A few things in life are absolute certainties. Here in the US death and taxes are just a few of those. In North Korea, one of the most well-known is that Kim Jong Un will turn off the economic aid and let his people starve to fund more weapons testing. As reports of long-range missile testing and another attempt at a spy satellite are coming out, simultaneously are reports of people starving to death inside his country.
In the first UN Security Council meeting on North Korean rights since 2017, they discussed how previously they have dealt with economic despair and being repressed by their government. A duo of situations they always seemed to face independently, but now were enduring both simultaneously.
While Kim closed off any northern borders to prevent COVID from coming inside their borders, guards have been put on increased alerts. Many have been told to shoot all suspects approaching the border on sight, including UN Humanitarian Relief that like everyone else in the world have been told they are not welcome by the regime.
As part of Kim’s increasingly paranoid behavior, anyone caught viewing “reactionary ideology and culture,” i.e., material from the outside world, especially South Korea can face five to 15 years in prison Those distributing the material could face life in prison or even death. Economically, markets have been shut down, and people have lost their private ways of making income and North Korea has made such actions illegal.
The U.N. high commissioner for human rights said, “For example, the widespread use of forced labor — including labor in political prison camps, forced use of school children to collect harvests, the requirement for families to undertake labor and provide a quota of goods to the government, and confiscation of wages from overseas workers — all support the military apparatus of the state and its ability to build weapons.”
During all of this starvation and economic disparity, the North Korean regime is going full steam ahead with its new weapons testing For those who are in the government, many have been put back to work stealing people’s information and data to raise money from the North Korean government. A long-standing way of making money for their criminal enterprises, Kim has been doing this for decades, and thus far no nation has truly been able to stop him from it.
With 26 million people calling North Korea home, the vast majority are experiencing the worst food shortages and economic troubles since he took over the regime in 2011. While many experts don’t believe a full-fledged famine or even any rumblings to challenge his power are on the horizon, the restriction of the market on the people of North Korea may have been the last straw.
Shelves becoming barer and wallets lighter makes people upset and anxious. They tend to panic, and no level of prayers or words of solitude to their dear leader can fill that swollen famine belly. The older people of North Korea remember this feeling all too well, one they vowed their children or their children’s children would never know. Yet here they are and here the famine is, in full force it rages and destroys the people of North Korea, all so Kim can feel like the big kid on the block.
The problem is, he is perpetually a week late and $20 short. The missile and spy technology he is now adapting has been around for the US for over 30 years and in some cases 50 years.
With the annual US-South Korean war games for the mid-end of August, North Korea could be looking to make the games a bit spicier, simply to throw a monkey wrench in planning, but not destroying anything. If anything at this point, the North Korean regime is little more than a noise mosquito that just won’t toss off.
