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We begin with corruption, one of our favorite topics. Kim Jong-un, the Magnanimous Comrade, in Greg Scarlatoiu’s parlance, announced a special amnesty for prisoners this year which Steph Haggard and Jaesung Ryu likened to a shell game. Now the Daily NK is reporting that the possibility of amnesty is being used to shake down prisoners. [...]
In his blog, North Korea Tech, Martyn Williams recently reported some interesting news on Koryolink, the joint venture between the Egyptian telecommunications chaebol Orascom (75%) and the government (25%) and North Korea’s only commercial 3G cell phone network. The company has recently signed up its 1 millionth subscriber. Yonhap also provided some interesting news related [...]
My colleague Marc Noland is Mr. Digital North Korea, having written on the background on the Orascom deal. But he is traveling and there are some updates that are too interesting to pass up. Alexandre Mansourov has written a report for Nautilus with the breathy title “North Korea on the Cusp of Digital Transformation.” But [...]
KCNA has announced that elections for local People’s Committees will be held 24 July. According to the North Korean constitution such elections are to be held every four years, and insofar as the last elections were in June 2007, these would be more or less according to schedule. This could be interpreted as a sign [...]
The North Korean food situation appears to be deteriorating. Daily NK is reporting on the basis of “North Korean sources” that, as predicted, the spring potato harvest is down. Here in Washington rumor has it that the Administration is likely to decline to provide aid due to concerns over diversion. (Welcome to 1995: its déjà [...]
We’ve been writing a lot about the aid issue; David Straub, in particular, has made the straightforward utilitarian argument that in a world of limited resources, North Korea has no special privilege, and aid may be better allocated elsewhere. Now the US Congress has cut the budget for foreign food aid assistance, tightening those constraints [...]
Not all the news from North Korea is bad. This past weekend Kim Jong-il shared a cordial dinner with Naguib Sawiris, head of Orascom Telecom, the Egyptian firm which in a joint venture with the state-owned Korea Post and Telecommunications Corporation is bringing cellular telephone service to North Korea. Orascom Telecom claims more than 300,000 subscribers. [...]
