Hungry N. Korean Bureaucrats Become Shakedown Artists

“After food distribution being halted, many low-ranking officials stopped showing up for work. Instead, they started picking on people. They carry out frivolous inspections anytime they want to extort people,” said a source from North Hamkyung Province in a phone conversation with Daily NK on May 15.

“Nowadays, you see all sorts of inspections going on. Those with a shred of authority all come to carry out inspections. They try to find fault with people and fine them in order to extort things like cigarettes and alcohol as bribes,” the source said. [Daily NK]

If you doubt the potential for this as a business model, you’ve obviously never heard of John Gotti. There is one positive side to this story:

The source said, “It is disturbing that food prices are rising. However, it is great that we do not have to attend as many public meetings as we did because officials do not do their jobs [i.e. organizing meetings] after their food rations halted. The source said that some people jeer at their misfortunes, saying, “It is better to go hungry all together.

In fact, a great number of minor officials who do not receive food rations frequently leave their offices after showing up for work in the morning, causing serious problems in the country’s administrative system.

This report may be anecdotal, but such anecdotes would not have been possible even a few years ago. The regime is now losing control over its own lower echelons, often the people who directly administer services to — or control over — the population. Add this to reports that farmers are too weak to plant crops, and that factory workers are too weak to work, and it sounds like North Korean society is making another great leap backward toward dysfunction. Yet stubbornly, the regime vainly tries to reestablish control through crackdowns on private trade and exhortations to return to Juche agriculture. Exhort away. The people don’t believe a word of it, and some of them don’t even pretend to anymore.

The source told our reports that “during the conference, a speaker explained the international and domestic state of affairs, saying that “˜the U.S. and the puppet regime (the Lee administration) have overridden the peaceful agreements between the North and South (referring to the June 15th Joint Declaration and the October 4th Agreement) in order to create a serious food crisis in our Republic (North Korea)’.

The source described an awkward atmosphere at the conference: When a chairperson of the People’s Unit of Hyehwa-dong in Hyesan asked outright, “We can understand that fact that Americans and Lee’s puppet factions are not aiding us with rice, but, why won’t China help us, as our closest ally?” The speaker’s face turned pale at the question and a sudden silence and tension filled the hall.

“At that moment, the lady next to the chairperson started chuckling, putting her head down, people began to chuckle here and there, and eventually, the entire hall was engulfed in laughter,” the source told DailyNK.

The speaker reportedly responded through his own laughter, “‘You know the lecture material always reads like this. You can well understand the situation and know what I am saying, right?'” The source said that “his comment sent people rolling in the aisles,” and pointed out, “The situation showed how absurd the propaganda released by the authorities is. [Daily NK]

I wonder how the company-grade officers are faring these days.