Asia Times: PYONGYANG WATCH: Forestalling geekification



	January 29, 2000	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH: Forestalling geekification
By Bradley Martin

The South Korean government policy that forbids export to North Korea of any moderately advanced computer, even a 486, has pros and cons. Obviously computers are useful in military applications, and you don't want to arm your enemy. On the other hand, development of the North's computer-related industries could encourage positive changes in the country, changes that might lessen the risk of war.

Seoul's policy was spotlighted this month when the Unification Ministry issued a warning to a South Korean magazine reporter who had left her high-end notebook computer with a North Korean magazine journalist in Beijing, on her way home from a reporting trip in the North. The 37-year-old reporter reportedly said she wanted to have the computer in Pyongyang so she could use it during future reporting tours there.

The authorities, according to Korea Times (January 13), were skeptical in view of the fact that a notebook computer is a reporter's essential tool - not likely to be given away casually. That's a good point, especially considering that the machine in question has a Celeron processor and a high-speed modem. Such a notebook is not inexpensive.

Seoul used to permit models as advanced (!) as the 486 to be exported to the North, but tightened the regulation, noted the Times, when ''intelligence authorities claimed that the computers, offered for the purpose of education, had been diverted to other uses''.

Prior to the ban, according to a Yonhap story that appeared in JoongAng Ilbo (October 17), four organizations in the South had sent 450 computers North ''on humanitarian grounds; the latest was a transfer of 100 computers to Kim Chaek University of Technology by Kyongnam University on Sept 7, 1998''.

The Korea Times article doesn't say to what purposes the North was diverting imports, so we cannot assume that the only non-educational uses were military-related. Some could have been related to the fact that the top leadership in Pyongyang is eager to expand the country's own electronics industry, so much so that it set up a new ministry for electronic industry last year.

Reporting that move The Korea Herald (November 26) quoted a South Korean researcher who opined that ''the establishment of an electronics ministry will lead to the creation of a favorable environment for South Koreans wanting to do business there''. Pyongyang is taking a similar tack in its pronouncements on the issue. This month, according to Chosun Ilbo (January 21), Pyongyang's Central Broadcasting complained about the South Korean ban, calling it a political barrier to free economic cooperation. (Imagine that.)

The Herald's report pictured the existing North Korean electronics industry as ''one of the least developed industrial sectors''. The country's ''annual capacity to produce computer software still remains at about 30,000 units, and it has managed to develop only about 30 pieces of software on its own''.

Despite that pathetic record, South Korean computer-related firms are interested in doing business with the North. Samsung Electronics said in December that it had signed a deal to cooperate with the North's Chosun Computer Center, starting early this year, in software development and hardware manufacturing-on-consignment. Yonhap (December 2) reported that the software projects would involve word-processing, Chinese characters, games, document summarization and graphic libary applications.

The hardware to be produced includes color TV sets, casette radios and telephones - but not computers. Samsung is reported to be investing $1 million and hoping for annual sales of $10 million.

Another Yonhap story (January 21) says the North is also dealing with companies in China, Japan, India, Iran and Pakistan. Japanese financial companies have arranged for help from the North's Chosun Computer Center in developing software for small and medium-sized firms to use in handling long-term loans, Yonhap says. Joongang Ilbo (January 21) says Chosun Computer Center plans to set up computer centers in each of 12 provinces by October this year.

It's nice to think North Korea could get so caught up in the ''new economy'' as to lose interest in making war. But, alas, the rising interest in civilian applications does not rule out a parallel need for advanced computers to be used in military applicatons, including arms-building and -design.

The problem with trying to block such uses through an export ban are considerable, though, because such a ban is bound to be porous in the extreme. Just look across the Sea of Japan, where authorities in Tokyo are investigating how North Korea might have gotten hold of the central part of an anti-tank launcher suspiciously similar to the product of Japan's Sunbeam Co. The possibly incriminating evidence was found in a North Korean submarine that was sunk in 1996, according to Chosun Ilbo (January 18).

If North Korea can acquire a Japanese anti-tank launcher, it should be a cinch to dispatch some of its numerous agents in Japan to buy notebook computers with Celeron processors in Tokyo's Akihabara electronics market and smuggle them over to Pyongyang. Hey, why not go all-out and buy Apple G-4s while they're at it?

So why bother to establish and try to enforce a ban? The South Korean authorities quite likely are concerned mainly with limiting quantity, as a means of slowing the North's rise in computer-related technology.

The country already has some world-class software writers despite the shortage of up-to-date equipment for them to learn and work on. A team at the North's Korean Computer Center, graduates of Kim Chaek University and Kim Il-sung University, took first place in the world championship competition for computerized versions of the game of go - called paduk in Korean - in Nagoya in 1997. According to North Korean media quoted in a January 18 Yonhap story, the young technicians ate and slept together while they worked day and night to come up with their winning entry. One of them developed a life-threatening illness but refused to be hospitalized.

''Our young men are treating even their research project as combat, and are giving their all before their computers, defeating death with laughter, Radio Pyongyang commented. The team ''embraced the spirit of revolutionary soldiers, and through repeated research finally developed a high-level go program''. In the process they developed other programs including one for remote control, one for character recognition and an English-Korean translator.

South Korean officials may have reasoned that to equip the North with enough high-end computers to train masses of computer nerds prepared to take on the South and the world across the board - from military use to hacking to legitimate business competition - could require shipments so big they could be detected and halted.

And right now, it appears, the export ban may be all that's stopping large-scale giveaways of computers by South Korean firms seeking to curry favor with Pyongyang. According to the JoongAng Ilbo story, ''North Korea has reportedly been making the request that South Korean companies involved in inter-Korean economic cooperation projects and civilian organizations supply the North with computers.''

Look at the shiploads of color TVs, jeans and other items that eager South Korean companies have been sending north - without much apparent concern for getting paid - and you can see that the trickle of nice computers could turn into a flood if the Seoul authorities should let go.

But does North Korea really need to import a lot of the latest gizmos in order to become a formidable force in the computer world? Maybe not. Consider Linus Torvalds, a Finnish computer science student who was frustrated by the shortage of Unix workstations at the University of Helsinki. One weekend he wrote his own substitute - on a 386 machine - and released it over the Internet. Thus was born the Linux OS, one of the currently hot alternatives to Microsoft's Windows operating system.

Maybe the ban on exports of anything better than a 386 machine will turn out to be a similar stimulus to the North Koreans. Who knows? One day we may all be using a Juche OS.

(Special to Asia Times Online)

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