Chosun Ilbo: Protests in NK Over Food, Electricity
North Korea is to political disgruntlement what tar sands are to energy — enough to supply the whole world for decades, if only someone could figure out a way to harness it:
Small pockets of unrest are appearing in North Korea as the repressive regime staggers under international sanctions and the fallout from a botched currency reform, sources say. On Feb. 14, two days before leader Kim Jong-il’s birthday, scores of people in Jongju, Yongchon and Sonchon in North Pyongan Province caused a commotion, shouting, “Give us fire [electricity] and rice!”
A North Korean source said people fashioned makeshift megaphones out of newspapers and shouted, “We can’t live! Give us fire! Give us rice!” “At first, there were only one or two people, but as time went by more and more came out of their houses and joined in the shouting,” the source added. [Chosun Ilbo]
Do you suppose this could have been contained to “small pockets of unrest” if the North Korean people had Twitter, or cell phones? Not even the grand old North Korean tradition of ratting out your neighbors is sacred anymore:
The State Security Department investigated this incident but failed to identify the people who started the commotion when they met with a wall of silence. “When such an incident took place in the past, people used to report their neighbors to the security forces, but now they’re covering for each other,” the source said.
The commotion started because the North Korean regime had diverted sparse electricity from the Jongju and Yongchon area to Pyongyang to light up the night there to mark Kim’s birthday on Feb. 16.
See my masthead for further information on that.
Now, take every report like this with a few grains of salt. We don’t know who that “North Korean source” is, or how many of those “pockets of unrest” he’s seen for himself. Still, this report is consistent with other things we’ve heard from North Korea recently, as you’ll confirm by clicking the “resistance” category link above. And while North Korea seems to produce a record harvest of misery and deprivation every year around this time, the situation is more unstable this year, when the regime is also having difficulty feeding the people is actually wants to feed: soldiers, residents of Pyongyang, and the elite.
Interestingly, “a North Korean defector” quoted by the Chosun also notes that Yongchon, a/k/a Ryongchon, “has long been a headache to the regime due to the spirit of defiance of the people there.” Impossible! Ryongchon is the place where, according to the impeccable Korean Central News Agency, residents “struggled heroically in the last moments of their lives to save portraits” of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 explosion.
Question: one protest, three towns? The Korean article is clear that “a few tens” of people protested at the same time in three places. So either what we have is an outright lie, a terribly written article, or (the less likely of the three, though also much the more mouth-watering), people were communicating between towns and what you are looking at is the first cross-community, semi-organized protest in North Korean history.
LONG LIVE YONGCHON!
The Chosun Ilbo also reports “several hundred†protesters in Sineuiju:
However, the Unification Ministry denies reports of “mass demonstrations†(집단시위), telling reporters that there are “no confirmed cases.†While the MoU confirmed that “small-scale†protests had taken place since the currency “reform,†they have been unable to pick up signs of people expressing their grievances through mass demonstrations.
According to the same Chosun article I posted above:
The article claims that once authorities got word of the event, the miltiary was quickly dispatched and violently put the protest down, killing around 4 to 5 people.
Perhaps this guy is North Korea’s Mohamed Bouazizi? I wonder if there will be mourning-cycle protests…
Indeed I share your skepticism of this story and others. As a general rule of thumb, I am skeptical of all single-sourced articles originating from within North Korea. Given the events in the Middle East, part of me wonders if this is not just wishful thinking on the part of reform-minded North Koreans and collaborating journalists.
That said, I don’t doubt for a minute that—with the worsening food situation, the broken economy, the currency “reform,†and growing awareness of the prosperity of the outside world—North Korea is ripe for a popular uprising. North Korea is very much in the prodromal phase of revolution (that doesn’t mean it will happen though. It could be argued that such a state has existed in the North for the past two decades).
I also want to point that it’s very possible and plausible for there to be a multi-city uprising almost simultaneously—even with the absence of social media, communication devices, or even any prior organization. A case in point is what happened in Tunisia. When Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolated in Sidi Bouzid on the 17th of December, protests erupted not just in that town but in neighboring towns and villages as well. This was all spontaneous and occurred without Facebook or Twitter or cell phones or any kind of planning.
It was fortuitous that Bouazizi picked a market day to carry out his protest. Traders from outlying areas were in town to sell their goods and when residents of Sidi Bouzid took to the streets in anger, the traders going home for the day took the news back to their villages and spread the word generating more anger and protests. So, it is imaginable that something similar could have happened in these towns and villages.
“few tens of protesters in three cities” probably came from the English editor getting lazy with rewriting the output from Google Translate. “Few Tens” is what we say in Korean for the equivalent of “a few dozen.” We were using metric since before the metric system!
If a real person properly translated the article it would say something like:
There were small demonstrations in the towns of Cheongju, Yeongcheon, Seoncheon and a few other places in North Pyeongan Province. In each of the demonstrations, a few dozen people would shout “Give us electricity and rice!”. . ..
Imagine only 10 years ago in 2001, the FEW elite of Pyongyang begun question the regime. 10 years later and after an influx of North Koreans fleeing to South Korea, the entire World knows that South Korea needs to destroy North Korea, and reclaim Pyongyang and the entire Korean Peninsula. Even Russia is ready for Seoul to reclaim it’s birthriight of the entire Korean Peninsula.
Beijing will be smart, it will stop overvaluing the Yuan. China knows that Moscow has had a blood-bond with the U.S. for about 70 years now. The Cold war was just a red Herring after the Soviet Union-American alliance of WWII. Allianced Nations became enemies. One twin succeeded and allowed the defeated to live and prosper. If the other had won, the whole world would be in a perpetual state of 1984, not just North Korea.
Thank God the Lesser of two evils won.
Ditto81, Beijing undervalues the yuan.
The South Korean government has confirmed widespread NK unrest, and that soliders are invovled. The Hankguk Ilbo, quoting a high-ranking government official, notes:
The article misses the point when it suggests that the protests are about living conditions and not about the system; it’s always about the economy. People don’t give a &@%# about human rights and democracy. They care about putting food on the table. If the government is unable to respond to the people’s needs (and it isn’t), this will spread and it will challenge the system. It never becomes “about the system” until the very end. A Yonhap report from back in January on Libyan protestors storming a South Korean construction site also dismissed claims that the protests were “not anti-government†and thus nothing to worry about. Wrong.
Of course, this is assuming that all of this is true. And if true, then the most significant thing of all is that the fear barrier has been broken. We saw indications of this in that video from a few months back depicting a North Korean woman chastising a police officer.
Other reports suggest that phone services along the Sino-Korean border have been cut or restricted as news about events in the Middle East and Libya spread.
Agreed, Milton. Furthermore, if the editor really did use Google translate, it would not look as it does, would it. It would be an awful mess.
So, instead of having a wee jab at English editors and being wrong in the process, how about dealing with the problem, which is that it is hard to believe that three protests broke out simultaneously, and even harder to believe that anyone fashioned a megaphone out of a newspaper in a country where the, ahem, ‘newspaper of record’ is delivered in single copies to individual enterprises and government organs.
hello Milton and Chris,
My point about the use of “tens” is that the sentence is an almost direct word-for-word translation of the original Korean sentence. Of course I have no idea whether they were really generating stuff from Google Translate, but the translation of the sentence definitely looked like it probably could have used a few rounds of editing.
I actually think that the story is generally plausible, even the part about rolling up a newspaper to use as a megaphone. I think the newspapers in North Korea (the Rodong Sinmun – worker’s daily) is distributed via enterprises and government organs, but I do not think just a single copy is delivered to such places. It probably is more like they will deliver bundles of papers to those sites and workers can pick up and take with them individual copies. It is after all the main propaganda arm of the Party.
Also, there are stories of how people get into trouble for mishandling the images of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jung Il in the paper when they use newspaper scraps for household purposes. Anyone who has lived in a developing country will be familiar with the multiple uses newspaper scraps have for cleaning and stuffing into things. So I think newspapers are generally available to commoners in North Korea.
Perhaps we will hear more from Rimjin Gang when its next issue comes out!