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www.groovekorea.com / March 2014 32 K opi Luwak is unique in the coffee world: the “ultimate bling coffee,” in the words of The Guardian. Prized for its velvety texture and famed for its high price, genuine Kopi Luwak comes from coffee cherries di- gested and excreted by wild Asian palm civets in Indonesia. The digestive tract and, they say, discerning nature of these civet cats combine to reduce the bit- terness of the beans and bring out the flavor of the coffee. Analyzing North Korea has long been a bit like gathering Kopi Lu- wak. As if information were coffee beans lying on the floor of a forest coated in feces, the North Korean government offers up a very limited amount of usable data, and coats all of it in a thick layer of pungent background noise. Worse still, civet cats, presumably unaware that their defecation is capable of fetching hundreds of dollars a kilo on the open market, excrete on in- stinct, whereas the North Korean government treats information as a vital strategic resource and crafts its messages in pursuit of specific political goals. Take the tradition of the New Year’s Address. Delivered annually on the morning of Jan. 1 and com- parable to the Christmas Day mus- ings of Queen Elizabeth II, these speeches (televised in the eras of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-un; a published editorial during the reign of Kim Jong-il) are scoured by the outside world as a means of predicting how the North Korean government plans to act in the 365 days to come. Unfortunately for those doing the scouring, much of the content is boilerplate propaganda; the overwhelming majority of what remains is either strategic disinformation or simple truths that get misinterpreted. Jang Jin-sung should know. He is the founding editor of New Focus, a website which, like that of my own employer, Daily NK, is dedicated to inside source report- ing of political, economic and social process- es in North Korea. Until his defection in the early 2000s, Jang worked as a propagandist for North Korea’s ruling Korean Workers’ Par- ty. Though he never contributed to the New Year’s Address, Jang would presumably still know if the statement was just a straightfor- ward account of the nation’s priorities for the coming year. Unsurprisingly, it isn’t. On Jan. 1 this year, Kim Jong-un appeared on state television to announce that, among other things, 2014 marks “the 20th anniver- sary of the date when President Kim Il-sung wrote his last signature on a historic document concerning the country’s reunifica- tion.” Therefore, he declared, “a favorable climate should be es- tablished for improved relations between the north and the south.” (In writing, “north” and “south” are never capitalized by the North Ko- rean media, as both Koreas insist on designating the other an illegiti- mate occupier rather than a sover- eign governing power.) The South Korean media immediately report- ed the phrase verbatim, and Euro- pean and U.S. outlets followed suit later that day. Taken at face value, it looks like good news. Who wouldn’t want to see inter-Korean relations improve? It may even seem like an open- and-shut case, with logic that goes something like this: Since the word of national founder Kim Il-sung is de facto law in North Korea, if Kim wanted reunification, reunification must be what North Korea wants. Get the parade organized — the DMZ is coming down! But, no. There is an elephant in the room, which is that in the paragraphs surround- ing the widely re-reported “favorable climate” phrase, Kim Jong-un also mused (note that the translation used by New Focus differs from the official North Korean one, so I have reverted to the latter): ThE NORTh KOREA COLuMN Edited by Matthew Lamers (mattlamers@groovekorea.com) INSIghT Much of Kim’s speeches is boilerplate propaganda. So what counts? Finding meaning in Pyongyang’s excretions Column by christopher Green / Illustration by michael roy