FRIDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2003
North Korea racing to embrace IT revolution
AP
SEOUL : North Korea 's dear leader Kim Jong Il, whose sayings are followed by his people with a religious fervor, has defined three types of fools in the 21st century: People who smoke, people who don't appreciate music and people who cannot use the computer.
Small wonder, then, the communist state's elite are rushing to become tech savvy in the internet age.
''In North Korea , a job with the computer is considered a token of privilege," said Tak Eun Hyok, a North Korean army sergeant who defected to South Korea last year. ''Everyone wants to learn the computer, believing they can get good jobs."
After leading his impoverished country into the elite ranks of countries that can launch multistage rockets and build atomic weapons, the North's reclusive Kim has set his eyes on a new frontier: Computer technology. Under his order, the North is now driving its best and brightest to learn the new technology.
His campaign is making fitful progress, however, hamstrung by US-led economic sanctions that block the country from importing the latest computer hardware, and slowed by North Korea 's self-imposed ban on e-mail and the internet, where seditious, yet eye-opening, insights on the outside world lurk just a few mouse clicks away.
North's 1.1 million-soldier military, the backbone of Kim' s totalitarian rule, has been quick to embrace his new directives. Today, the military, down to the battalion level, receives orders by computer, Tak said. Computer science tops the list of subjects young military officers and college students want to study.
''We get some of the brightest North Koreans in our projects," said Lee Kwang-hak at South Korea 's Samsung Electronics, which has been outsourcing to Pyongyang 's Korean Computer Center since 2000.
Samsung asks North Korean engineers to build software for internet search engines, media players and Linux programs. But so far, their productivity is only about half that of Russian and Indian engineers assigned with Samsung projects, Lee said.
''Working with North Koreans, you feel like you are using a shovel to do a job you can do with an industrial earthmover," Lee said. ''But they are working hard and eager to learn. We are there to secure the cream of North Korean brain power. For us, it's a long-term venture."
Free flow of Internet data and e-mail would be anathema to the North Korean regime, which has vowed to shut out ''degeneration, violence, and corrupt sex culture" of the West. Although military units, cooperative farms and government agencies are rapidly installing computers, few ordinary North Koreans have computer or e-mail access.
''What would normally take a few minutes to send by e-mail now takes us three days to send to our clients in Pyongyang," Kim Jong-se, an official at South Korea's Hanaro Telecom.
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