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2 North Korea's living
exports By Bertil Lintner
BANGKOK - It has been known since the
early 1990s that North Korea exports manpower to
eastern Russian logging sites. But two remarkable
incidents over the past years reveal that the
foreign-currency-strapped nation also sends
laborers to other, somewhat less expected places
in the world.
When North Korea won a
soccer game over Japan at the Asian Games in the
Qatari capital Doha last December, its
cheerleaders became so excited that they rushed on
to the field and carried the
players on their shoulders
around the grounds. They could do that, because
the North Korean cheerleaders were not, as
cheerleaders usually are, young, petite women.
They were all male - sturdy, middle-aged
construction workers who belonged to the
contingents of laborers that the North Korean
government is sending to work in the Middle East.
Then, in January, the managing director of
an unnamed construction firm was found slashed to
death, and one of his workers hanged, in a
building in the East Malaysian riverside town of
Sibu, on the fringes of the jungles of Sarawak.
The businessman was identified as Ri Won-gil, 52,
and the worker as Kim Kwong-ryun, 47 - both North
Koreans. Their company had "been doing contract
work here for years", the Malaysian Star newspaper
reported, although it was not clear what kind of
work that was.
As many as 70,000 North
Koreans are currently working in various
countries, Kim Tae-san, a defector who testified
last year on North Korean migrant labor to the
European Parliament, told US-financed Radio Free
Asia (RFA) this year. Other estimates are
considerably lower, but it is evident that labor
export is becoming an important source of income
for the government in Pyongyang.
Today,
North Korean workers are found not only in Russia,
Malaysia and Qatar but in Dubai, Mongolia, the
Czech Republic, Poland, Bulgaria, Libya, Saudi
Arabia and possibly also some African countries.
Many are dispatched through labor agencies based
in China, and most of their salaries end up in the
coffers in Pyongyang. As North Korea does not
publish any economic statistics, it is not known
exactly how much it earns from exporting labor to
other countries, but is it believed by North
Korea-watchers to be bringing in millions of US
dollars annually.
In addition, tens of
thousands of North Koreans are working illegally
in China, and sending money home to their
relatives. This may not directly benefit the
Pyongyang regime, but it helps alleviate poverty
in the country, and therefore stifle possible
social unrest on the level that actually hit the
North Korea during the great famine in the early
and mid-1990s. On a more organized level, trusted
citizens are sent by Pyongyang to work in North
Korean-run restaurants not only in China - Beijing
and Shanghai - but also in Russia, Cambodia,
Thailand and Laos. Profits from those enterprises
are, naturally, sent to Pyongyang, or to support
the activities of North Korean diplomatic missions
in those respective countries.
Russia, or
the erstwhile Soviet Union, is the oldest
destination for North Korean labor, and it
probably began when in 1967 Soviet secretary
general Leonid Brezhnev and North Korea's Kim
Il-sung reached an agreement to bring manpower to
sparsely populated eastern Russia. In September
1996, Amnesty International stated in its
"Democratic People's Republic of Korea/Russian
Federation: Pursuit, Intimidation and Abuse of
North Korean Refugees and Workers", one of the
earliest reports on the subject: "North Korea
brought in the manpower and ran the logging sites,
while the Soviet Union provided the natural
resources. The profit, reportedly many million
dollars over the years, was split between the two
countries." Some of the income was also reportedly
used to pay off North Korea's debt to Russia.
Today, according to Moscow's Ministry of
Economics, 90% of North Korea's "exports" to
Russia consist of workers. An estimated 2,500
North Koreans are to be found in Primorye, or the
maritime region adjacent to the Sea of Japan, and
almost all of them work at construction sites in
Vladivostok and Nakhodka. According to local
sources, they sleep in dormitories and eat
together under portraits of the late Kim Il-sung
and his son, current ruler Kim Jong-il.
Political classes are held every week
under strict supervision of members of the ruling
Korean Workers' Party. The supervisors, who belong
to North Korea's security police, also collect
their
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