Coal, Clams and Crabs

North Korea has been left behind in a world of global competition and rising living standards. With the largest body of armed forces on earth and a nuclear program that you might expect from a much larger nation, this land of under 25 million has a GDP that is considerably less ($40 billion estimated) than the net worth of some of the world’s wealthiest individuals and certainly a whole lot less than lots of multinational corporations. The North relies very heavily on the fact that its powerful ally to the north, the People’s Republic of China, will tolerate its roguish, embarrassing and brutal brinksmanship in order to avoid sharing a common border with a nation clearly in the American orbit: South Korea.

The limited resources in the north are used to keep the power elite in luxurious decadence and the army strong to keep those elites solidly in power. No one enjoys the good life more than the little leader, the brutal Kim Jong-un, a man who has six “prison” slave labor camps of about two hundred thousand tortured souls and their families generating “stuff” for the elite, providing easy sadomasochistic outlets for cruel soldiers with evil on their minds. The above satellite photo pretty much says it all, a visual contrast between north and south that staggers the mind.

Agricultural resources, needed to feed a severely undernourished populace, are often diverted to harvest narco-crops that the government uses to generate hard currencies by selling drugs to dealers operating in their “enemy” countries. To keep the little leader in Western luxuries, the North developed an all-cash (yup, armored trucks filled with U.S. currency cross over all the time!) assembly plants within the Kaesŏng Industrial Region, six miles north of the Demilitarized Zone, under a cooperation agreement with South Korea and a few of the latter’s biggest industrial giants. A few experiments with privatization have been heavily limited. The KIR facility has been closed on occasion when tensions between North and South have escalated.

Dennis Rodman notwithstanding, the recent execution of Kim Jong-un’s trusted Uncle seems to have less to do with his purported corrupt lifestyle or even his suggestion that the North would do well with a regime change than it does with who gets the cash from a battle over a few more natural resources in this sparse and Spartan nation. “North Korean military forces were deployed to retake control of one of the sources of those exports, the rich crab and clam fishing grounds that Jang Song-thaek, the uncle of the country’s untested, 30-year-old leader, had seized from the military. In the battle for control of the fishing grounds, the emaciated, poorly trained North Korean forces ‘were beaten — very badly — by Uncle Jang’s loyalists,’ according to one official.

“The rout of his forces appears to have been the final straw for Mr. Kim, who saw his 67-year-old uncle as a threat to his authority over the military and, just as important, to his own family’s dwindling sources of revenue. Eventually, at Mr. Kim’s order, the North Korean military came back with a larger force and prevailed. Soon, Mr. Jang’s two top lieutenants were executed.” New York Times, December 23^rd.

It’s the economy stupid! As Jang vied with the military over resources, the underbelly of theretofore hidden schisms in the North bubbled to the surface. “The open warfare between the two factions has revealed a huge fracture inside the country’s elite over who pockets the foreign currency — mostly Chinese renminbi — the country earns from the few nonnuclear exports its trading partners desire…

“During a closed-door meeting on [December 23^rd] of the South Korean National Assembly’s intelligence committee, Nam Jae-joon, the director of the National Intelligence Service, disputed the North’s assertion that Mr. Jang had tried to usurp his nephew’s power. Rather, he said, Mr. Jang and his associates had provoked the enmity of rivals within the North’s elite by dominating lucrative business deals, starting with the coal badly needed by China, the North’s main trading partner.

“‘There had been friction building up among the agencies of power in North Korea over privileges and over the abuse of power by Jang Song-thaek and his associates,’ Mr. Nam was quoted as saying… [Just north of the western sea border between the Koreas], the North harvests one of its major exports: crabs and clams, delicacies that are also highly valued by the Chinese. For years the profits from those fishing grounds, along with the output from munitions factories and trading companies, went directly to the North Korean military, helping it feed its troops, and enabling its top officers to send cash gifts to the Kim family…

“But when Mr. Kim succeeded his father two years ago, he took away some of the military’s fishing and trading rights and handed them to his cabinet, which he designated as the main agency to revive the economy. Mr. Jang was believed to have been a leading proponent of curtailing the military’s economic power.

“Mr. Jang appears to have consolidated many of those trading rights under his own control — meaning that profits from the coal, crabs and clams went into his accounts, or those of state institutions under his control, including the administrative department of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, which he headed.

“But this fall, the long-brewing tensions that arrangement created broke into the open. Radio Free Asia, in a report last week that cited anonymous North Korean sources, reported that Mr. Kim saw North Korean soldiers malnourished during his recent visits to islands near the disputed western sea border. They say he ordered Mr. Jang to hand over the operation of nearby fishing grounds back to the military.” NY Times. Was Mr. Kim being nice or making sure that the guys with the guns knew that they should protect the little leader against anything and anyone?

No matter how you look at this corrupt and selfish regime, it is a bleak and desperate society with not a scintilla of humanity in its value system. What’s worse, with communications and information squarely within the control of the government, the people sincerely believe that their suffering is wholly a product of a hostile West and that they are protected by the benevolent largesse of a battling pro-people Kim Jong-un. They truly hate us and blame the United States and its “cronies” for their deprived quality of life. If the North collapsed tomorrow, the people in the north would take decades to convert to a modern society, and there would be more than a few martyrs along the way.

I’m Peter Dekom, and despite the struggles in Syria and in Africa, North Korea is a constant reminder of how inhumanity simply endures amid the spotlight of the rest of the world.