Building Pyramids in Pyongyang

Egypt has been set on fire, but in Pyongyang it’s still business as usual. An odd comparison, but consider this: an earnest, bilateral relationship that was cemented during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which saw North Korea supply strategies, pilots, and fighter jets to Egypt, blossomed into highly profitable trade between the two countries that continues to this day. It wasn’t long after the war that Egypt’s air force commander, Chief Mubarak, scratched Kim Il Sung’s back with a fat SCUD missile, simultaneously opening the Middle East for thirty years of missile trade and hard currency imports with the DPRK.

With such excessive and enabling ties, it’s quizzical that Pyongyang remains in business with Cairo after the fall of Mubarak’s empire, and yet so it is. The largest employer in Egypt, Orascom Group, is also still heavily entrenched in North Korea’s economy. Although Orascom gained a degree of notoriety in 2008 when it resumed construction of Pyongyang’s failed monstrosity, it is Orascom’s investment in telecommunications that may represent the next generation of North Korean state weaponry against its own people.

For the past several years, Orascom has been rapidly developing a joint telecommunications venture with North Korea, dubbed Koryolink. To paraphrase Koryolink’s marketing advertisements, subscriptions currently total about 300,000 customers, with modern 3G coverage and network capabilities being rapidly expanded to meet demand. Koryolink also currently provides geographical network coverage for up to 75 percent of North Korea, with plans to expand to many minor cities. Koryolink is proving to be so profitable and popular that Kim Jong Il hosted Orascom Telecom’s CEO, Naguib Sawiris, with a dinner in his honor in Pyongyang several days after the beginning of the January Egyptian uprising.

When Orascom was questioned on Bloomberg TV about doing business with Kim Jong Il, Naguib Sawiris came out swinging as a reformer, declaring that “when people accuse me of doing business in countries like North Korea, I am there because I provided the people of North Korea with their right to speak.” Indeed, Orascom’s official line, characterized by Sawiris’s rebuttal, suggests that their business endeavours have a strong, democratic streak related to the euphoria of Egypt’s networked revolution.

The idea that democracy can be imported under the guise of advanced telecommunications is dangerously seductive. Indeed, pundits from all sides of the political spectrum continue to rave about the inherently democratizing effects of networked technology. So what’s going on in the heads of North Korea’s party elite? While Mubarak tirelessly worked to shut down the mobile network in Egypt, Kim Jong Il was heavily investing in his own.

For one, Orascom’s corporate subterfuge (with the Washington consensus) is blatantly simplistic and wrong. Mobile networked technology certainly played a role in the overthrow of a few Maghreb rulers, but the extent is probably overemphasized and poorly understood. Economic and political factors were and are probably more influential than networked technology in influencing the odds of the revolutionaries’ struggle. However, this still doesn’t fully account for Kim Jong Il’s enthusiastic investment in advanced telecommunications.

While such technology may contribute to the political mobilization of citizens, there is a much darker part of the equation, which is how governments can be empowered by the same technology. The Kremlin, for example, has developed a sophisticated bureaucracy that uses telecommunications in its propaganda wing. They also use social networking sites to gather intelligence as well as insert pro-government users into dissenting forums. In Belarus, the last bastion of European dictatorships, the 2010 presidential election protests in Minsk resulted in a mass crackdown and subsequent arrests because of mobile phones. The government traced the details of all the protesters in the Minsk public square because their phones had to connect to towers, which in turn were run by mobile operators that the government controlled. Additionally, North Korea’s most influential neighbor has virtually perfected the art of social control through networked technology. Although China’s 70 million dollar Golden Shield project is without a doubt one of the most sophisticated tools of Internet censorship, it is China’s skill at handling dissent through public social networking forums that creates a veneer of reform in China’s political structure.

All of this has particularly high stakes for Egyptian revolutionaries and North Korean slaves. The Egyptian military, with newly increased powers, remains invested in its country’s economy, with no civilian oversight and no public accountability. Orascom’s success in North Korea is tied to Egypt’s economy, as Kim Jong Il plays technological catch-up with his Russian and Chinese counterparts, while Egypt’s citizens remain powerless to prevent the ironic oppression of millions of North Koreans with cellular technology.

This is of course not to say that cellular phones cannot play some sort of positive political role in North Korea. Smuggled phones have provided insight into social conditions that was previously unavailable, while experiments in mesh networking may provide more favorable conditions for an uprising. However, it is plainly misguided to assess the political power of telecommunications technology solely based on how it empowers citizens. Such technology may contribute to mobilization, but can also dis-empower citizens while enabling oppressive governments. I follow Evgeny Morozov’s statement that while networked technology may make revolution more effective, it also could make it less likely. Until we honestly assess its merits, limits, and current uses by dictatorships around the world, the DPRK will continue to let their elites eat cake, and keep building those pyramids.

Dave Zeglen is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist