Simple incident or sign of decline? Over the past week, North Korea closed its embassies in Uganda and Angola and ended its diplomatic missions in Hong Kong and Spain, according to North Korean state media and local authorities.
But North Korea wants to be reassuring. Pyongyang said Friday that the recent closures of several of its embassies are just “regular business,” after Seoul claimed the diplomatic withdrawal was driven by an ailing North Korean economy.
According to its South Korean neighbor, this decline offers “an insight into the desperate economic situation of North Korea, which has difficulty even maintaining a minimum of diplomatic relations with traditional allies”.
The number of Pyongyang’s overseas missions has been reduced in recent years
“In accordance with changes in the international environment and the state of the state’s foreign policy, we either close or open diplomatic missions in other countries,” said an anonymous spokesperson for the ministry. North Korean Foreign Affairs, without specifying which embassies were concerned. “We have already implemented such measures several times in the past,” he said.
Pyongyang maintains diplomatic relations with more than 150 countries according to Seoul, but the number of its missions abroad has been steadily declining since the 1990s. Experts say that the last time North Korea operated a such diplomatic withdrawal, it was hit by a wave of famine which left several hundred thousand dead, even millions according to some estimates, in the mid and late 1990s.