(Assignment 1) CASE- STUDY OF POLITICAL CORRUPTION: NORTH KOREA - Sreelakshmi R

North Korea (officially, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) has been named as the most corrupt nation in the world, along with Somalia by Transparency International’s 2015 report. This was measured by evaluating the honesty of public officials and transparency of the public institutions in each nation. It doesn’t come as a surprise as North Korea is one of the most secretive dynastic dictatorships, true to its erstwhile tag of a “hermit nation” with an all- pervading censorship policy within and outside of the country. Additionally, North Korea calls itself a Leninist socialist state, and the policy- making bureaucracy is controlled by a strong dictator who uses brutal military and police powers to enforce a monopoly over mass communication in a centrally planned economy. The kind of corruption looked at here is that of the political, but not strictly distinguished from the bureaucratic. Here, two aspects of such corruption- Human Rights abuse and the government’s illicit activities will be examined. The great limitation of such an examination comes from the fact that North Korea is a very opaque country and any statistic that comes out needs to be viewed with some wariness.

The North Korean political system is infected with nepotism (as the source of political corruption) from the way Kin Jong Un has succeeded his father to the privileges enjoyed by the country’s elite. This relates to Transparency International’s report as corruption of public officials leads to denial of human rights for the poor of a nation. Human Rights violations in North Korea include lack of freedom of speech, incarceration of prisoners in abusive conditions and arbitrary detentions and public executions of political prisoners and dissenters. Due to rampant censorship, such information is pieced together by testimonials of defectors from the North to the South which happened during the famine of 1990 in North Korea. Granting of Human Rights in North Korea is conditional, not universal. Collective rights take precedence over individual rights, much in keeping with Marxist- Socialist theory. Thus, the constitutionally guaranteed rights are also contradicted by the same document that tells us that it is “a dictatorship of the people of the republic”.

The government itself of North Korea is said to sponsor multiple clandestine activities such as drug/ arms/ human trafficking, counterfeiting currency and manufacturing and sale of illegal drugs, the proceeds from which are said to go to their nuclear arms programme. The active involvement of state in such activities has led North Korea to be dubbed as a “criminal sovereignty” by foreign policy analysts. The collapse of the Public Distribution System in the 1990’s led to the set up of many private, even, black markets, which might have promoted such activities. The point to be noted here is that the state does not facilitate any private cartel to run such clandestine operations on its behalf—opium farming was mandatory even during times of famine and the drugs and notes are trafficked via diplomatic missions and officials.