Angry Women

More on the North Korean currency devaluation (for earlier posts see here and here). From the Chosun Ilbo:

North Korea's women are emerging as a formidable force in the face of controversial currency reforms, sources said Monday.

Most of the market traders in the North are women in their 40s and 50s trying to earn enough to feed their children. And now they are openly expressing their anger as the draconian reforms, which replace the currency at a rate of 100:1 and effectively confiscate any savings, make their lives even more difficult.

"The women are tough and defiant," a source said, "and now they are angry. Markets are turning into places of protest against North Korean leader Kim Jong-il." The women gather to accuse the authorities, defying threats of arrest.

Organizations reporting on life in North Korea say prices denominated in new won are already soaring. Activist organization Good Friends said rice sold for 16-17 new won per kg in the Pyongyang market until Dec. 2 jumped to 50 won on Dec. 3. Another sources said there are rumors of cutthroat inflation because market traders are hoarding food. Rumors have it that the price of an egg has risen from 300 old won to 7,000.

But the North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity, a group of defectors, said food rations are being distributed at state offices and the initial chaos is dying down in North Hamgyong Province, including Onsong, Hoeryong and Musan. The regime claims food rations will soon resume across the board, so there will be no need of money. But many North Koreans remember the millions who starved to death in the mid- and late 1990s and are unlikely to be fooled by such promises.

Meanwhile, a seminar hosted by the Korea Peace Institute heard that the nascent middle class and the rich will not be too badly affected because they appear to have hard currency stashed away, according to Dong Yong-seung, a senior fellow at the Samsung Economic Research Institute. But he added the living conditions of ordinary people will deteriorate rapidly.

From the Daily NK:

It has belatedly come to light that the North Korean authorities carried out sudden inspections at customs houses, state enterprises and foreign currency earning organizations ahead of the currency redenomination at the end of last month.

Inspections seem to be aimed at cutting off the link between the state-run trading apparatus and private wholesale merchants in advance of confiscating those merchants’ property via the redenomination....

The inspection groups entered the targets unannounced and impounded their documents. In the cases of foreign currency earning enterprises, they forced open storage areas and confiscated everything.

Sources reported that inspection groups were there less than three hours, but their losses were tremendous.

A source said, “They took all the products to the headquarters of the No. 9 Corps. I don’t know what the authorities did with them.”

He explained part of the reason for the raids, “Foreign currency earning organizations have made connections with rich persons, and these individuals have them under their thumbs. The authorities don’t like the fact that private individuals hold the whip hand even over state foreign currency earning organizations.”

Claudia Rosett is one of the few Western commentators to have grasped the significance of what's happening. It's a piece well worth reading in full:

While climate delegates are quarreling in Copenhagen, and President Barack Obama is collecting his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, an important story is unfolding in relative obscurity, in North Korea. Furious over a confiscatory currency "reform," citizens of the world's most repressive state have begun publicly criticizing their government.

It is hard to overstate just how bold a move that is. North Korea's military "is on alert for a possible civil uprising," according to a major South Korean newspaper, the Chosun Ilbo. Reports have been filtering out of North Korea that the country's markets have become arenas of protest, with traders--many of them women in their 40s and 50s--publicly cursing the North Korean authorities.

Most of these reports attribute the information to anonymous sources. That's no surprise, given that North Koreans can be condemned to starve and freeze to death in labor camps for such acts as singing a South Korean song or failing to pay fawning homage to the ubiquitous portraits of their tyrant, Kim Jong Il.

That is exactly why these signs of unrest are so important. Dissent in North Korea carries individual risks even worse than the horrors that street protesters have been braving in Iran. But the stories are credible, and they suggest that North Korea's regime is approaching a fragile moment. This comes on top of Kim's questionable health, following what is believed to have been a stroke in 2008.

President Barack Obama, and other leaders of the democratic world, have a choice. They can dismiss the rising murmurs of North Korea's stricken people, and stick with the sorry tradition of bailing out and propping up the North Korean regime via yet another round of nuclear talks and payoffs. Or they can leave Kim to struggle with this nightmare of his own making, and maybe even notch up the financial pressure to nudge North Korea's totalitarian regime toward its rightful place in history's unmarked graveyard of discarded lies.

Comments

[tolkein]

Let's see. Stand with democratic and popular opposition to a tyrant North Korea, or stand aside as in Iran.

Where do you think that what's left of the Left or Obama will stand?

Why is it left to the Right to call out these monsters?

[Bob-B]

Why is there so little about this story elsewhere?