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It looks as if Pyongyang's only bar for foreigners will have to close if, as North Korea demands, all foreign NGO staff leave by January next year. The U.K. Guardian reported Tuesday that the bar, which is run by aid workers, will probably not survive the exodus.
Some 300 foreigners live in North Korea, 90 percent of them working for international organizations. The remaining 10 percent are people who come and go on business, a handful of Western journalists, and five English teachers.
Every Friday Pyongyang¡¯s expat crowd gathers at the bar inside the UN World Food Program compound. Foreigners have taken to calling it the RAC ? an acronym for "Random Access Club,¡± itself a take on the WFP's famous "no access, no food" slogan. It is also "the single place in North Korea where one can come and go as one pleases,¡± the paper said, ¡°an oasis of modern globalized normality inside a land where time has not only stood still but gone backwards."
As the food shortage grew worse, the number of WFP staff grew, and so did the number of Western NGO workers in North Korea. In 1997, the North Korean authorities offered the WFP an independent office, and it was natural that the RAC should emerge.
The Guardian quoted an official with an international organization as saying, "The mood in the RAC has never been gloomier." That may be because only a small number of people including diplomats and food aid workers are likely to remain. "It'll be like going back to 1994," one regular told the paper, while another commented, "The jokes these days are black ones, about all the second-hand fridges and cars that will flood into Pyongyang's markets at the end of the year."
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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