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Agence France-Presse

The waitress at the North Korean restaurant in Beijing has no concerns about a deadline this weekend for Pyongyang’s overseas workers to be returned.
“I’ll go home for the holidays,” she says. “But I’ll come back.”
Nuclear-armed North Korea has long made a fortune from the army of citizens it sends abroad to work, mostly in neighbouring China and Russia but also as far afield as Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Two years ago, the UN Security Council ordered the countries where they work to send them back as part of the efforts to press Pyongyang over its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes, with complete compliance required by this Sunday.
Gaps in records cloak China’s North Korean ‘slave labourers’ in mystery
But analysts say Beijing and Moscow are circumventing the measure by issuing North Korean workers with alternative visas to ensure a continued supply of cheap labour.
Long-standing allies of Pyongyang, the two called this week for several sanctions – including the ban – to be eased, with nuclear negotiations between the United States and North Korea at a deadlock.
China was estimated to have 50,000 North Korean workers when the resolution was passed, and witnesses and reports say North Koreans continue to enter the country to work in border-region factories.
At Unban, a North Korean restaurant near Pyongyang’s sprawling embassy in Beijing, a waitress said she had worked there for four years and expected to continue.

“No one has told us that the restaurant will close,” she added. “We had two new colleagues who came last month.”
Foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said last week that China “earnestly” implements all UN resolutions, but declined to say how many North Koreans were working in the country.
Moscow’s ambassador to Pyongyang Alexander Matsegora said in September that the number working in Russia had already been cut from more than 30,000 to less than 10,000.
“After December 22, there will not be a single North Korean in Russia with a work visa,” he told the RIA Novosti news agency.

But the key sanctions text – paragraph 8 of resolution 2397 – does not specify visa types, referring more broadly to “all DPRK nationals earning income”.
And Kang Dong-wan, a professor at South Korea’s Donga University, said: “Since Russia can’t issue new work visas due to sanctions, the North Korean workers are going there on tourist visas.”
Figures from Russia’s interior ministry show that in the January-September period, Moscow issued six times as many tourist visas to North Koreans as it did in the whole of 2018, and three times as many student visas.
Across the two categories, Russia granted nearly 20,000 visas in nine months of 2019. For all of last year, it was below 5,000.

 
The workers’ deadline comes with tensions rising again: it will soon be followed by a year-end limit Pyongyang has set Washington to offer it fresh concessions.
According to estimates by the US mission to the UN, the overseas workers – many employed in construction, factories and forestry – are worth more than US$500 million a year to Pyongyang.
Former North Korean workers say they received only a fraction of the sums charged for their services.
Ro Hui-chang, a defector who supervised workers in the Middle East and Russia for nearly a decade before fleeing to South Korea, said firms paid US$1,500 per month per person on average – 90 per cent of which went straight to the Pyongyang government.

“It was free money that came in without fail when they sent their people overseas,” Ro said.
Living and working conditions were dismal, he added, with the shortest shifts lasting around 12 hours.
“There was a fixed hour for waking up, but no set time for the day’s end,” he said.
Even so, overseas work has long been sought-after in the impoverished North, where incomes are a fraction of those in the democratic and capitalist South.
It sometimes offers the chance to make money in side employment or small businesses, and on average they save US$1,000-US$2,000 a year, according to Andrei Lankov of Kookmin University in Seoul – far more than they could earn at home.

Workers needed a good background with no family history of political crimes – many were members of the ruling Workers’ Party – and were “always paying bribes to be selected”, Lankov said.
Conditions were hard “but usually less harsh than inside North Korea”, he added, and most returned with enough savings for a small business, “planting seeds for new independent non-state economy”.
As such, he said, the ban was misplaced, as people who worked abroad gained “a very different picture of the world” and became a force for change in North Korea.
“These sanctions on labour export is counter-effective, counterproductive, immoral,” he said. “They are hitting [the] elite to some extent, but they are hitting the common people much more.”


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North Korea

North Korea cashes in on citizens working in China and Russia but their time is running out

North Korean workers queue for a flight to Pyongyang at an airport in Beijing in March. Photo: AFP

epaselect epa05833836 Chinese paramilitary policemen stand guard outside the North Korean embassy in Beijing, China, 07 March 2017. North Korean Ambassador Kang Chol arrived in Beijing on 07 March after the Malaysian government declared him 'persona non grata' and was ordered to leave Malaysia within 48 hours, after he said Malaysia's investigation into the murder of Kim Jong-nam could not be trusted. North Korea's government said it has banned all Malaysians currently in its country from leaving. Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has called on North Korea to immediately release its citizens and in response the Malaysian government has banned North Korean embassy staff and officials from leaving Malaysia. Diplomatic tension between the two countries has increased following the assassination of Kim Jong-nam, a half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, by two women with a highly toxic chemical weapon known as VX nerve agent at a Kuala Lumpur airport on 13 February 2017. EPA/WU

North Korean female workers look out of the window as the bus carrying them crosses the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge from North Korea's Sinuiju to China's Dandong on Dec. 5, 2019. Under a U.N. sanctions resolution, countries using North Korean workers must repatriate them before Dec. 22. (Kyodo) ==Kyodo

North Korean factory workers head to work before dawn on Dec. 5, 2019, in Dandong, a Chinese city on the border with North Korea. Under a U.N. sanctions resolution, countries using North Korean workers must repatriate them before Dec. 22. (Kyodo) ==Kyodo

epa08032127 An undated photo released by the official North Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) shows Kim Jong-un (C), chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea, chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and supreme commander of the armed forces of the DPRK, inspecting the test-fire of the super-large multiple launch rocket system conducted by the Academy of Defence Science, at an undisclosed location in North Korea (issued 29 November 2019). According to South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), North Korea again fired two unidentified projectiles into the sea off its coast on 28 November 2019. EPA-EFE/KCNA EDITORIAL USE ONLY

How Kim Jong-un kept expanding North Korea’s nuclear arsenal while appearing to seek peace with US

US President Donald Trump with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Photo: AP

The apparent launching of projectiles that, according to military officials in Japan and South Korea, landed in the sea between the Korean Peninsula and Japan, is seen in this undated picture released by North Korea's Central News Agency (KCNA) on October 31, 2019. KCNA via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS IMAGE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY. REUTERS IS UNABLE TO INDEPENDENTLY VERIFY THIS IMAGE. NO THIRD PARTY SALES. SOUTH KOREA OUT. NO COMMERCIAL OR EDITORIAL SALES IN SOUTH KOREA. TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

People watch a TV screen showing a file image of a ground test of North Korea's rocket engine during a news program at the Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, Dec. 9, 2019. North Korea said Sunday it carried out a "very important test" at its long-range rocket launch site that it reportedly rebuilt after having partially dismantled it after entering denuclearization talks with the United States last year. The sign reads: "Very important test." (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

This undated picture released from North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on December 4, 2019 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (C) visiting a vegetable greenhouse farm and a tree nursery in Jungphyong in Kyongsong County, North Hamgyong Province. (Photo by STR / KCNA VIA KNS / AFP) / South Korea OUT / REPUBLIC OF KOREA OUT ---EDITORS NOTE--- RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE - MANDATORY CREDIT "AFP PHOTO/KCNA VIA KNS" - NO MARKETING NO ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS - DISTRIBUTED AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS / THIS PICTURE WAS MADE AVAILABLE BY A THIRD PARTY. AFP CAN NOT INDEPENDENTLY VERIFY THE AUTHENTICITY, LOCATION, DATE AND CONTENT OF THIS IMAGE --- /

Why is Kim Jong-un riding a horse up a sacred mountain? Some clues from North Korean history

An undated photo shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-un riding a white horse on the snow-covered Mt Paektu. Photo: KCNA via dpa

A photo taken on September 12, 2019 shows visitors walking before a mural depicting late North Korean leader Kim Il Sung holding his son, Kim Jong Il, with his wife Kim Jong Suk, at the entrance to the 'Secret Camp, said to be the birthplace of late North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, near Samjiyon. - The secret camp was Kim Il Sung's headquarters from 1936 -- and never located by the occupying Japanese in nine years -- according to a guide, from where he travelled across Korea and to bases in China "to finally accomplish the historic liberation of the country". There was no mention of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 that triggered Japan's World War II surrender, and with it the end of Tokyo's 35-year rule over the peninsula. Every year 100,000 North Koreans or more are taken on study tours to the camp, the mountain, and nearby revolutionary sites where relics of operations are preserved. Dressing in khaki uniforms said to resemble guerrillas' outfits and carrying

FILE - In this July 8, 2019, file photo, people visit Mansu Hill to pay tribute to the late leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Kim Il Sung's death, in Pyongyang, North Korea. A panel monitoring U.N. sanctions said Monday, Aug. 5, that North Korean cyber experts have illegally raised money for the country's weapons of mass destruction programs "with total proceeds to date estimated at up to $2 billion." (AP Photo/Jon Chol Jin, File)

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According to estimates by the US mission to the UN, the overseas workers are worth more than US$500 million a year to Pyongyang
But the UN Security Council set Sunday’s deadline for their return two years ago, as part of efforts to press the North over its weapons programmes



According to estimates by the US mission to the UN, the overseas workers are worth more than US$500 million a year to Pyongyang.
