You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, Boy, Back in the DPRK
An estimated 200 North Korean nationals are in Libya and previously worked as doctors, nurses and construction workers, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency. They had been dispatched to the country in order to earn the hard currency that Pyongyang requires to fund its missile and nuclear weapons programmes.
Yonhap reported that the North Korean nationals have been left in limbo, joining their compatriots who are stuck in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries with orders not to return home.
North Korean media has so far failed to report that Gaddafi is dead and the government has made no moves to officially recognise Libya’s National Transitional Council as the legitimate governing authority of the country.
The decision to ban its own nationals from returning indicates just how concerned the North Korean regime is of the news leaking out to its subjugated people.
While being banned from North Korea certainly has its upsides, recall that many of these individuals will have a lot of trouble finding work, shelter, etc. where they’ve been stranded. Also, they’ve been allowed to work outside of North Korea because they’re not considered defection risks, which in practical terms probably means that they have families to support.
This move seems very old school, and not in a good way. I suspect that the North Korean state is being far too optimistic about its ability to control information; North Koreans in non-Arab countries will probably also have heard of the Arab Spring, and I find it extremely unlikely that the North Korean populace is as in-the-dark about developments as the authorities seem to hope. Doesn’t mean that there’ll be a popular anti-government movement in the DPRK anytime soon, of course.
You can try out our plus size trench coat, camel leather jacket, and leather jackets for juniors. There is a great saving on leather motorcycle gloves and womens leather motorcycle jackets at our online shopping store.
I’ve long thought that this is maybe the strangest site on the web.
That’s—yeah. Strange.
Dear Leader believes websites hit their aesthetic peak in 1996.
I’ve followed that site off and on since the early 90s. It had a less awful font then, but nothing else has really changed.
I wonder why it’s got a Japan domain. Is North Korea not allowed a country domain thingy?
They do, it’s .kr they only have like 3 sites up or something like that.
It’s doubly strange in that KCNA and other English-language (or indeed non-Korean) websites carry almost completely different content from their internal media. Internal and external North Korean propaganda are very, very different. Particularly in ideological tone.
I think the Koreans will be all right because they appear to have in-demand technical skills(though perhaps not in Libya). The people that have been abused and in danger are all the sub-Saharan Africans that were employed in all sorts of manual labor in and around the oil fields.
Black Africans have had the label ‘mercenary’ applied to them even in the seaside slums where many of them holed up during the war.
I remember reading a story about a defector stumbling across a bowl of dog food on her way into China and thinking, “Oh my god! In China dogs are better fed than doctors!”. I think the information control in North Korea is better than you think. It’s a small country with an easier to manage border and much more committed to the totalitarian project than various other examples.
That’s in the outstanding book by Barbara Demick: Nothing to Envy – Ordinary Lives in North Korea. I just got through listening to the audio book and I can’t recommend it enough.
Yeah, it is a great book. There is no possible way to understand North Korea that I had found until I read the defector stories.
I tend to agree. I remember after the fall of the iron curtain, that many Albanians were surprised to find that they were not the most prosperous nation in the world. Many Albanians had first hand knowledge that it was certainly not the case that they were a prosperous nation, but the ridiculous fiction was still widely believed.
That’s the thing about making generalist claims – if they don’t or can’t connect to your experience, there’s no way to disprove them. You absorb them by rote.
Actually, this sounds like a lot of Americans I’ve talked to. Why would they ever want to go abroad when they live in the best damn country in the world? Sure, college and health care are expensive, but that just means everywhere else is worse.
Considering that one of the people who thinks America is the best place to live is Noam Chomski, I think that the situations are not really that similar.
Believe it or not, there are a lot of good things about living in America. While some reflexively patriotic jingoes erroneously think America is the best at everything, America is a very good place to live in many different ways.
Albania in the early 90s was a convenient place to live if you only spoke Albanian. That was about the only thing it had going for it.
A closer example can readily be found in how many Real Americans ™ believe the rest of the world lives at subsistence agriculture levels of development protected from starvation only by American foreign aid. Blind patriotism can make stupid people believe very stupid things even in the absence of official information controls.
My favorite – recently exemplified by the utterances of one Paul Ryan – is how Real Americans think that the US is a land of unrivaled opportunity and income mobility, while in those hidebound, class-ridden European societies your fate is determined before you’re born. The statistics say rather the opposite.
Well, IIRC, foreign aid is about 40% of our budget. If all those people need so much of our food, how can you say they are not almost starving?
What? Foreign Aid is less than 1% of our budget and is mostly military aid? Come now, you can’t believe every little thing you hear…
Yeah, you don’t RC. Foreign aide is not even 1 percent of our budget.
Thank god you were there to set us all straight, someguy, or I could have persisted in this deluded impression I received from reading agorabum’s first paragraph, not reading his second paragraph, and having no ear for sarcasm whatsoever.
How can you possibly be thanking this guy? Didn’t you bother reading to agorabum’s second paragraph? Have you no ear for sarcasm at all?
Someone is going to tell these people that they can walk into the S. Korean consulate anywhere in Africa and be flown to ROK and they will get $30,000 to resettle.
1) See the part of the post about “they’ve probably got families”. The DPRK punishes families for domestic infractions, let alone international ones.
2) I think the $30,000 figure may be out of date; after many South Koreans complained, there were at least noises about reducing this sum.
Yeah, that does put a wrinkle in the ointment. Information out of the DPRK is incredibly hard to verify, but the last I had read the government had ceased going after the families in direct ways (disappearing them), and had downgraded it into downgrading the family into a lower status (and this status never goes up, only down, your family for eternity will wind up mining coal or something). Either way, it’s a hell of a choice to make.