Hear no evil dictators being deposed, see no evil dictators being deposed (redux)

Welp, if you're a North Korean laborer in Libya longing for some home-cooked Hamhŭng naengmyŏn, you're just s.o.l. for the time being.

Last April, when the Arab Spring was just starting to kick up some sand, we had reports that Pyongyang was in no mood to have workers returning to the Workers' Paradise bearing news that one by one the dictators of the Arab world were falling like dominos as the people in those countries rose up against them. Even though some of them were getting injured in the air attacks.

And now, with the death of Colonel Moammar Kadafi, we see that this policy is continuing:

North Korea has banned its own citizens working in Libya from returning home, apparently out of fear that they will reveal the extent — and final outcomes — of the revolutions that have shaken the Arab world.

Pyongyang had a close working relationship with the regime of Moammar Gaddafi before the popular uprising that unseated him. That revolution was completed with Gaddafi's death at the hands of insurgents last week - leaving Kim Jong-Il as one of a dwindling band of old-fashioned dictators on the planet.

An estimated 200 North Korean nationals are in Libya and previously worked as doctors, nurses and construction workers, according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency. They had been dispatched to the country in order to earn the hard currency that Pyongyang requires to fund its missile and nuclear weapons programmes.

Yonhap reported that the North Korean nationals have been left in limbo, joining their compatriots who are stuck in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries with orders not to return home.

North Korean media has so far failed to report that Gaddafi is dead and the government has made no moves to officially recognise Libya's National Transitional Council as the legitimate governing authority of the country.

The decision to ban its own nationals from returning indicates just how concerned the North Korean regime is of the news leaking out to its subjugated people.

An editorial in The Korea Herald stated that the one per cent of North Koreans who are aware of the Arab Spring uprisings will be top-level party and administration officials, as well as the trusted few who are permitted to travel to China on business.

"Pyongyang’s silence about the fall of the dictators in Tunisia and Egypt and the bloody death of Gaddafi reveals Kim Jong-il’s awareness of the vulnerability of his regime in the process of a third-generation dynastic succession of power," the paper said.

And the DPRK nomenklatura are right to think this. With the Great Currency Obliteration of 2009, they have sown the seeds of resentment and may have lodged in almost every North Korean's head the notion that the regime is not on their side. 

This blanket ban on returning to North Korea comes as no surprise to me. I wrote a few days ago that the North Korean workers in Libya are "persona non grata" back home as far as the regime is concerned. Of course, it could be worse: the regime might have welcomed them home only to send them to reeducation camps or worse. Maybe Seoul should be looking into helping these folks stuck in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria gain asylum and eventual residency in South Korea.

Right now "s.o.l." means Sitting it Out in Libya.

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The view from Pyongyang

With the death of Libya's deposed strongman Moammar Kadafi, perhaps this is as good a time as any to revisit what we've learned. Or rather, what the Pyongyang regime has learned. We've talked about this before, the lessons Pyongyang can glean from Libya.

In the recent past, I have said that the DPRK leadership has learned two things. From the Jasmine Revolution: Control information technology like your life depends on it, because it really does. From Libya's recent concessions with the West: Never, never, never, never give up (your nukes).

But now that Kadafi has been chased into a hole just like Saddam Hussein and then shot, let's address a third lesson.

I have suggested, and still do, that one of the things for Kim Jong-il to learn is that maybe it's better to take a deal:

I have long advocated that the powers-that-be in Seoul, Washington, Tokyo, and perhaps Beijing have on the table the same type of deal for North Korea's ruling elite, should disgruntlement with the regime ever erupt into a full-blown challenge to its authority.

As hard as it might be to stomach, it might make for a far smoother demise of the DPRK if Kim Jong-il, his family, his inner circle, etc., are just simply allowed to leave. If they are allowed to make an orderly play for the exits, it might mean less bloodshed (including attempts to attack the South or Japan in a desperate last-ditch attempt to rally the North Korean people), and it might also mean a quicker departure and thus a speedier end to the regime.

This is an important lesson for the Kim Dynasty because when things start to head downward, they do so at an accelerated 9.8 meters-per-second-per-second. The Norks are already trying their darndest to keep information out, particularly information about the Jasmine Revolution. North Koreans who are forcibly repatriated or voluntarily return are persona non grata with the regime, while average citizens are restricted from traveling even to neighboring counties lest they spread gossip or dissent.

But dictators across the Arab world also thought they had things under control, including Colonel Kadafi, and now he's dead. The same thing is plausible in North Korea, given the right circumstances. And if it comes down to that, take the deal, Mr Kim. Because they will hunt you down, they will find you, and you (and possibly your family) will end up dead.

The Mongolian steppe's looking pretty good right now, eh?

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Jasmine fall

With the regime of Moammar Gadhafi's regime really on the verge of collapse this time, I thought it might be a good chance to review a few posts from earlier this year that managed to tie together Libya and North Korea.

For starters, there's this post on how North Korean workers in Libya were not being allowed to return home despite the violence going on there, for fear that they would bring word of decades-long dictatorships starting to fall in the face of popular opposition and armed rebellion. I wonder what has happened to those North Korean workers and what their future holds. I'm guessing they really are better off in Africa for the time being, and I hope they're allowed to stay.

Probably a legal phone.

On a related note, this post talked about how the Pyongyang regime was trying hard to round up illegal cell phones in order to prevent the spread of such news.

Back in March, when it looked like Gadhafi might accept a deal to take his sons and go away to a comfortable exile in a neighboring country with lots of open desert, I suggested the same model might work for North Korea (Mongolia has lots of open desert).

Of course, Gadhafi didn't take the deal, but depending on whether he ends up like Slobodan Milošević (with a long prison term) or Saddam Hussein (with a long neck), Kim Jong-il and his cronies may wish to consider that option.

[source]

In this post, I also noted that North Korea may be looking at NATO's air support in Libya and thinking to themselves, "Like hell we're ever going to give up our nukes" (that was Libya's quid pro quo for US recognition).

Or, to borrow from Winston Churchill: "Never, never, never, never give up (your nukes)."

Best thing to do is to trick the North Koreans into testing each of them, one by one. Keep accusing them of lighting up a bunch of TNT deep in a mineshaft each time and watch them try to go ballistic.

UPDATE:
Joshua at One Free Korea has taken a hiatus from his hiatus to bring us some timely thoughts on the same subject.

Hear no evil dictators being deposed, see no evil dictators being deposed

China has taken up the challenging of blocking information about the so-called Jasmine Revolution, even going so far as to block Internet searches for those terms. North Korea has a bit of an easier time, since it has a far tighter control over the far fewer percentage of its population that has access to the Internet, which is more like an intranet.

But we GenXers remember a time when pixels and bytes were not the only means by which information flowed. There was television and radio, of course, and the Pyongyang regime has long been on top of that. But there are also those fleshy biological units known as people, and they have been known to pass along uncomfortable facts that undermine faith in their despotic government.

For the Kim Jong-il, the take-away message is that if you give up your nukes and play nice the US will invade; he doesn't want the North Korean people's take-away message to be that the only way you'll get rid of a dynastic regime that has ruled with an iron fist for decades with no end in sight is to rise up and start shooting at the rulers' soldiers.

And it is against that backdrop that North Korea has told its worker in war-torn Libya not to come back. Stay where you are.

From Yonhap:

North Korea has ordered its people in Libya not to return home, apparently out of fear that they will spread news of the anti-government uprisings in the African nation, a source said Sunday.

In a letter sent to the North Korean embassy in Libya, Pyongyang ordered its people to "follow the measures of the Libyan government" and not return home, said the source familiar with North Korea affairs.

As AFP notes, Libya and North Korea "have maintained close diplomatic ties." Consequently, there are hundreds of North Koreans in Libya, performing duties as doctors, nurses, and construction workers, as well as in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Frankly, if this is the kind of thing Pyongyang is worried about, the North Korean workers may be better off in Libya even as things get out of hand there. Were they to return and the DPRK authorities decided they were a contagion, God only knows how they might be "contained." Perhaps South Korea, the US, and Japan should work on helping the North Koreans find a safer place to go.

North Korea's take-away message

A lot of people have asked me if I think the Jasmine Revolution will affect North Korea. Tentatively, I would say no, not really. Just as Beijing has such a tight control over information flow within its own borders, most North Koreans are hermetically sealed from the day-to-day news events happening in the rest of the world.

On the other hand, if two characters in a South Korea drama love story talk about Egypt's successful uprising while they're dining at some posh café in Kangnam, the North Korean peasantry might eventually hear about it when the DVDs are smuggled into Shinŭiju in early 2012.

In the meantime, the Pyongyang regime is taking a look at what's going on and they are coming to two conclusions. First, don't let the people know anything. Second, once they give up their nukes (or the threat of nukes) then the Americans can invade.

From the New York Times:

A North Korean statement that Libya’s dismantling of its nuclear weapons program had made it vulnerable to military intervention by the West is being seen by analysts as an ominous reinforcement of the North’s refusal to end its own nuclear program.

North Korea’s official news agency carried comments this week from a Foreign Ministry official criticizing the air assault on Libyan government forces and suggesting that Libya had been duped in 2003 when it abandoned its nuclear program in exchange for promises of aid and improved relations with the West.

Calling the West’s bargain with Libya “an invasion tactic to disarm the country,” the official said it amounted to a bait and switch approach. “The Libyan crisis is teaching the international community a grave lesson,” the official was quoted as saying Tuesday, proclaiming that North Korea’s “songun” ideology of a powerful military was “proper in a thousand ways” and the only guarantor of peace on the Korean Peninsula.

You'll have to take that nuclear trigger out of the Dear Leader's cold, dead hands.