Monday 13 February 2012

12 Feb 2012 - North Korean corruption

I was having some drinks with my extended family and having a chat with one of my relations, who has recently returned from South Korea. Whilst he was there he had learned a great deal about the political situation between North and South Korea, and as I have always been intrigued by North Korea but have never really known much about the country, except obviously what I learnt from the movie "Team America", I was happy that my relation had a bit of knowledge on the subject. He was telling me about the level of corruption in North Korea, how they traffic drugs and counterfeit foreign currency and how this crime is basically sanctioned by the government. I had always known that the country was very autocratic and my assumptions were, that based on this autocracy the people had very little freedom. This conversation further confirmed my thoughts in this area but I guess what I didn't realise was the level of their corruption, and that organised crime was apparently ignored if not encouraged by their government.

I did a further Google search which uncovered many websites with information outlining North Korean stories of corruption. One website was a newspaper article about a poll completed late last year which concluded that North Korea was considered to be one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Number one on the list was considered to be the least corrupt country, Australia was number eight and North Korea rated 182 on the list. All this got me to thinking that even though Australia may have issues with corruption at some levels and Victoria is having trouble getting an anti-corruption task force up and running, at least we are 174 rankings less corrupt that North Korea!

The corruption poll article was on the Daily Mail website.


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