The idea of North Korea deciding to launch an international charm offensive might seem ridiculous, but the hermit state is certainly up to something. A flurry of activity over the past few weeks has seen North Korea appear on YouTube, Twitter, and briefly on Facebook – although two attempts to establish a presence on the social networking site failed when Facebook management deleted the pages for "violating the site's terms of use".
 |
Arrival at Pyongyang airport of former US president Jimmy Carter |
The YouTube channel is flourishing, and as of 26 August it had received more than a quarter of a million upload views. Initially, most of the videos were old ones taken from the official North Korean websiteuriminzokkiri.com, but I was interested to note a 19-second video showing the arrival at Pyongyang airport of former US president Jimmy Carter, who is visiting the country on a humanitarian mission to seek the release of a Boston man jailed since January. Unfortunately the audio and subtitles have only been in Korean so far, but the video shows that Mr Carter received a warm welcome.
Comments
Predictably, the YouTube channel has received a variety of comments – over one thousand as of 26 August – ranging from "North Korea is best Korea" posted multiple times by ostensibly different people, to one that says "I feel for the North Korean people. The DPRK has destroyed their will. I await the fall of your train-wreck of a nation."
The Twitter account seems to be used only to carry headlines from the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), and so far has failed to reveal any details of the daily life of the dear leader. KCNA has been available for many years via a server in Japan, so there’s nothing particularly striking about this development.
Government denies involvement
What’s intriguing is that the North Korean government denies that it has anything to do with the new sites.Forbes magazine quotes an unnamed government official as saying that the accounts are run by government supporters, not government officials, living in Japan and China, not North Korea. Those social media sites are still banned in North Korea, says the official. Nevertheless, the Twitter account gives the location as Pyongyang.
But even if the government is not actually running the accounts, they are being advertised on the Home Page of uriminzokkiri.com, which carries the latest official news from North Korea, and is only available in Korean, though the servers are actually located in Shenyang, China. This suggests that the target audience is South Koreans and North Korean exiles worldwide.
The Official Webpage of The Democratic People's Republic of Korea for international visitors is actually run by the Korean Friendship Association, and does not have any links to the YouTube and Twitter pages. The servers for this site are located in Germany, but the people who run it are in Spain, and have Spanish names, although they all include 'Government of the DPR of Korea' in their contact address.
All the 'North Korean' websites mentioned in this article are actually hosted on servers located in other countries. It's quite common for websites to use servers outside their country of registration, but it makes it difficult to find out who's really behind these sites.
Black clandestine?
Media analyst Kim Andrew Elliott comes up with another idea that should not be dismissed. He writes “This social networking effort might be a classic black clandestine effort, with all the messages pro-Kim Jong-il for now, but eventually deviating from the party line, maybe supporting one faction over the other, as a way to sow discord inside the DPRK, or among its supporters.”
Whoever is behind these initiatives seems to have good contacts with Pyongyang, as the short video of Jimmy Carter appears to be an item from the TV news, and was uploaded very quickly after the event. Of course, as North Korean TV is now available on satellite, it could have been recorded from a satellite feed. Further monitoring of the YouTube channel may make it clearer exactly what is going on.
All this online activity makes the Voice of Korea, formerly known as Radio Pyongyang, sound very old-fashioned, not helped by the atrocious audio quality of the shortwave service. I rarely listen to it, but I would be very surprised if the Voice of Korea makes even a passing reference in its broadcasts to YouTube and Twitter.
What's really going on?
It could be that the regime in Pyongyang is just carrying out some experiments and doesn’t want to admit to anything until the Central Committee has given its blessing. Do they, perhaps, realise that their external radio service is now so decrepit that it’s time to look at new ways of telling the world about the dear leader? Have they simply used a translation program that has turned ‘social networking’ into ‘socialist networking’? Or will Kim Andrew Elliott’s black clandestine theory turn out to be spot on? Time will tell, even if the North Korean government won’t.
Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa, left, accompanied by his North Korean counterpart, Pak Ui-chun, in Jakarta on Monday. Marty warned Pak that there was an “inherent risk” attached to the current freeze in six-party talks over the North’s nuclear program. (Reuters Photo/Enny Nuraheni)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.