PYONGYANG WATCH North Korea: The Columbus complex
By Aidan Foster-Carter
"To explore strange new worlds ... To boldly go where no man has gone before."
Stumbling on North Korea for the first time, not a few people - awestruck,
disgusted, or just plain open-mouthed - seem fondly to imagine themselves as Star
Trek's Captain Kirk: piloting the Starship Enterprise to land in
Pyongyang, surely this planet's final frontier.
Or maybe Christopher Columbus is a better parallel. As we all learned in
school, Columbus discovered America. That claim now comes heavily qualified:
America already existed and was
inhabited. Vikings got there before Columbus, who didn't even know where he
was; he thought he'd hit India. For all concerned, it was a fateful - for some,
a fatal - encounter.
My own Columbus moment on North Korea was 40 years ago. A typical revolting
student of 1968, head full of Marx and heart afire with anti-imperialism, I
found my Nirvana. Here was a small ex-colony which defied the worst the West
could throw at it (napalm included), to industrialize and lead its people out
of poverty - as capitalism, I was cocksure, could not.
Fast forward 30 years. While capitalist South Korea soared into the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, communism saw a million
North Koreans die in a wholly avoidable famine. I'd wised up a while before. At
a meeting in London in the 1980s, four British academics - Korea neophytes, all
of leftist persuasion - recounted their recent visit to Pyongyang in tones that
smacked of Columbus and Cap'n Kirk. They'd found a new civilization - and were
not best pleased when I got up and played Leif Ericsson: yeah yeah, been there,
done that, got the scars and the cynicism.
Still, such Columbuses can do good. This was the first ever conference on North
Korea in the UK. It became a useful book, and one of the quartet - the other
three sank without trace - went on to spend a year there and become one of
Britain's foremost experts on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Peace through art
And still they come. David Heather, a British financier, recently discovered
North Korea - in Zimbabwe. A chance encounter with a Merited Artist from
Pyongyang led him last year to mount a display of North Korean art - vivid,
often militant - in London's Pall Mall, of all places: home of stuffy British
gentlemen's clubs. (There's a witty account of this on Philip Gowman's
excellent
blog.) The art can be seen, and indeed purchased - the comrades need
your cash - at www.lagalleria.org, which caters for every taste. It also
features fetish nudes - albeit not North Korean. Not yet.
For his next venture, Heather will bring an entire North Korean symphony
orchestra to Britain later this year. Freely admitting no special knowledge of
either Korea or the arts, he sees this as a way to break down barriers. More
power to him. But for decades others have tried to pry the DPRK hermit out of
its shell; yet still Kim Jong-il clings to his nukes.
Even the hard-headed world of business has its Columbuses: aroused by the idea
of a virgin market, albeit one sorely lacking in the readies thus far. In Seoul
a decade ago, I met a chap from Unilever whose lips positively smacked at the
prospect that, one day, millions of Ms and Mrs Kims north of the demilitarized
zone will each carry the same US$100-plus worth of cosmetics in their Gucci
handbags as their Southern sisters already sport. He may well be right.
A Columbus from Cairo
But I'm less sure about North Korea's latest business Columbus - who in a new
twist hails from Egypt. In a January 30 press release, Orascom Telecom Holdings
(OTH) proclaimed proudly that "it has been granted the first commercial license
to provide mobile telephony services in the Democratic People's Republic of
Korea". CHEO, a 75:25 joint venture with Korea Post and Telecommunications
Corporation (KP&TC), has a 25-year license, the first four being exclusive.
Orascom will invest up to US$400 million in network infrastructure and plans to
have Pyongyang and most other major cities in the country covered within a
year. Orascom's chief executive, Naguib Sawiris, described this as a
"greenfield license ... providing the first mobile telephony services [in North
Korea]", and boasted that "OTH has consistently proved its ability to
successfully roll out mobile services into countries where no other operator
has".
Not so fast, Signor Columbus. Indeed not so, period. This particular field is
far from green; it looks muddy from the tramp of many boots before yours. You
may even find it slippery.
In 2008, not even North Korea is a cellphone virgin. The DPRK and mobile
telephony have a tangled history, starting over a decade ago. (There's a very
useful account as of 2005 at
this site.) The tale includes a joint bid in 2002 by several South
Korean firms to build a CDMA network in Pyongyang, which sank when Washington
made it clear it would not let Qualcomm sell the technology.
That false start apart, our Egyptian Columbus is ignoring, and perhaps
usurping, a Thai Leif Ericsson in the shape of Loxley. Back in 1995, the Thai
conglomerate set up a 70:30 joint venture, North East Asia Telephone &
Telecommunication, with the very same partner Orascom has now bagged,
KP&TC. NEAT&T had a 30-year "exclusive" concession - or so it thought.
They're not the only ones. Hyundai used to vie with Samsung to be South Korea's
biggest chaebol or conglomerate. The group's northern-born founder, the
late Chung Ju-yung, was a pioneer of inter-Korean business. His reward was to
be fleeced rotten by Pyongyang, which charged almost a billion dollars for a
six-year tourist concession - and then coolly offered bits of it to rival
operators like Lotte. As a result, Hyundai splintered into separate firms - and
no other chaebol will touch the North with a bargepole. Cheating really
doesn't pay.
But back to the luck of the Loxleys. Having begun with a mainly fixed network
in the Rason special economic zone in the northeast, several years later in
2003 Loxley rolled out mobile service in Pyongyang - only to see them banned
after a mere six months. That was in May 2004, soon after a huge rail explosion
destoyed a swath of the northwestern town of Ryongchon - hours after Kim
Jong-il’s train had passed through from China. Officially an accident, one
rumor is that this was an assassination attempt triggered by a mobile phone.
Whatever the reason, with service still suspended over a year later, Thailand's
then foreign minister, Kantathi Suphamongkhon, went to Pyongyang in August 2005
to fight Loxley's corner. He got no joy. North Korea still bars handphones,
confiscating them from the rare foreign visitor at the country's Sunan airport
and coming down hard on bold souls along the northern border who have illicit
mobile phones using Chinese networks. Last October, a factory boss who made
international calls from 13 lines - unlucky for some - installed in his
basement was reportedly executed in a stadium in front of 150,000 people.
So if Orascom's venture is for real, it's quite a volte-face for Kim Jong-il -
and galling for Loxley. Will the Thai firm now react, or just shrug? You win
some, you lose some. Not many win in North Korea. Future Columbuses had best
mug up on their history - or risk being made a mug of by the Dear Leader.
Meanwhile, I have a fine statue of Admiral Lord Nelson, in Trafalgar Square,
going cheap. What am I bid? Thank you, sir. A fine statue - yes madam, roll up!
You sir. A fine statue ...
Aidan Foster-Carter is honorary senior research fellow in sociology and
modern Korea at Leeds University, England, and a freelance writer, broadcaster
and consultant on Korea for policy makers and businesses. A frequent visitor to
the peninsula, he has followed North Korea for nearly 40 years.
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