Anju Links for 2 May 2007: North Korea Denies Abducting Any S. Koreans, May Day in Kaesong, and North Koreans’ Growing Meth Problem
* It has now been 18 days since North Korea violated all of the denuclearization commitments to which it agreed last February. I blame Bill Richardson, who obviously must have said something tactless and belligerent while being led around the deck of the U.S.S. Pueblo. It’s time for us to get serious about diplomacy and offer some carrots. How many of our soldiers’ lives is Catalina Island really worth? How many times must the canonballs fly, Bill?
* Has North Korea made the fundamental decision to rejoin the civilized world? Not so much, I guess:
“No POWs or abductees exist in North Korea,” Choe Song-Il, the North’s deputy Red Cross chief, said in an interview with Choson Sinbo, a newspaper for pro-Pyongyang ethnic Koreans in Japan.
“If South Korea broaches the issue again, we will have something to say about 83,000 North Korean POWs held in the South in the name of anti-communism at the time of signing a truce (after the 1950-53 Korean War).” [AFP, via The Nation]
North Korea claims there are no abductees, but they keep trying to escape, and those permitted brief meetings with their families sure do behave strangely. Yet South Korea doesn’t do anything to save them, so why should we? To a degree, it’s understandable that the State Department dropped all references to them in its annual terror report. The Lost Nomad has a comparison of last year’s language to this year’s and some good commentary.
* Happy May Day. If you’re interested in the best available guess about what a North Korean worker gets paid, the Daily NK offers it. That also goes for the workers at Kaesong:
According to wage specifications received last November for the wages of North Korean laborers in Kaesong Industrial Complex, each worker is entitled to 7,000won monthly. This includes wage and day-off allowances as well as “bonuses. On the black market, US$1 equals 3,000won, so in actual each worker receives no more than US$2 a month.
The $57 sent by South Korean enterprises for each individual worker somehow falls into the hands of North Korean authorities. For this reason, some argue that South Korean businesses should develop a system to stop the exploitation of North Korean workers by paying workers directly.
* Want to Score Some Crystal Meth in Pyongyang? The Yaggakdo Hotel is the place [Daily NK].
The source informed on the 30th, “Drug dealers directly approach the wealthy class who live around the borders of North Korea-China” and revealed, “People fall for the dealer’s trap and hence the number of addicted drug sellers and wealthy class is increasing.
A few North Korean tradesmen even testified that a large number of the rich living in the border regions of North Korea, have in fact dealt with drugs in one form or another. Apparantly, about 3 out of 10 rich persons in North Korea have had some experiences with drugs and most of the long-distance drivers in North Korea take drugs.
One North Korean tradesman “˜H’ revealed, “Drug dealers con North Koreans with money by saying that the “˜medicine’ clears the head and acts as an aphrodisiac by giving you strength. Then they let the buyers taste-test the drug for free. H said, “After a few times, the majority of these people become addicted and the dealer sets up a relationship to sell the drug for a long time.
How can the government contradict misinformation like that without implicitly conceding that the problem exists?
* See also: Ha Tae Kyung, a/k/a Young Howard, offers some thoughts on Korea’s geopolitical place in Northeast Asia and the world after regime collapse.
* “Nothing says Saturday night like a soju-induced coma on the subway.”