Women facing harsh new pressures in N Korea

As the world’s youngest dictator, Kim Jong-un has gotten off to a remarkable start in North Korea. He has reneged on a deal with the United States for a quarter-million tons of food aid, threatened South Korea with fiery annihilation — nothing new there, really — and embarrassed his principal patron, China. Most surprising of all this, writes my colleague Jane Perlez, is “how Mr. Kim has thumbed his nose at China, whose economic largess keeps the government afloat.” When a senior Chinese diplomat went to North Korea and warned Mr. Kim against a ballistic missile test, Jane says, “the new leader went ahead anyway.” Mr. Kim, not yet 30, seems to have deftly consolidated his hold on state power since his father’s death in December. He appears fully in command of the political, military and diplomatic levers. And some of his regime’s first policy moves in the economic sphere “were focused on re-enforcing controls” from the central government, according to a new paper by Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland for the Peterson Institute for International Economics. They suggest that the regime could impose a return to a more centrally planned economy, as we have seen before. Such a trend, which might well include a crackdown on the private, shadow-economy markets that are predominantly run by women, “could have the effect of once again marginalizing North Korea’s women.” Mr. Haggard and Mr. Noland report that disproportionate numbers of women are now being laid off from jobs at North Korea’s state-owned enterprises because “working for the state is considered more politically advanced ‘man’s work.’ ” As a result, women have moved into the markets, which are statutorily closed to men and operate quasi-legally in North Korea’s grudgingly hybrid economy. The regime views these markets — and the women who run them — with “an ambivalent if not actively hostile posture,” Mr. Haggard and Mr. Noland write. “In other settings, this newfound freedom might be empowering,” they say, but the women traders have frequent run-ins with the police and, therefore, the North’s harsh penal system. Corruption is rife. Bribing police officers and state officials is common. “In short, the increasingly male-dominated state preys on the increasingly female-dominated market.” “The regime has criminalized a range of market activities,” Mr. Haggard and Mr. Noland say, which inevitably lands traders in jails, prisons, labor camps or punitive “collection centers.” Nearly half of the 300 North Korean defectors surveyed for the Haggard-Noland paper said they had seen executions while in detention. “Roughly three-quarters report forced starvation, and nearly a third report witnessing deaths from beatings and torture,” they write. Mr. Haggard and Mr. Noland say their research paints “a picture of a vulnerable group that has been disadvantaged” in North Korea’s fitful transition from a purely command economy. “Energies are directed toward survival,” they write, adding that civil disobedience is rare and that market women as a group appear “to lack the tools or social capital to act collectively to improve their status.” A year ago I interviewed two North Korean women who escaped the North after their jobs at state-owned factories dried up. A famine had taken hold of the country, and both women said they defected because, quite simply, they were starving. One of them, Lee Young-geum, a former truck dispatcher at a state-owned steel mill, called it “the eating problem.” The other woman, Son Hyang-sun, now 41, had taken to eating grass to stay alive. State food rations had ceased at her factory, which produced glass ampules of morphine. There was no salt or sugar. Until she defected, she said, she had never once eaten fish or beef. After crossing a river into China, Ms. Son dyed her hair and pierced her ears — small emancipations. But the Chinese police quickly picked her up and sent her back to North Korea. She spent the next four months in prison. “With my hair and my pierced ears, the North Korean government thought I was mentally ill and that I would infect other people,” she said. “So they tortured me with an electric stick” — she searched for the right term — “yes, a cattle prod. They stuck it everywhere.” She did her time, then ducked the police who were watching her and crossed into China again. She met a North Korean man who wanted to get to South Korea, and they walked thousands of miles, through Vietnam, Cambodia and into Thailand. Together, they finally reached Seoul in May 2003. After the birth of a daughter, the couple made their way to South Korea’s eastern coast, to the port town of Donghae, renowned for its clams and scallops. They found a small fish shop for sale and managed to get a loan to buy and modernize the place. The three of them now live upstairs. And Ms. Son has named her shop “The Future.”