The Daily NK reports that North Korean security forces in the bleak border province of North Hamgyeong are “shaking down” smugglers to make them rat out the identities of those who’ve escaped to South Korea. They’re identifying the smugglers by intercepting the cell phone signals of money-smugglers, who in turn are forced to rat out goods and people smugglers, who rat out the refugees, whose families are then vulnerable to shake-downs and collective punishment.
For many of the stay-behinds, what their relatives in Seoul send is a large share of what keeps them alive. You don’t have to wonder how this crackdown is affecting the food crisis for those families, although I doubt the World Food Program will never tell us much about that.
It’s all in a day’s work in North Korea’s steady progress toward reforming and opening itself to the world–progress that some of the brightest minds in America and South Korea have been predicting for several decades now. And that many bright people couldn’t possibly be wrong.
In other perestroika news, to most North Korea-watchers, it has been old news for a long time that South Korean DVDs have become ubiquitous in the North, despite the occasional public execution for watching them.