people vent their frustrations under the cover of night.”

North Korea, starting with the Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Act in 2020, which included clauses for extreme punishment, successively enacted laws such as the Youth Education Guarantee Act and the Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act, collectively known as the ‘anti-South Korea three acts,’ all during the administration of former President Moon Jae-in. Ko analyzed that Kim Jong-un’s actions, including the directive to demolish facilities at Mount Kumgang in October 2019, blowing up the inter-Korean liaison office in Kaesong in June 2020, and even going as far as to enact extreme laws, were due to the judgment that the side effects of South Korean cultural infiltration, such as ideological and systemic relaxation, far outweigh the benefits gained from inter-Korean exchanges.

What’s the economic situation in North Korea?

“Kim Jong-un recently lamented that ‘we can’t even provide necessities to the local people.’ Simply put, in the provinces these days, people have to dip food in salt since there’s no soy sauce or bean paste. In the past, they used to light lamps with petroleum or pine resin at night, but even that isn’t easy now. After 7 p.m., only a few people walk around, and people sleep right after the early evening. It’s like a zombie city, a ghost town. The only place that’s lit is the statues of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.”

It wouldn’t be a recent development that the situation has become difficult.

“When I was in the North, there was already a huge gap between Pyongyang and the provinces. Food distribution in the provinces was cut off during the North Korean famine, also known as the March of Suffering, and things got even harder in the mid-2010s as UN sanctions intensified. Still, people managed to get by with items found in the markets, but with the pandemic, the market hours have been shortened, and the items available for trade have been restricted.”

Is it any better in Pyongyang?

“Pyongyang has electricity only four hours a day, two hours each during rush hour. In high-rise apartments, 300 to 400 people line up to use the elevators at rush hour. Apartments in the Hwasong district, which Kim Jong-un boasts about, are 70 to 80 stories high. The residents are frustrated. They go out in search of firewood because houses are not heated. Many homeowners move to the outskirts because they can’t get wood.”

But N. Korea builds 10,000 apartments a year.

“The Pyongyang sewer system was built in 1958-1959 before the People’s Army of China withdrew. They’re building skyscrapers on top of it. When you flush the toilet, it clogs and backs up on the first floor. A North Korean defector from Pyongyang called it “an apartment without a butthole.” They’re just building apartments in a rush without maintaining sewer pipes or expanding sewage disposal facilities.”

Disposal of feces must be troublesome.

“Luckily, excrements have to be collected in the winter months. People fight over compost in cities and rural areas alike. Pyongyang is no exception. While the higher-ups pay the People’s leader to take care of it, the majority of the population composts their collected wastes by mixing them with briquette ashes. The collecting process is in full swing at this time of year.

Kim Jong-un has acknowledged the poor conditions in Pyongyang on several occasions. At a Politburo meeting Kim chaired in June 2020 amid the rampant spread of COVID-19, he openly addressed the urgent issue of sustaining the livelihood of Pyongyang’s residents. During his speech at the National Mothers’ Congress last December, he said, “We will first solve the problems of insufficient water and firewood, public transportation, elevators, and heating system for the capital’s citizens.” This means nothing has improved in three and a half years.”

Ko compared North Korea’s current aggressive stance to when it threatened “a sea of fire” upon Seoul in 2013. “In early 2013, North Korea threatened to turn Seoul into a ‘sea of fire’ daily, and Kim went to Jangjae Island and Mudo Island on the West Sea frontline and urged to ‘mow down the enemy lines,’ raising the risks of a possible war,” Ko said. “Jang Sung-taek’s power was great at the time, and Kim bluffed his way out because his power was vulnerable.”

He said North Korea is most likely ratcheting up hostile demonstrations against South Korea to cover up domestic turmoil. “A country that wants to go to war does not sell 5,000 containers of shells,” he added. “Kim’s biggest concern is passing on power to the fourth generation and continuing the ‘Kim Dynasty.’ How could he possibly go to war?”