It has become much harder to make contact with the interior of North Korea by cell phone since the start of January, something which it is hard not to see as related to the formal launch of the Kim Jong Eun regime.
During the mourning period, this was not the case. It has always been rather trickier to make contact with people in the Shinuiju area because of North Korean jamming efforts, but in more northerly areas no such problems previously existed. However, with the arrival of 2012 calls started cutting off without warning, and on many occasions it became impossible to connect with sources at all.
On the 2nd, for example, Daily NK received a call from a source in North Hamkyung Province, but all that could be heard was a humming signal with nothing on the other end. After an hour of trying, the source finally got through, but the call kept cutting in and out until in the end the source gave up after less than a minute.
Things are apparently no different for traders in China. One who used to call North Korea daily from Changbai, just across the river from Hyesan, told Daily NK today, “I haven’t been able to call at all for a few days.”
Nobody can say exactly what is happening, but it is known that defectors are currently being threatened with ever more serious punishment, and that the Sino-North Korean border was shut down completely before North Korea even officially announced the death of Kim Jong Il, all seemingly as part of an overall effort to limit the entry and exit of information. As one piece of that same puzzle, it would not be a huge surprise if the authorities were to have opened a new front in their efforts to combat cell phone usage.
It may also be one effect of the so-called ‘loyalty battle’ going on in North Korea today. In a similar vein, one Yangkang Province source reported yesterday, “With the New Year the NSA and PSM are both out there trying to track down defectors, so the border has gotten really brutal.”
Unrelated to calls being dropped but no less effective at limiting the spread of information is the fact that in these straightened times people are also very wary of making calls at all; many phones are set to stay hidden for the time being deep, deep inside the proverbial kimchi pot.
