Everywhere you go in North Korea, the walls
are plastered in signs depicting the “loyalty struggle for hard currency,”
where women and men of all ages appear hard at work, engaged in tireless
efforts to procure foreign currency for the state. Overlaid on these images are
slogans such as “Let’s earn even more hard currency and bring joy to the General
[Kim Jong Un].”
To the same end, gold mines and fisheries
affiliated with Office 39, a special department charged with raising funds for
Kim Jong Un’s use, referred to as “the General’s Revolution Fund,” as
well as provincial, municipal, and county agriculture units, are obliged
to frequently assemble people for “loyalty competitions” during which they earn
or directly offer foreign currency to pay as a tribute to the state–”even if
it is only a penny,” they say.
Moreover, the foreign-currency earning
companies that went into full operation in the early 1990s, along with the
trading companies and individual citizens, must participate in movements to pay
dollar tributes to the regime. The regime enticed people to participate in
these challenges by offering to label anyone who successfully earned 1 million
USD for the authorities a “Work Hero,” a campaign that continues to run to this
day.
The vulnerable members of society are not
exempt from this obligation. Children are encouraged to pitch in to the
foreign-currency earning effort by collecting rabbit skins and colorful scraps
of metal, while housewives contribute by growing castor seeds and raising
silkworms.
It is in this way that the dollars earned
through the blood and sweat of the people are transformed into “revolution
funds,” or money that props up the leadership. It is possible to do
dollar-based transactions in the trading banks that are located in Pyongyang,
but even these banks only retain about 20% of their funds, sending the majority
of them to the Central Party clerk’s office, who spends the money according to
Kim Jong Un’s instructions.
The number of dollars held in reserve,
along with the sums disbursed to the clerk’s office, are kept secret from anyone
outside of the Central Party leadership and a few privileged insiders. It is
impossible to find out this information. The businesses operating under the
umbrella of Office 39 are self-censoring, so even the Central Party’s
Prosecutors’ Office cannot touch them.
When Kim Jong Un’s revolutionary funds are
occasionally tapped in cases of emergency, they must be replenished. The
majority of these ‘emergency situations’ involve funding military-related
operations or the munitions industry. For example, in the early 2000s Kim Jong
Il provided on-the-spot guidance to the Kimchaek Iron and Steel Complex, after
which he proposed investing $30,000,000 from the clerk’s office in the mill to
stimulate production. However, after 3 years, the mill had not paid the money
back, inviting strict surveillance and scathing threats from the Central
Party to convey the message that the ominous implications would only escalate
until they did.
To bring this system into a more recent
context, cash earned from Kaesong Industrial Complex, as well as all of the
other hard currency that flows to the Party through a variety of channels, is
collected by the clerk’s office. It is used to pay for Kim Jong Un’s nuclear
tests, which he uses as propaganda touting his achievements, to pay for all of
the materials used to develop missiles and other weapons, and to pay for the
luxury items that are awarded to those who are loyal.
Because the regime is
always in desperate need of this kind of cash, even the amount of hard currency
brought in by Kaesong–”hardly enough to fill the hand of a baby,” is one phrase
I’ve heard–is a veritable gold mine for the leadership.
