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Germany has an embassy
Until Corona that also had a youth hostel for some reason
YES
I distinctly remember walking past that building - back then I was a huge lib - and thinking “oh wow this looks like THE most 70s building ever… wait what does the plaque say over there? Embassy of the DPRK? What’s that?”
Another fun fact: DPRK still owes Sweden (a lot of money) for some Volvos they bought on credit in the 70’s
impoverished postcolonial countries that were bombed to shit are in debt to rich imperial core countries? Tell me more!
Wasn’t just the Volvos, also mining equipment. But the only way Sweden is trying to collect the debt is with biannual reminder letters, so it isn’t like there is a huge effort to collect the debt.
One of the main reasons that Sweden is allowed to act as a protection power (wtf is English for Skyddsstat? Essentially means neutral ground for countries that lack diplomatic relations) for a load of western countries and North Korea is how lax the debt collection is.
Once again, the DPRK was NOT an impoverished country even after it was being bombed to shit! It was one of the fastest growing economies in Asia and fared closely with post-war Japan’s reconstruction. The DPRK in the 1960s had higher living standards than China, South Korea and other Asian economies that rose in the 1980s.
I wrote an entire comment here if you’re interested.
The reason the DPRK couldn’t pay off the Volvo debt was because of the 1972 drought in Europe that caused short falls in Soviet crop harvest. The “Russian wheat deal” resulted in the USSR spending heavily to purchase grain abroad on the international market, causing global grain prices prices to be inflated everywhere else. The DPRK, which as I had written on the linked comment, was severely lacking in food security and depleted much of its foreign reserves purchasing food in the early 70s with highly inflated price.
This was the reason why the DPRK couldn’t pay back Volvo. This was the reason why the DPRK would spend the next few decades going after a self-reliance policy (Juche can be roughly translated to something like “self-reliance”), trying to conquer nature and increase food production on a very cursed land that is the Korean peninsula, to much disastrous consequences.
good for them
